Offline SharePoint

From time to time, David Whitehead, one of our sales engineers, creates screencasts to illustrate specific functionality of the Colligo Contributor product line. He does such a terrific job, I thought I’d share a couple of these with you.

IMHO, one of the great features of Contributor is the capability to select content using the site configuration file. While this is a powerful capability, it is not well known. So David decided to explain it better with a screencast.  He explains how to create a site configuration file and gives a technical demonstration of how it can be pushed out to users to quickly and easily configure their computers when they first deploy Colligo Contributor. In this example, David shows how to use a site configuration file to define which SharePoint sites are to be synchronized to the local desktop and how to pre-configure SharePoint folders in a user’s Outlook folder tree.

(L-R) Ed Kaczor, Dave Foster, Dan Holme, Barry Jinks, Genèse Castonguay

During the Olympics, we were really pleased to learn that SharePoint mega-expert, author, MVP, and well known blogger, Dan Holme, was visiting Vancouver (Colligo’s home) as Microsoft Technologies Consultant for NBC Sports. Of course I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to meet in person and host him at Colligo.

He got an opportunity to meet a bunch of members of the Colligo team. You can see a picture of him here on our balcony overlooking false creek. He’s proudly wearing one the coveted Colligo “Share” shirts.

We got to know him a bit better at the bobsleigh event at Whistler, too. He’s a terrific guy and wicked-smart. So, many thanks to Dan for hanging out with us a bit and letting us soak up some of your wisdom!

Also, thanks for the kind words in your blog here and here. Hope you had a good trip back home to Maui!

(L-R) Doug and Carole Arthur, Barry Jinks, Stephen Cawood

We also had the pleasure of attending a few events with our friends from Syntergy and Metalogix. One of those was the “Super Combined” downhill Skiing event at Whistler Creekside. As you can see from the photo on the right, it was a beautiful sunny day. We saw US skiier, Bode Miller, win the Gold Medal. What an amazing, and inspiring, athlete. Bode won three medals at the 2010 Winter Olympics – Gold in Super Combined, Silver in Super G, and Bronze in Downhill – Wow!

As growing companies, Colligo, Metalogix, and Syntergy are all aspiring to win gold medals with our SharePoint customers. It was great to be able to enjoy the event with Doug Arthur of Syntergy, his wife, Carole, and Stephen Cawood of Metalogix.

As some of you may know, the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics were in our backyard during the last half of February. It was a great party and now we are experiencing Post-Olympics depression. So let’s brighten things up a bit.

At Colligo, we had the pleasure to host some of the great people from the “SharePoint Ecosystem” up at Whistler for a few events. Over the next couple of posts I’ll share some of the photos from those events.

First up, Joel Oleson, who joined us from Quest for the ski jump and bobsleigh. While he was at Whistler, Joel really caught the Olympic Spirit! As you can see, though Joel is from the states, he embraced his “Inner Canadian”. He’s definitely living the spirit of the Colligo “Share” shirt he’s wearing.

Joel is a well known SharePoint expert and blogger. He was also a guest blogger here at OfflineSharePoint.com. You can read his posts here.

Joel Oleson Embraces His Inner Canadian

Awhile back I posted about a webinar I was doing with Tricia Bush of Microsoft entitled  ”Is SharePoint 2010 Ready for Enterprise Content Management?” We presented it on Tuesday. It went very well with over 2,500 registrants. The webinar is available for instant replay here. In addition to the webinar, you can also get a trial of Contributor Pro and request a case study on how Watson Wyatt is deploying SharePoint 2010 and Colligo Contributor for content and records management.

