Moss News & Articles

Last February Microsoft (news, site) announced that it was discontinuing mainstream and extended UNIX and Linux support for its FAST search technology. There was some speculation that in doing so it hoped that it could drag Linux and UNIX users into its Windows stable. However, Autonomy (news, site) has been quick to see and seize the opportunity this decision provided.

It's been noted that SharePoint 2010's improvements in the area of social computing are relatively impressive, but built-in features have a tendency to be outshone by third-party solutions. Ergo, we thought we'd round up a few of our favorites:

Most of our readers have a pretty clear idea of what SharePoint (news, site) is. However, many people misperceive its core functions. And Microsoft's product websites -- with their broad ambitions -- aren't always clear enough for new-comers. So for the confused amongst us, here's a concise response to the simple question: What is SharePoint?

With the release of SharePoint 2010 looming, we were curious to know what your plans were -- if you had any at all -- in regards to implementing the next version of Microsoft's business collaboration platform. Our poll revealed that while many of you are not in a SharePoint frame of mind, those that are seem focused primarily on its collaboration and social media capabilities.

It was inevitable that at this year’s LegalTech conference eDiscovery-related announcements would abound. So the announcement that archiving specialist Mimosa (news, site) and legal consulting and risk management company Navigant have integrated their products is not really that surprising. Between the two, they hope to be able to deploy software that cuts the costs of eDiscovery while providing a more efficient and more streamlined product.

I finally got around to reading the preliminary SharePoint 2010 taxonomy and metadata info on MSDN. As most of you know, MOSS 2007 had some serious challenges in this regard (e.g., no hierarchical metadata, no sharing controlled vocabularies across site collections, etc.) -- and they caused information architects like me much consternation.

It would appear that SharePoint 2010 includes many new features under the umbrella of Enterprise Metadata Management, and they seem to have addressed some key issues. Here are the highlights.

The SharePoint 2009 Conference kicked off officially yesterday with the keynotes from Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Office Business Platform. If you had the time to listen to keynotes (which were streamed live), then you know Microsoft is expecting big things for SharePoint 2010 (news, site) -- not just for the enterprise but also for the web.

On the last day of ARMA ’09, the focus on SharePoint was clearly compelling, and the room was full. Through interaction with the attendees, it became clear that many of us are facing the same situation.

SharePoint is already in the organization, but hasn’t necessarily been deployed through a defined strategy.

In the run up to the worldwide SharePoint conference in Las Vegas later this month, it is inevitable that there will be a number new developments announced before the curtain finally lifts on October 19th.

One such development is the announcement by enterprise content management vendor pTools (news,  site)  that they have extended its Web CMS product to be used directly in the SharePoint (news, site) interface and framework.

The release of v3.6 of NextDocs (news, site) Regulatory Document Management system continues the company’s move towards establishing itself as the principal provider of document management systems for the Life Sciences.

It comes with pre-configured support and full validation documentation for the DIA Electronic Document Management (EDM) Reference Model.

SharePointBoost is a supplier of SharePoint Web Parts and Add-ons, in addition to consulting services. Their products range from list, administration, portal, alert to lookup web parts, in addition to a couple of free tools.

Probably one of the most interesting is the SharePoint Password Change web part. With a new version recently released, this web part offers some nice capabilities to help administrators manage the password security policies for their implementation.

So it was available -- the fourth and final version of the SharePoint Administrators Toolkit for SharePoint 2007 (news, site) -- for a little while. The toolkit, which offers administrative services for both MOSS and WSS3.0 has been released, but is not available due to a file issue in the download package.

Now some of you might ask why Alterian (news, site) would have two SharePoint connectors in their inventory content management connectors. If you knew the history of Alterian, you would know. It's because they have two web content management systems: Morello and Immediacy. And each one connects to SharePoint a little bit different.

Ah, we knew it wouldn't be long until we heard about another new SharePoint connector. This latest one comes from Kentico (news, site) and is called the Kentico CMS Connector for SharePoint. What's different about this one? It's free.

SharePoint Solutions (news, site) decided to make accessing and integrating Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL) database information from/with SharePoint less of a chore by introducing new SharePoint Data Zoom extensions.