Oh, and by the way, many thanks for the mention of the launch of Colligo for SharePoint 2.0 in your blog!

Barry.

Colligo Reader is an excellent product.

Dustin Hannifin did an extensive review of Colligo Contributor on Dustin’s Tech Notes. I was particlarly pleased with the introductory paragraph:

If you’re looking for true bi-directional synchronization of Sharepoint sites, including MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0, then Colligo for Sharepoint is the best solution available on the market today. I have tested a couple of competitor products and none come close to stacking up to Colligo for Sharepoint.

Mart Muller also mentioned the release on Tam Tam Weblogs.

Thanks to all for posting. Sorry for the blatant promotion, but I’m really excited to see that the reaction has been strong. It’s kind of like giving birth. I hope to see some other reviews over the next week as well.

Barry.

If you are interested in requesting a trial of Version 2.0, downloading Reader, viewing a screencast or whitepaper, fill out this form and we’ll send you out what you need right away.

Barry

Here’s a little description of the problem and solution:

As an email sharing and collaboration solution, SharePoint document libraries offer many advantages over Exchange Server public folders, including ease of administration, ease of access, search, and content organization. Yet a number of mission critical requirements must be considered before integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Outlook email, such as:

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one possible solution since it enables users to drag emails into SharePoint discussion lists. Unfortunately, this approach means that message fields are not saved with the email. They appear just like file attachments. In addition, discussion lists lack the flexibility and organization of document libraries, meaning that you can’t apply metadata and therefore create views based on it.

Colligo Contributor version 2.0 integrates with Microsoft Outlook. Firstly, it enables you to drag emails and attachments into and out of doc libraries from/to Outlook both online and offline. These are then synced with SharePoint through Contributor.

But here’s the cool thing. If you create a document library with columns of a particular name, Contributor automatically maps the email message fields (To, From etc.) to those columns when an email is dragged into the library. Users can apply custom metadata then, too. When online, emails and metadata are automatically synchronized to the server, whereas changes are cached locally when working offline. Users can search, sort, and view emails whether they are online or offline. Setup of email document libraries is simple: templates can be saved as SharePoint content types and then applied across many sites.

By the way, Brent did a terrific set of screencasts on Version 2.0, including the email feature. They are up on our SharePoint support site now.

Barry.

Update: June 25, 2008 – Colligo Contributor 3.0 was released in the spring of 2008 and it now includes an Add-In for Microsoft Outlook that enables users to move content to and from SharePoint within Outlook 2003 or 2007. FYI, I’ve also recently posted a series on email management in SharePoint.

Well, I’m pleased to report that today, the team released Version 2.0. The press release went on the wire this morning. So far the reaction has been very positive. Our friend, SharePoint MVP Dustin Miller of SharePoint Experts, called Contributor 2.0 a “killer productivity boost”. The 451 Group wrote a very flattering piece. Thanks to Tony Rizzo for that. We like you guys, too!

Thanks also to Lawrence Liu, who among many other things, is the manager of the SharePoint Team Blog and is the founder and lead product manager of the shared source Community Kit for SharePoint project. We were pleased to see that Lawrence called Colligo Reader 2.0 a “must have” SharePoint addon product along with Telerik’s r.a.d.editor for MOSS 2007 in his post today. FYI, Lawrence runs the SharePoint Community Portal, too which is a great place for finding SharePoint resources.

Over the next little while I’ll post a bit about the features, applications and resources of Colligo for SharePoint V2.0. Meanwhile, thanks very much to the Colligo Team for working many overtime hours developing and launching this great product. I think it’s a huge step forward.

Barry.