Bonjour! This week I attended (and spoke at) the ITA Fall Collaborative in Montreal. It is the 10th Anniversary of the Information Technology Alliance, an alliance of IT professionals from accounting and consulting firms and the technology vendors that service the industry. In addition to many CPA firms from the U.S. and Canada, software vendors attending included Microsoft, Interwoven, CCH and Sage to name a few.
The ITA’s motto is “Knowledge Increases in Value When it is Shared”, and ITA is truly a collaborative organization. Everyone is there to share best practices on how to leverage, manage and implement technology to improve the efficiency, productivity and work-life balance in the competitive and rapidly changing professional services sector. It’s interesting to see the number of accounting firms that have adopted collaborative technology. As you’d expect, many of them are implementing SharePoint, much like our friends at Crowe Chizek who recently did a webinar with us on their experiences there.
There were several talks on SharePoint at the conference. One of the things that struck me while I listened to the war stories was the importance of the “soft” issues. All too often we IT professionals focus on the nuts and bolts of this powerful technology. But SharePoint is inherently a social platform, where people are working together to achieve a business goal. It seemed to me that the success of the SharePoint implementations that were showcased often relied on non-technical issues.
That reminded me of something. A few months back I mentioned a whitepaper by Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors entitled “SharePoint for Business: A Six Step Strategy for Achieving Collaboration Success and Improving Business with SharePoint”. Back then, I said I was going to post a review and it’s long overdue. Michael was good enough to provide me with a copy of his paper and as I re-read it on the plane home from Montreal, I realized the power of his analysis.
In my next post I’m going to go a bit deeper into that White Paper to discuss some of the interesting insights it provides.
Barry.
On October 23rd, in conjunction with Windows IT Pro and Office & SharePoint Pro, we held an online webinar called “from Portals to Offline Knowledge Management – a Crowe Chizek Case Study”. This event was extremely well attended with almost 800 registrants. It highlighted how Crowe Chizek and Company LLC, one of the top 10 U.S. accounting firms, has deployed SharePoint for multiple business applications, while providing their mobile professionals with a consistent user experience both online and offline using Colligo Contributor.
The main speaker is Cornelius J. van Dyk, Microsoft SharePoint MVP & SharePoint Architect at Crowe Chizek. To learn more about Corne, check out his blog.
This isn’t a sales pitch… it goes through how Crowe Chizek started with portals, but is today using SharePoint for project management, client extranets, knowledge management, team sites, and more. Corne shares his experiences as his firm continues to evolve their SharePoint implementation. It also goes through their trial of Colligo Contributor and talks about the benefits they are gaining from the product.
If you are interested in seeing a replay of the webinar, you can go here. You may also find the case study interesting.
Barry.
Last week we released version 2.2 of Colligo Contributor. It has a bunch of new features, including:
- Check In / Check Out Support – Version 2.2 features basic support for Check Out and Check In through the Contributor UI.
- User Configuration – The new Options Panel allows users to set the following preferences:
- metadata prompting,
- storage location,
- and synchronization.
- View-level Selection – Users can now select content for synchronization based on a specific view (for example, “My Documents” view or “Draft Documents” view).
- Customizable Email Filenames – The file name for emails added to a document library from an Outlook folder is now based on: Sender, Sent Date-Time, and Subject.
- Save As – A document opened from Contributor can be “saved as” a new document in the Contributor offline cache.
Here are a few other resources you can use to learn more about this release:
The View Level selection (or “sync on view”) feature is a terrific new capability that allows users to select a list of content for sync which can change dynamically depending on how the view is defined. For example, let’s suppose a project manager frequently travels and wants to be sure that they have all pending documents from a specific project available offline so they can edit and approve them while traveling. They would first create a view on the SharePoint site called, say, “project X pending”. When creating the view, filters would be set to select documents with metadata values that equal “Project X” and “Pending” as shown in the following screenshot:
To ensure that the project manager has these documents at all times, they simply select the sync filter button beside the view selector in Contributor, then choose the “project x pending” view as shown here:
Now, whenever a new document that meets these filters is uploaded or modified in the document library, it will be automatically included in the view and, hence, synchronized to Colligo Contributor during the next sync cycle. Likewise, documents that no longer meet the criteria (for example documents that are moved from “pending” to “approved”) will not continue to be sync’d.
I think 2.2 is a pretty cool advance. Let me know what you think. You can request a trial here.
Barry.