Tricia Bush, Director of Microsoft’s SharePoint Enterprise Business, discussed SharePoint 2010 as an ECM platform. She highlighted new 2010 ECM features and how Microsoft has extended the platform particularly in the area of metadata management, records management, and scalability. My section follows with a discussion on how SharePoint client solutions like Colligo Contributor promote user participation and increase the amount of content being managed.
On-demand webinar highlights:

• What’s new in SharePoint 2010 for better ECM
• Why SharePoint 2010 can improve records management
• How Microsoft addressed limitations of SharePoint 2007
• Why integrating SharePoint & Outlook is critical for ECM
• How to give Outlook users offline SharePoint access
• Tips to drive ECM adoption by supporting email and document drag-and-drop with automatic metadata capture

Recent Events

December 3rd, 2009 – DataLAN SharePoint 2010 Briefing Session in New York City.
Earlier this month Colligo exhibited and spoke at a Microsoft-DataLAN SharePoint 2010 briefing session at the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center in midtown. John Arnold and Tony Smith from DataLAN always do an excellent job putting these events together for their clients, and this was no exception. DataLAN provided a thorough overview of the SharePoint 2010 platform and various considerations as firms looked to leverage new features and functionality with the platform.

On behalf of Colligo I presented an informational piece on the various out of the box options available for email integration with SharePoint. Other vendors (Syntergy, Nintex, etc.) covered off their playgrounds as well.

Also, this was my first peek at the newly renovated Microsoft facilities. Very chic and modern!

December 10th – St. Louis SharePoint User Group
A Midwestern swing through St. Louis and Kansas City brought me to the St. Louis SharePoint User Group hosted by Convenent Technology Group, a Colligo partner. For a user group there was a solid turn out of over 70 people to listen to Joel Olesen speak on both “The New World of SharePoint 2010 Admin” and “Migration to SharePoint 2010”. Joel was in his element with the tech crowd, about 30% of whom had played around with SP2010 already, and really put on a good 2.5 hour show. Well done Joel. Colligo was an event sponsor and we gave away a bundle of our Share shirts. We look forward to doing more with this SPUG in the future, as they are a well organized group of Midwesterners.

December 12th – Kansas City SharePoint Saturday.
After what turned into an epic train ride to Kansas City, I attended the KC SP Saturday event. This was Colligo first SP Saturday event as a sponsor, and we joined at the encouragement of Becky Issermanand Kevin Hughes from HNTB. The event was very well attended, particularly for a Saturday this close to Christmas.

Again on behalf of Colligo I presented an expanded version of the Outlook – SharePoint integration options. If you have any questions, or would like a copy of the presentation please let me know.

This award means a lot to us as it’s voted on by the IT community, so many thanks for those who supported us. The 2009 Awards were the cover story in the December issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine. The Community Choice winners for “Best SharePoint Product” are:

• Gold: Site Administrator for SharePoint—Quest Software (www.quest.com)
• Silver: Colligo Contributor Pro—Colligo Networks (www.colligo.com)
• Bronze: CorasWorks Workplace Suite 10—CorasWorks (www.corasworks.com)

Here’s the first paragraph from our press release. 

Vancouver, BC, December 9, 2009 – Colligo Networks Inc., a leader in SharePoint® client solutions, today announced that its Colligo Contributor Pro product was named as a silver medal winner for “Best SharePoint Product” in the 2009 Community Choice Awards by Penton Media’s Windows IT Pro magazine. The winning products in each category are both nominated and selected based on individual voting by IT professionals.

Again, thanks to all our supporters out there!

On Wednesday, November 18, 2009, Colligo and Quest Software partnered on a webinar entitled “The Secrets to Successfully Migrating Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint”. Over 1,400 SharePoint and Exchange professionals signed up for the webinar. Attendees submitted questions during the live broadcast. While we answered several of them live, many more were answered by email afterwards. Below are the answers to the questions that were submitted to Colligo.

If you are interested in learning more about this important topic, you can get a replay of the webinar and download a copy of the associated whitepaper here.

Now for the Q&A:

how much is Colligo?

Colligo Contributor is sold on a “per seat” basis. Pricing depends on product and quantity. For single quantities and low volume pricing, please visit the Colligo webstore at www.colligo.com/store. For volume pricing requests, please email sales@colligo.com.

What about Sharepoint 2010? Will this drag & drop not be supported native?

