Nintex News & Articles

Arguably one of the reasons for SharePoint's success over the last few years is the ecosystem of third party products and developers that help to support it. Generally speaking, if you want to add to or expand the standard SharePoint feature set, there is a product or plugin that fits the bill. Visual workflow design, list and document level backup and a hundred weather webparts -- all can be readily and easily added to your SharePoint environment.

But who will be setting the pace in the new year, and what software is worth keeping an eye on? Let’s review some of the most interesting third party products on the market for SharePoint right now.

This week, IBM’s Domino migrations get easier with the release of DLItools’ Docova v3, Microsoft and Equisys team to integrate Dynamics NAV 2009 R2 with Office 365, Gartner takes a look at enterprise CMS vendors in its Magic Quadrant and ShareMethods upgrades document sharing, while PSIGEN and Nintex partner.

A story with an apparently broken embargo -- that moved us to revisit the science of media embargoes -- brought the news that Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL (which recently ended up in hands of Oracle as part of the Sun acquisition) became the CEO of open source cloud computing company Eucalyptus.

Everyone, remember Nintex? (news, site) It's been some time since we've covered the productivity solution providers, but they've been busy at work. 

Nintex focuses is on developing solutions that support the SharePoint platform, including advanced workflow. Today they'll be continuing that trend with Nintex Workflow 2010, a product that's to be shipped shortly after the launch of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

An interesting piece of news coming out of the SharePoint Conference was the introduction of a new standards group specifically for SharePoint (news, site).

No this isn't coming from Microsoft, but rather from a group of Microsoft partners including founding members Danny Boulanger - Alcero, Susan Yee - Active Data Exchange, Larry D. Hunt - Integrated Digital Systems/ScanAmerica Inc., Tony Lanni - Avepoint, Esa Tervo - Neoxen Systems, and Mike Fitzmaurice - Nintex.

Called the SharePoint Interoperability Solution Architecture (SISA) Standards Group, the organization wants to create a software standard for developing SharePoint applications. The purpose? To simplify the integration and interoperability of solutions built for SharePoint by ISVs.

Products designated as being SISA™ compliant will have the ability to exchange information, processes, and tasks between two or more different SharePoint systems or components on a standard platform.

Other participating members include Bamboo Solutions, MetaVis Technologies, Atalasoft and Mark Logic.

We asked Tom Rizzo, Senior Director of Product Management for SharePoint if Microsoft was involved with this new standards organization. Rizzo told us that they had heard of it, but have not had deep discussions with the group as of yet. He did say that Microsoft is very supportive of community based initiatives, and that they passionately listen to customers and partners.

There's not much information on the SISA website yet (which by the way is a SharePoint based website), but we'll keep an eye on this standards group to see if it's able to take hold and make advances in the greater SharePoint partner community.

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.