We're really excited about the upcoming webinar in February with consultant and author, Michael Sampson. As you can see, he just published a really interesting book on SharePoint, called "Seamless Teamwork". I'm just reading it and plan to review it on this blog before the webinar.
Please join me on February 19th to hear Michael deliver some of the valuable content from his book live! The promo piece for the webinar is below:
In this webinar, you will learn 7 key strategies that you can implement today to:
- Drive effective collaboration, innovation and new business processes using SharePoint
- Expand SharePoint into new areas including document management, project management and email management
- Apply new tools and technologies such as wikis, blogs and RSS feeds to maximize communication and team collaboration
- Implement effective strategies and solutions to increase user adoption and improve the SharePoint user experience
If you are a CIO, CKO, Line of Business Manager, IT Manager or SharePoint Administrator responsible for ensuring your organization is achieving maximum benefit from its SharePoint investment – register HERE today!
WHAT: 7 Ways to Get More From Your SharePoint Deployment Now
WHEN: Thursday, Februrary 19, 2009 at 11:00 AM EST
PRESENTERS: Michael Sampson, Consultant & Author (and me)
COST: COMPLIMENTARY
REGISTER: Here
Even if you can’t make the webinar date, please register and we will send you a link to the on-demand webinar when available.
Guest Speaker – Michael Sampson, Independent Consultant & Author. Michael focuses on improving the capability of teams that can’t be together, to work together. Michael helps organizations understand the collaboration landscape and provides impartial counsel and advisory services to clients wanting to improve the capability of people and teams through collaboration technology. He is the author of “Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways“, published by Microsoft Press (2009). Link to the book: www.seamlessteamwork.com
Happy New Year! This is my first post of 2009 on the Offline SharePoint blog and the fifth in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on SharePoint email-enabled lists.
The subject of this post is Managed Folders. Managed Folders were introduced in Exchange 2007 to provide administrators with an easy way for users to archive email. Any Managed Folder can be configured such that all emails sent to it are routed to SharePoint. It’s an incredibly insightful feature and when implemented properly can reduce mailbox sizes, while capturing the intended emails and attachments. When not implemented properly, Managed Folders can be abused, causing SharePoint to become a dumping ground.
One poor example of managed folder design could be a managed folder called “Keep.” If everyone is told to put their email in that one folder and it’s archived to SharePoint, it sounds like a perfect solution for email archiving. However, there are some serious drawbacks. First, scale is an issue. Putting all that junk into one list can overwhelm SharePoint since it doesn’t scale well to support millions of items in one list, especially if there is a single view. Second, what about the security of that list? Managed Folders require extensive administrative set-up. It’s an IT option in Exchange, not a feature that is end user configurable.
So what does a good Managed Folder design look like? An example might be a folder titled “Legal Hold,” which is used to archive items under legal hold because of an investigation or other circumstance. On the SharePoint side, a specific document library is set-up and secured, then a legal site administrator is responsible for any tagging and for managing the views for the LCA team. A special search view might be set-up with specific indexed columns to support a quick and easy search. To avoid performance problems, avoid the “All items” view. I’ll discuss performance issues related to SharePoint list scalability next.
Truth: Managed Folders can work well, but require a solid information architecture design & trained administrators who understand how to manage scalability.
Happy New Year. We had a terrific 2008, thanks in part to the terrific growth of the SharePoint market. Let’s hope 2009 is even better. I came across an interesting article by Dan Holme (SharePoint MVP), where he collects some of the 2009 SharePoint predictions from fellow MOSS MVPs.
Meanwhile… we are continuing the series of posts on the “Myths and Truths of Email Management with SharePoint”. In his last post, Joel Oleson discussed some of the pifalls of using email enabled lists in SharePoint. I wanted to expand on that a little further.
While very powerful, email-enabled lists have some additional drawbacks that should be well understood before deploying them. These are described below:
- When an email is sent to an email-enabled list, attachments are stripped off and stored separately.
- The email body is stored as a .EML file, which cannot be opened in Outlook.
- Users cannot specify different content types.
- Users cannot specify custom metadata.
Colligo Contributor is an easy-to-deploy and manage .NET client Add-In for Outlook that enables users to move content to SharePoint through a simple drag-and-drop interface. It stores emails and attachments together in a single .MSG file, which can be opened in Outlook. Both content types and custom metadata can be set at the time of drag-and-drop. In addition, emails can be automatically moved to SharePoint using Outlook rules.
