OK, we just broke the cardinal rule of blogs. We haven’t posted anything for weeks. Between the launch of Colligo Contributor and Colligo Reader and travel, well … you get the drift. Anyway, undaunted, we will resume posting again now that we’ve got a bit more time.

First up, our little blog was covered in a Canadian National Magazine called Backbone. Nice piece on Web2.0 and the power of blogs in a business context.

There’ve been some good articles on our offline SharePoint products. We thought John Fontana of Network World did a nice job in this article entitled “Colligo Builds Offline Client for SharePoint”. I was particularly pleased to see this quote from Gartner analyst, David Smith, on the need for offline support of SharePoint:

“This has been the Holy Grail for SharePoint users, because remote and mobile workers were not able to take work offline”

However, he went on to say that he thinks we will face competition from Groove in the future. I’m not sure I agree. While a small part of Groove 2007’s functionality is for taking SharePoint files offline, it doesn’t seek to solve the same problem - namely that of a product focused entirely on taking the rich collaborative features of SharePoint offline. I will try to make this distinction clearer in my upcoming review on Groove 2007, now that beta 2 has been released. Look for that post in the next week or so.

Many bloggers have been writing about our new products as well. I particularly enjoyed reading the MSR Consulting TechnoBlog. They lay out a pretty good case for the need for offline support of SharePoint and give a specific example of how it can improve the efficiency of a business process.

“So, if you use Sharepoint in your daily life you’ll understand just how big a deal this is…and if you don’t, this might just take away that last barrier that’s been keeping you from it.”

I had the pleasure of attending the first Microsoft conference entirely devoted to SharePoint products and technologies in Bellevue Washington. 1300 of my closest friends and I were able to see a great keynote by Bill Gates. A good summary of his comments about SharePoint and the competition was published again in Network World. When asked a question about competition from IBM Lotus Workplace, he answered:

“…IBM/Lotus has done nothing new in the productivity software space since Notes founder Ray Ozzie left in 1997 to found Groove.” Later he said: “I don’t know of any substantial use of Workplace that is out there.”

Ouch! In a subsequent article, Lotus general manager, Mike Rhodin called Gates’ statements “Marketing Hype”.

Gee, isn’t building collaboration software fun?