SharePoint 2010, SharePoint News, Reviews

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.

In anticipation of the Year of the Dragon, our contributors got down to business this week, urging readers to be more agile, more adaptive and more responsive to the needs of their business and their customers. We learned that Golden Retrievers can teach us a thing or two about adaptive case management, the potential unhealthy future for mobile health (and how this future can be avoided), why you should always be ready for Mother Nature, how the blues inform web content and were asked the perennial question “What would SharePoint do?” But please, whatever you do, do not call what follows a list.

Enter the dragon!

Swedish IT security risk management company Cryptzone Group said a recent survey showed almost one in three (30%) Microsoft SharePoint users have disregarded its security measures and admitted to copying and distributing sensitive or confidential documents through non-secure means. The group further comments that, remarkably, of the 92% of respondents who understood the risk, 13% believe that protecting company data is not their responsibility.

Rumors and conjecture have circulated about a possible SharePoint App store since the release of SharePoint 2010. A number of independent attempts currently exist, though they amount to little more than website catalogs. An official app store was thought to be part of Microsoft's launch plans for SharePoint 2010, but it is believed that logistical and technical issues prevented it from becoming a reality. With the success of the iOS version and official plans for a Windows 8 store, it's almost certain we will see something soon for SharePoint.

If you’re a heavy SharePoint user, you will know that it can be used on-premise, online and in hybrid deployments. Managing one type of deployment is difficult enough, but three? AvePoint 6 -- or, officially, DocAve 6, which has gone on general release today -- aims to help enterprises overcome that by pulling the management of SharePoint into one space.

Social software provider NewsGator and Vizit, a social collaboration solution provider for SharePoint, announced that they've integrated their software to improve viewing, commenting and conversation abilities for SharePoint users.

The Real Story Group published its annual report on the enterprise content management industry last week. We talked to Real Story Group (RSG) Principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, who outlined some of the main findings and who argues that the industry has already passed a turning point which will result in some established and newer trends gaining ground in the year to come.

Silverlight was Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash, an application framework with which to build rich internet applications. It was launched in April 2007 to much fanfare, albeit mainly from Microsoft. Version 5 brought GPU accelerated video decoding and 64-bit support in December of last year. It also brought the conclusion of the Silverlight story, as this version is set to be the final release. Silverlight is no more. Or so people have been speculating, as there has yet to be any official word from Microsoft. Its lifespan might be prolonged as a Windows Phone platform, but it seems likely it will cease to exist as a browser plugin.

However this article is not about SIlverlight per se, but rather its somewhat fractured relationship with SharePoint. If we have really seen the final installment of Silverlight, what does that mean for its use with SharePoint in the future? Let’s start by seeing how it is used today.