Offline SharePoint

I’m very excited to announce that Colligo has been recognized on Profit Magazine’s List of Canada’s fastest growing companies.  The editor of Profit summed it up like this: “Heroes for hard times, role models for the recovery. That’s how we describe the firms featured on our 22nd annual ranking of the PROFIT 100: Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies.”  Just to be eligible for the list requires a five year track record of increasing sales along with a minimum of triple digit growth, so no “flash in the pan” companies allowed.

Thanks and congratulations to everyone at Colligo as well as to our customers and partners worldwide for contributing to our success. This is our first year of eligibility for the list, and I look forward to making this an annual annoucement for years to come!

The Colligo team is in New Orleans for Microsoft Tech-Ed this week and the only thing hotter than the weather is all the buzz about Office and SharePoint 2010. Conference attendance is definitely up from last year, with most of the sessions packed to the rafters and the exhibit hall a frenzy of activity, especially the first night with the vendor reception driving 10,000 attendees into Hall D.

Traffic to the Colligo booth has been excellent and the team has had some great conversations with people stopping by to learn more about our SharePoint solutions and how they can deploy them in their organizations. The vast majority are interested in Office and SharePoint 2010 support and we definitely have a good story to tell about Colligo products here. Email management in SharePoint is high on the list of companies either deploying SharePoint or looking to expand their use of it. Without exception, everyone loves our Contributor Add-In for Outlook!

The post conference festivities have been excellent too, as expected in a city as vibrant as New Orleans, which has definitely bounced back with a passion since Katrina. Last night’s AvePoint sponsored party at the famous Maison Dupay Hotel in the French Quarter was excellent, featuring great food and a very talented fire dancer. Later in the night, the party moved to Bourbon Street in style, with a jazz band and full police escort leading a parade of about 200 people through the streets of the French Quarter. It was quite the spectacle!

Look for more from the Colligo team when they return.

We’ve had a very busy couple months, attending a number of conferences and events all across the country. We were at the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Technology Conference in Las Vegas, and the Office and SharePoint 2010 launch events  in cities all over North America. Next week we’ll be in New Orleans for Tech-Ed 2010  and I’m sure that SharePoint 2010 will be a hot topic in the sessions and among the attendees.

SharePoint 2010 was definitely top of mind at the AIIM Expo that we also attended last month in Philadelphia. In fact, a whole conference track was devoted to SharePoint 2010 and included presentations from a number of high level Microsoft people (including our next webinar guest speaker Ryan Duguid and our past webinar guest speaker Tricia Bush) as well as from customers who had deployed SharePoint 2010 in their organizations.

One of the most interesting presentations was given by Nishan DeSilva who is Microsoft’s Director of Information Management and Compliance. Nishan’s presentation was titled:  “Eating Our Own Dog Food: Insights to the SharePoint 2010 Strategy within Microsoft Legal & Corporate Affairs.” In the presentation, Nishan outlined how Microsoft’s legal and corporate affairs department is leveraging SharePoint 2010 to address corporate compliance while empowering users to get their work done.

At one point in his presentation, Nishan talked about how Microsoft was planning to deploy Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. At the end of the talk he was giving away some Microsoft swag, and one of the questions he asked the audience was:  “We plan to use a third party application in this deployment, can anyone remember what it is?”

To which a resounding “Colligo!” echoed through the hall!

That’s right folks, Microsoft has chosen to purchase Colligo as part of their legal and corporate affairs department’s SharePoint 2010 deployment!  

Of course, we can’t be happier to have Microsoft as both a customer and a partner.  As an important side note, the legal and corporate affairs department’s SharePoint 2010 deployment is being used as the model for deploying SharePoint 2010 throughout Microsoft, hence the “Eating Our Own Dog Food” title to Nishan’s presentation.

Nishan is definitely no stranger to Colligo. Prior to moving to Microsoft, he was the Global Director, Records & Content Management at Watson Wyatt Worldwide (now Towers Watson). While at Watson Wyatt, he spearheaded the development and deployment of RecordsExcellence, a global records management system built on SharePoint 2010. As part of the enterprise wide deployment, Nishan once again chose Colligo Contributor as a critical part of the RecordsExcellence system. Colligo Contributor makes it easy for staff to move emails and files into RecordsExcellence and to ensure that these emails and files are properly tagged with metadata, for better findability and regulatory compliance. The added bonus is that Colligo Contributor helps drive adoption of RecordsExcellence and makes the staff more efficient and productive.

We’ve written a complete case study of the Watson Wyatt implementation that can be read here.

Nishan also made a presentation at the 2010 SharePoint Conference on RecordsExcellence and how Colligo is being used. The video presentation can be viewed here.

