Content Management Matters ™

NewsGator Technologies was one of the nine companies who announced product integrations with Microsoft SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week. For these guys though it wasn’t “breaking” news, as they have been talking about the latest version of Social Sites for a few months now.

Not all vendors out there believe that you should be able to move back and forth between Lotus Notes and SharePoint. AvePoint, provider of SharePoint infrastructure and administration management solutions, continually brings to market migration tools to move content from another product to SharePoint. Their latest migration tool is the DocAve Lotus Notes Migrator.

Remember those guys who figured out how to hack Vista to allow you to run your SharePoint environment directly on the desktop and not within a vm? Well they are hanging out at Microsoft TECH-ED NORTH AMERICA 2008 this week and they have a product announcement that may interest many SharePoint developers.

It's called Bamboo MashPoint and it's a free data integration platform for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Note that important point -- it's for WSS3.0 which means you can start developing and integration enterprise applications into WSS without the need of MOSS and the Business Data Catalog.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has kicked into full swing and Microsoft seems to plan on taking center stage. They have already laid out a number of new announcements that give it's flagship content management system SharePoint an overflow of social networking options.

Content is a big deal these days, in case you haven't noticed. However, its exponential growth over the years has left some businesses struggling. IBM has stepped up its game by unveiling their integrated approach to helping organizations manage enterprise content with software that helps control and manage all types of content created and shared by workgroups across an organization.

It's called a Business Content Services strategy, and it's designed to help businesses of all sizes cope with the rapid growth of content, including business documents that have been created both individually or collaboratively across diverse and even global workgroups.

Microsoft has some pretty ingenious partners out there. One that is recently in the news for a really beneficial "hack" (their words), is Bamboo Solutions, a provider of SharePoint Web Parts. They have developed a way to help simplify development of SharePoint solutions called SharePoint on Vista. This solution enables developers who have Vista desktop to do SharePoint development outside the server environment.

eTouch Systems, the creators of the SamePage enterprise wiki, have announced the launch of SamePage v3.5. What's to note? They implemented a fully multilingual user interface. The first languages available will be French and Polish, but any number of languages will be provided for customers upon request.

That's not the only new feature. SamePage is all about Enterprise 2.0 collaboration, and this release carries a few goodies that may make your team smile.

Newmerix, a provider of comprehensive Application Lifecycle Management solutions, has introduced new versions of Automate!Control and Automate!Change, part of their Automate! suite designed to reduce high costs and effort required to maintain packaged applications like SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite.

These programs now offer workflow, document management, improved data reporting and enhanced security for PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite customers. They also integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, letting customers benefit from increased collaboration, information sharing and productivity.

Looks like Europe also hangs out on the SharePoint bandwagon. This news is according to the content management association -- AIIM Europe. Annual survey results show what we already know here in North America, that organizations intend to use MOSS, but have no formal plans for application.

We all know that SharePoint (MOSS) is being heavily used for basic document management and collaboration services. We also know that the software is often deployed in an environment where it must be integrated with other technologies like content management systems and portals -- why else would so many Enterprise CMS vendors cooking-up nifty connectors and building repository bridges?

The message is clear: Knowledge workers the world over are putting a lot of digital stuff into MOSS and if your tech can't talk MOSS, you're liable to be left out in the cold.

If you are a religious SharePoint follower then you've heard of Andrew Connell -- known best as the expert on Web Content Management with SharePoint 2007.

Well Andrew and a team of other SharePoint experts have been hard at work writing a new book: Professional Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and it's finally finished and getting ready for publication.

The book is aimed at developers who build publishing sites with SharePoint 2007 -- something many believe is not easy. WCM is considered one of the weakest components of SharePoint. Andrew may argue this as he's spent lots of time working on it, training people on it, talking about it at conferences. So this book should be the answer to many a dream...

A quick scan of the table content reveals much about the information that will be provided in the book. Some of the Chapters include:

• Embarking on Web Content Management Projects
• Minimal Publishing Site Definition
• Site Columns, Content Types and Lists
• Navigation
• Accessibility
• Leveraging Workflow
• Authoring Experience Extensibility
• Authentication and Authorization
• Implementing Sites with Multiple Languages and Devices
• Content Deployment

Definitely sounds like a book I'd like to read. You can preorder on Amazon or sit back and impatiently wait for the June release.

Surety, LLC, a provider of data integrity solutions, has announced the release of AbsoluteProof for Microsoft SharePoint -- a lightweight, automated software solution that seals and authenticates records in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS).

RedDot, Open Text's Web solutions arm, has announced new integration features for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. The new package is called "MOSS 2007 Document Management Integration", and focuses on ... let me check my notes here... document management in Microsoft's Billion Dollar baby.

More specifically, RedDot's new product aims to 'Expand the web visibility of "...SharePoint Document Libraries Securely to ... Online Media."
If we were in sarcastic mood, we could point out that we know of another product which will do exactly that, and do it pretty well, and that other magical tool is called... SharePoint. Of course that would be trite and mean, and not like us at all.

It was back in September of last year that Microsoft first announced that it was going to offer SharePoint (MOSS) as a service (SaaS). When first announced, the offering was available as a limited beta and restricted to organizations with over 5,000 users. We're now onto the next phase and the broader market is being invited to stroll in the fields.

At the recent SharePoint Conference 2008, Gates announced that the hosted services would be opened up to organizations of all sizes, coming to a node near you, so it was said, in the second quarter of this year.

Now considering how well Microsoft has be able to sell the "Be all you can be with SharePoint" dream, this announcement has surely inspired everything from cheers of joy to cynical snickers to shivers of fear.

The online collaboration and content management space is heating up damn fast. And being the nosy CMS'ers that we are, we rung up Tom Rizzo, Redmond's Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, to see if he could add a few nuggets of detail to the story.

If you have SharePoint Server 2007 in your organization and you are keen to start taking advantage of more than the Team Site functionality, SharePoint Solutions is offering a 3 day instructor-led course that you shouldn’t miss.

It’s called Mission: Automation – SharePoint Workflow and InfoPath and is designed to teach information workers how to leverage SharePoint Workflows, InfoPath and SharePoint Designer to automate business processes.