Offline SharePoint

We’ve just drafted a whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Collaboration Solution in SharePoint”. It discusses some of the user adoption issues that must be faced when tackling an email collaboration implementation project and discusses how Colligo Contributor can help to solve them.

Many thanks to Brent Bolleman for his contribution to the document. Also thanks to Michael Sampson for his comments and suggestions on the early draft.

Please feel free to add your comments. Let me know what you think!

EPFs or SharePoint?

Email management is a critical requirement for many organizations today, however deploying and supporting an effective email management solution can pose significant challenges for IT. In addition to heavy storage requirements, email management systems must support categorization of emails, preservation of critical metadata and accurate, timely search of message content. Use cases will vary between organizations; however requirements are often driven by two broad scenarios: 1) Collaboration, i.e. members of a team or department that need to share emails as part of a project, and 2) Retention, i.e. the need to store and search emails and attachments for regulatory or legal reasons or to prune email archives to reduce storage requirements.

Email retention solutions for Microsoft Outlook users often involve Exchange Public Folders (EPF’s); or what are now called Managed Folders in Exchange 2007. For consistency, I will use “EPF” to refer to both Exchange Public Folders and Managed Folders. Microsoft has recommended best practises for using EPF’s as part of an email retention solution. There are also a number of specialized third party solutions that enable organizations to archive, delete and search emails and attachments based on their retention policies and legal requirements.

This series of posts will focus on the email collaboration scenario. While EPF’s were traditionally used for collaboration (or document and email sharing) applications, they have been “de-emphasized” as the primary email sharing tool, though they are by no means dead. In any event SharePoint is becoming the recommended solution for many email and document collaboration scenarios.

SharePoint has several advantages for email collaboration applications. Firstly, it has lower administrative overhead associated with creation, permissions, maintenance and deletion of shared folders. Secondly, through the use of SharePoint content types, administrators can easily set global retention policies on email so that it can be automatically deleted or routed to a SharePoint Records Center or other email archive for storage. In addition, SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities make it much easier to locate relevant emails and attachments.

In the next post I will cover different solutions for moving emails and documents from Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint.

It was brought to my attention that I did not do a posting on the release of our Version 3.0 product line in March… Shame on me! It was actually a really big event and I forgot completely to put it in the blog. So for those of you that haven’t see it, here’s the scoop on Version 3.0. There’s a link at the bottom so you can request a trial for yourself.

Contributor Version 3.0 Just Released

Colligo Contributor™ is now a product line with Version 3.0! Contributor Client is a rich desktop application that provides a consistent SharePoint experience online and offline for mobile professionals. Contributor Add-In for Outlook^® offers deep integration between SharePoint and Outlook interfaces, enabling email and document drag-and-drop for information workers. Colligo Contributor Pro includes both these interfaces to boost productivity, improve content management, and increase the number of documents and emails stored in SharePoint. Contributor SDK supports the development of custom clients for SharePoint.

Key enhancements in Contributor Pro Version 3.0 are highlighted below.

• Outlook Folder Tree View   V3.0 features new tree view support for library folders. When a library is synchronized to the Contributor Add-In, a SharePoint folder hierarchy is added to the left navigation pane in Outlook. Users can easily add emails and documents to sub-folders – manually through drag-and-drop or automatically with rules.


• List Support   SharePoint lists can now be synchronized to Outlook 2003 and 2007. Both custom and standard SharePoint lists can be accessed and modified from Outlook. List support is an IT configurable option – to ensure that the required 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 (SP1) is first installed.


• Pending Synchronization Changes Pane   It’s now easy to review cached changes. Users can access the new Pending Synchronization Changes Pane to review or discard pending changes prior to the next synchronization event. When users opt to remove a pending change, the server version is retrieved on the next synchronization cycle.


• French Language Support   If the underlying Window system has been installed with the Microsoft French language option, Contributor Pro will install and use the French language text option – voilà!


• Software Development Kit for Customizations   Version 3.0 of Contributor Pro includes a .NET Application Programming Interface (API). By purchasing a Software Development Kit (SDK) from Colligo, your organization can now develop new custom client applications for SharePoint to meet your specific business requirements. Please contact sales@colligo.com to learn more.

Get your free 30-day trial today HERE

Our intrepid VP of Marketing, Genèse Castonguay, really outdid herself this time… I’m referring to the coveted Colligo “Share.” shirts that have become a HUGE hit. Here’s what they look like (on the left). Those of you who visited our booth at the Microsoft SharePoint conference in March know what I’m talking about since you would have received your very own.

On the right is a shot of Genèse modeling one at the WPC conference in Denver last year. Now that she’s been seen wearing it, all the cool people want one.

Joel Oleson, who was until recently the Sr. Technical Product Manager for SharePoint at Microsoft, recapped his recent trip to the middle east on his blog. We were really pleased he mentioned the shirt … “You can see me here with my Share (point not dot) shirt”, which we liked. Actually, it’s the Share (Colligo point not dot) shirt since we actually use the Colligo logo for the Point part. To the left is a picture of Joel in his Share shirt outside a monastery in the City of Petra, Jordan. Joel recently announced that he is moving on from Microsoft, but will stay actively involved in SharePoint.

Next, we noticed that our old friend, Lawrence Liu, Sr. Technical Product Manager and Community Lead for SharePoint at Microsoft, started turning up in the shirt. Here in the right you can see him at the recent MVP Global Summit Conference that was held earlier this month in Seattle and Redmond. I actually cropped this photo from one that was published on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog (hope you don’t mind, Lawrence).

So I guess you are probably wondering “How can I get me one of them Share shirts?”. Never fear, we will be handing them out again soon at the Tech-Ed North America 2008 event, June 10-13 in Orlando.

And for those of you who already have a shirt… send me a picture of you or anyone/anything else in it and I will be sure post the photo on this blog.

Barry.