Content Management Matters ™

Other content management vendors have two choices when it comes to SharePoint -- join it or beat it. The product is entrenched at the departmental level, nevertheless aspiring competitor, Alfresco, think they can uproot enough MOSS to make business sense of a full assault. Others seek harmony. Day Software is one of these. And their latest claim is that they can help SharePoint grow from department collaboration to enterprise content management.

Most of the connectors we see for SharePoint are focused on search, content repositories and social networking. Here's one that fits a different bill - ADAM Software offers a connector for SharePoint to improve it's Digital Asset Management capabilities -- to a degree.

CMS Watch has come out with its Enterprise Portals Report 2009 and it appears like Microsoft SharePoint may be splitting the vendors into camps -- those that have been able to rise above and those that have risen to challenge MOSS. It's interesting to see who shows up where.

The Social Media industry seems to get just a little bit bigger every hour and it's amazing how many different vendors can come on the scene and offer products and solutions that can help us design and build communities of one sort or another.

As an enterprise though, you need to be sure you are working with the right solution provider. Someone who is not only selling you a service, but helping you truly understand why and how to implement it. This is where you see Awareness -- an on-demand social media platform for Web 2.0 communities provider -- emerge as a front-runner. They have the right technology platform and what appears to be a wealth of knowledge and understanding to implement your community(s) the right way.

Zoho is out for SharePoint. They have announced a new service -- a central repository -- called Zoho Share that will enable personal and business users to share and publish their content from Zoho Show, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Writer to other users. They call it "SharePoint meets YouTube".

The 12th annual KMWorld and Intranets Conference and Exhibition is scheduled for September 23 – 25, 2008, in San Jose, California. This year's theme, Driving Enterprise Innovation and Achievement: User-Focused Tools and Practices, emphasizes the myriad of new ways to communicate, collaborate and exchange knowledge within the enterprise.

The event will also cover such hot topics as ECM, intranet and portal strategies, enterprise 2.0, knowledge sharing, enterprise search and much more.

Microsoft Licensing is confusing at the best of times. If you've ever looked at their SharePoint 2007 licensing spreadsheet, then you'll understand what a headache really is. Fear not though, because Bamboo Solution's has come out with a tool that will help you figure out how much you will pay for SharePoint licensing before you have to talk to Microsoft themselves. And that may save you a bottle of aspirin.

AIIM, one of the oldest organizations in the world focusing on ECM, ERM and BPM, prepared a special treat for all of us in the ECM world – a free, one-day seminar on Microsoft SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007) and traditional ECM technologies.

The goal is to get educated on whether SharePoint is really the tool for you to reach your organizational goals, or is it simply yet another application among many others used to build a content management solution. In other words, is SharePoint enough?

You know them for their document management and records management systems, but today Laserfiche has moved a step further into the world of enterprise content management with the announcement of Laserfiche Rio, a combination of their enterprise document management software and business process management software.

Laserfiche says Rio is the enterprise content management solution you've been looking for. And guess what? -- It integrates with SharePoint.

Gilbane recently produced a research paper entitled: Information Workplace Platforms: Oracle vs SharePoint which has some interesting findings on which of these two ECM platforms is the best choice for an organizations information lifecycle.

The report findings are based on research on a number of companies who reviewed both platforms for their Information Management needs and what their final decisions turned out to be.

Having trouble administrating your SharePoint environment? Nintex has developed a reporting solution to help ease your pain. Nintex Reporting 2008 is designed to improve governance and adoption of SharePoint.

Not tired of hearing about SharePoint training? Good, because here's another one that crossed our path. Tony Byrne of CMS Watch will be conducting a SharePoint Symposium, a Satellite Event at KMWorld & Intranets 2008 on September 26, 2008 in San Jose McEnery, CA.

Brava! Alfresco Labs 3 is striving to be a viable open source alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint MOSS enterprise content management offering.

As of today, Alfresco Labs v3 -- the application formerly known as Alfresco Community -- offers potential SharePoint customers a different option, providing them with what they claim is the first fully-compatible open source SharePoint repository.

So MOSS has been attacked for its web content management, lack of social networking features, its blogging and wiki functionality, and its fitness as a public facing Web CMS ...hmmm not much else they can go after is there?

Oh yeah...be careful using it as an application development platform -- it could wreak havoc in your organization.

If you are one of those organizations who has been frustrated by the search functionality in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007, then good news may have just arrived. Microsoft has released an update that will improve the search in MOSS.

Can we get a resounding "it's about time!"