SharePoint 2010 will not support drag and drop through the browser, nor will it support automatic extraction of email properties. Outlook 2010 only provides download of emails, not upload.

does this work in outlook 2003

Yes, Contributor works with Outlook 2003, 2007 and (as soon as it’s released) Outlook 2010.

Is the Colligo Outlook add-in compatible with the Dynamics CRM Outlook Client?

As far as we know, there are no conflicts with the Dynamics CRM client.

Will the Colligo add-in work with the Outlook 2003 client? Does access with Colligo contributor work with audience targeting?

Contributor works with Outlook 2003, 2007 and (as soon as it’s released) Outlook 2010. Unfortunately, Colligo Contributor does not cache data which is rendered through the Content Query Web Part, which controls what different audiences can see. That being said, lists and libraries that are cached in Contributor are security trimmed, so users must have at least read permissions to view content offline.

Regarding Metadata, is there a way to utilize properties like Outlook categories to organize contacts?

Yes. “Categories” is one of the properties that Contributor automatically extracts from emails and populates in SharePoint as metadata. Views can then be used to sort and filter by the values in that column.

How about Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010? Will your products be replaced by functionality in those products in the 2010 and beyond?

Contributor has no dependency on Exchange direclty, but will support Outlook 2010 when it’s released. We’ve announced support for SharePoin 2010 when it’s released as well. We are already working with some beta customers. Office 2010 has some increased functionality for offline SharePoint scenarios, but the support for SharePoint in Outlook 2010 has not changed much from 2007. For example, you will not be able to drag and drop emails into SharePoint from within Outlook 2010, a critical requirement for Public Folder replacement.

How are the emails viewed in Sharepoint outside of Outlook?

Emails are saved to SharePoint as .msg files and can be opened and viewed from the site, and from Colligo Contributor, through Outlook. They are just a standard emails.

Does Colligo’s solution integrate/work directly with BPOS?

Yes, Colligo Contributor works today with BPOS and will work with the 2010 version as well.

Does colligo support Outlook 2010? Does colligo support SharePoint on BPOS? do you support configuration via group policy? how does colligo work with products like matchpoint?

Colligo Contributor will be certified to be fully compatible with Outlook 2010 and the other Office 2010 clients when they are released next year. Yes, Colligo Contributor works today with BPOS and will work with the 2010 version as well. Contributor can be configured using login scripts, an admin shell, or modified through registry settings. I’m not familiar with Matchpoint, but as long as the application stores content on SharePoint in standard lists and libraries, so they are accessible using SharePoint web services.

is this meant for each client computer to purchase and use, or is there a server application?

Colligo Contributor is 100% client code, nothing is installed on the server.

How to work around SharePoint limits for >2000 elements in lists when using Colligo? Any recommendation on folder structure/separation into different libraries?

I think the limit is related to the rendering time required for large lists on SharePoint 2007. These limits have been raised significantly in SharePoint 2010. As a client application, Contributor does not actually have such a limit, but there is a practical limitation to how much content you will want to cache on the client. As far as recommendations go, I’d suggest you partition into folders on SharePoint 2007 as much as possible, or move to SharePoint 2010 as quickly as possible.

Does Outlook Search look into the SharePoint folders?

Not at the present moment, but we are looking at this for a future release.

Is this supported on the Mac (Entourage)?

Contributor does not run in Entourage. You could, however, run Contributor on a Mac using Boot Camp on OSX.

How does Colligo handle multiple users accessing the same document/file?

Multiple users can edit content offline. A sophisticated conflict resolution engine notifies users if conflicting edits have been made by multiple users while offline and provides ways for them to correct the conflicts.

Does Colligo Contributor require Outlook 2007?

Contributor works with Outlook 2003, 2007 and (as soon as it’s released) Outlook 2010.

Does a person have the ability to still reply to a message that has been migrated from a public folder into SharePoint? What are the pros and cons to integrating email communication to a document library, such as Colligo Contributor, versus a discussion board list. If a document library is the best solution, then what do you see as the role of a discussion board within SharePoint?

