Offline SharePoint

This is my sixth and last post in a guest series I’m doing here on “The Myths & Truths of Email Management with SharePoint.”. My last post was on SharePoint list scalability.

SharePoint is a great platform for managing email and attachments and has several advantages in the right scenarios. In addition to providing the capability to store, organize, and search for content, SharePoint enables email to become part of the content that is shared throughout the organization. This improves collaboration and content re-use. There are a number of alternatives for moving emails to SharePoint, including out-of-the box methods such as email-enabled lists, managed folders, and third party applications such as Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. The key to success is building an architecture that is scalable, while making it easy for information workers to use.

PST Files – While some of the capabilities of Exchange and SharePoint overlap, there are distinct differences and advantages of one platform over the other for different scenarios. When important files are stored on individual PST files throughout the organization, the information becomes inaccessible islands. Worse still, PST files pose security and data loss concerns, and often lead to the loss of enterprise content. In reality, PSTs are a thing of the past. Storage and sharing of email and attachments in SharePoint offers distinct advantages for collaboration, document management, and discoverability through a rich search interface.

Exchange Public Folders – While I don’t recommend deploying Public Folders for new applications, you needn’t worry if you already have them. They will continue to be supported by Microsoft in the next major version of Exchange server after Exchange 2007, and for at least 10 years thereafter. For new Exchange deployments, SharePoint is “strongly encouraged” for application development.

If deploying both Exchange 2007 and SharePoint, it doesn’t make sense to build up a huge Public Folder deployment. It’s confusing to users and additional overhead for the team managing Exchange. Microsoft is making major investments in SharePoint and has indicated that it’s the preferred application platform for collaboration and document management going forward.

SharePoint Advantages – As discussed, SharePoint offers a number of advantages over PST files and Public Exchange folders for email management:

• It supports the sharing of email across the enterprise
• User-based email and attachment selection ensures that “important” content is stored
• SharePoint centralizes critical enterprise content on secure company servers
• Email becomes “structured” enterprise content when custom metadata is applied
• The email body and attachments become findable and reusable
• Information workers can take advantages of the version control and history features
• Content types support retention policies and regulatory compliance requirements
• SharePoint improves collaboration and enterprise content management

“Out of the box” there are two ways (highlighted in this series of posts) that Microsoft products support the integration of Exchange and SharePoint for email management: (1) “send to” email-enabled SharePoint lists and (2) “auto copy” Managed Folders to SharePoint.

Email-Enabled Lists – Email-enabled self service lists can easily get out of control and become a significant drain on IT resources. Microsoft IT decided against using email-enabled lists internally. Most organizations don’t need the email-enabled functionality and the oversight it requires, and users prefer to access archived emails in .MSG format (rather than the .EML format created in SharePoint lists). With proper planning and design, email-enabled lists can be deployed successfully. However, Managed Folders are a better alternative.

Managed Folders – Introduced in Exchange 2007, Managed Folders provide administrators with an easy way for users to archive email. Managed Folders can be configured to “auto copy” emails added to them to SharePoint libraries. This incredibly insightful feature can significantly reduce mailbox sizes, while capturing the intended emails (in .MSG format) and attachments. Still, abuse must be avoided to ensure that SharePoint does not become a dumping ground. Managed Folders require a solid information architecture design, and trained administrators who understand scalability and how to manage it.

SharePoint Scalability – Storing emails and attachments in SharePoint can have great advantages for project and knowledge management in corporations, if they are secured in the proper context. However, SharePoint lists and libraries can quickly be bogged down with too much content if not carefully managed. The scalability of SharePoint lists is a major consideration and requires oversight, especially when using email-enabled lists. The default “All items” view can be particularly problematic.

Training and guidance may be required to change corporate culture so users understand where and how content should be stored. Training users to tag content with metadata will increase the usefulness and “findability” of documents. Folders, custom views, indexed columns, and a query-based design are best for large lists to ensure fast performance.

Third-Party Solutions – When deploying SharePoint for email management, it’s important to consider what you get out of the box with Microsoft, and what you get with a partner. Most gaps you find in SharePoint are filled by a very solid partner ecosystem. For example, Gold Certified Microsoft Partner Colligo Networks offers an Add-In for Outlook that makes it easy for users to drag-and-drop emails into SharePoint, while reducing the burden on IT. I would encourage you to try their .Net client-only solution to see if it can meet your Outlook and SharePoint integration requirements.