Also at the AIIM conference, Carey Bachman, the Corporate Records Manager at Towers Watson did a very interesting presentation on best practices for enterprise records management with SharePoint. Carey used their RecordsExcellence system to illustrate many of the points she was making regarding best practices and we are very grateful to her for highlighting the role of Colligo Contributor in the success of the RecordsExcellence deployment.  Thanks Carey!

So I’d like to thank Nishan and Carey for their continuing support, and invite any of our current and future customers to come and visit the Colligo booth at Tech-Ed 2010 in New Orleans (booth #324).  See you there!

At the Office and SharePoint 2010 launch last week in New York, Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division and the keynote speaker, pulled a few interesting facts and figures regarding return on investment on SharePoint 2010 from a recently commissioned Forrester Consulting report. The report is called “The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010” and is very thorough in its analysis. Forrester interviewed 11 organizations that were early adopters of SharePoint 2010, or I suspect were part of the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 TAP program, and from their interviews, created a “composite” company and associated ROI framework to reflect the investment in an on-premise SharePoint 2010 implementation. For the record, the composite organization they created was a 7000 worker professional services firm with $1 Billion in revenue and 25 offices in the US and 15 in Europe. (Sound like anyone you know?)

Regardless of who the mystery composite company could be, some of their conclusions on ROI were quite interesting! The risk adjusted ROI figure (otherwise known as the conservative figure) was 104% with a payback period of just over 10 months. The total cost of implementation was around $1.5 million with the total benefits of $3.1 million in the same time period. That’s a pretty rapid pay back period and I’d say very good ammunition for any CTO or IT director to pry some budget from Finance to do the upgrade! The report is still on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 home page, and the link is listed below. If it disappears, let me know and I’ll send you a pdf copy.

Download the report here.

I found a very interesting interview that Don Lueders conducted with Adam Harmetz from Microsoft for the SharePoint Records Management blog. Adam is Microsoft’s Lead Program Manager for the SharePoint document and records management engineering team. He’s also one of our excellent contacts at Microsoft who’s ideas and opinions are highly valued by both our management and engineering team. In this interview, he lays out where Microsoft sees Exchange and SharePoint intersecting for email and records management and discusses some of the important new capabilities for Exchange and SharePoint 2010. It makes for a very interesting read. Thanks Adam for the Colligo plug regarding email management in SharePoint!

Check it out here.

Virtual Conference: Climbing the SharePoint Summit
May 20, 2010 – 10:00 am – 5:00 pm Eastern

Join Colligo at Climbing the SharePoint Summit – a free online one-day conference for SharePoint developers and administrators.

Speakers include industry experts Todd Baginski, Asif Rehmani, Andrew Connell, Michael Noel, Robert Bogue and others for a series of free technical sessions that will help you get the most value from SharePoint.

2 tracks – 10 sessions! Topics for Developers and Admins!

• SharePoint site Lifecycle- Creating and Archiving sites
• Customizing SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management Document Sets
• Creating Custom Silverlight Applications with Business Connectivity Services and the SharePoint Client Object Model
• Architecting a High Performance and Fault Tolerant SharePoint 2010 Farm
• Generate and Publish Electronic Forms on Your Intranet Using InfoPath 2010… No Code Required!
• And more!

Register for the virtual conference here.

The official Office 2010 Launch has just taken place in the same studio that they shoot Saturday Night Live. It’s a great space but smaller than you might think. There were plenty of presentations from Microsoft people as well as select customers plus a pretty thorough demo of Office 2010. Here’s a great play-by-play summary of the event by Paul Thurrott including a covert photo of the stage, since cameras were not officially allowed in the studio.

Office 2010 Launch Play by Play

I’m in New York for the worldwide launch of SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. Colligo was invited by Microsoft to participate in the launch today, so I’m heading over to NBC Studios in a half hour to see Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division and others take the covers off “Wave 14″..

Last night, Microsoft hosted a party at the NBC Experience store. A bunch of customers, partners and, of course, Microsoft-ies, were there. I had the company “Flip” with me, and made a short video of the event.

On the video you can see:

• Gideon Bibliowicz, who heads up SharePoint products at Microsoft
• Paj and Ruth (who organized the event), both from Microsoft
• Rasool Rayani from Metalogix
• Tony Lanni, and Tiani Jiang from AvePoint
• Marsha from Mercer Consulting
• Nic Betts from Pfizer
• Chris Johnson from Microsoft (he put the on stage demos together)
• Dan Pontefract from Telus

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.

Register or learn more here: www.microsoft.com/business/2010events/default.aspx