SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 News, Reviews

Yes, Virginia, there is life beyond SharePoint.

Microsoft is changing its SharePoint Client Access License structure and raising fees by 15% starting December 1. Maybe it's not too late to convince Microsoft to call it off?

This year's SharePoint conference is now over, and as people return for Las Vegas there is time to reflect on the many announcements made at the show.

SharePoint 2013 is expected to be available to the public in the first quarter of 2013, and you may be wondering when is the best time to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

There have been a number of announcements in the GRC space recently, especially in e-Discovery. Among them are the new e-Discovery capabilities in Office 2013 and the release of OpenText’s InfoFusion. Otherwise, Modus releases Early Insights, LockPath upgrades Keylight, while Catalyst and Rimkus partner.

This session was unusual at a Microsoft SharePoint Conference for two reasons. Firstly, the session was part of the all new “Business” track for non-technical business decision makers. Secondly, it was about Dynamics CRM, and this is the first time I remember the Dynamics products making an appearance at a SharePoint conference.

This year at the SharePoint Conference something was different. Something that has existed at all the other events, but something that this time was front and center, loud and clear! This year the Community was made into a central component of the conference. Community efforts were noticed and encouraged.

This week, even with the Thanksgiving Weekend, there are still a few notable releases, particularly in the mobile space. EMC, for example, offers workers the possibility of making their presentations mobile, while Alfresco upgrades its iOS app. Also this week, Microsoft is offering a free trial of Office 2013 Professional Pro, while docStar upgrades Eclipse.

Semantic search provider Smartlogic is ready to integrate its Semaphore platform into Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013, and upgrades include more ontology related Web parts and better multi-farm support for large-scale deployments.

Let’s face it, no matter how you slice it, SharePoint has been a big success: for Microsoft (78 percent of enterprises currently running SharePoint according to AIIM), for end users (finally some technology they could relate to), and for the enterprise content management (ECM) community (at last, people were somewhat excited about what we do for a living). 

A variety of IT vendors debuted add-on solutions that bring functionality including mobile, cloud and collaboration features to SharePoint at last week’s SharePoint Conference held in Las Vegas, NV. Solution providers making noteworthy announcements included Workshare, Colligo, Nintex and Axceler.

For the first time, this year’s Microsoft SharePoint Conference had a dedicated “Business” track for non-technical, business decision makers and judging by the 600 plus people that packed in to this session there was a huge demand.

In the legal community, it’s well known that Clifford Chance, one of the world’s largest law firms, has been undergoing a major shift towards using SharePoint as the firm’s Enterprise CMS. At the SharePoint Conference last week, I attended the session dedicated to exploring this implementation in more detail. 

At this year's SharePoint Conference I took the opportunity to put the Surface device to the test. Instead of dragging around my laptop I wanted to see how well the Surface would do to fulfill my computer needs for the week. I was pleasantly surprised.

Fresh from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, my overview of a great session looking at how one multi-national company created a vibrant knowledge sharing culture using SharePoint.