Colligo Blog: Ben Henderson

I’m happy to announce the introduction of Colligo’s new SharePoint Services division. Our services, in conjunction with Colligo’s solutions, are designed to enable organizations that are adopting SharePoint and Colligo to minimize the impact to end users, and maximize the ROI on their investment. For the past eight years, Colligo has provided professional services to …

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a real surge in the uptake of SharePoint by organizations. And there has been one particular use case that I have engaged with several customers recently, which I felt might be of interest to the greater SharePoint community. The use case that I’d like to discuss revolves around how to effectively utilize SharePoint offline in a remote “mobile office” environment.

Our recent webinar, “Enterprise Information Management with SharePoint 2010: Secrets to Success” was a great success and attracted a huge worldwide audience of records managers as well as SharePoint professionals. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the live event, you can now view the on-demand version and read all the questions and answers from the webinar.

Join Dan Vasey, Director of Records & Information Management at Fortune 500 cable operator, Charter Communications, as he shares the strategy, methods, and tools that enabled his organization to successfully deploy the Charter Online Information Network, an enterprise-wide SharePoint 2010 based solution for records and information management.

The European SharePoint Best Practices Conference 2011 was held last week in London and Colligo not only attended but were proud sponsors of the event. This year saw nearly 100 session by 70 speakers in just 3 days. This year’s event wasn’t affected by the ash cloud of last year and the attendance definitely reflected the fact that people were able to travel unhindered to the conference. The Exhibitors Hall was packed for the kick off party and during the lunch breaks!

I recently attended an interesting event in London with a Colligo partner, Content and Code, titled: Building a Business Case for Cloud Computing. The presentations, however, covered more ground than just cloud computing and I’ve noted some of the key themes and takeaways from the event below:

Cloud computing is on everyone’s agenda. All CxO’s are talking about the cloud because it’s in all the newspapers, on the television, and they are discussing it with their colleagues on the golf course and with their kids at home. “Cloud” has become a ubiquitous business term that everyone is using and it’s something that all IT related businesses need to address.

Last week I attended a training course in the middle of the British countryside along with several network administrators who were all looking to deploy SharePoint 2010 in the not so distant future. Over the course of the week there was a lot of great discussion ranging from the technical side of what disk arrays to use in order to have high availability; to high level debates around what SharePoint Services should be deployed to meet the business requirements. There was a general theme of the week and it wasn’t the beer that the bar was serving, but how to effectively plan a system that could quickly take off and snowball.

SharePoint 2010 certainly provides the ability to scale, allowing you to build an architecture that has the potential to keep expanding without the need for system admins to panic and migrate to new kit. New services like FAST Search, Excel Services, and managed metadata can be added at a later date with no serious impact to the current implementation.