For the past week I’ve been kayaking up Clayoquot Sound - a positively blissful experience. The trip was organized and guided by my dear friend Kim Crosby from Wildheart Adventures, who always puts on a terrific trip. But (sigh) now that I’m back to reality I noticed a few interesting blog posts that I wanted to share.

Andy Dale MCSE, who works for Officetalk in the UK, wrote a couple of interesting posts. The first one entitled “Six Summer SharePoint Sizzlers” highlighted a number of SharePoint Add-on products that he found interesting. His comments about Colligo Contributor were very flattering, indeed:

“Award winners at Tech Ed 2008. Colligo is a real SharePoint gem because it provides easy offline synchronisation allowing laptop users to always have access to their most important SharePoint libraries.”

In a later post, he did a more in-depth review of Contributor. I love the title: SharePoint “Open All Hours” and this quote:

“SharePoint is now at the heart of many businesses and the addition of Colligo makes it an even more powerful tool and a saviour for the customer facing staff who travel the globe visiting existing and potential customers.”

The next post, “Recording - Exchange Public Folders vs SharePoint - the battle (Community Day 2008)”, is by Joris Poelmans (AKA JOPX), Application Group Manager at Dolmen (www.dolmen.be), a leading Belgian IT services company and Microsoft Gold Partner.

The post is based on a session at “Community Day 2008”. On Community Day, 9 User Groups, Belgian Dynamics Community, Biwug, IT-Talks, Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, Visug, Winsec, and XNAbug combined their efforts and organized a joint-event.

The post features an interesting recording of a “battle” that pits SharePoint against Exchange Public Folders. This is very topical for me given the recent series of posts I did here on Email Management in SharePoint. In the recording, Ilse Van Criekinge, Exchange MVP (and Community Day keynote speaker) and Joris Poelmans (SharePoint MVP) stage a “punch up” to see if the new kid on the block, SharePoint, can give a black eye to the old master, Exchange Public Folders. I think SharePoint fares rather well and only comes out with a few minor scrapes. A special thanks to Joris for demoing Colligo Contributor Client about 30 minutes into the recording. I think that Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help SharePoint bulk up even more against EPFs because it enables users to drag and drop emails into SharePoint document libraries from right within the Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 interface. Now that’s a battle I’d love to see: SharePoint+Contributor Add-in vs. Exchange Public Folders - Las Vegas here we come!