Offline SharePoint

We are really pleased to be partnering again with Microsoft on another important webinar. This time, we’re working with Nishan DeSilva, Director of Information Management & Corporate Records Compliance on how Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs Department (LCA) is leveraging SharePoint 2010 and Colligo Contributor for ECM and Records Management.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Microsoft’s LCA strategy for information/records management
• How to easily move unstructured content & email in SharePoint
• Tips for consistent classification & compliant retention policies
• How Colligo facilitates email management in SharePoint
• Ways to improve the user experience to drive adoption & compliance

Nishan will also provide some insights into Microsoft’s strategy for SharePoint 2010 and how SharePoint along with Colligo Contributor enables organizations to take ownership of their information assets.  This is going to be another great webinar and I encourage anyone who’s interested in using SharePoint 2010 for Enterprise Content Management or Records Management to attend.

Register today for this webinar here.

Ed Kaczor (left) and Trevor Dyck at the Colligo pod at ILTA.

The Colligo team participated at another interesting conference last week, this time the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) Conference in Las Vegas. We were invited to participate by Microsoft who graciously shared their booth space with us. The legal industry is very important to Microsoft as law firms and legal departments of all sizes are deploying SharePoint for matter management faster than ever before. In fact, we spoke with many law firm CIOs and CTOs, and were told empathically that it’s not a matter of “if” they’ll deploy SharePoint but “when” they’ll deploy SharePoint.

Colligo’s integration of Outlook to SharePoint is a critical piece of the puzzle for any law firm or legal department looking at SharePoint for matter management. The reason is simple: the vast majority of client communications (up to 90% by some research) occur via email. By making it easy for lawyers and administrative staff to move emails into client and matter folders while capturing accurate metadata, Colligo Contributor is essential for the success of any SharePoint project in the legal space.

Many thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for their support and for walking over so many of their clients to our “pod” for a demonstration of Colligo Contributor. It was also extremely gratifying to have Microsoft highlighting the role of Colligo Contributor in their own Legal and Corporate Affairs Department’s deployment of SharePoint. A special thanks to Norm Thomas, Mark Beckman, Julie Kremer, Tanice Myers, and Karin Breedis for their help and hospitality.

Colligo already has some great clients in the legal space and you can read their individual case studies that detail how they are using Colligo Contributor for matter management:

• Fernald Law Group Creates Competitive Advantage with Microsoft Hosted SharePoint & Colligo Contributor Pro (Click here to download the Case Study)
• National Grid Legal Department Improves Collaboration & SharePoint Adoption with Contributor Add-In for Outlook (Click here to download the Case Study)
• Fischer Behar Chen Well Orion & Co. Drives Adoption of SharePoint for Email & Document Management. (Click here to download the Case Study)

We’ve also produced a new white paper that explains how Colligo Contributor helps law firms and legal departments manage their matter content including emails in SharePoint. Click here to download the White Paper.

Stephen Cawood has recently published an excellent book on SharePoint 2010, written specifically for end users who want to get the most out of their SharePoint 2010 implementation. The book is titled: “How to Do Everything: Microsoft SharePoint 2010” and is available from Amazon. Stephen is a former member of the SharePoint development team and is now the Director of Community and Support Services for Metalogix Software, a provider of SharePoint migration, management, and archiving solutions and a Colligo partner.

This book covers a lot of ground including providing a history of SharePoint as well as a wealth of practical and often step-by-step information that will help organizations and end users get quickly up to speed on SharePoint in general and the new features and capabilities of SharePoint 2010 in particular.  One area that he spends a lot of time is on metadata, where he offers some excellent information on the use and benefit of metadata, specifically the new enterprise managed metadata (EMM) and term store functionality of SharePoint 2010.  One of the major benefits of Colligo’s SharePoint client solutions is around capturing and managing metadata, so it’s great to see the amount of space that Stephen dedicates to metadata tagging and taxonomy in his book.

Stephen provides an interesting, easy to read, and highly practical book on SharePoint 2010 and I highly recommend it. A big thanks to Stephen for his three pages on Colligo Contributor in Chapter 10 “Using SharePoint with Client Applications” where he gives an excellent summary of SharePoint client technology and the benefits of Colligo’s integration with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Explorer.

Get the book from Amazon here.

Ed Kaczor, our VP of Sales, spent last week in Washington, DC at the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.  Over 13,000 people participated in this year’s conference, far surpassing last year’s attendance, which is a very good sign for the coming year.  The conference featured some high profile speakers, including a keynote by former President Bill Clinton titled “Embracing our Common Humanity” in which he discussed where he sees the world going and the role  that technology plays in reducing global disparities.

Another very interesting keynote speaker was Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer.  Kevin’s presentation covered a lot of ground but some important take-aways were Microsoft’s impressive success in building market share and the continuing success of SharePoint in the global market place.  SharePoint has been Microsoft’s fastest server product to hit $1 billion in revenue and Kevin predicts it will also be the fastest to $2 billion.  Another important take-away was Microsoft’s commitment to “cloud computing” with a focus on its BPOS Business Productivity Online Suite offering. 

