Sharepoint 2010 News & Articles

In a continued effort to extol the virtues of the upcoming SharePoint 2010 (news, site) platform, Microsoft created a special competition for seven startups in their BizSpark program. The competition? In one week create an Enterprise 2.0 solution on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Here are the results.

Quite an eventful week in the content management industry! Here are our highlights of the week and most popular stories, jobs, featured events and -- new in this column -- polls and your votes.

Top Stories of the Week

• Open Text Reports Good Q2, Vignette Contributes to YoY Spike. OTEX did better than in the past quarters, in part, thanks to Vignette and (formerly known as) RedDot contributing to the bottom line.
• SharePoint 2010 - 5 Hot Features to Look Forward To. With the release of SharePoint 2010 getting closer, people are getting either a) excited, b) nervous or c) all of the above. Have a look at the top 5 noteworthy changes coming with SharePoint 2010.
• Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands. In this exclusive, we discussed Alterian's plans and WCM strategy. In short, it boils down to major consolidation efforts in the mish-mash of Web CMS technologies the company currently offers. Customers, get ready for changes.
• Webtrends Adds Advanced Targeting and Mobile Analytics. The Web analytics solution provider released both advanced targeting capabilities and Webtrends Mobile Analytics. Heads up marketers, this one’s for you.
• Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List. In this guest post, Seth Gottlieb drills down into the science of building a short list -- one of the important steps in any Web CMS selection process. Don't let the high stakes paralyze you.
• Day CQ 5.3 Aims to Brighten the Days of Techies and Marketers Alike. Day’s latest minor release includes more than 600 enhancements over CQ 5.2.0 code base. Changes start right from the welcome screen.
• Social Media Minute: Social to Rule the Enterprise, Unless Spam and Malware Win Out. Gartner offered five social software predictions for the near future. Social networking will spread into the enterprise, they say, and will replace e-mail as a primary communication platform for 20 percent of business users.

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Unlce Google's analytics data.

• Gartner’s Top 5 BPM Predictions for 2010 And Beyond. Gartner released latest report on business process management highlighting what they see as the five major trends in business process management for 2010 and beyond.
• Web Design: Top 5 Wireframing Tools. As more wireframe tools become available, the focus is shifting to include IA. Here is a selection of wireframes that are sure to prove useful.

• 10 Best Practices for Website Landing Pages. These top ten best practices for landing pages encourage companies to make smart marketing choices, which will not only engage the user but be able to show higher ROI.

• Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in February 2010. Updates from the majority of open source CMS players: from Acquia to XOOPS.

• 6 Ways Document Management and Records Management Differ. The question is, will your document management system also support records management? At the core of this question is what is the differences between document management and records management. Let's examine six differences.

• Google Drops Bomb on MS Internet Explorer 6. If you swear allegiance to both Internet Explorer and Google Apps, as of March 1st you may find yourself in an uncomfortable predicament, and frankly speaking, we're rather happy about all this.

• SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. 100 million licenses and 4,000 partners later, Microsoft thinks they have a handle on this SharePoint phenomenon.

Polls and Your Votes

• What's Your Biggest Digital Asset Management Challenge? Is it taxonomy management, usability or selecting a product? So far, it looks like the biggest struggle is the usability of the system at 23% with 98 votes. Vote and let us know what your challenges with DAM are.
• What's Your Web CMS Focus in 2010? Cloud hosted or SaaS, search integration or integration of social media? As of today, the majority of readers (25% with 18 votes) say their focus lies in the cloud and SaaS area. Do you agree? Cast your vote and see what others think.

