Offline SharePoint

Exhibiting in Orlando at the Launch 2010 right now. As in Denver traffic past the booth is brisk. An interesting study in the value an individual places on their contact information. In Denver many people came by the booth. Lots of great discussions. But quite a few did not want to be scanned (and then spammed). Here in Orlando, I bought a $50 Best Buy gift certificate and most everyone seems to want to be scanned. Wonder where the threshold is? $20? $25? Not sure what my threshold would be.

Exhibited at the Launch 2010 event in Denver today. Very exciting. Lots of people pouring in early. Set up was from 6:30am to 7:30am and by the time I made my way to our table/booth at 7:15am there were minglers mixing and a line up forming near the door. A well run show with some excellent, fairly high-level sessions.

Now on to Orlando for the next Launch event. See you there!

Yesterday, I attended the SharePoint Saturday event in Charlotte, NC (http://www.sharepointsaturday.org // #SPSCLT). The event was very well attended and organized with over 200 registrants and well over 100 actually present on a sunny Saturday.

From a sales perspective it was a productive day with a few quality leads and some excellent discussions following my session on email management with SharePoint which covered off the OOTB options from Microsoft and planning considerations. I also had an great discussion with Michael Chapman from InCentric Solutions (http://www.incentric.com/wps/portal/InCentric), a local North Carolina based system integrator. Looking forward to collaborating with InCentric on some specific opps in the months ahead.

Now for a little sightseeing in Charlotte and then off to DC for meetings and then the Philly SPUG.

Recently I have been trying to get into the new millenia and social media with increased use of blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn and even signed up for a Twitter account (englandbill).

While many of you will be far more advanced with social media and the associated tools, I thought it might be useful to share my findings thus far.

First off, I’ve got TweetDeck on my desktop.  Wendy Rose (www.businessready.ca) turned me on to TweetDeck which is an excellent tool.  I have three viewing columns configured to monitor activity: (1) for IT industry news; (2) SharePoint specific follows; and (3) for friends/personal contacts.

Second, I’ve installed Camtasia.  As per my previous post, David Whitehead and I spoke at VanSPUG last night.  To record the presentation our good friends at Habaneros (www.Habaneros.com) recommended Camtasia, and it worked wonderfully.  Very straightforward for a luddite like me. You can find the free 30-day trial at: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp.

Then today a colleague in sales, Redmond O’Hanlon was asked about using Outlook rules to copy all emails arriving in an Inbox to SharePoint, so I took advantage of the opportunity to test the integration between Camtasia and Screencast.com by recording a quick video and uploading it to screencast.com to answer the question.  The output of the exercise (which took 22 minutes including signing up for my screencast.com account and recording twice to get the audio) can be found at: http://www.screencast.com/users/Colligo/folders/Default/media/8ada8fab-367d-42ae-80e0-d839e07725ae.  What an amazing sales and technical support tool.  This will become standard operating procedure for me.

After the presentation last night, Yaroslav Pentsarskyy from Habaneros  recommended that I use Vimeo (www.vimeo.com) to post embedded videos to our blog, so this will be my next challenge.  And of course, I’ll tweet about it all along the way…

David Whitehead and I recently presented at the Vancouver SharePoint Usergroup (VanSPUG).  A recording of the video is posted here:

We would like to thank Peter John McFarlane and Yaroslav Pentsarskyy from Habaneros (www.habaneros.com) for inviting us out and hosting.   We look forward to being a more active member of the local SharePoint community going forward.

Tony and the crew with their SharePoint give away: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CcqGw1KovM.

Just returned from a few days in Las Vegas at the SharePointPro 2010 Summit & Expo (see: http://www.sharepointprosummit.com/ for more details).  Randy Halischuk and I attended on behalf of Colligo.  After a busy first day the show slowed down on the second day, so I took the opportunity to speak with some of the vendors and recorded the discussions (with their approval) on a Flip.

Ken Allen at Axceler: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=corl-vqvi4o

Nate from StoragePoint/Metalogix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmGZjcI_f_k.