Colligo is well positioned to take advantage of Microsoft’s emerging cloud strategy since our products already work with BPOS and we have lots of happy customers to prove it! We also saw a lot of interest in our products from other SharePoint hosting companies proving once again that “cloud computing” will be a hot topic in the coming year.

Ed’s discussions with our global partners provided further validation of the traction that we’re seeing in the market for SharePoint 2010 as a platform for enterprise content management (ECM).  This is great news as ECM and document management in SharePoint is a natural sweet spot for us with our Outlook to SharePoint and Windows Explorer to SharePoint integration solutions.

Would you like to benchmark your organization against hundreds of others with regards to the adoption of SharePoint, enterprise content management (ECM) systems, and cloud storage systems? Colligo is conducting an industry wide survey and if you participate, you’ll not only get a copy of the results but you’ll be entered to win a Nikon D5000 camera (an $800 value).

By participating in this survey, you’ll get answers to questions like:

• How broadly deployed is SharePoint?
• Do organizations struggle with SharePoint user adoption?
• Which departments use SharePoint and for what business activities?
• What are the benefits of client / desktop software?
• How many ECM platforms do organizations typically support?
• How broadly adopted are cloud storage systems within the enterprise?

Our blog readers are close to this fast-evolving market so we’d like to hear your perspectives – and have the chance to share with you the perspectives of your peers. Please complete this survey by Friday, July 30 for your chance to win a Nikon D5000 camera.

Click here for the survey.

Many of you may have watched our recent webinar with Ryan Duguid, titled “SharePoint 2010: What’s New for Email Management?” In fact, we had a record number of registrations for the event at almost 2600, so we definitely know that email management in SharePoint 2010 is a hot topic! Not only is Ryan very busy being Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for ECM, but he’s also a very much in-demand speaker, recently providing the keynote address at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Wellington.

Ryan has agreed to be a guest blogger and do series here based on the webinar. Over the next few weeks, Ryan will publish blog posts that break down the webinar into more manageable pieces, as well as provide links to the slides he used and to the specific audio portion of his presentation. You can either listen online or download the audio and listen at your convenience.

Here is Ryan’s bio:

Ryan Duguid is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft responsible for SharePoint Enterprise Content Management. Ryan moved to Redmond from Microsoft New Zealand where he was a Technology Specialist responsible for evangelizing the Microsoft 2007 Office system, assisting customers with deployment and adoption of Office system-based solutions and developing competency and confidence within the Microsoft partner ecosystem. He is passionate about understanding people, identifying their unique problems and helping them to realize their true potential through effective and innovative use of technology.

Thanks Ryan for agreeing to be a guest blogger, we are looking forward to your posts!

Ryan Duguid, Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for ECM, was the guest speaker at our very successful webinar on “SharePoint 2010: What’s New for Email Management?” During the webinar we received several questions from attendees, some of which Ryan was able to answer live. However, a number of questions were answered by Ryan via email after the webinar and you can read those questions and answers below.

How do we educate users on what emails need to be declared as a record?

The decision about what email should be declared as a record varies from one organization to the next depending on specific internal requirements as well as industry and government regulations.  In general though, any email correspondence that is considered to be evidence of business activities and transactions would constitute a record.  Two of the most prominent definitions of what constitutes a record are:

ISO 15489 – “information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”

International Council on Archives – “a recorded information produced or received in the initiation, conduct or completion of an institutional or individual activity and that comprises content, context and structure sufficient to provide evidence of the activity”

I’d also highly recommend reading and sharing the following document from ARMA:

http://www.arma.org/pdf/WhatIsRIM.pdf

Is there any way to force metadata entry without custom development?  For Document IDs, we require a sequential ID without the prefix requirement across the farm. Can this be accomplished using document ID provider customization?

Custom development is not required to force metadata entry.  All metadata attributes in SharePoint can be defined as required or optional.  If an attribute is defined as required, then a document cannot be checked-in without a value being provided for that attribute.

The Document ID provider is a pluggable model so you can define your own provider that generates sequential numbers.  The prefix is an optional component, defined at a Site Collection level, that allows you to ensure guaranteed uniqueness across Site Collections when using the out of the box Document ID provider. 

Can the same copy of a document be part of multiple document sets?

The Document Set is a physical storage structure and as such, a document can only reside in a single Document Set.  You can create pointers to a document that is stored in another Document Sets but there is no notion of a single document existing in multiple Document Sets.

How do we find the URL for a document ID? How do we save it, so we know what to search for in the future?

If you display the Document ID as a column in a library, the value is rendered as a hyperlink and the URL of the hyperlink specifies the document redirect service and the Document ID.  You can copy this URL by right clicking the hyperlink and selecting Copy Shortcut.

Can folders have an object ID?

Folders do not have a Document ID.

One functionality that I lack in the Content Organizer is dynamic rules/destinations. So for instance this scenario: Content Type: email, Cust No: xxx  Rule: route object of content type email to dynamic dest. Dest based on Cust. No. Can it be done OOB?