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. For both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

• Software Engineer at NewsGator
• Social Media Business Assistant at Mashable
• Technical Writer at ZL Technologies
• Project Manager at TERMINALFOUR
• Territory Sales Manager at Kentico Software, LLC
• Sales Representative at Nuxeo
• Web Developer at ADAM Software

Traveling or Virtual, There are CMS Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• February 9-10 (Santa Clara): SDL Innovate 2010
• February 9-12 (Phoenix): ECM Master Class
• February 10-12 (San Francisco): SharePoint Technology Conference 2010
• February 17 (Online): Webinar: 4 Essential Strategies for Advancing Your Website's Business Impact
• February 17-18 (Universal City): Createasphere DAM 2010

With the release of SharePoint 2010 (news, site) getting closer, people are getting either a) excited, b) nervous or c) all of the above. Whatever your mindset, here are 5 changes coming with SharePoint 2010 which you should take note of.

It’s no secret that the new managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 (news, site) will be a welcomed addition to the product. What may not be apparent is exactly how this service will benefit your end-users. It will. Here's how.

Excited to try out SharePoint 2010 (news, site) but not exactly sure how to get started? Microsoft is helping with the release of a free 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta).

Want more proof that cloud computing is becoming very popular? Bamboo Solutions (news, site) has started up a new division focused on providing hosted solutions based on SharePoint.

The cloud is becoming a popular place, not everyone wants to deal with the licensing and deployment issues related to on premise solutions. Bamboo Solutions obviously sees an opening in the SaaS market that they can easily fill.

With SharePoint Online opening its doors to extensibility when it upgrades to SharePoint 2010, Bamboo has a potentially burgeoning market for its Web Parts, accelerators and applications. And there's room to develop even more. But that doesn't mean they should stop there.

The newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group will develop and offer SharePoint based solutions themselves. The first of these Bamboo SaaS-based offerings will come sometime before the end of January in the form of collaboration solution. Called the Bamboo Requirements Manager (BambooRM™), it enables geographically dispersed teams to collaboration and communicate on demand.

Requirements Manager is just the start of a number of hosted solutions Bamboo will offer to small to medium sized businesses on a subscription basis. PMCentral, their flagship application, will also be offered as a hosted service at some point.

If you like SharePoint and you like the idea of someone else providing the application and platform for you, get ready to take Bamboo Online Applications for a trial run (they will offer trials).

Yes, Mainsoft (news, site) is hanging out at Lotusphere this week. But the talk doesn't have to be all about IBM and Lotus does it? Well technically yes, it does. Mainsoft is just sprinkling in a bit of SharePoint 2010 to make it all that much more interesting.

MetaVis (news, site) is a company whose goal is to help you manage and control your SharePoint environments. So if you are one of those companies who wants to use SharePoint for more than a gloried file share, the MetaVis Migrator for SharePoint is a tool you should consider adding to your arsenal.

Even before the beta release last November of SharePoint 2010 there had been a rush to build integrators and connectors for SharePoint. This year, the first of them comes in the shape of Skelta (news, site) which has just announced that its BPM. NET product will support SharePoint 2010.

While the release date of KnowledgeLake’s (news, site) Imaging for SharePoint (IFS) only four days before Christmas may seem odd, the company explains that it did it so that customers would be able to use the new features straight away.

Here we are on the brink of the night before Christmas, if that's your kind of thing. And this time we're indulging ourselves by shuttering the shop from now until the first Monday of 2010.

For us it's reflection season. In that spirit we've cooked up a concise retrospective of 2009, including items our readers took particular interest in, and some things we found generally interesting.

Without further ado we leave you to some holiday reading. May the end of 2009 treat you and yours well.

Enterprise CMS Highlights

It was largely business as usual in the ECM sector this year, with a few notable exceptions.

• SDL's acquisition of XyEnterprise made sense.
• But it was Autonomy's acquisition of Interwoven that was the most talked about.
• That is until Open Text's acquired Vignette -- although many suspected Vignette was on the market.
• In November Forrester fingered EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Open Text and Oracle as the leaders in their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management while Autonomy, Day Software, Alfresco and SpringCM were placed in the visionaries box.
• In early Q4 at Open World Oracle announced plans to integrate their enterprise Applications with their ECM document services. Details were slim, so we'll have to look for more facts there in 2010.

Beyond acquisition activity, open source players stepped up their game and look to be positioned well for some 2010 combat.

