| Website: http://www.colligo.com |
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Profile: Bill England is North American Sales Director for Colligo Networks. Previous to Colligo, Bill worked as Sales Account Manager for Spectrum Signal Processing. Bill has a degree is electrical engineering from Simon Fraser University and is a frequent speaker at SharePoint conferences and user group meetings. |
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.
Today I received a query from a prospective client regarding our free Colligo Reader for SharePoint product. The Reader is free for personal (non-commercial) installations, and this particular client was interested in purchasing Reader for commercial use. This is a fairly common question due to the popularity of the Reader product, so I wanted to answer it here for all the interested parties following our blog.
First, a little background on the Reader.
The Colligo Reader product has been a tremendously successful product for Colligo. It provides end users with a straightforward way to sync SharePoint content (docs , metadata, lists, views) to their local PC for use when disconnected. Reader is a light-weight and easy to use. See http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/reader.asp for more details.
However, the Reader product is targeted for personal use by individuals, and as such does not have the configurability and extensibility required for business users and their deployments.
For commercial use, Colligo has the Contributor Client (Viewer) product, or more commonly known as the “Viewer”. The Viewer product is essentially the “enterprise” version of Reader with all the benefits of (and support) associated with a commercial grade product.
The Viewer provides the ability to configure various features in the msi package including the storage location, background sync frequency and SharePoint sites to be automatically sync’d. A full list of the current configuration options is available at: http://support.colligo.com/Lists/Knowledge%20Base/DispForm.aspx?ID=16 and there will be more available with each subsequent release. The Viewer is also extensible with the Contributor SDK.
Additionally, to upgrade from the Viewer product to the full, 2-way synchronizing Contributor Client, the user simply needs to install the new license key using Help > Install License Key.
To summarize: The Reader product is free for personal (non-commercial) use. If your business is looking to deploy one-way SharePoint sync technology, you will want to contact us about the “Viewer” product.
This afternoon I received a question on our support for versioning. In short, our support is as follows:
Colligo Contributor and Reader behavior is the same here. The latest version is downloaded – in Reader that is the end of the story as it is a reader with no write access. In Contributor uploading documents will act as SharePoint is configured.
SharePoint Options Contributor
No version history Changes uploaded & current version over-ridden
Major Only New Major version created
Major & Minor New Minor version created
Just stumbled on to an excellent article here (http://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2009/06/20/best-practices-in-gathering-requirements-for-sharepoint-projects.aspx) by Dux Raymond Sy on requirements gathering for SharePoint projects. The content is from his presentation at the Baltimore SharePoint Users’ Group (http://www.baltimoresug.org/default.aspx).
Yesterday I was down in LA at the SharePoint Solutions 2009 event hosted by Microsoft, Xelleration, QuickStart Intelligence, Softchoice, LMR Solutions, and Colligo Networks (see: http://www.xelleration.com/ss09/index.html). The sessions were informative and well attended.
Colligo presented a session on email management. Much of the content was drawn from the webinar we did with Kathy Hughes (Microsoft MOSS MVP). The webinar is recorded here: http://www.colligo.com/articles/ResourceCenter.asp.
In surveying the room, I would say that 25% of people were actively either had or were in the process of moving email into SharePoint. Around two-thirds (including the aforementioned 25%) viewed email management as a topic on their radar to address in the months ahead.
Special thanks to Fiazan Hassan and Zee Subzwari from Xelleration (a Colligo partner in SoCal), as well as David Constantine from QuickStart for hosting me in LA for the day.
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:
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.