SharePoint 2010, SharePoint News, Reviews

It doesn't have to be so painful

“Wait… what? .NET I get… Web Parts make sense… Server Object Model I can get behind, but what’s up with v4.Master, CAML, XSLT, XML, core.css, JavaScript, jQuery, SPD, features, solution galleries? Really??? All I want to do is pre-populate a couple of fields and make the screen look less ugly!! I hate SharePoint!!”

Take a deep breath and count to ten. We’ve all been there. Do not despair. You are not unintelligent. You are not a moron. You do not need to quit your job to find work in the fast food industry, and you are not alone in your frustrations with SharePoint.

In the document management space this week, Alfresco announced that later in the week it will be releasing Enterprise 4, Microsoft announced the public beta of Office 15 for the summer, Colligo got legal at LegalTech, Rioch bought HSSK and M-Files can now be used on mobile devices.

Aiming to be a bigger player in the mobile collaboration and data market, UI and UX company Infragistics has snapped up SouthLabs, the developer of SharePlus, a leading SharePoint-on-your-iOS/Android/BlackBerry smartphone client.

If you want to successfully implement SharePoint in your organization, then you need to clearly define and manage your information architecture (IA). There are a number of things you need to do to define your SharePoint IA and here are five critical steps to ensure you are on the right track.

Over the past 12 months alone, there have been two reports that suggest that SharePoint is being widely adopted across the enterprise and that it is being used in many cases as an enterprise content management system. A recent paper from Microsoft makes the business case for these two trends.

FAQ: Which feature article this week caused the biggest stir?

Those seemingly innocuous, innocent FAQ pages tucked away in the bottom navigation bar of many websites provoked quite a bit of discussion this week from readers who did not lack for opinions.

Our experts also weighed in with thoughts on the millinery choices of content managers, suggestions for who should be your sweetheart this Valentine’s Day (hint: your customers), how big data and analytics can help shape CXM strategies, and what it takes to be a great employee in today's social businesses.

And oh, did somebody say SharePoint?

If you thought all the SharePoint 2010 migration options had been exhausted at this point, think again. It has just found something else to migrate into SharePoint, this time in the shape of the migration of Exchange public folders.

Last year I wrote an article entitled “Is the Legal Industry Ready for SharePoint?”, as I had just gotten back from ILTA with fresh questions in my mind from inquiring customers about using the platform as a Document Management System (DMS), in lieu of Autonomy Worksite or OpenText DOCS Open. The article was a simple walk through on the viability of moving to SharePoint as a DMS in a law firm.

I’d like to expand on that topic now and share with you some of my experiences with respect to recent client engagements of this type.

Editor's Note: This article serves as part 2 of the article mentioned above.

Last time on the Art of SharePoint Success we concluded our exploration of strategic lenses that I use to help clients understand and articulate their SharePoint related goals by looking at Enterprise Content Management and Collaboration.

In this scintillating installment we are going to delve into the third and final part of the Strategy element, the business case for SharePoint.

In my last post, I outlined the decision point that the SharePoint user community faces right now. I caught some flak after the post that I want to address here head-on: some folks pointed out that whatever SharePoint can or can’t do in theory, in practice SharePoint implementations frequently fail to provide improved document management…and organizations find themselves with as big (or bigger) of a mess as they had with shared drives, Lotus Notes or whatever else was in place before SharePoint came along.

Consider this: Microsoft has sold over 125 million licenses of SharePoint. It is a multi-billion dollar business. SharePoint is a platform that everyone seems to have, many actually use and most don’t understand how to implement and manage properly. There is no platform more in need of a proper information architecture than SharePoint. But what exactly does that mean?

Taxonomies in Enterprise CMSs like SharePoint 2010 can be made more valuable if content can be autoclassified. This month, I show how the taxonomy management tool DataFacet can be used to precisely control how autoclassification can be done to get better search results.

For those organizations contemplating a move to SharePoint, there are a couple of ways to test the product before committing to a purchase. Which trial method is right for your enterprise? Read on.

Huddle's new Enterprise Unlimited offering will open up business accounts to customers, partners and others to expand the concept of collaboration beyond your office's walls.

This week in the document management space, OpenText extends its offerings on the Azure platform, we find that document security is still an issue with SharePoint users, Box gets easier email management, Kofax extends its document capture abilities, Zylpha offers secure document transfer and SmartSoft offers OCR.