Recently, Navantis completed a successful SharePoint project with a large energy firm in Alberta. Because of the highly regulated nature of the pipeline, carbon capture, and transmission industry, the firm was looking for an easy-to-use solution that would enable their users to capture Microsoft Outlook email messages and attachments and move them to SharePoint, in order to fulfill their governance, compliance, and corporate policy requirements.

To meet the company’s needs for a highly integrated and intuitive solution for email management in SharePoint, Navantis deployed Colligo Email Manager.

“Colligo Email Manager is a very straightforward product to implement, and, because of its seamless integration of Outlook to SharePoint, users are immediately productive on the solution,” says Kyle Bergum, Senior Enterprise Architect at Navantis.

“Working with Colligo is great. They are very responsive and easy to engage in the sales cycle, from providing demos to supporting customer conversations. The Colligo and Navantis partnership is an ongoing success and our customers are benefiting from the results.”

Interested in partnering with Colligo? Learn more about the Colligo Partner Program now.

The survey covers various BYOD issues including:

• IT policy for organizations supporting BYOD
• Corporate data security concerns for mobile devices
• Issues regarding cloud-based services for file transfer
• SharePoint usage and access requirements for mobile devices

We invite you to take make your opinions count by participating in this important survey. The results of the survey will be presented at an upcoming Colligo webinar featuring Michael Osterman of Osterman Research on June 7 and will be available for download via a White Paper.

Please take a few minutes to complete the survey. Survey participants will be automatically entered in a contest to win the new iPad! The survey period ends on May 8, so please complete the survey today.

Murali Kandasamy, Senior Graphic Designer

Last week, I attended a very interesting conference in San Francisco called Usability Week 2012. The conference was organized by the UX consulting and research firm Nielsen Norman Group and was focused on ways to improve the user experience for websites, intranets, and mobile software apps.

The conference provided an excellent opportunity to meet people involved in application and website design and learn best practices from some of the real experts in the field. One of the areas that I found very interesting was the tutorials on improving the user experience on mobile apps. Part of my job at Colligo is to work on the user interface of our new iPad app, Colligo Briefcase, so it was great to hear from other people working in mobile app development in terms of their experiences in user interface design and usability.

Mobile is still such a new medium that many organizations do not have the experience or knowledge to develop a cohesive mobile strategy. It’s really important for mobile app developers to take into account the mobile users’ needs in order to design apps that are intuitive to use, provide the necessary functionality and make an immediate impact to the user’s day-to-day activities and productivity.

One best practice that I found particularly insightful during a discussion on iPad app design was aptly called “abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness.”  The main point being that it’s always better to use consistent interaction techniques that empower users to focus on their content instead of wondering how to get to it.

Day three of the conference focused on SharePoint and was led by John Pruitt, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, who is currently working on the next version of SharePoint. John’s presentation provided a lot of good information on how to maximize the SharePoint user experience and gave some details on UX issues they faced in SharePoint 2010 and what’s coming up in the SharePoint 15 release. The information that John presented is very useful for us at Colligo, as our products are designed to integrate SharePoint seamlessly with the applications and devices that people use every day, and to further enhance the overall SharePoint user experience. So, understanding the issues that Microsoft faced in the user interface design of SharePoint and the lessons learned is extremely valuable.

I’d like to offer congratulations to the Nielson Norman Group for putting together an excellent conference. The speakers were top notch and the content presented was relevant, detailed and immediately useful to me. It’s great to see UX being given the importance that it so rightly deserves in application design and development.

Ben Henderson, EMEA Technical Consultant, Colligo Networks

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.

But by “mobile office”, I am not talking about mobile workers who set up a temporary office for something like a financial audit. What I’m talking about is a full office, with a physical structure, that has the capability to be moved when required. Examples of this include oil exploration platforms, ships at sea, and mobile research facilities. These operations all share some similar characteristics: they move around the globe, have no fixed location, and are often in some of the remotest parts of the world.

When talking to CTOs and CIOs of organizations with mobile offices, it’s important to understand the issues that they are facing in order to propose an effective SharePoint solution. For example, having users on remote sites in areas where reliable communication is not guaranteed, along with the incredible costs of satellite based Internet connections, poses some significant challenges.

With this in mind, I’d like to discuss a recent customer engagement that shows how we overcame some of the business challenges for an organization with mobile offices.

