SharePoint 2010, SharePoint News, Reviews

SharePoint 2010 is a popular tool for creating Intranets, customer portals and almost any web-based solution. It’s a powerful product that can address an impressive number of business solutions. With all of the power SharePoint has to offer, and the money you’ll likely spend on deployment, it’s important to get certain things right. In this article, I’ll cover the top seven things that executives must consider when deploying SharePoint 2010. So if you’re thinking about SharePoint, or are revisiting a stalled deployment to give it a kickstart, read on.

Before you begin adding customization tools to SharePoint to create a solution for your business, you must understand your company’s business problem. In this article, I cover a few important areas you need to address before you look at technology.

In this, the month of everything SharePoint at CMSWire, we’ve started looking at SharePoint in some detail and with some interesting results. Last week, Jed Cawthorne, a Senior Strategy Consultant for enterprise content management, looked at uses for SharePoint. Here we will look at some of the challenges with deployments in the enterprise.

While SharePoint has been widely successful, not all organizations have seen the full benefit of using this platform. Here is the four key element framework that I have developed for you to ensure that SharePoint becomes both a business and technical success for your organization.

SharePoint is in 80% of enterprises today, but not always implemented successfully. This month we provide expert SharePoint guidance and example SharePoint strategies to help you effectively plan and implement Microsoft's platform in your organization.

In the news, we covered a review of Hippo Web CMS, the latest version of Telligent Communities and how Novell is killing the Vibe cloud.

We also took a closer look at key information management topics: business process management and e-Discovery, and checked-out the leading vendors -- Jive and Lithium, to name two -- in Gartner's Social CRM Magic Quadrant.

This month's Tweet Jam takes place on August 17th and will focus on SharePoint in the Enterprise. See details here and please join the discussion on the 17th.

Most Popular

• Jive, Salesforce & Lithium Lead Gartner's Social CRM Magic Quadrant
• SharePoint -- Good at Controlled Access, Bad at Process
• The Root of All Evil: SharePoint Information Architecture and Happy End Users
• Business Process Management: What It Is, What Its Implementation Problems Are
• 4 Best Practices for Transitioning from Social Media to Social Business

Editor's Picks

• SharePoint: An Enterprise Solution for What?
• Social Funnel is Future of Successful Marketing
• So Just What Do We Mean by 'Information Management'?
• Enterprise 2.0: The Future Digital Workplace Makes Work Flow
• Web Design: Four More Wireframing Tools

Around the Web

• Why Customer Experience Shouldn’t Report to Marketing
• Like It or Not, Your Content Marketing Is Channel Agnostic
• 5 Things Lady Gaga Can Teach Marketers About Community Building
• 9 Ways To Measure The (Actual) Success Of Your Social-Media Community
• Social business for people like me

Featured Events (all events | post an event)

• Aug 23, 2011 -- UX Week 2011 - San Francisco
• Sep 12, 2011 -- Semphonic X Change 2011 Web Analytics Conference
• Sep 13, 2011 – Enterprise Tomorrow Conference - San Francisco 2011
• Sep 26, 2011 -- Telligent's The Big Social 2011
• Oct 03, 2011 -- Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit 2011 #CXM

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post a job)

• News Editor at Future US
• Enterprise Solutions Consultant at Dow Jones
• Web Analytics Manager at LeapFrog
• Freelance UX Designer & Developer at Inquirium
• VP, Engineering at CrowdFlower

Although Microsoft sells SharePoint as a collaboration tool, it really isn’t. It is a process and storage tool, and actually does a reasonable job at that. Many of our larger clients have thousands (if not millions) of documents stored in SharePoint. But in terms of supporting collaborative interactions between team members, SharePoint has some bolt-on technology at best.

This month we are taking a closer look at SharePoint's role in the enterprise and its capabilities as an enterprise platform. Where does it fit? What should you be thinking about? Where would other solutions/platforms work better? This is a perfect opportunity to get your perspective in the upcoming Tweet Jam on August 17th.

CMSWire recently wrote about the important community that supports the SharePoint platform. But just how active and popular is it?

Does your organization follow most of the principles that help define “information management”? If not, then how can it expect to make an impact on its business performance by implementing SharePoint 2010 or other suites?

So you may have experienced the good, the bad and the ugly around SharePoint information architecture (IA). In this post, I’ll address common concerns surrounding SharePoint IA and discuss how a better understanding of IA can help you to improve the effectiveness of your SharePoint environment.

The Law of the Instrument states "...if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it were a nail."

When you examine the content management world's zeitgeist, the tool that has all the buzz is the shiny hammer of SharePoint. Yes, SharePoint, a fascinating "free product" that supports an $8 billion a year -- and growing -- ecosystem. By fully embracing Microsoft enterprise site licenses, IT administrators have used SharePoint to justify stable budgets for IT and doubled down their bets on on-premise software. I admit, there is some appeal in having a single vendor to work with, a single price to pay and being able to physically hug your server, should you so choose. But given the benefits of cloud computing like redundancy, cost savings and speed of deployment, is it worth the trade off? Is SharePoint really the only strategy you need?

Are you considering SharePoint for your enterprise? For what purpose? And what's your definition of enterprise anyway?

The release of SharePoint 2010 introduced a new way to develop and deploy SharePoint customizations called "Sandbox Solutions.” Sandbox solutions encompass both a new deployment model for no-code elements like master pages and page layouts, and a new least-privilege code execution environment.

Sandbox solutions have gotten a bad rap in some circles, largely related to the restrictions placed on developers, and the limitations on supported customizations. However, sandbox solutions offer some compelling features for developers and administrators that make them essential knowledge for anyone developing and deploying custom solutions for SharePoint 2010.

Businesses today all want SharePoint from IT departments. Different business units and their many departments and teams all have, at some point, been given the sales pitch on the value of using the technology, and inevitably the IT department is challenged to drive down costs. But just how many implementations does an organization really need? SharePoint was made to be shared. So instead of providing technology to the business, provide them with a service.

Because Ars Logica specializes in helping clients choose or assemble content management products (CMS, DAM, CXM, portals), we often get asked how – and if – SharePoint should be integrated into an overall solution stack. Since no two customer implementations are ever identical, our advice is never exactly the same. But similar themes underpin most of our guidance on SharePoint usage.