• Alfresco got more attention from analysts and chalked-up an important DoD certification. Adobe and Alfresco continued to work together on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. The company also made strides with their cloud offering via a partnership with RightScale.
• Paris-based Nuxeo launched US operations in the ever popular Boston area, added Digital Asset Management (DAM) to their offering and hired Cheryl McKinnon -- previously of Open Text -- to run global marketing programs.
• The DoD was on our radar again as it voiced support for open source software in the procurement process, in the form of a DoD memo.

SharePoint in the Limelight (still)

• SharePoint remained so dominant that vendors big and small rushed to build integrations and connectors. All year long people found the topic of Web Content Management with SharePoint intriguing. However, we heard more about frustrations than successes.
• The anticipation and early previews of SharePoint 2010 dominated the annual (and sold out) SharePoint Conference 2009. The event brought tidbits for technical administrators, covered the 2010 upgrade plans, and spurred partners to announce support for the product.
• For project managers, Dux Raymond Sy wrote up a brief on project management with SharePoint 2010. He followed up this article with a two-part treatise on why SharePoint ignorance is not bliss.
• The SharePoint 2010 beta was released this past November. And Microsoft -- ever keen on inspiring upgrades and enabling the partner channel -- followed up this month with the launch of an official SharePoint 2010 upgrade service offering.
• Yet despite progress in the field, many organizations still struggle to go beyond using SharePoint as a file sharing service. Still, dear Steve Ballmer's confidence is higher than ever. He even described how SharePoint is like the PC.

Web CMS a Super Dynamic Space

Perhaps it's been web content management that has seen the most change this year:

• Vignette and Interwoven acquisitions were mentioned above, but we'll shed a tear and pay them homage one more time here. Confusion was voiced fairly broadly around the Open Text grab of Vignette, notably around their 2010 platforms roadmap. There were also some whispers and chirps about Open Text layoffs. More on that in 2010.
• Yes, we like strong opinions as much as the next fella. Catering to such appetites analyst firm Forrester Research announced that Web CMS 1.0 was officially dead. Weee!
• We all learned that the second most used Web CMS, Drupal, will -- with the brains and funding of Acquia -- go from not so user friendly framework to easy as pie SaaS with the release of Drupal Gardens (now in early alpha). This something to watch in 2010.
• At the J Boye conference in Aarhus, Denmark key practitioners voiced some inconvenient truths and focused on web content management industry challenges. Our recent article Emerging Trends in Web Content Management touched on this again. Certain voices from the field are calling for the death of the WCM acronym, but suitable replacements have yet to be put forward, with a straight face. Stay tuned to the vocabulary space. We're either going to move forward, move backwards, or stay put. I think that about covers the options.
• Mass market WCM options shifted around a bit in terms of brand strength and popularity. Yet  the most popular open source Web CMS products remained Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. You can get the skinny on the top 20 open source CMS brands in the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report.

Standards Abound, Gain Ground

The subject of standards was never far from anyone's mind:

• Enterprise CMS and document management vendors realized part of the key to their success is the ability to interoperate via CMIS. The greatest common factor interoperability specification made good progress over the course of 2009 and version 1.0 is now out for public review.
• HTML 5 continued to gain traction even if it's more years away than we like to admit.
• CSS3 brought support for mobile and multi-column layouts
• Increased use of the mobile web brought the need for standards.
• Even Microsoft expressed support for open standards and interoperability
• At J Boye Aarhus in November, Day Software's David Nüscheler, covered 8 Key Trends in Web Content Management. They fit well with Day's plans and offerings, but nevertheless were good food for thought and quite standards oriented.
• Discussions at the Gilbane San Francisco event also shone light on standards. Irina Guseva's article Content Integration Standards -- CMIS, JSR-170, JSR-283 is a worthwhile read.
• For a great overview of hot content management standards, read Jon Mark's article WCM Field Notes: The Skinny on JCR, CMIS and OSGi.

Enterprise 2.0

The adoption of social computing in the enterprise was big news this year.

