Apps News & Articles

For those of you keeping score at home, I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email.

In the age of social and mobile customers, all paths lead back to your website.

There is definitely not a shortage of tools and apps designed to help us manage social media, the messages we send, the communities that gather and its influence on building brand loyalty. Of course, the right tools are easy to use and add value to how customer experience is managed and measured.

2012 will see further pushes in the way stores try to get us to buy stuff, but don't just be a passive consumer this year, expect appeals for you to fund or work on apps and games to become increasingly common.

Google plans to open source Google Sky Map and close down Social Graph API, the Needlebase data management platform, amongst other projects. Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management at Google, announced the product updates in a blog post last week.

At this point, it's growing beyond hints in the wind, as word on the street is that the Salesforce.com CRM behemoth will soon offer social network technology to include data sifting of tweets and other filters to gain meaning from real-time social network traffic. 

The rumor, from a talk given by Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami, in Munich, Germany, comes on the heels of Salesforce.com's agreement to purchase Rypple and its social performance management application. Salesforce.com is moving this largest seller of online customer-management software toward the social space.

Rumors and conjecture have circulated about a possible SharePoint App store since the release of SharePoint 2010. A number of independent attempts currently exist, though they amount to little more than website catalogs. An official app store was thought to be part of Microsoft's launch plans for SharePoint 2010, but it is believed that logistical and technical issues prevented it from becoming a reality. With the success of the iOS version and official plans for a Windows 8 store, it's almost certain we will see something soon for SharePoint.

Adobe has released some interesting findings in its new Digital Marketing Insights Report. Executives involved in marketing, e-commerce and retail sales need to pay attention -- tablets are taking over the PC/laptop.

If you’re a heavy SharePoint user, you will know that it can be used on-premise, online and in hybrid deployments. Managing one type of deployment is difficult enough, but three? AvePoint 6 -- or, officially, DocAve 6, which has gone on general release today -- aims to help enterprises overcome that by pulling the management of SharePoint into one space.

There are a number of legal issues that intranet managers need to be aware of, and some apply to websites and any application with a web browser even if it is not an intranet.

Let me start by saying that I am not a lawyer and I guess you are not one either, so the information and advice I have set out below needs to be verified with the legal team in your organization. In this column I am only addressing accessibility issues and the use of photographs on intranets. There are many other issues!

Consumers these days can’t seem to get enough mobile apps, games, videos and other content. Mobile web usage has exploded and mobile search has quadrupled in the past year. Many people search on their smartphone when viewing a TV or print ad, looking for products via a search engine or through a clever speech recognition application such as Siri. And they expect to find the answer at their fingertips. Actionable content, right there, in seconds flat. Mobile has created a monster -- and it’s you and me.

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs in our spiffy little corner of the world. Our weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week.

Microsoft is continuing to earn its open source stripes. The company’s latest Windows Azure updates added support for several open source tools. The open source love isn’t stopping with Azure though: Microsoft is also allowing open source applications in the Windows Store, which is being launched for Windows 8.

Android users have millions of apps to enjoy, but there's still some envy for iOS's best-in-class products. Another of those pins will fall down soon, with the upcoming release of mega-popular photo app Instagram while a faster updated Facebook app is out now.

Google has reason to celebrate, with Android Market breaching the 10 billion app download mark. To celebrate, Android developers are offering 10-cent downloads for select premium applications on a limited time basis.