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.

I was pleased to see the following quote from Adam Davidson of National Grid:

We are also about to start deploying (after a successful pilot) the Colligo Outlook Add-in to give us an even better tool to upload emails into SharePoint, as well as allowing lawyers offline access to their matter files within SharePoint.

This really highlights how the Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help to reduce the barriers to adoption of SharePoint for content management applications, such as legal matter management. I was especially proud since we were selected by a team that has been recognized for it’s leading edge application of SharePoint. National Grid won the “In-House Legal Department Initiative of the Year Award” at the Legal Technology Awards in 2006 for their use of SharePoint for DM.

Thanks for the mention, Adam!

Rees mentions SharePoint in an earlier post from his blog and references an article in the ACC Journal by Nanci Tucker of the Simpson Neely Group, a provider of law technology consulting services. The article presumably evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint for legal departments, though I couldn’t access the article from the ACC Docket archive since I’m not a subscriber.

It’s great to see SharePoint getting the notice it deserves from the legal community. As Adam from National Grid said:

…[SharePoint is] not as fully featured as some proprietary DM/PM [document management/project management] systems, but it cost less and is much easier for us to administer…

I have a feeling that many of the feature deltas will be closed in SharePoint v.next.

Version 4.0 will go RTM on Monday, June 29th. It will support several new scenarios, including:

• email attachment management in SharePoint
• network file share replacement
• low cost email & metadata upload to SharePoint

The new release will include two new products in addition to the existing Contributor Add-In for Outlook, Contributor Client and Contributor Pro. Colligo Reader will also be upgraded.

Contributor 4 is built on top of an upgraded runtime platform. This means more functionality that can be accessed by customers developing their own tools using the Contributor SDK.

Customers that purchase any current Contributor 3.2 product between now and the end of the month will get an automatic upgrade to the corresponding product in 4.0 at no additional charge. Some of the products may go up in price in July, so this is an excellent chance to purchase an upgraded product at the current price.

To learn more about version 4.0, attend the webinar on Tuesday, June 30, 2009. Times: 8:00 AM Pacific, 11:00 AM Eastern, 4:00 PM London, 5:00 PM Paris. You can sign up here.

If I get a chance, I’ll post a few more tidbits before the launch date.

We’ve previewed a lot of ground that you’ll need to cover in your race with SharePoint, but don’t become disheartened and retreat to the server room. This is where the real action is at … taking what Microsoft has made available in SharePoint and putting it to great use within your organization. Let’s summarize what we’ve looked at:

SharePoint is a broad-brushed platform technology from Microsoft to support many information worker processes in organizations. And it’s clearly important to Microsoft—given the centrality it’s taking in the Microsoft technology stack, and in the revenue that it’s bringing into Microsoft’s coffers.

The tremendous range of flexibility offered by SharePoint means that it can be melded to do many different things for an organization—which is good, and bad. If you walk into the bad territory, then SharePoint will quickly devolve into a chaotic and unmanageable environment that causes great grief and consternation.

There are some very specific activities that you can do now to get more from your SharePoint deployment, such as increasing your awareness of the business reasons for SharePoint at your organization and aligning what you do with SharePoint to those reasons; embracing the Seamless Teamwork approach to make SharePoint the authoritative place for people to work and collaborate; re-examining how business gets done in light of the new technology capabilities that SharePoint brings to the table, rather than just re-creating old ways of doing things with the new tool; and looking at how third-party tools can increase user adoption and team productivity.

Race well … looking forward to celebrating with you when you reach the finish line!

With SharePoint being a “platform-technology”, Microsoft has to decide which capabilities to support out-of-the-box, and which capabilities to leave for its business partners. One of the areas that SharePoint users benefit greatly from a third-party tool is addressed by Colligo Contributor. Contributor addresses two main ideas: the first is the provision of offline access to most SharePoint data (note that the wiki capabilities in a SharePoint site are not currently supported for offline editing in Contributor) for people working away from an Internet connection, and the second is for people who “live in SharePoint”, and therefore want a more responsive client application rather than using a Web browser. Contributor addresses both, and by lowering usability barriers, helps with increasing the adoption of SharePoint among your user base, and as a flow on effect, it helps with getting more content into SharePoint so it can be managed and shared.

In exploring the potential for Colligo Contributor to help your users, identify the people and groups who fit the two ideal profiles of Contributor users: those that are offline on a regular basis but still need access to their SharePoint sites, and those who work in SharePoint for a high proportion of their day. Once you have identified these groups, get the 30-day free trial of Colligo Contributor, and assess the benefits with real people at your firm.

Governance for SharePoint is worth a whole white paper in and of itself, and maybe even a whole book! So we don’t expect to address all of the key points of governance here, suffice to wave the flag that getting your governance strategy and approach in place before going too far with SharePoint is really important. Here’s why: on the social side, SharePoint can fundamentally re-wire the way that people get their work done and thus what is expected of them in order to carry out their work. Thus you have tremendous power over the way that people work. And on the technology side, there are a raft of decisions that you have to make that have deep technical consequences and implications for your business. A governance strategy ensures that this power is wielded well and for the good of the business.

Some examples the technology decisions are:

• The number and variation of content types to use.
• The metadata to put in place, and which metadata values to mandate vs which are optional.
• The variation permitted in site templates, as we’ve discussed above.
• The degree of custom development that will be embraced.
• The willingness of the firm to customize templates that come from Microsoft.

A governance strategy puts in place the checks-and-balances to ensure that decisions of this nature, in addition to a host of decisions about appropriate use and adoption of SharePoint, are made with due process. The benefit of a great governance strategy is that it launches SharePoint on a trajectory for success, by lining up all of the social and technical factors required to make SharePoint work at a social and technology level.

There are many resources available on governance for SharePoint, and a browse or search of the Internet will bring a plethora to light. Three resources of note as you start on your governance journey with SharePoint are:

• Microsoft’s SharePoint governance web site
• Chapter 12 of my book Seamless Teamwork, which addresses the thinking involved in scaling the Seamless Teamwork approach to the enterprise. Chapter 12 was co-authored with Grant Margison of Information Leadership; and
• The book Flapping to Flying, co-authored by Grant Margison and Sarah Heal of Information Leadership in New Zealand.