• Google took the beta tag off its apps to show it was enterprise ready
• Then they released Google Wave, supposedly the next generation collaboration platform.
• We learned four reasons you should adopt social media in the enterprise
• That Twitter and Facebook are the most persuasive technology of all time. And now the real-time fire hoses are open (watch what you say!).
• But despite all the hootin and hollering, not everyone thought this Enterprise 2.0 thing was necessary.

Industry Themes: Search, Speed, Analytics, Semantics, Real-time, Open Source and more...

You can't go through a year without major industry shifts, 2009 had its share:

• Microsoft challenged Google in the search arena with Bing. Have the Search Wars begun in earnest this time?
• Google brought new meaning to less is more with the Chrome browser.
• Just about everyone was talking about the real-time web. Google unveiled real-time search, Twitter opened the real-time fire hose for all developers, as did Facebook.
• The analytics space was taken for a roller coaster ride when IBM acquired SPSS for US$ 1.2 bil and Adobe acquired Omniture for US$ 1.8 bil.
• The semantic web pushed forward with an HTML+RDFa Draft, RDFa metadata moving it the Drupal core and some interesting research on applying semantic web metadata to large data sets. Tim Berners-Lee continued work on linked data and semantic web technologies, with an official mandate in the UK.
• Open Source went to the White House in the form of the Drupal Web CMS. And the U.S. Department of Defense said open source software was a-OK for them.
• Looking forward, CMS Watch recently made their 2010 predictions.
• And looking backwards (to October 2008), Gartner predicted the Top 10 Strategic Technologies of 2009 ...were they right?

That's it for the holiday brain food fun. Thanks for supporting us in 2009 -- we'll see you right back here in January.

It has been a very good year for social computing solutions in the enterprise. For NewsGator (news, site), the tightly integrated relationship with SharePoint has likely proved a smart move and will continue to do so into 2010.

Last year, Microsoft launched SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS), a service that provides customers of SharePoint Software Assurance extra tools to plan and implement SharePoint effectively in their organization.

SDPS includes tools such as:

• SharePoint Deployment Plan Templates
• Architecture Design Documents
• SharePoint server farm deployment guidance

Today, SDPS offers a new service: 2010 Upgrade Planning Offer. The offer includes 1, 3, 5, 10 and 15-day engagements with Microsoft certified partners to help you decide if you need to upgrade, why you should and how you should approach the upgrade process.

Along with a nice, in depth introduction to SharePoint 2010, you get personalized advisement on how your particular deployment will be upgraded, a look at the cost of upgrading (and the benefits) and your own customized migration plan.

Lots of good stuff there to seriously consider. You can think about it over the holidays, but come the new year, SharePoint 2010 will be looming ever closer and you will need to start thinking about how you will upgrade to the new and improved version.

Get all the details about the new offer here.

In my last article, I discussed the first two reasons why executive SharePoint ignorance is not bliss, here are the remaining three:

Note: If you haven't already, take a look at Reasons 1 and 2 on Why Executive SharePoint Ignorance is not Bliss.

Gilbane Boston is approaching fast. Here’s a look (more like a glimpse, given the breadth of the event) at what you can expect at the conference taking place December 1-3:

• Listen and talk to the "who's who" of practitioners, analysts and technologists in the content management space. This is a great opportunity to exercise your brain, as well as network and socialize with the industry’s experts.
• Take a deep dive into the three C’s -- Content, Collaboration & Customers -- by attending sessions, workshops and keynotes.
• Be one of the first to see and touch the already famous SharePoint 2010.
• Participate in the Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming.
• Take part in the Open Source CMS pow-wow.
• Check out content management in practice, lessons learned and real stories from the CMS implementation trenches.
• Push the envelope, look into the future of WCM and share your ideas.

There's a lot more on the menu for the thirsty content management minds of yours. Registration is still open. To get a discount, our readers can use this code: CMSWIRE.

In the meantime, follow Twitter chatter on #gilbaneboston to get more information on what’s in store the first week of December (you may very well find that CMS Christmas is coming early this year). See you in Boston!