Vijay Sharma from Syntergy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxYfXHXCUfM

With the New Year upon us, I’ve been engaged in discussions over the past couple weeks briefing our partners on Colligo’s successes in 2009 and our plans for 2010.  Much of this focus has been with partners in the bigger markets, but yesterday I sat down with Sean Wallbridge, a SharePoint MVP fromVictoria on Vancouver Island.  Like many companies Colligo is focused on selling aboard into the bigger markets, so it is always refreshing to speak with another local success story.  In this case it is particularly true because Sean is a fan of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs which is a rare find on the west coast of Canada!

Sean’s company, itgroove, provides a variety of IT consulting services with an increasing focus on SharePoint.  According to Sean, and this matches with what I have seen recently, the local market is picking up in 2010 for more complex SharePoint rollouts and 3rd party SharePoint products.  Organizations now have stood up some SharePoint sites and user acceptance is strong and growing.  They are now looking to roll it out to address other business problems and leverage the initial investment.

If you are on Vancouver Island and looking for some assistance with your SharePoint deployment, please give Sean a ring.  He and his staff are friendly, responsive and knowledgeable.  Their website is: www.itgroove.net and their blog is at: www.brainlitter.com.

Recent Events

December 3rd, 2009 – DataLAN SharePoint 2010 Briefing Session in New York City.
Earlier this month Colligo exhibited and spoke at a Microsoft-DataLAN SharePoint 2010 briefing session at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in midtown. John Arnold and Tony Smith from DataLAN always do an excellent job putting these events together for their clients, and this was no exception. DataLAN provided a thorough overview of the SharePoint 2010 platform and various considerations as firms looked to leverage new features and functionality with the platform.

On behalf of Colligo I presented an informational piece on the various out of the box options available for email integration with SharePoint. Other vendors (Syntergy, Nintex, etc.) covered off their playgrounds as well.

Also, this was my first peek at the newly renovated Microsoft facilities. Very chic and modern!

December 10th – St. Louis SharePoint User Group
A Midwestern swing through St. Louis and Kansas City brought me to the St. Louis SharePoint User Group hosted by Convenent Technology Group, a Colligo partner. For a user group there was a solid turn out of over 70 people to listen to Joel Olesen speak on both “The New World of SharePoint 2010 Admin” and “Migration to SharePoint 2010”. Joel was in his element with the tech crowd, about 30% of whom had played around with SP2010 already, and really put on a good 2.5 hour show. Well done Joel. Colligo was an event sponsor and we gave away a bundle of our Share shirts. We look forward to doing more with this SPUG in the future, as they are a well organized group of Midwesterners.

December 12th – Kansas City SharePoint Saturday.
After what turned into an epic train ride to Kansas City, I attended the KC SP Saturday event. This was Colligo first SP Saturday event as a sponsor, and we joined at the encouragement of Becky Issermanand Kevin Hughes from HNTB. The event was very well attended, particularly for a Saturday this close to Christmas.

Again on behalf of Colligo I presented an expanded version of the Outlook – SharePoint integration options. If you have any questions, or would like a copy of the presentation please let me know.

Colligo has a great deal of success in the engineering and construction space. Lots of firms are adopting SharePoint and working to capture emails from their jobs sites given the litigious nature of their business. Metadata is the key in this regard for both emails and documents, the old file shares are proving insufficient, and our Outlook Add-In/Uploader products hit the sweet spot.

Interestingly enough many of the engineering and construction projects that come to our attention have been in St. Louis, MO and Kansas. A real hot spot for us and is certainly punching above their weight by population and GDP in the Colligo funnel! In working in St. Louis and surrounding areas we have found ourselves on few projects with a great system integrator and SharePoint consulting practice out of St. Louis called Oakwood Systems Group. By all accounts, Oakwood is a valued implementation partner and I am pleased to announce that Oakwood has agreed to formalize this relationship by becoming a member of the Colligo Partner Program.

We are happy to welcome them aboard, and look forward to jointly ensuring you have a successful SharePoint deployment.