Offline SharePoint

One of the open ended questions we asked in our survey was how respondents were using our offline SharePoint tools today. Below is a summary of some of the most common answers:

Who uses offline SharePoint tools?

Department and division managers: traveling to remote locations.

Sales people: when on the road or at a customer location.

All staff: to provide access to SharePoint when they are offline.

IT project managers: to take offline copies of IT project related sites for use when on client premises.

Engineering project managers: to be able to view content when working off site.

Consultants: to enable them to work in the field.

Analysts: to access the latest commodity information when they travel.

Frequent travelers to, and staff in, foreign countries.

Why do they need them?

Customers or partners often do not allow visitors to connect through their firewall to access SharePoint content.

Obtaining a reliable connection to SharePoint can be difficult when users are in transit, such as on a plane or train.

In foreign countries, particularly in the developing world, Internet connections are often unreliable or unavailable.

How do they Use them?

To sync to the latest versions of sales tools, such as presentations, specifications, and media content for availability while traveling or at a customer site.

To have the latest copies of reference documents, such as practice manuals when out of the office.

To edit documents or list items without connecting to the internet.

As a personal backup of SharePoint site content.

For team members working offsite to have access to the teams documents wherever they are.

Next, I’ll discuss our respondents’ plans for deployment of SharePoint 2007.

We asked our survey respondents to tell us how many employees worked in their organization. 38% had over 1000 employees, 31% between 100 and 1000 and 31% below 100. So the majority of Colligo for SharePoint users who responded to the survey are from larger organizations.

We also asked how many SharePoint users their organization had. 62% of our survey respondents at organizations with over 1000 employees reported over 1000 SharePoint users. This indicates that SharePoint has become a mainstream collaboration platform used by many employees, not just isolated pockets – at least among our customer base.

Next, we’ll look at how our survey respondents are using offline SharePoint products.

Response has been strong since we launched Colligo Reader and Colligo Contributor in the spring of this year. Now that there is a critical mass of users of the Colligo for SharePoint products, we felt that it was time to survey our customers. We learned a lot about the nature of SharePoint deployments at their organizations, their plans for future upgrades, how they are using our products, how they like them and what features they will be looking for in the future.

Some of the results we received were surprising to us. We thought they might be interesting to others, so over the next while I’ll post some of them here.

In this post I’ll talk about how the survey was conducted. In early August, we sent out email requests to a selection of our end users. About 130 people from over 100 different companies responded. We use a tool called QuestionPro to do our surveys and by all accounts it performed pretty well. The survey consisted of 13 multi-part questions.

Many of the respondents were from the IT departments of their companies which makes sense since they are generally the primary interface point for software vendors. About 50% of respondents classified themselves as either being in IS or tech support. The other 50% were end users, with the largest being consultants (22%), followed by operations (8%), sales & marketing (7%), finance & HR (2%) and other (11%). So the offline need for SharePoint is spread across several departments.

Next up, I’ll post some interesting things we learned about SharePoint adoption within our customers organizations.

It’s official! Yes, they’re finally here Colligo Contributor 1.0 and Colligo Reader 1.0. We are very proud to announce their launch, Friday April 28, 2006. Thanks to the great work by the Colligo development team and the input and assistance of more the 300 beta testers it’s finally here. The last few weeks have been BUSY and now that we have 1.0 we can start working on the next release. The cycle never ends, but that’s the fun of software development. So past the hurdle and off to the next leg of the race….

On behalf of the Dev. team and myself, I would like to especially thank all the beta testers, a fantastic group of insightful, precise and articulate people. Thank you.

To get the Free Colligo Reader 1.0 go HERE.

To find out more about Colligo for SharePoint line of products go HERE.

Cheers, Tony
__________________________
Anthony A. van Houten
Senior Consultant, Applications
Colligo networks, Inc

Today we released the Beta 3 for Colligo Contributor and Colligo Reader.

Last week, while I was at the MSD2D SharePoint Connection Conference in Orlando Florida, we officially announce the Free Colligo Reader product, so you may already have heard about that. More about the conference in a later post, suffice it to say it was well worth the trip.

Major changes in Beta 3 include:

CFS now allows users to synchronize only certain folders of document libraries, if desired. Full document library synchronization is still available. Users can right-click document libraries in the left list navigation pane and a menu will appear allowing them to choose between synchronizing the entire document library, specific folders or disabling synchronization altogether

Improved performance for known issues occurring when synchronizing and viewing lists and document libraries that contain more than 100 items. [edit:corrected text]

If you had renamed a folder and had also modified a file within that folder, it would take two syncs to transfer both changes to the server. On the first sync, the folder rename would succeed, but the file update would fail. On the second sync the file update would succeed. This issue has been resolved and now both changes are successfully transferred on the first sync.

To start testing Beta 3 (0.9.18) go HERE. The updated documentation and Release Notes are also available there.

Cheers, Tony
__________________________
Anthony A. van Houten
Senior Consultant, Applications
Colligo networks, Inc

Some very nice comments today from Dustin Hannifin on his TechNotes Blog:

Colligo for Sharepoint Beta 2
9th March 2006

Colligo appears to be on track to deliver this top notch product early next month. If you’re looking for the ability to take your Sharepoint documents with you on the road Colligo for Sharepoint looks like a real winner.

Read the full review here.

Thanks Dustin.

Cheers, Tony
__________________________
Anthony A. van Houten
Senior Consultant, Applications
Colligo networks, Inc

We’re about two weeks into the Beta 2 of Colligo for SharePoint and I have to say it is going very well. The numbers of people signing up has been quite remarkable. Even in such a short time, we have literally doubled the numbers of truely active testers and are already getting back some great feedback.

There have been quite a few people who have picked up on the Beta 2 and have helped get the word out there ….
Romeo Pruno – wrote
Bil Simar – wrote
And looking at the maps a couple of fellow Dutchmen…
Remco – wrote
Mart Muller – wrote

And even a note about this very blog site from Daniel McPherson on Point2Share.

All great blogs for those interested in SharePoint.

Thanks for getting the word out. As I said before, the traffic to the Beta sign up, the resulting increase in the number of highly active beta users and their feedback has been stellar.

Cheers, Tony
__________________________
Anthony A. van Houten
Senior Consultant, Applications
Colligo networks, Inc.

Well, for my very first Blog post, being able to announce the Beta 2 release
of Colligo for SharePoint is pretty cool.