This particular customer is a UK-based oil exploration company that has small research units located all over the world. The teams on the research units are often on site for long periods of times and return to the head office only once a year. The locations of these research units are in remote areas where the only communication available is via a satellite connection, and that connection is shared between VOIP and Internet, so it can’t be guaranteed and by its nature, is very costly.

Company documents are stored on SharePoint and the actual server is hosted in the UK. The organization strategy is to use SharePoint as the document repository for various company templates, policy and procedure documents. Due to where the server is physically located and the fact that the research unit staff seldom return to head office, the employees are often using old and out of date documents, since those are the document that are stored on their local computers.

The organization researched some technology options that could help them overcome their document distribution problems and learned about Colligo’s offline SharePoint solutions. After talking with them about their specific requirements, it was apparent that just installing Colligo Contributor Pro on every machine was not going to solve their problem. Colligo Contributor Pro is an excellent solution for accessing SharePoint offline, but in a normal deployment, it requires that the user connects to their SharePoint server in order to download and sync all of the required content. Since the initial sync would occur over a satellite connection, it would cost the company a prohibitive amount of money to transfer this large quantity of SharePoint data.

After some further discussions to better understand their business processes and issues, an interesting solution was devised by Colligo that fit the bill perfectly and achieved the company’s objectives. Colligo’s architecture is built in such a way that we were able to create a DVD that included the Colligo Contributor Pro installation kit along with all the content they required from the SharePoint server.

This was done by loading Colligo Contributor Pro on a local machine, selecting the sites and document libraries to cache, and then doing the initial sync while connected to SharePoint. Then a copy of the Colligo cache with all the up-to-date SharePoint documents and files was burned to a DVD.  The beauty of this method is that the Colligo cache retains all the important SharePoint structure and metadata for the documents and enables the user to interact with this information using Colligo Contributor, as if they were actually online with SharePoint.

However, this DVD was not sent through the post or courier (because of the remote location of the mobile office) but was prepared for the next head office visitor to take back with them to the mobile office. Once back on the remote site, the DVD was used by all the staff to install Colligo Contributor on their computers and then to copy the cached content into the correct location on their machines. By following this very simple process, they had a fully functioning Colligo Contributor app along with the ability to access all the SharePoint content while still retaining the SharePoint structure, metadata and views, all without the need to connect to the SharePoint server.

If updates were made to important documents, then a new DVD would be created and passed to the next visitor to head office. Or if someone from the remote office was staying, for example, at a hotel where they had a good Internet connection, then a sync of the data could be performed using Colligo Contributor and this new Colligo cache would be shared amongst the research unit’s team members.

In the case of this particular customer, Colligo assisted in creating the process, providing the application as well in developing the necessary supporting documentation for remote staff.  The benefits for the organization has been significant with staff at all of their remote research offices now having direct access via Colligo Contributor to up-to-date documents, while also retaining the structure of SharePoint as well as the document’s metadata. Most importantly, they were able to accomplish their goal without incurring extraordinarily high satellite data costs.

It’s very interesting to see how and where SharePoint gets used by organizations. Whether it’s in a downtown office tower or a remote research site in a barren part of the world, SharePoint has become a critical part of an organizations technology infrastructure.  We are always happy to help our customers develop interesting ways to utilize SharePoint along with Colligo’s client technology to create innovative solutions to unique problems.  If you have particular SharePoint challenge that you need help in solving or a unique implementation that you’d like to highlight, feel free to contact me at bhenderson@colligo.com.

Trevor Dyck, Colligo

Colligo is back from a great trip to Australia and New Zealand, where we participated in the SharePoint conferences in both of countries, and completed many successful visits with customers, prospects and partners.

We had a great time exploring the latest SharePoint developments in APAC. There is truly a massive amount of activity happening in this region, as folks here are known as ‘early adopters’ of new technologies. We saw iPads everywhere we went, even more than we see here in Canada and in the US.  iPad access to SharePoint was a very hot topic indeed!

Congratulations to Rebecca Curd, IT Service and Procurement Manager for PGG Wrightson Seeds in Christchurch, New Zealand for winning our draw for the new iPad – including a free copy of Colligo Briefcase Pro.

