Content Management Matters ™

We told you at the beginning of April of the upcoming release of Andrew Connell's book on SharePoint. Well we finally found it available at almost all book retailers.

Called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the 456 page book published by John Wiley and Sons is the only book known to cover the Web Content Management aspects of SharePoint in detail.

Andrew is a big proponent of SharePoint's ability to create highly engaging web content management sites and this book is his attempt to sell us all on it's potential.

Chapters in the book cover everything from master pages and page layouts, to content types, navigation, accessibility, workflow, content deployment and a lot more.

Oddly enough, the book comes at a time when we hear more about SharePoint's collaboration capabilities than its content management. It seems like lately we don't talk too much about what SharePoint can do from a web content management standpoint. Now that's either because we've finally all settled on the fact that it isn't quite there yet, or we are just way too caught up in this whole social computing discussion where Microsoft seems determined that SharePoint is a leader.

In either case, this is a book I would personally like to read, especially considering it's coming from someone who has dedicated his career to learning and understanding how SharePoint works from a web content management perspective.

If a book isn't enough for you, Andrew is set to teach some WCM courses -- both online and in person over the next couple of months on SharePoint and Web Content Management.

And we all stood back and applauded heartily as the giant knelt down and handed over the blueprints to his castle...what? you didn't applaud too?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the release of Version 1.0 technical documentation for Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 as an effort to drive greater interoperability and foster a stronger open relationship with their developer and partner communities. They also posted over 5000 pages of technical documentation on Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint binary file formats on the MSDN site royalty-free basis under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP).

This is a good thing isn't it? It clearly demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and data portability.

Not everyone agrees...

J. Boye has just produced a new research report on the ever popular Microsoft SharePoint. This report, Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide, outlines some of the thought processes organizations have gone through when selecting SharePoint for their public facing websites, some project recommendations and dispels some of the often heard arguments for a SharePoint-based solution.

It’s a day for SharePoint based news announcements. This time the news comes from Clearview Software who is releasing the latest version of their SharePoint-based ECM Suite. V4.1 provides a number of enhancements and new features designed to support the growing needs of enterprises around the globe.

Microsoft isn't the only game in town if you want to build your website in a hosted SharePoint environment. SharePoint360, a SharePoint hosting and consulting firm located in San Diego, has launched a new SaaS offering -- SharePoint360 Web.

As a provider of enterprise automated media production and delivery solutions, Equilibrium should be very familiar with integrating their MediaRich Media Server with portals and content management systems. Their latest version of MediaRich -- version 3.8.6 -- has added some new features that will help many companies provide richer Web 2.0 experiences.

It’s well known that Microsoft relies heavily on partners to help develop extensions or integrations to their software. That doesn’t mean however, that they sit back and wait for the cool tools to come to them. Such is the case with social networking. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week they demoed a social networking solution they had been testing internally called TownSquare.

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.

With a relationship that was first announced at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit in October last year, it was probably no surprise that Atlassian officially announced their partnership with Microsoft to integrate their Confluence wiki with SharePoint at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week. Still it's an interesting integration to look closer at. And so we did.

Most of the integration news we hear about SharePoint relates to the creation of internal, employee focused solutions. Here's one that flips that around and focuses on SharePoint as an external solution. Awareness, a provider of social media solutions, has integrated their product with SharePoint -- both WSS3.0 and MOSS -- to provide Web 2.0 communities capabilities inside the SharePoint world.

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.

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.

Microsoft is known for documentation and support of their products. So it comes as no surprise that they have launched a new partner-delivered offering for Microsoft SharePoint. Called the SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS), the service is tailored to help organizations who have enrolled in Volume Licensing Software Assurance successfully plan and deploy their SharePoint initiatives.