Yes, emails are saved to SharePoint as .msg files so they can be opened directly in Outlook. If the original recipient opens a .msg in Outlook which contains an email that was sent to them, they can reply to it. Outlook 2007 allows users to drag and drop emails to discussion lists, however, the “Subject” and “Body” properties are captured, but the majority of email metadata (e.g. To, From, Cc, Received, etc.) is lost or changed in this process. For example, Outlook changes “From” to the person who added the email to the Discussion list, not the original author of the email. The discussion board is used to enable a group of users to send messages to a distribution list – much like email. On SharePoint this distribution list can be limited to those with credentials on SharePoint.

SharePoint storage (any database storage) is also expensive – is SharePoint the best location for the Exchange data?

Microsoft does not recommend all Exchange data be moved to SharePoint. It`s not recommended for email archival. They do, however, recommend SharePoint for a number of scenarios when replacing Exchange Public Folders, such as document and email collaboration, since SharePoint is a very effective platform for that application.

Many of my PF’s are email enabled. How is this done in SharePoint?

SharePoint document libraries can be configured to enable users to send emails (and attachments) to them. However, this has a few limitations. Attachments are stripped off and stored separately while the body of the email is stored as a .eml file that cannot be opened by Outlook.

Does Colligo make the Exchange to Sharepoint connection two way?

Yes, Colligo Contributor sync in bi-directional. It enables users to save content from their PC (emails, files) to SharePoint. Conversely, SharePoint content can be cached to their PC.

Do you have any best practice regarding number of e-mails in a document library before we will get serious performance issues?

SharePoint 2007 has a recommended limit of 2000 items per list or folder. This limit has been raised significantly in SharePoint 2010. I believe it’s now 10,000 items or more.

what kind of contact & distribution list sync (if any) does contributor have?

Contributor can sync most types of custom lists in SharePoint, including contact lists and distribution lists. The actual format of these in SharePoint depends on the migration tools you choose.

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.

Our next webinar is coming up on November 18th. We’re partnering with Quest Software on it. I think it should be pretty interesting. Here’s the info on how to register:

Exchange Public Folders are being replaced by SharePoint in many organizations, because it is a better choice for document sharing and collaboration applications. Once you’ve made the decision to migrate to SharePoint, how do you ensure a successful project from both the content migration and end-user adoption points of view?

Attend this practical “How To” webinar to learn the secrets of designing and implementing a complete end-to-end solution for migrating from public folders to SharePoint. Join Adam Woodruff, SharePoint Solutions Architect at Quest Software and Barry Jinks, Founder and CEO of Colligo Networks as they provide the strategy, tools, and secrets to a successful migration.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Plan, and structure a public folder migration project
• Migrate existing content from Exchange to SharePoint
• Provide MS Outlook users with online and offline access to SharePoint
• Drive end-user adoption of the final solution

If you are responsible for SharePoint or Exchange in your organization, you won’t want to miss this webinar! Join us to learn the secrets to a successful public folder migration – register here today!

WHAT – The Secrets to Successfully Migrating Exchange Public Folders to SharePoint

WHEN & WHERE – Wednesday, November 18, 2009
8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern
4:00 PM London / 5:00 PM Paris
Online Webinar

PRESENTERS – Adam Woodruff, SharePoint Solutions Architect, Quest Software, and Barry Jinks, President & CEO, Colligo Networks Inc.

COST – COMPLIMENTARY

REGISTER – Register HERE Today

Web Seminar Guest Speaker - Adam Woodruff
SharePoint Solutions Architect, Quest Software

Adam heads the Microsoft SharePoint Professional Services Practice at Quest Software. With more than 10 years of experience creating solutions utilizing Microsoft systems and infrastructure, Adam is skilled in Windows, Microsoft Exchange, Office, and SharePoint Portal Server (MOSS) platform integrations and configurations for deployment, architecture, design, governance, and operational management. He has written white papers, maintains his own SharePoint blog and is a contributing author to .NET Developer’s Journal.