Content Management Matters ™

Seems like it was only yesterday we were talking about IBM introducing a Quickr Content Integrator that will help move organizations away from SharePoint. Oh, right it was yesterday...

Today, we see that IBM may actually be wise enough to tackle the SharePoint challenge from both ends. Another IBM partner is helping to bridge the integration gap with SharePoint. The partner -- Mainsoft. The solution -- SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. If you are one those organizations that has a mixed technology environment -- and you are not alone -- this solution will go a long way to help.

CMSWire spends a fair amount of time bringing you news and information about products or services that help you integrate SharePoint data into your other systems. It's pretty rare to find a vendor who doesn't want to integrate with Microsoft's flagship CMS system.

If there was ever to be one though, it should come as no surprise that IBM is that vendor. The newest release of their Collaboration software, Quickr, comes with a content integrator tool designed to help organizations move away from the dreaded viral software that SharePoint is fast becoming to the software company that use to claim that "viral" title.

There’s some interesting talk in air these days around office productivity suites and the move to using purely web-based products. Some predict the end of Microsoft if they don’t make the move to a SaaS offering. Other reports show something completely opposite.

When Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch speaks, people listen. Education Web professionals, especially.

At Monday's Education Web Professional National Conference, a packed house of web professionals serving public, private and independent schools in the Mid-Atlantic region (and beyond) convened to talk content management.

It looks like a busy April for Jive Software. Not only did they announce the release of Clearspace 2.0, their social productivity software, they also announced their acquisition of Jotlet, a web 2.0 social calendar solution, to be integrated into Clearspace in the future.

Originally released last year as a people-oriented alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint, this new version of Clearspace was inspired by a customer demand for "Facebook for the Enterprise".

Looks like Europe also hangs out on the SharePoint bandwagon. This news is according to the content management association -- AIIM Europe. Annual survey results show what we already know here in North America, that organizations intend to use MOSS, but have no formal plans for application.

We all know that SharePoint (MOSS) is being heavily used for basic document management and collaboration services. We also know that the software is often deployed in an environment where it must be integrated with other technologies like content management systems and portals -- why else would so many Enterprise CMS vendors cooking-up nifty connectors and building repository bridges?

The message is clear: Knowledge workers the world over are putting a lot of digital stuff into MOSS and if your tech can't talk MOSS, you're liable to be left out in the cold.

If you are a religious SharePoint follower then you've heard of Andrew Connell -- known best as the expert on Web Content Management with SharePoint 2007.

Well Andrew and a team of other SharePoint experts have been hard at work writing a new book: Professional Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and it's finally finished and getting ready for publication.

The book is aimed at developers who build publishing sites with SharePoint 2007 -- something many believe is not easy. WCM is considered one of the weakest components of SharePoint. Andrew may argue this as he's spent lots of time working on it, training people on it, talking about it at conferences. So this book should be the answer to many a dream...

A quick scan of the table content reveals much about the information that will be provided in the book. Some of the Chapters include:

• Embarking on Web Content Management Projects
• Minimal Publishing Site Definition
• Site Columns, Content Types and Lists
• Navigation
• Accessibility
• Leveraging Workflow
• Authoring Experience Extensibility
• Authentication and Authorization
• Implementing Sites with Multiple Languages and Devices
• Content Deployment

Definitely sounds like a book I'd like to read. You can preorder on Amazon or sit back and impatiently wait for the June release.

Have you made that investment in SharePoint 2007 that you've been thinking about for the last year? Or do you already have it and just aren't sure what to do with it? Independent analyst CMS Watch has just released their latest report entitled: The SharePoint Report 2008: A Comprehensive Evaluation of SharePoint in the Enterprise.

Well known for their independent and objective evaluation of content management and associated technologies, CMS Watch provides us with a review of SharePoint that helps us understand where and how it best fits -- or doesn't -- into the enterprise and how if we aren't careful, SharePoint will become the next Lotus Notes.

Whether you have MOSS 2007 or WSS3.0, you have the ability to create a blog site for your company intranet, department, internet and so on. But the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with either version of SharePoint is less than stellar.

Now, however with the final release of the new Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) you actually have some blogging capabilities that provide a pretty advanced looking – and functioning – blog.

RedDot, Open Text's Web solutions arm, has announced new integration features for Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. The new package is called "MOSS 2007 Document Management Integration", and focuses on ... let me check my notes here... document management in Microsoft's Billion Dollar baby.

More specifically, RedDot's new product aims to 'Expand the web visibility of "...SharePoint Document Libraries Securely to ... Online Media."
If we were in sarcastic mood, we could point out that we know of another product which will do exactly that, and do it pretty well, and that other magical tool is called... SharePoint. Of course that would be trite and mean, and not like us at all.

It was back in September of last year that Microsoft first announced that it was going to offer SharePoint (MOSS) as a service (SaaS). When first announced, the offering was available as a limited beta and restricted to organizations with over 5,000 users. We're now onto the next phase and the broader market is being invited to stroll in the fields.

At the recent SharePoint Conference 2008, Gates announced that the hosted services would be opened up to organizations of all sizes, coming to a node near you, so it was said, in the second quarter of this year.

Now considering how well Microsoft has be able to sell the "Be all you can be with SharePoint" dream, this announcement has surely inspired everything from cheers of joy to cynical snickers to shivers of fear.

The online collaboration and content management space is heating up damn fast. And being the nosy CMS'ers that we are, we rung up Tom Rizzo, Redmond's Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, to see if he could add a few nuggets of detail to the story.

KnowledgeLake Inc., a provider of Enterprise Content Management solutions for SharePoint products and technologies, has announced Capture Server 2008. Capture Server 2008 is part of KnowledgeLake's Capture Suite and provides an end-to-end solution that lets organizations convert paper documents into electronic data using any appropriate device from any location.

Ascentium Corporation, an interactive marketing and technology consultancy, has announced the release of two new search tools for the Microsoft Enterprise Search platform: Search Center Branding Removal and ASP.NET Search Controls.

According a the Quest Software press release “Gartner, Inc. predicts that 80 percent of organizations will be using SharePoint Server 2007 by 2010, but only 40 percent will use it effectively.”

Quest has arisen to challenge of supporting that 40% who can't figure out how it use SharePoint correctly. They have come up with a new set of tools to ease SharePoint management.