Patrick Cook, the “Small Business Technology Guru” made an interesting post that brought the issues of offline SharePoint and the Colligo solution to the attention of his readers recently. With WSS 3.0 being shipped free as part of Small Business Server, SharePoint is gaining a big place in small business. However as this study shows, laptops now dominate in small business, which means they need an offline solution for SharePoint too.
Thanks, Peter! I love the title of the post: “How Do You Collaborate When The Web Doesn’t Work?”.
Well, I’m off to Mexico for the annual spring break vacation again. I’m disconnecting completely… but rest assured I will still be able to access my SharePoint content offline (…yeah, like I’ll be taking my laptop with me).
See you in a week.
Barry.
In my previous post I looked at the increasing trend towards laptops and the problems that can cause for organizations of all sizes that are deploying SharePoint. I thought it might be interesting to hear this directly from a customer.
Here’s a quote from a case study on one of our customers, AAXICO, that sums up the reasons for deploying SharePoint, the problems of making it mobile and how Colligo can help:
In order to best serve its customers, AAXICO operates 11 offlices globally, with direct international sales teams. Disconnected from the Miami head office customer management application, international sales executives previously used Excel spreadsheets to track customer data. “Every Friday, each member of the global sales team would update their weekly report and send it to head office,” said Sergio Rodriguez, Global IT Manager at AAXICO. “This process was not only time consuming, but also prone to forgotten data and entry errors.”
AAXICO sales executives represent dozens of manufacutures that offer thousands of airplane products. The sales cycles are long and they must keep track of detailed sales activites. In June of 2006, AAXICO deployed Microsoft SharePoint to centralize sales and business development information and to improve the standardization of customer data. The SharePoint site allowed the sales teams to keep and share all notes in one organized and central point. AAXICO chose this hosted solution to provide global accessiblity from any connected computer and to avoid the maintenance costs typically associated with client/server solutions.
However, the user experience was very slow resulting from inconsistent connection speeds available around the world. “Because it often took four minutes for the site to load, adoption of SharePoint was limited,” explained Rodriguez. “We needed to find a solution that would drastically speed-up the user experience.” AAXICO sales executives, who spend 25 to 90% of their time away from the office, were also frequently unable to access SharePoint while on the road. AAXICO needed a solution that would improve the user experience while online and solve the offline usability challenge.
…“The faster user experience has been a huge benefit of using Colligo Contributor when online,” said Vieira. “Mobility is another. Now our international sales teams can use Contributor offline from anywhere in the world to update our SharePoint site.”
Barry.
Small Business Technology Magazine published a great study last October on the use of laptops in small business. It showed that 51% of the survey respondents used laptops as their primary business tool (49% use desktops). The data was based on survey responses from 116 U.S. businesses with 100 or fewer employees.
The study found out a few other things that caught our eye, namely:
- Most (80%) think the most valuable reason to own a notebook is that it allows them to work anywhere;
- 37% consider ubiquitous Internet connectivity the most important feature for their next notebook, followed by longer battery time (18%) and more portable form factors (17%).
This move to laptops has been happening for awhile. For example, in May 2005, analysts hailed the fact that generally laptops now outsell desktops as a “milestone”.
And larger organizations are supporting mobile technologies, too. In a 2005 Network World 500 study entitled “Trends in a Networked World”, almost 80% of large organizations (with IT expenditures exceeding $10 million) surveyed were purchasing laptops. The most common reason (80% of respondents) cited for deploying mobile technologies such as laptops was to increase worker productivity. The study went in to state:
“Right now there is a growing expectation of an always-on, always-connected work-lifestyle, regardless of the employee’s physical location. This has a huge implication for the IT Department…”
Here’s what our customers tell us: While most users want the freedom and productivity improvements that a laptop offers, the reality is quite different. An inability to connect at customers premises, poor performance on wide area wireless and variable quality from different wirless Internet service providers all reduce the productivity of workers using laptops in the field. Once users experience this, they stop relying on web-based collaboration tools. This lowers the adoption and undermines the whole reason for installing collaboration tools in the first place – to make content accessible to everyone.
What is needed is a hybrid architecture content from web collaboration platforms is cached locally so it can be accessed instantly anytime and from anywhere. We are seeing that approach can increase adoption significantly.
Barry.
Brent and Genese from Colligo will be presenting at the “Under the Radar: Why Office 2.0 Matters” conference at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA on March 23rd.
The conference organizers put up a blog and several of the companies that are presenting have contributed. They asked us a few tough questions – like who will win: Google or Microsoft? The answers are interesting.
Barry.
Bradley, the SBS (Small Business Server) “Diva” and MVP posted about Colligo for SharePoint in her blog. Apparently, she had heard about our products from Wayne Small of sbsfaq. Thanks to Wayne and Bradley for the mention.
I noticed a comment to this post by David Schrag. He asked a fair question which was:
Will this product still be needed once the world graduates to WSS 3.0 and Office 2007?
We believe the answer is “yes”. While MS did a great job in Office 2007, there are still many SharePoint features that you cannot use offline, such as viewing document libraries with custom metadata, creating new documents offline from server content types, looking up to custom lists, dragging and dropping emails into doc libraries etc.
Many of these issues are covered here, here or here.
Barry.
I just read a post by Alison Murdock on the Under the Radar blog. Google’s entry into the application software world is very interesting. However, as Alison points out, there’s a big problem with applications that only work on the web – they can’t be used when you are disconnected.
My experience is that most people just don’t think of this. Unless, of course, they are mobile workers like accountants, consultants, sales people, project managers etc. etc. They are the ones that suffer when a new web application is installed in a company and no one thought about the offline scenarios. Of course, making applications work on and off the web is our business, so I’m keenly aware of this issue. And so are the hundreds of organizations that have purchased offline collaborations tools.
This space is going to start heating up in my opinion. Apparently Firefox 3 will support some sort of offline capability for the Google apps. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
I still think for the next while anyway, Microsoft will have the advantage in the application space as it’s our experience that the growing population of users on laptops require their productivity tools to work whether they have an Internet connection or not.
Barry.
