A Busy Week at #SPC12: Mobile, SharePoint 2013, Windows 8, Surface RT, & Bon Jovi! What a fantastic week at the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas! Colligo’s booth was very busy showing our brand new Colligo Briefcase for Android and Mac OS X, Colligo Email Manager, and talking with attendees from all over. The mobility …

Bruce Miller of RIM Tech reviews the new GimmalSoft Compliance Suite for DoD 5015.2 compliance, which includes the Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook, and calls it a “market game changer.”

The Colligo team has returned from an incredibly successful Microsoft Tech·Ed 2011 conference in Atlanta. The conference provided an excellent opportunity for us to talk to a lot of our customers and to also touch base with many of our partners in the SharePoint eco-system. This year, we heard a lot of interesting talk on both “cloud strategies” and how to support the increasingly large number of new devices that are finding their way into organizations. These are two topics that I’m sure will dominate the discussion in many IT departments in the months to come.

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!

Congratulations to Microsoft for releasing the public beta of Office 365. The buzz that we’re hearing about Office 365 is incredible and we’ve talked to a lot of customers who are looking at either moving totally to Office 365 or creating a hybrid environment with both on-premise and cloud-based SharePoint.

We’re really proud to have been the first company in our market to announce support for Office 365 and actually had Microsoft demonstrate Colligo Contributor working with Office 365 at the AIIM/Info360 conference in Washington, DC in March. The presentation showed how a user can move content to SharePoint libraries located on-premise or in the cloud from within the Outlook interface.

Social media has made a huge impact on the way companies communicate with customers, prospects and other stakeholders. At Colligo, we’ve really taken social media to heart and have made it an integral part of both our culture and our communication strategy. An important component of our social media initiatives is the creation of our own Colligo Networks YouTube Channel.

I’m pleased to announce that Colligo Networks turned 11 years old today! It’s been an amazing time for the company and we’ve come a long way over the past 11 years, moving from developing innovative peer-to-peer networking products to becoming the world leader in SharePoint client solutions for email and document management. So congratulations to the entire Colligo team for a great 11 years.

No matter what you call it, hosted or cloud-based, SharePoint Online services are becoming increasingly popular for organizations that want to take advantage of the features and capabilities of SharePoint, but don’t want the overhead associated with managing an on-premise SharePoint installation. The benefits of cloud computing are many – lower hardware costs, simplified software deployment, and incredible scalability – to name a few.

With Microsoft’s recent announcement of Office 365 (the newest incarnation of BPOS, planned for rollout in 2011) and their renewed drive into the cloud computing market, organizations from large to small, will be looking at hosted or cloud based SharePoint as an alternative to on-premise.

Colligo and Microsoft were invited to present at the recent SharePoint Palooza conference in Seattle. The event was a great success with over 470 SharePoint professionals attending this action-packed, one day conference.

Colligo and Microsoft were asked by the conference organizers to speak (in both the Executive Summit and the regular conference track) on our recent webinar topic: How Microsoft’s Legal and Corporate Affairs Department (LCA) is Using SharePoint and Colligo for ECM and Records Management. At the Executive Summit in the morning, Sheryl Nolan, LCA’s Senior Solution Manager and I presented, while at the regular conference track later in the afternoon, I shared the stage with Nishan DeSilva, Director of Information Management & Corporate Records Compliance at Microsoft.