To enter the draw for the new iPad:

1. Get Colligo Briefcase Pro now
2. Rate the application and write a short review on the App Store
3. Send us an email with your name and iTunes nickname and we’ll enter you into a random draw for the new iPad, to be held April 2, 2012.

The April deadline is coming up fast, so send those entries soon to be eligible to win the new iPad!

Matthias Bandemer, Ernst & Young

Our recent webinar, “The iPad Invasion: Leveraging SharePoint for Mobile Enterprise Security” was a huge success with nearly 3000 registrations from around the world. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the live event, you can now view the on-demand version.

In the webinar, mobile device security expert Matthias Bandemer from Ernst & Young, discussed the security challenges presented by mobile devices in the workplace. Matthias was joined by Colligo’s CEO, Barry Jinks, and Director of Product Management, Trevor Dyck, who provided valuable insight on integrating iPads into an enterprise SharePoint environment and how to securely access and store SharePoint content on an iPad using Colligo Briefcase.

During the event, we received many good questions from the audience. All of the questions along with their answers are provided below:

Does Colligo Briefcase support InfoPath forms/form entry?

In the current version of Colligo Briefcase, form entry is not supported. This is planned to be available in a future release.

What versions of SharePoint does Colligo Briefcase work with?

Colligo Briefcase supports SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2010 Online (Office 365), and SharePoint 2007.

How is the data wiped? Is it recoverable? Is the data backed up right before the remote wipe?

The data is not recoverable, but Colligo Briefcase can be re-installed and the data can be synced again. Because the data is read-only, there is no need to back it up and no new data is lost during the wipe. All the data is always stored in SharePoint so there is no actual loss of content. The wipe is intended to ensure there is no access to data on the iPad when it has been lost or stolen.

Using Colligo Briefcase, can you access the items inside a SharePoint document library without syncing the content locally?

Yes you can. If you’re online and using Colligo Briefcase to access SharePoint, you do not need to cache that content in order to access it. However, you will be downloading the content live, so depending on how you’re connected to SharePoint and the size of the file, it will affect the speed that you are able to access the content. If you’ve added the document library to Briefcase but have not cached the contents of that library, when you’re offline, you’ll still be able to see the items headers in the document library, but you won’t be able to actually view the item. As a side note, with Colligo Administrator, you can centrally turn on or off the document libraries a user can cache on their iPad, which is another nice security feature.

If a staff member uses Dropbox to move corporate content to their iPad and then leaves the company, is there a way for an IT manager to delete that corporate content from their Dropbox account?

That question really hits the nail on the head regarding the use of the public cloud to transfer files to a mobile device. Short of a court order, I don’t think there is any way for a company to delete content that’s sitting on a person’s Dropbox account, since the account owner of the Dropbox account is also the owner of the content, as per the Dropbox terms of service. Once that corporate information is on the public cloud, it’s beyond the control of IT and the organization.

Can you disable the ability to capture screenshots on the iPad?

Colligo Briefcase cannot disable the ability to capture screenshots on the iPad.  This is a function of iOS. We believe that since it is user-initiated, the security risk is very limited.

However, related to screen capture, is a feature of Colligo Briefcase that it blanks the screen during app switching. There is a small security gap inherent in the iPad when switching between apps. Blanking the screen when switching apps stops a rogue app from automatically (and unknowingly to the user) taking a screen capture.

This is different from allowing a user initiated screen capture as by its nature, the user is aware that they are taking a screen capture. The Colligo Briefcase feature stops a rogue or malicious app from taking a screen capture without the user’s knowledge during the critical period when a user is changing apps.

Does the link open it in the iPad app or SharePoint?

We assume here that you mean the link (URL) that can be sent using the “Send as Link…” feature. This is simply a URL, so if the recipient clicks the link it will open it in the browser of whichever device they receive it on (PC, Mac, iPad, etc.).

Can Colligo Briefcase sync with SharePoint, when SharePoint is published through forefront UAG (United Access Gateway) or TMG (Threat Management Gateway)?

Yes.  We have tested with UAG and plan to test with TMG in the near future.

So you need to have two different products just to “sync” documents between a mobile device and a laptop/desktop?

Yes.  Colligo Briefcase syncs between SharePoint and your iPad. Colligo Contributor syncs between SharePoint and your PC.

Does Briefcase integrate with Boxtone MDM? Or Colligo Administrator?

There is no integration required. Colligo Briefcase and Colligo Administrator are compatible with any MDM that provides app deployment.

