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.

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.

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.

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

Melanie is posting a lot of other interesting information on LinkedIn and is finding an active Colligo community on Twitter.

1 Best SharePoint Information Site 2009
Winner – SharePoint Reviews

The newcomer on the block which contains reviews of 100’s of SharePoint Products

2 Best SharePoint Webpart Provider 2009
Winner – SharePoint Boost

Creating easy to install and use webparts as if they are going out of fashion

3 Best SharePoint Administration Tool 2009
Winner – ControlPoint from Axceler

Finally a way of really managing all those user permissions across all of your servers and sites. Oh, and very useful for moving complete sites.

4 Best Website built on SharePoint 2009
Winner – Cadbury

Chocolate and SharePoint have never tasted so good.

5 Best SharePoint Training Package 2009
Winner – CBT Clips

Still the best solution to show End Users how to use SharePoint.

6 Best SharePoint Offline Solution 2009
Winner – Colligo Contributor from Colligo

Allows SharePoint to be with you even when the network isn’t. Don’t forget to download the free reader on the right.

7 Most Useful SharePoint Webpart 2009
Winner – Batch Check-in from SharePoint Boost

Lets us finally get rid of the ‘Checked Out’ annoyance after we have move lots of documents.

8 Favourite Free SharePoint Webpart 2009
Winner – Google Search Webparts

Keep your users in SharePoint as they Google away.

9 Most Fun Free Webpart 2009
Winner – Picture Puzzle Widget from Spring Widgets

Spring Widget have lots of snazzy free webparts including cat clocks with moving tails

10 Biggest SharePoint Mess-up 2009
Winner – Microsoft for 180 day expire error on SP 2.

Thanks a lot Andy. We are very flattered, indeed, that you selected Colligo Contributor as a winner this year!

I was pleased to see that Colligo Reader is the Top Rated Freeware product at SharePoint Reviews. Colligo Contributor Client also received a 5/5 rating. Thanks to all the people who were kind enough to do a review of both these products. I noticed that they just put a product description of Contributor Add-In for Outlook up there recently, but it hasn’t received any reviews yet. We’d love to get a few reviewers if anyone is so inclined. You can get a 30 day full function evaluation copy of the Add-In here.

SharePoint is evolving at full tilt with new use-cases cropping up every day. In these challenging times, supporting new requirements can be daunting for IT departments already stretched to the limit. Colligo has responded with the launch of Colligo Contributor 4.0, a significant new release that provides important enhancements across the entire product line, and introduces two exciting new products.

Join Dave Foster, Vice President of Product Development at Colligo and me as we discuss how SharePoint is moving beyond the portal and how Colligo can help you respond rapidly with off-the-shelf client solutions. You’ll see a hands-on demonstration of Colligo Contributor 4.0 (to be released in June) and learn how to get more horsepower from your SharePoint investment.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How organizations are expanding their use of SharePoint
• What is known about the next version of SharePoint
• What’s new in Contributor 4.0 – New features and interfaces
• How to manage email attachments in SharePoint
• How to integrate Windows Explorer with SharePoint
• How to use SharePoint as a Network File Share Replacement
• How the Contributor SDK can speed the development of custom SharePoint client applications

WHAT – Supercharge Your SharePoint Deployment With The New Colligo Contributor 4.0

WHEN & WHERE – Tuesday, June 30, 2009
8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern
4:00 PM London / 5:00 PM Paris
Online Webinar

PRESENTERS – Barry Jinks President & CEO, Colligo Networks Inc., David Foster, VP, Product Development, Colligo Networks Inc.

COST – COMPLIMENTARY

Register HERE
Even if you can’t make the date, please register and we will send you a link to the on-demand webinar when it’s available.