Well, that’s it for this series of posts on the OfflinesharePoint blog. I hope you found them interesting and informative. If you’d like to keep up with my latest posts, please visit my blog “SharePoint Joel’s SharePoint Land”.

- Joel Oleson.

The Michael Sampson Company recently announced “The SharePoint for Collaboration: Business Impact Awards 2009 program”. As you may recall, Michael was the guest speaker at our last webinar titled “7 Ways To Get More From Your SharePoint Deployment Now”. Michael is also the author of “Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways” (Microsoft Press, 2009), a book that helps organizations envision how to support collaboration with SharePoint.

These are the first awards I’ve seen that are 100% dedicated to the use of SharePoint. There are 7 award categories:

Project Team Collaboration … The use of SharePoint to support team project activities. This is likely to include the tracking of milestones, deliverables and emerging information over time, aligned with a specific business project.

Document Collaboration … The use of SharePoint in business activities to support the joint creation of large and complex documents. This is likely to include people working across departmental or organizational boundaries, on large and complex documents such as request for proposals.

Structured Data Collaboration … The use of SharePoint to help groups collaborate on structured data through lists. For example, this could be about running the organization’s budgeting process through SharePoint.

Process Collaboration … The use of SharePoint for business process enablement, either directly through workflow services, or indirectly as a way of handling exceptions in business processes.

Product Design and Service Creation Collaboration … The use of SharePoint to support the design of new products or the creation of new services.

Enterprise Social Networking … The use of SharePoint to support the discovery and cultivation of connections between people in the organization, the identification of expertise, and the formation and support of communities of interest and practice.

Extended-Enterprise Collaboration … The use of SharePoint to support collaboration with partners, suppliers and customers.

There’s more information about the awards here. We’d love to see some Colligo customers enter!

More and more clients are discussing concerns around compliance and security that when you step back and think about it would more properly be addressed by a IRM solution. Here is an excellent video by Michael Gannotti explaining IRM for SharePoint and Office:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=1b3bbb8f%2D4b5a%2D4f72%2D94c4%2D94cb80bc3866&ID=1592 .

Eric Schupps a SharePoint MVP from Binary Wave, and a Colligo partner, posted a good article how to drive SharePoint adoption:

http://www.binarywave.com/blogs/eshupps/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=174 .

As a #4 for Eric’s list, I would add that companies should consider quality 3rd party products, such as Colligo, to improve the user experience.

Here is an interesting post on IT considerations at GM: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/GM-IT-Steers-Through-the-Economic-Storm/.

From my perspective as a sales person here at Colligo, there were a few useful datapoints.

First and foremost was the sheer number of applications: “Killeen said GM eliminated 300 applications in 2008, reducing its corporate total from 2,200 to 1,900. Back in 1996, when Szygenda took the reins at GM, the application total was a budget-busting 7,000. At that time, Szygenda has estimated, GM had the highest IT costs per vehicle in the auto industry.” This staggering number of applications speaks to the sheer complexity of the industry. Many of my clients these days are trying to simplify their software stack. When you layer all the various aspects of support, upgrades, patches, and interdependecies into 7,000 applications you can only imagine the headaches. Additionally, I will feel better about CIO’s not calling me back right away – after all they might have 1k’s of other sales reps calling!

Also, Siemens Teamcentre is serving as the point of entry for SharePoint into the rest of GM. Several of my clients looked at Colligo as an offline solution for Teamcentre prior to Siemens acquiring UGS. Working with large files locally and syncing them to SharePoint later was preferred by some engineers. It is a slick product.

As part of our continuing series on email management in SharePoint, I wanted to comment on Joel Oleson’s last post on storing all emails and attachments in a single document library. As he points out, SharePoint lists can exhibit performance problems when they are used to store large numbers of items. Since Colligo Contributor is a client-based solution for storing and displaying SharePoint lists, it can often improve list rendering performance for users.

Colligo Contributor will reflect server performance optimizations to the client since it supports folders, views, and filters. In addition, the performance of the Contributor interface is usually significantly better than the browser for content cached locally, for example when accessing content for a specific view. A unique feature in Contributor, which is not available out-of-the-box in SharePoint, is default folder-level metadata. This feature can provide advantages for tagging content since users can set default metadata values that get applied automatically when content is dragged into a SharePoint folder in Outlook. Colligo Contributor 3.2 supports large SharePoint folder hierarchies rendered through the Outlook interface.

Just stumbled upon an excellent introductory article on the Business Data Catalog (BDC) by Mark Gerow on Law.com.

Here is the link:

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1200594607309.