Document Management, Document Management Software

This week it’s all about security. Symantec has come back from its Vision annual conference where it announced that it intends to spend US$ 1.25 billion on acquisitions and gives the world a chance to see its O3 cloud security offering. Android gets more security, while MS says zero-day attacks are relatively rare. WebLayers beefs up its governance.

Box.net is gearing up to take on bigger players in the enterprise software market. Having recently raised US$ 48 million earlier this year, the cloud storage platform startup has recently updated this Series D financing round with US$ 81 million from Salesforce.com and SAP, with Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA contributing to the round.

Last week was a busy one for conferences, but it was also a busy week for document management. BlackBerry users will be able to have access to Office 365 documents in beta, Colligo offers document management for SharePoint, eFileCabinet heads to the cloud, LibreOffice celebrates its first birthday and Version One partners with Intuitive.

For the last few months I have been working on a project for the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (an agency of the European Commission) to prepare a techno-economic assessment of the enterprise search industry and market in Europe. I’m not in a position to disclose the outcomes of the project, but in the course of the research I did examine how organizations went about selecting an enterprise search solution, and looked at the websites of around 60 vendors. At the same time I was working on an intranet strategy project for a European company with over 40,000 employees world-wide and no enterprise search capability! In this column I’ve summarized some of my conclusions from these two projects.

With all the money IBM has spent over the past three years on analytics, it’s hardly surprising that it is trying to get as many new releases out onto the market as possible. Over the week, it has added to what it already has in the analytics space by upgrading and releasing products aimed at improving business process and developing smarter applications.

The primary focus of the SharePoint Conference 2011 was on productivity with the SharePoint 2010 platform. As a result a number of case studies where presented, including this one from D&M Holdings, who designed a single SharePoint content repository to support multiple sites. Here's the whys and hows of what they did. 

While attending the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco last week, I had an opportunity to discuss the many different Oracle announcements with customers. The general theme from my conversations can be summed up as “Wow, that’s really cool, but how can it help me?”

Day two of the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim (held October 3-6, 2011) and around 300 people packed into the room to listen to Todd Ray, a Senior Business Strategy Consultant within Microsoft Enterprise Strategy Services. As part of this group's Enterprise Strategy Program, Todd works with Microsoft's enterprise architect community to implement Microsoft's Value Realization Framework. The demand for this session (#SPC226) was so high that people were turned away at the doors, and this was one of only a handful of sessions that had to be run a second time. Expectations were high…

At the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim California, Rob Koplowitz, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, shared the results of the Forrester survey on "Best Practices in SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Migration." The crowd was near capacity, and full of questions about the various data points, and some of Forrester's qualitative input. The following is a synopsis of the session, with some of my own feedback on the numbers from their survey of just under 1,000 SharePoint 2010 customers, the Forrester interpretation of the data, and my thoughts on where there may be room for additional research and investigation.

The usual view of a conference is to hear about the latest in product development, or the road map of the next technology strategy; so if that’s what you are looking for, it’s not here. The story that gets missed is what happens on the exhibit hall floor and the latest in vendor booth tactics, which I cover in this article. Competition for which booth seems the busiest is fierce as the tactics to attract attendees range from old fashioned in- your-face intrusion to gimmicks that don’t necessarily attract qualified buyers.

Forget about Box's ongoing SharePoint bashing, Huddle stepped it up a notch and did a little cheer — and not for SharePoint — at the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim this past week. Oh yea, and they announced a strong first quarter for 2011.

Yesterday was the final day of the SharePoint conference. I chose to attend a morning session lead by Jeff Fried, CTO & VP of Engineering at BA Insight and Guy Mounier, Co-Founder & CEO of BA Insight. This session is a vendor-sponsored session, which means that the vendors are free to discuss their specific products and tools. I have worked in the past with previous versions of BA Insight and I was curious to see what they had in mind for working with Office 365.

Following the announcement in August that it intended to buy UK-based i2, IBM has announced that the deal has officially gone through and that i2 will now be incorporated into the analytics division of IBM.

Yesterday at the SharePoint conference I got to attend a session on best practices for building InfoPath forms (#SPC296). The session was presented by Darvish Shadravan, a Microsoft Senior Technical Specialist. Overall the session was really fast-paced and full of great content. I was actually surprised when the session ended because I had completely lost track of time. For me there were two big takeaways that I got from the session which I will share with you in this article.

It’s the final day of the SharePoint conference in Anaheim, and there are just a few loose ends to tie up before leaving. While there has been a lot to think about over the past four days, there were a few releases that slipped under the radar from EntropySoft, RIM and CommVault, as well as early results of some interesting research from Forrester.

One of the better foundational presentations on what is involved in administering SharePoint (the good and the bad) was conducted by SharePoint MVPs Shane Young and Todd Klindt at the SharePoint Conference this week in Anaheim, CA. While I've seen Shane and Todd present this session (or a variation) several times, their presentations are always worth seeing again. They do an incredible job of keeping people entertained while sharing their extensive experience in supporting, migrating/upgrading, and configuring a SharePoint server.
 

Open source content management provider Alfresco has announced the latest community release of their platform, Alfresco Community 4, at JavaOne and it’s packed with new features.

This month I am writing from the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim where governance is a recurring theme. I’ve only been to a few sessions so far (I am writing on day 1 of the conference), but governance has been mentioned in every session I’ve been to so far. In the keynote, Jeff Teper claimed, “Governance is not an issue… we have lots of customers doing it on a large scale.” Good, so that’s all sorted then!

This is the third in a series of articles discussing my Art of SharePoint Success framework which consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Architecture and Transition. The first article gave a quick start guide to the framework, quickly covering all four elements, and last month we took a look at the reasons why some SharePoint projects fail. Over the next two months we are going to take a look at the most overused (yet still misunderstood) topic in SharePoint: Governance. We are going to start with the basics — what it is and what it isn’t.

GRC releases this week are dominated by the SharePoint conference, but there have been a couple of interesting acquisitions too with IBM announcing that it is buying Q1 Labs for enhanced security and what looks like the start of a serious move to develop its security division, while McAfee, recently acquired by Intel, has announced it is buying Nitro.

Back to Anaheim and Colligo, with the announcement that Colligo has released an eight-product integrated suite of email and document management applications that covers just about every enterprise SharePoint need conceivable across PCs, tablets, laptops and smartphones, on-premise and in the cloud.