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:
National Grid Legal Department Improves Collaboration & SharePoint Adoption with Contributor Add-In for Outlook (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.
Ed Kaczor, our VP of Sales, spent last week in Washington, DC at the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. Over 13,000 people participated in this year’s conference, far surpassing last year’s attendance, which is a very good sign for the coming year. The conference featured some high profile speakers, including a keynote by former President Bill Clinton titled “Embracing our Common Humanity” in which he discussed where he sees the world going and the role that technology plays in reducing global disparities.
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.
June continued to be a busy month at Colligo for conferences and events. Colligo’s Braeden Calyniuk, who’s responsible for business development in the Asia Pacific region, recently attended, presented, and exhibited at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Wellington and the Australian SharePoint Conference in Sydney. Both events were well attended with over 400 SharePoint professionals in New Zealand and 800 in Australia. Ryan Duguid, who recently co-hosted our extremely successful webinar on email management in SharePoint 2010, provided the keynote address in Wellington.
This was Colligo’s first time exhibiting in New Zealand and Australia and it was great for Braeden to meet face-to-face with the many partners and customers that he’s only talked with on the phone. It was also great to meet with Microsoft representatives in both countries, so a big thanks to Ryan Duguid for introductions to the Microsoft New Zealand people and to Gayan Peiris for introductions to the Microsoft Australia folks.
Colligo was the guest of Information Leadership Consulting at the New Zealand show and the guest of Unique World for the Australian conference. Both groups generously shared their booths with us and played the part of excellent hosts, making many introductions to key companies and important SharePoint contacts in their respective regions. So another big thanks to Grant Margison at Information Leadership and Eddie Geller at Unique World for their support and incredible hospitality. Many thanks also to Debbie Ireland for putting together two great conferences!
Colligo has built a very good profile in New Zealand and Australia with a solid core of customers and excellent partners. We received a lot of good plugs at various “Voice of the Customer” presentations and the knowledge level of Colligo and our SharePoint client solutions with the conference attendees was fantastic.
Here are some photos that were taken at the events. Braeden is sitting in the middle.
Conferences like Tech-Ed are a great way for us to connect with customers, learn about their experiences using our products and the results that their companies are achieving. At Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans, we had the good fortune of having Bob Burke from Newfoundland Power stop by the Colligo booth. Bob is an Application Analyst and was heavily involved in deploying Colligo Contributor to their field service staff.
Newfoundland Power operates an integrated generation, transmission and distribution system throughout the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador. The company identified a problem in the time delay involved in updating and printing manuals for their field staff to take with them in their service vehicles. To solve the problem, the company implemented SharePoint and Colligo Contributor, so that the manuals could be updated electronically, uploaded to SharePoint, and then synched to each of the field service technician’s laptops using Contributor. This process ensured that field staff always had the latest version of the service manuals in their trucks.
As Bob told us at Tech-Ed, Contributor provided fast and easy access to up-to-date field service manuals and helped solve Newfoundland Power’s mobile document management problems.
We’re at the big New York launch event tonight and tomorrow. Next week, we’re Gold Sponsors in Atlanta.
This is one of a series of events held throughout the United States. No matter what your job is, you’ll find a launch event that delivers technical content you can use today, and gives you the inside track on what Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 have to offer. There are all day or half day in-person events and virtual events that you can attend anytime. It’s all free.
David Whitehead and I recently presented at the Vancouver SharePoint Usergroup (VanSPUG). A recording of the video is posted here:
We would like to thank Peter John McFarlane and Yaroslav Pentsarskyy from Habaneros (www.habaneros.com) for inviting us out and hosting. We look forward to being a more active member of the local SharePoint community going forward.
Just returned from a few days in Las Vegas at the SharePointPro 2010 Summit & Expo (see: http://www.sharepointprosummit.com/ for more details). Randy Halischuk and I attended on behalf of Colligo. After a busy first day the show slowed down on the second day, so I took the opportunity to speak with some of the vendors and recorded the discussions (with their approval) on a Flip.
Yesterday I was down in LA at the SharePoint Solutions 2009 event hosted by Microsoft, Xelleration, QuickStart Intelligence, Softchoice, LMR Solutions, and Colligo Networks (see: http://www.xelleration.com/ss09/index.html). The sessions were informative and well attended.
Colligo presented a session on email management. Much of the content was drawn from the webinar we did with Kathy Hughes (Microsoft MOSS MVP). The webinar is recorded here: http://www.colligo.com/articles/ResourceCenter.asp.
In surveying the room, I would say that 25% of people were actively either had or were in the process of moving email into SharePoint. Around two-thirds (including the aforementioned 25%) viewed email management as a topic on their radar to address in the months ahead.
Special thanks to Fiazan Hassan and Zee Subzwari from Xelleration (a Colligo partner in SoCal), as well as David Constantine from QuickStart for hosting me in LA for the day.
The SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTechCon)
I just returned from SPTechCon in San Francisco, CA last week (see: SPTechCon) and wanted to provide a brief summary and commentary.
The three day event was well run and more importantly well attended. For a conference of this type, 600+ attendees is a solid turn out. Contrary to the news headlines these days, there are still plenty of organizations with IT budgets to spend on SharePoint implementations, upgrades and third party products. Randy Halischuk, who runs our marketing department and I manned the booth for Colligo and we were very busy between sessions answering questions and introducing people to our technology.
In terms of the conference portion of the event, there was a fully docket of interesting topics. I wanted to highlight two speakers who have been strong Colligo advocates for some time now.
Bob Mixon, a Microsoft MVP, (http://mixonconsulting.com/) spoke numerous times at the event on “Share and Ye Shall Find: Delivering Content that Users Need”, “How to Balance Web Apps, Application Pools and Site Collections for Optimal Use”, “SharePoint Content Types: Keys to Managing Information Taxonomy”. He also provided sage advice at the “Microsoft Answer Session” and put in a plug for Colligo too which was appreciated.
Also, another Colligo partner, Errin O’Connor, the founder of EPC Group and author of “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out” spoke on “Calculating SharePoint’s ROI” in the closing key note.
There will be a SPTechCon in Boston on June 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. Hope to see you there.