Why are there are limits on certain versions? Do you run the data through a cloud infrastructure?

The limits on Colligo Briefcase Lite are in place so users can experience the product without having to purchase it first.

The data is downloaded directly from the SharePoint server; no third-party program is used. The solution is completely client-side, nothing is required to be installed in SharePoint.

I’m not seeing any managed metadata navigation on the free app, is that part of the Colligo Briefcase product?

Managed Metadata (taxonomies) are supported in Colligo Briefcase.  Because all the data synced through Colligo Briefcase is read-only, only the managed metadata fields that have been selected in SharePoint are displayed. When we add two-way sync support, the other managed metadata choices will be viewable.

Does SharePoint need to be published externally or would this work with a VPN connection?

SharePoint does not need to be published externally. Colligo Briefcase supports VPN connections as well as ForeFront UAG for external connectivity to on-premise SharePoint.

Can Colligo Administrator be used when you have SharePoint Online deployed thru Office 365 or will it only work for an on premise SharePoint install

Colligo Administrator can be used with SharePoint Online as well as on-premise SharePoint.

Do you support iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Windows 8?

Colligo is always investing in our product line and we plan to support other devices in the future. Please contact Colligo Sales directly to discuss your needs.

If I open a SharePoint stored document in an iPad app such as DocsToGo, can I edit the document and save the changes back to SharePoint via Briefcase?

Currently, Colligo Briefcase is a read-only product – it is designed primarily for content consumption.

Two-way sync, including the functionality mentioned in the question is planned for the next major release. Please contact Colligo Sales directly for specifics and timing.

How do you secure users/iPads that are not members of your enterprise? We have external clients that access our SharePoint sites.

Users outside the enterprise can purchase a Briefcase license and access any SharePoint sites and content that they have permissions for. If they can access the sites through a browser they can access the sites through Colligo Briefcase.

Those users can then be removed from access and their data wiped from their device when they stop working with your company.

How does the enterprise product get deployed to users?  Do they need to be connected to an Exchange Server using ActiveSync?

There are several deployment options, depending on your company size and infrastructure. If you have an MDM in place, you can deploy by setting up an Enterprise App Store in the MDM. If you don’t have an MDM in place, Colligo can assist you in setting up enterprise application deployment hosted on your server or on our servers.

Is there access to SharePoint search from Colligo Briefcase, so you can then download?

Colligo Briefcase allows you to search the content that you have synced to the iPad. Online search of SharePoint is planned for a future release.

Can you turn off caching completely so NO documents can be stored locally?

Yes. Individual users can set their own sync settings and use the “No Sync, Browse Only” setting, which means nothing is cached.

Does Colligo Briefcase support custom file types?

A list of supported file types is available in the Briefcase User Guide on the Colligo web site. File types not in this list can still be synced, however preview is not supported in that case. Those unsupported files can still be opened in other applications using the “Open In…” functionality.

If you have a question about a specific file type, feel free to contact Colligo Sales.

Are all column/field types supported (especially BDC/BCS column/field types)?

Yes, all metadata types are supported including BCS.

Regarding Colligo desktop, does it experience any problems in accessing InfoPath forms?

Colligo Contributor (our desktop/offline product) supports InfoPath forms.

How does Colligo allow an employee to securely access SharePoint from their home PC?

Colligo has several PC based products, including the Colligo Contributor suite and Colligo Email Manager. These products all allow secure access from a home PC by allowing connection through a VPN and through SharePoint credentials. With Colligo Contributor, content is stored encrypted in the local cache on the user’s home PC. When SharePoint access is removed, the content is removed from the user’s PC.  With Email Manager, no content is cached on the user’s PC.

How about approval workflows?

Colligo Briefcase does not support workflow in this release.

Does Colligo Briefcase allow for SharePoint webpage editing on the iPad?

Colligo Briefcase provides read-only access to the content on the SharePoint sites you have permissions for. You cannot edit SharePoint pages from Colligo Briefcase.

Is there any way to globally hide the non-user libraries/lists such as Style Library, Form Templates, etc.

Individual users choose which libraries are displayed, but there is currently no way to globally hide specific libraries across an enterprise. However, the following libraries are not synced by default: Site Pages, Site Assets, Style Library, and Form Library.