The Content Organizer has the ability to dynamically generate folders based on each unique value for a specific metadata attribute.  In your example, the Content Organizer would provision a folder for each unique value of Cust. No. under a root path that you specific.

The metadata driven navigation shows OOB all terms that are available in the term store. Is there a way to only display those terms that are used in the current library/list? Without filtering the metadata driven navigation gets impossible to navigate.

Metadata driven navigation is configured on a per library basis and for each library you need choose which Term Sets are available as navigators.  The choice of available Term Sets is based on the Term Sets used in the Document Library.  When configuring Managed Metadata columns on a Document Library, you need to select a specific node in the taxonomy hierarchy to bind to for tagging.  As a result, Metadata driven navigation does not show all available terms out of the box but rather it shows the specific nodes that have been chosen as key navigators.

Re: information management: how do you envision to update all the existing documents with the new policy rules and the retention periods. Is there going to be any mass migration tool?

SharePoint 2010 allows you to specify location based metadata default values and Information Management Policy.  This means that Document Libraries and folders can be used to drive policy rules and retention periods.  Any content that exists in a Document Library or folder will inherit the policy and retention period defined for the container and this will allow you to apply policy and retention periods to existing documents.  We have also worked with our colleagues in the Windows Server team to provide core capabilities that will migrate content from file servers to SharePoint, leveraging the content organizer to route content to the appropriate location within SharePoint, inheriting the policy and retention period on migration.  You can find more information at http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/ScriptCenter/en-us/f538c34c-4f74-4645-9649-fd25e49805d6.

In addition we have a range of partners that provide migration tools including Metalogix, AvePoint, Tzunami and Quest.  These partners support advanced migration scenarios from existing content repositories and allow you to manipulate information architecture, metadata and Content Type as part of content migration process.

Could this be used and what would be the best method of taking all incoming emails and send them to a document library inside individual project subsites? It would need to take an email associated with a project and automatically route it to the library?

My suggestion would be to define a term set in the Managed Metadata Service that defines each project (and potentially sub project).  I would then define routing rules in the Content Organizer that route content to specific Sites and Document Libraries based on the project name.  Once these rules are set up, you can have users tag email using Colligo with the appropriate project name and have the Content Organizer route the email to the appropriate location.

We’re looking for an effective work program – a documented/repeatable process to help organizations take advantage of the new capabilities or EX/SP 2010 to address messaging records mgmt best practices.  Where will I find that?

I would suggest leveraging the content on the following sites:

Enterprise Content Management Resource Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ee263905.aspx

Records Management Resource Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff598594.aspx

Exchange Server Tech Center – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd351165.aspx

Dave Foster, our VP of Development, has created a short screencast that demonstrates a new feature in V4.2, the use of Keyword Metadata fields. This feature allows user created folksonomies to be accessible via the Colligo metadata editor. Users can set, edit, and modify terms from term stores on the server through a simple type-ahead interface from the Colligo Term selector.

Colligo Contributor retrieves potential term matches from the server and lets the users select the desired term. Selected metadata terms can then be used in filters and views to present items in a structure format.

View the screencast to see this new feature in action.

We are really pleased to announce the launch of Colligo Contributor Version 4.2! This is an important release for us as it provides support for Office/Outlook 2010 along with additional support for new SharePoint 2010 enterprise content management (ECM) features including keyword metadata, document sets, and in-place records management. It also includes some technical enhancements designed to accelerate synchronization and increase overall performance. Thanks to our world class development team for delivering a great new version of our award-winning SharePoint client solutions.

Read the press release for more information on the V4.2 release.

June continued to be a busy month at Colligo for conferences and events. Colligo’s Braeden Calyniuk, who’s responsible for business development in the Asia Pacific region, recently attended, presented, and exhibited at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Wellington and the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney. Both events were well attended with over 400 SharePoint professionals in New Zealand and 800 in Australia. Ryan Duguid, who recently co-hosted our extremely successful webinar on email management in SharePoint 2010, provided the keynote address in Wellington.

This was Colligo’s first time exhibiting in New Zealand and Australia and it was great for Braeden to meet face-to-face with the many partners and customers that he’s only talked with on the phone. It was also great to meet with Microsoft representatives in both countries, so a big thanks to Ryan Duguid for introductions to the Microsoft New Zealand people and to Gayan Peiris for introductions to the Microsoft Australia folks.

Colligo was the guest of Information Leadership Consulting at the New Zealand show and the guest of Unique World for the Australian conference. Both groups generously shared their booths with us and played the part of excellent hosts, making many introductions to key companies and important SharePoint contacts in their respective regions. So another big thanks to Grant Margison at Information Leadership and Eddie Geller at Unique World for their support and incredible hospitality. Many thanks also to Debbie Ireland for putting together two great conferences!

Colligo has built a very good profile in New Zealand and Australia with a solid core of customers and excellent partners. We received a lot of good plugs at various “Voice of the Customer” presentations and the knowledge level of Colligo and our SharePoint client solutions with the conference attendees was fantastic.

Here are some photos that were taken at the events. Braeden is sitting in the middle.