SharePoint, SharePoint 2010 News, Reviews

Enterprise guinea pigs will soon be getting hold of the next big update to Microsoft's Office Suite, with the public promised beta access in the near future.

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.

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.