Offline SharePoint

With the New Year upon us, I’ve been engaged in discussions over the past couple weeks briefing our partners on Colligo’s successes in 2009 and our plans for 2010.  Much of this focus has been with partners in the bigger markets, but yesterday I sat down with Sean Wallbridge, a SharePoint MVP fromVictoria on Vancouver Island.  Like many companies Colligo is focused on selling aboard into the bigger markets, so it is always refreshing to speak with another local success story.  In this case it is particularly true because Sean is a fan of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs which is a rare find on the west coast of Canada!

Sean’s company, itgroove, provides a variety of IT consulting services with an increasing focus on SharePoint.  According to Sean, and this matches with what I have seen recently, the local market is picking up in 2010 for more complex SharePoint rollouts and 3rd party SharePoint products.  Organizations now have stood up some SharePoint sites and user acceptance is strong and growing.  They are now looking to roll it out to address other business problems and leverage the initial investment. 

If you are on Vancouver Island and looking for some assistance with your SharePoint deployment, please give Sean a ring.  He and his staff are friendly, responsive and knowledgeable.  Their website is: www.itgroove.net and their blog is at: www.brainlitter.com.

Colligo has a great deal of success in the engineering and construction space. Lots of firms are adopting SharePoint and working to capture emails from their jobs sites given the litigious nature of their business. Metadata is the key in this regard for both emails and documents, the old file shares are proving insufficient, and our Outlook Add-In/Uploader products hit the sweet spot.

Interestingly enough many of the engineering and construction projects that come to our attention have been in St. Louis, MO and Kansas. A real hot spot for us and is certainly punching above their weight by population and GDP in the Colligo funnel! In working in St. Louis and surrounding areas we have found ourselves on few projects with a great system integrator and SharePoint consulting practice out of St. Louis called Oakwood Systems Group. By all accounts, Oakwood is a valued implementation partner and I am pleased to announce that Oakwood has agreed to formalize this relationship by becoming a member of the Colligo Partner Program.

We are happy to welcome them aboard, and look forward to jointly ensuring you have a successful SharePoint deployment.