SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 News, Reviews

There’s just nothing like seeing a couple of old hands get together for a common cause. That’s what’s happened today with the announcement that Webtrends and Axceler are joining forces to help another old pardner -- SharePoint.

For many of us who eagerly await the release of the latest and greatest from Microsoft we were shocked and awed when we discovered that this release removed one of the primary tools for Business Users from the product. SharePoint Designer, as we had come to know it, had been drastically changed.

It's a busy time in the document management world. The Microsoft Exchange Conference returns after 10 years as Microsoft gears up for the new Office 2013 release, HP uses Autonomy’s IDOL for information governance, AvePoint offers governance in SharePoint, FileTrail extends SharePoint’s records management, and Alfresco releases a new synching tool for enterprises.

On September 8th, I found myself on the road again, far from my home in the Seattle area, participating as a speaker at the annual SharePoint Saturday Cape Town (#SPSCPT) event in South Africa.

Last year Iron Mountain sold off its digital assets to Autonomy. Then Autonomy got gobbled up by HP and we thought that was that. But any fears that Iron Mountain exited the information management space can be put to rest by today’s announcement of its new records management product that works with SharePoint.

SharePoint is a complex product. It can be used for Intranets, websites, portals and custom solutions. It supports document management, workflows, content creation, business intelligence and more. Is it little wonder users get confused?

There are many ways to gather project requirements: most utilized are the traditional “post-it” workshops, brainstorming and interviews. But can you be sure that you get the right requirements that solve your business needs when using these techniques? Probably not. 

The Jain legend of the blind men and the elephant came up at this week's Dachis Social Business Summit during David Gray's presentation. 

The story goes a little like this: six blind men are led up to an elephant, each left in front of a different part. One man feels the tail and says, "It's a rope." Another feels the ear and says, "It's a fan."  You get the idea. The story is usually told to show the value of collective intelligence, but I think it works for many of this week's articles as well. 

If you segment and analyze your data without keeping in mind the bigger context, you lose value. If you search for information in your DAM system and it's missing context, your results will be irrelevant. If technology continues to explode at a pace faster than people can adapt to, we run the risk of losing perspective on its place in our lives. 

Curious? Read on.

In previous articles, we have covered the different solutions that can be built using SharePoint. But even the best of features are no good if they aren’t being fully utilized by the organization. 

Let’s face it, mobility should absolutely be on your radar if you’re an IT executive or decision maker. Whether your firm has a substantial investment in mobile devices for the workforce or you’ve adopted modern BYOD policies, you cannot ignore the impact of mobile devices on how we do business. Microsoft knows this, and has been hard at work to upgrade SharePoint’s plumbing in relation to the mobile experience.

Did you miss me? Since wrapping up the Art of SharePoint Success series here on CMSWire I’ve been reviewing the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview. There’s already lots of articles and posts out there that tell you about all the cool new features but little guidance on how to use them in an organization, or what benefits they might deliver so I am back with a new series of articles which examine SharePoint 2013 from the executive's perspective.

It is very common for SharePoint projects to be run by IT. The focus will then become technical functions and features instead of business value. It is therefore important that the business is running the project to make sure it solves business needs and gets ROI in the end.

While the hot weather is hanging on in NYC, this week marked the end of vacation for many as students went back to school and the mobile device announcement season kicked into high gear.  

Our contributors helped launch the beginning of the school year with some looks at how to put data to work for you, future trends in the digital asset management world and an explanation of just what semantic web technologies are and what they do (and a hint at how they will change the future of enterprise information management). 

If you're like me and you miss the syllabuses from schooldays, consider this yours for the week.

As many of those who have used Microsoft SharePoint will know, it is a bit of a "kitchen sink" product. It offers the typical enterprise a bit of everything -- a bit of workflow, lots of document management, social features, calendars, basic task management -- this list goes on. As a result it can be difficult to know what bits to use and how best to use them. Intranet projects can quickly become bloated and the final product is met with a resounding whimper by end users.

About this time last year many of my articles focused on the weak competitive position of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors. The rapidly shifting marketplace was predicted to force some to evolve and some to die through the introduction of strong products of cloud based offerings of Jive, Drupal, Salesforce, Google+ and eventually Facebook. When the cards fell, this introduction would eventually raise the stakes of the employee-experience/intranet space to spur a reinvention of the intranet from the ground up.

Since then...