Our SharePoint deployment is within our corporate network with no extranet.  What is the process of access our internal network?

There are several methods to provide external access to SharePoint. The first is using VPN access, which your company may already have setup. The iPad has native support for VPN access to SharePoint. Users would first setup VPN access on their iPad, then connect to SharePoint using their normal SharePoint credentials.

The other option is to use Forefront UAG, a Microsoft product, as a gateway to provide external access to SharePoint.

Do you support any file encryption software? If the file is encrypted within SharePoint and the client needs to encrypt that file before he can use it.

If files are encrypted using a third party tool, they would need to be decrypted using a 3^rd party application on the iPad.  This could be achieved by exporting the file from Colligo Briefcase using the “Open In” feature to the decryption application on iPad.

Jerry Toledo, Lead Technical Support Specialist

If you’ve visited the Colligo website lately, you’ve probably seen a new Community button at the top right of the page. If you haven’t already tried clicking it, I encourage you check it out!

The Colligo Community site is designed as a peer-to-peer discussion community for sharing assistance, tips, and tricks for all Colligo solutions for SharePoint and instant networking. It’s the place where Colligo users can post questions regarding Colligo products, implementations, or even general issues regarding such topics as email management in SharePoint, offline SharePoint access, or iPad integration. The Community site lets you tap into the resources and collective knowledge of the Colligo user community as well as of Colligo staff who regularly contribute by answering questions and providing advice.

The Community site is also searchable, so if you have an issue, try doing a quick search to see if your question has already been answered. If it hasn’t, then feel free to create a new post and put it out to the community. And if you have an answer, please feel free to post it and let others know.

Our goal is for the site to grow into a valuable resource, not only for Colligo users, but for the greater SharePoint community in order to share their ideas and experiences. So please visit the Community site, contribute to the discussions, and make knowledge grow!

Colligo is a Silver Sponsor of the New Zealand SharePoint Conference, being held in Auckland, March 28-29. So stop by the Colligo booth (booth #7) and let us introduce you to our award-winning SharePoint email and document management solutions for the enterprise.  While you’re there, make sure to enter our draw for a new iPad 2, pre-loaded with Colligo Briefcase Pro, our new iPad app for secure access to SharePoint, online or offline.

We’ll be doing a presentation titled “Best Practices for Driving Enterprise-Wide SharePoint Adoption and User Engagement” at the Vendor Track session on March. 29^th at 10:30AM. This presentation will take a deep dive into some of the issues that organizations face in getting a high level of SharePoint user adoption and show how Colligo can help solve the problem. I hope to see you there.

But before crossing the Tasman to New Zealand, we’ll be starting our trip in Australia by participating in an executive luncheon, “Secrets to SharePoint Success in Your Agency,”  sponsored by our partner, Sensory7. This session is targeted at public sector CIOs and records managers who are looking to increase collaboration, maximize productivity, and simplify records management.

The executive luncheon is being held in Canberra on March 23^rd and will provide product demonstrations and presentations on extending SharePoint beyond an out-of-box deployment to create real value for public sector agencies. The session will cover:

• Driving productivity and collaboration: integrating SharePoint with Outlook and the desktop to deliver a familiar user experience
• Securing vital content on mobile devices: leveraging your existing SharePoint infrastructure to secure corporate data on the iPad
• Simplifying records management challenge: implementing email records management in SharePoint

If you’re in the Canberra area and are interested in attending this event, please visit the registration page for more information and to RSVP.

The trip is going to provide an excellent opportunity for us to meet many of our customers in Australia and New Zealand. If you’re attending the New Zealand SharePoint Conference in Auckland or the Executive Luncheon in Canberra, make sure stop by and say gidday!

Specific new features available in Colligo Email Manager V5.2 include:

• Mark as Filed – Automatically mark an email as “Copied to SharePoint”
• Send as Attachment – Send an item from the search results as a full attachment to a new email
• Move or Copy – Email can now be moved or copied to SharePoint directly from the email inspector window
• Import Sites from Contributor – Sites can now be automatically imported from the Colligo Contributor product suite to Colligo Email Manager
• Check for Updates – Available software updates can be checked within Colligo Email Manager

The new features are designed to further improve email management in SharePoint and provide an even more seamless integration of Outlook and SharePoint. If you’re using a previous version of Colligo Email Manager, please visit the Colligo Download page to get the new version.