Offline SharePoint

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.

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.

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.

Hello World!

I am Bill England and this is my first foray into a blogging. Barry Jinks, our CEO at Colligo, is a regular blogger (www.offlinesharepoint.com) and has been encouraging me to participate. Inertia has gotten in the way until now, but Jeffrey Gitomer was recently in town and helped me over come old Newton.

The primary purpose of this blog is corporate in nature, but other interesting tidbits will be included along the way. I have worked for Colligo Networks since mid-2005, which was just before we launched our SharePoint product family called Colligo Contributor. We are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner developing and marketing software products extending and enhancing SharePoint. My focus at Colligo is North American sales, so my contribution to the community (hopefully) will be to provide comments on the client and prospect use cases. Other SharePoint information will be thrown in the mix here and there, as well as commentary on working as ISV in the Microsoft ecosystem.

My first article will be on the use of InfoPath and Form Libraries offline with Colligo Contributor. We have a number of current clients and prospects adopting a field reporting architecture that leverages these technologies. I will explore this topic further in the coming weeks.