SharePoint 2010, SharePoint News, Reviews

As the tech world takes to the skies on their way to Austin, TX to sample the bbq, music and information insights that #SXSWi brings, our experts reminded us this week that technology is only one piece of the puzzle. At the end of the day, it’s about the people, both those outside the enterprise and those doing the day to day work.

Businesses were put on warning that the end of metrics and the sales funnel is here, that social tools for social’s sake within the workspace just won’t cut it if there isn’t a clear benefit and reason for using them, and we were shown how an information architect is like the manager of a large office block.

Intrigued? Read on and save some bbq for me!

With the widespread adoption of SharePoint across the enterprise, and the steady growth of the small to medium-sized business deployments of both SharePoint on premise and in the cloud (with much of that coming from the success of Microsoft's Office365 platform), organizations are tempering much of their IT-centric push for anything SharePoint.

During all the hoopla around the Office 365 release, Microsoft promised that everyone would be able to do everything with it, including the government. Then everything went quiet. We didn’t hear much about the government, Microsoft, the cloud and Office 365, until a recent blog post indicated that Microsoft hadn’t forgotten and was getting something ready for government use.

Hopefully you’ve recovered from the excitement of our last installment in the Art Of SharePoint Success? It’s time to think about how we deploy SharePoint into the organization, and don’t worry, we’re not suddenly talking technology.

There were a number of interesting announcements this week including the release of CNG-SAFE v7.5, Lexmark’s addition of new Enterprise CMS functionality through the acquisition of Brainware, OpenText offered Tempo on general release, while Adobe upgraded printing functionality. Meanwhile, Webhostforasp.net offered new SharePoint hosting services.

Metalogix said it will purchase Syntergy and integrate its suite of products, including its popular Replicator web platform, into Metalogix' SharePoint content life cycle management solutions portfolio. Syntergy will continue to operate "independently," keeping its Open Text /LiveLink business but Replicator for SharePoint will become part of Metalogix.

In December, harmon.ie offered us the possibility of working in our inboxes and still having access to SharePoint. This week it announced that it will be offering the ability to gain access to IBM Connections through a social sidebar from an Outlook email box later in the year. Oh, and it also added some top new features to the free edition.

I’m in the middle of a series on how to build and deploy successful SharePoint document management applications, with the goal of migrating end-users off of the most prevalent legacy document management system out there: that unholy trinity of shared drives, hard drives and email.

In this post, we’ll dive deeper into system design and testing, one of the most exciting parts of the process.

Virgil Carroll’s presentation was a perfect conclusion to a fun, informative day at Office 365 Saturday Redmond. Mr. Carroll introduced his talk with the declarative: SharePoint implementations fail more often than succeed because of poor information architecture. He stated, “Information architecture (IA) is a practice, not a strategy. But there is good news. In IA, there’s no such thing as a right answer. There’s only what fits for your organization.”

The impressive Mr. Richard Harbridge of Allin Consulting presented his discussion, “The 7 Most Important SharePoint Online Success Factors” at Office 365 Saturday Redmond. It was a last-minute change to the agenda, but a welcome one. Few of us in the audience knew that he posts a number of resources here on the interwebz.

Is your project management environment prone to haphazard solutions, sometimes resulting in success and sometimes…not so much? Do you find yourself lacking the tools that will let you enhance your projects’ collaborative processes?

I’m a big fan of People Who Share and Fabian Williams is one of them, which is why I was so excited to meet him at the Office 365 event in Redmond this past weekend. He delivered. 

Mr. Williams gave a talk on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to migrate enterprise data into the cloud.

While it was possibly unlucky for some in the cloud that 2012 was a leap year, for our feature writers it was a boon. They took full advantage of the extra day to share their insights on what social business means for corporate America, approaches enterprises can take to transform into social businesses and looked at the technology that drives the evolution.

Our experts also reviewed the potential of DAM-API integration, looked further into big data, examined the commodification of content and shared practical steps to making your taxonomy more intuitive. Read on to learn more and to get a sneak peek of next week's features.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Kashman, a Senior Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft. I wanted to get his views on Office365, SharePoint Online and how he sees this cloud offering co-existing with SharePoint "On Premise" in the future.

While we might expect social within the enterprise to be easy as Facebook or Twitter, it’s not.  Deploying social technology within the enterprise is a journey filled with organizational hurdles that include compliance, security, culture change, executive sponsorship, budget and integration challenges to name just a few.  In some organizations, this social journey begins when the business wants to embrace social before corporate IT is ready.