Offline SharePoint

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:

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.

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.