SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 News, Reviews

Blame it on the Consumerization of IT, the "bring your own device" movement, the seemingly inescapable trend of all things moving toward the cloud, or the cyclical move from single-vendor solutions to best-of-breed (a cycle that seems to repeat itself every five to seven years). Regardless of these trends or cycles, collaboration environments within the enterprise are rapidly expanding. 

After years of will they/won't they, Microsoft has finally released an Office app for the iPhone (usable, but not optimized for the iPad), finally bringing its platform agnostic play to Apple devices. 

SharePoint gurus, developers and convention crashers can set the date for 2014's big Microsoft shindig for all things social business, enterprise and collaboration. 

There was a number of interesting releases this week. Axceler is preparing enterprises for SharePoint 2013, while Adobe has upgraded its EchoSign iOS app and Kofax added analytics to its data capture program. Meanwhile, KonwledgeLake has also upgraded Connect.

Many organizations have adopted Microsoft SharePoint as a central employee portal -- a way to deliver and share documents, create accessibility and encourage collaboration -- but managers are under increasing pressure to add more value to SharePoint investments. One way to do this is to incorporate video into the SharePoint experience.

As I help people build out their SharePoint solutions many groups use the phrases “one single location to access content” or a “single source of truth” to describe their end goals. These are great goals and can play a huge part in successful SharePoint implementations, but in many cases it overlooks one key point: the context of the data.

God knows people love SharePoint. In fact, if you Google “love SharePoint,” you’ll get 430,00 results. Among them, you’ll see images of t-shirts, teddy bears, coffee mugs and even a few tattoos emblazoned with the phrase “I ♥ SharePoint.” 

With information management reaching a crisis point in many enterprises as more and more channels pump data into disparate silos, an unlikely champion for breaking down content silos has arisen in the shape of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategies.

More SharePoint governance goodness this week from MetaVis, which has just announced the release of Informant, a tool that enables users to protect their personal and sensitive information stored in SharePoint.

When Office 2013 was first released, the client included SkyDrive Pro. This client application was available only with a new SharePoint 2013 installation and allowed for a user to sync content from a SharePoint library to their local machine or mobile device. This feature was a much anticipated feature, but unfortunately for many, the upgrade to Office 2013 wasn't possible. 

This week there were quite a number of releases for mobile including new printing possibilities for mobile users from Accellion and Ricoh. SkyDrive Pro is now available for Windows, while Adobe is offering Photoshop Express for Windows 8, and Cognidox releases XtraNet for document portals.

In a series of surveys last year of more than 1,000 SharePoint administrators and business professionals, much was learned about how people "perceived" their organizations to be handling their SharePoint governance strategy. The data showed a large gap between those perceptions and what governance actually looked like inside businesses. 

What roles do social technologies play in facilitating collaboration? A new study by Avanade showed a large, but untapped opportunity to fully adopt and leverage social technologies for collaboration at work. 

Today, harmon.ie brings Office 365 to the mobile enterprise. With harmon.ie 4.0 for mobile devices, companies can be afforded the security and offline support for Office 365 file sharing, as well as complete access to SharePoint, Yammer and Office apps.

This week brought us some very interesting articles related to our month long theme on Customer Journeys. In the world of Social Business we took a look at social intranets and what the future holds for enterprise portals, while over in Information Management we learned the five things you should know before making the move to SharePoint Online.