Colligo Contributor has strong traction in the professional services market (accounting, construction, legal, management consulting, architecture, etc.) This is not surprising given our rich history with the Workgroup Edition product in the audit space. More recently we have been picking up momentum in the legal vertical with the Contributor Outlook Add-In and we have released a case study with Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co.
As a result of this growing success, I am in the process of educating myself on the needs and careabouts specific to the legal market (i.e. trying to become a matter centric thinker).
As a starting point, I found an interesting link to an International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) survey here.
There were a number of interesting datapoints in the survey on the penetration of SharePoint, various “matter management systems”, eDiscovery, email policies, etc. so I wanted to pass it along for your edification.
This is the fifth in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on Managed Folders.
Storing all emails and attachments in a single document library is a common practice and popular method for personal storage, however this is not a recommended best practice for knowledge repositories. In SharePoint, document libraries require special information architecture because of performance degradation associated with lists that contain a large number of items.
To gain a better understanding of the issues, there are a few documents that I would recommend developers and architects review, as outlined below.
- The whitepaper called “Working with large lists in Office SharePoint® Server 2007” has charts and metrics based on query time with performance considerations being a key indicator. The recommended limit of 2000 items per folder popularized in WSS 2.0 is not a bad one for those that don’t have the time to invest in designing a query based interface, though there is no performance “cliff” at 2000 items in a list. You may want to recommend to your users that they keep their lists under 1000 or use 3000 items as an upper limit at which point IT gets involved in assisting teams and groups to more efficiently scale their lists.
- Microsoft IT recently published a whitepaper titled “SharePoint Performance Optimization” that discusses ways of optimizing render time of sites and reducing database blocking. At Microsoft, the IT team has set-up a scan to detect large lists over 3000 items to ensure proper usage and divide up content where appropriate.
- Another useful article is the one on capacity boundaries on TechNet. It’s a good resource for seeing guidance on “limits” within the product along with charts on list performance.
If you currently have lists with a large number of items, or cannot avoid them in your application, below are a few quick ways to improve their performance.
- Views can have a big impact on performance. The default “All Items” view should be avoided because it can take tens of seconds to render as a list grows into the tens of thousands. Views with too many items can can cause content database locking during query time. Changing the default view to something with a smaller number of items can often be a quick fix.
- Filters are another way of limiting the number of items displayed in SharePoint. Note, however, these queries can be inefficient in large lists.
- For document management deployments, use folders and sub-folders for better scale and retrieval. Keeping each folder with less than 2000 will support better performance. Even better, limit folders to one hundred or so to prevent unnecessary scrolling.
- Using Indexed columns is another way to manage list scalability and increase index query optimization.
- The most efficient method of retrieval is search queries.
Truth: SharePoint lists exhibit performance problems as list size grows, so it’s best to limit the number of items in lists and use views, folders, and filters to improve query performance.
A couple of new postings went up on the Colligo careers page today. These are interesting opportunities for talented people that are looking to join a fast growing, and well known, member of the SharePoint ecosystem.
The jobs are:
Senior Software Developer
Solution Sales Professional
Happy Valentines Day! In our continuing series on email management in SharePoint, I wanted to expand on Joel Oleson’s last post on Managed Folders. Here I will present an alternative to Managed Folders that let’s you store emails directly in SharePoint – Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook.
Colligo Contributor reduces the IT administration required to manage the routing of email content to SharePoint since it enables users to set-up their own links between Outlook folders and document libraries in SharePoint, based on existing user permissions set SharePoint. Like Managed Folders, Colligo Contributor automatically extracts email properties and moves emails and attachments to SharePoint when users drag-and-drop them into a folder in their mailboxes. In addition, Contributor enables the users to tag content with custom metadata and choose content type at the time emails and attachments are moved to SharePoint – a feature that is not available through Managed Folders. This can reduce the workload for legal site administrators and ensure that the proper retention policies are applied to content at the time it is saved by the user.
The SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTechCon)
I just returned from SPTechCon in San Francisco, CA last week (see: SPTechCon) and wanted to provide a brief summary and commentary.
The three day event was well run and more importantly well attended. For a conference of this type, 600+ attendees is a solid turn out. Contrary to the news headlines these days, there are still plenty of organizations with IT budgets to spend on SharePoint implementations, upgrades and third party products. Randy Halischuk, who runs our marketing department and I manned the booth for Colligo and we were very busy between sessions answering questions and introducing people to our technology.
In terms of the conference portion of the event, there was a fully docket of interesting topics. I wanted to highlight two speakers who have been strong Colligo advocates for some time now.
Bob Mixon, a Microsoft MVP, (http://mixonconsulting.com/) spoke numerous times at the event on “Share and Ye Shall Find: Delivering Content that Users Need”, “How to Balance Web Apps, Application Pools and Site Collections for Optimal Use”, “SharePoint Content Types: Keys to Managing Information Taxonomy”. He also provided sage advice at the “Microsoft Answer Session” and put in a plug for Colligo too which was appreciated.
Also, another Colligo partner, Errin O’Connor, the founder of EPC Group and author of “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out” spoke on “Calculating SharePoint’s ROI” in the closing key note.
There will be a SPTechCon in Boston on June 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. Hope to see you there.
