Colligo Blog: Content & Knowledge Management

Melanie Aizer, our dedicated and talented marketing specialist, has been posting Colligo User Tips to the Colligo for SharePoint User Group on LinkedIn. We are getting some good feedback on the posts, as people are discovering new ways to use the product. If you are a Contributor user, I’d suggest joining the group.

Melanie is posting a lot of other interesting information on LinkedIn and is finding an active Colligo community on Twitter.

Andy Dale, the Senior SharePoint Consultant at UK SharePoint Specialists, Officetalk published his list of “Best SharePoint” Awards for 2009 on his blog. I’ll repeat them here:

If you haven’t yet visited, SharePoint Reviews, it’s a terrific site. Hundreds of SharePoint Products are featured and many have been reviewed by users. Mike Ferrara, a SharePoint consultant in South Florida, writes an interesting column there called OnPoint.

I was pleased to see that Colligo Reader is the Top Rated Freeware product at SharePoint Reviews. Colligo Contributor Client also received a 5/5 rating. Thanks to all the people who were kind enough to do a review of both these products. I noticed that they just put a product description of Contributor Add-In for Outlook up there recently, but it hasn’t received any reviews yet. We’d love to get a few reviewers if anyone is so inclined. You can get a 30 day full function evaluation copy of the Add-In here.

Colligo Contributor 4.0 – The Latest Innovation in SharePoint Client Solutions

SharePoint is evolving at full tilt with new use-cases cropping up every day. In these challenging times, supporting new requirements can be daunting for IT departments already stretched to the limit. Colligo has responded with the launch of Colligo Contributor 4.0, a significant new release that provides important enhancements across the entire product line, and introduces two exciting new products.

Join Dave Foster, Vice President of Product Development at Colligo and me as we discuss how SharePoint is moving beyond the portal and how Colligo can help you respond rapidly with off-the-shelf client solutions. You’ll see a hands-on demonstration of Colligo Contributor 4.0 (to be released in June) and learn how to get more horsepower from your SharePoint investment.

A recent post by Rees Morrison in the “Law Department Management” blog discusses how National Grid, a large power utility headquartered in the UK, is using SharePoint for document management.

I was pleased to see the following quote from Adam Davidson of National Grid:

We are also about to start deploying (after a successful pilot) the Colligo Outlook Add-in to give us an even better tool to upload emails into SharePoint, as well as allowing lawyers offline access to their matter files within SharePoint.

This really highlights how the Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help to reduce the barriers to adoption of SharePoint for content management applications, such as legal matter management. I was especially proud since we were selected by a team that has been recognized for it’s leading edge application of SharePoint. National Grid won the “In-House Legal Department Initiative of the Year Award” at the Legal Technology Awards in 2006 for their use of SharePoint for DM.

I just got a demo of Colligo Contributor 4.0. It’s going to be a very exciting release, indeed! Of course, I’m biased 🙂 Below is a bit of advance information that I can share.

Version 4.0 will go RTM on Monday, June 29th. It will support several new scenarios, including:

• email attachment management in SharePoint
• network file share replacement
• low cost email & metadata upload to SharePoint

This is my final post on 7 ways to get more from SharePoint. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to share some tips with readers of the offlinesharepoint.com blog. If you’d like to contact me directly, please do so through the contact form on my website.

We’ve previewed a lot of ground that you’ll need to cover in your race with SharePoint, but don’t become disheartened and retreat to the server room. This is where the real action is at … taking what Microsoft has made available in SharePoint and putting it to great use within your organization. Let’s summarize what we’ve looked at:

SharePoint is a broad-brushed platform technology from Microsoft to support many information worker processes in organizations. And it’s clearly important to Microsoft—given the centrality it’s taking in the Microsoft technology stack, and in the revenue that it’s bringing into Microsoft’s coffers.

This is the next entry in my 7 part series on getting more from SharePoint now. My last post was on SharePoint governance. This time around, I’d like to look at increasing user productivity.

With SharePoint being a “platform-technology”, Microsoft has to decide which capabilities to support out-of-the-box, and which capabilities to leave for its business partners. One of the areas that SharePoint users benefit greatly from a third-party tool is addressed by Colligo Contributor. Contributor addresses two main ideas: the first is the provision of offline access to most SharePoint data (note that the wiki capabilities in a SharePoint site are not currently supported for offline editing in Contributor) for people working away from an Internet connection, and the second is for people who “live in SharePoint”, and therefore want a more responsive client application rather than using a Web browser. Contributor addresses both, and by lowering usability barriers, helps with increasing the adoption of SharePoint among your user base, and as a flow on effect, it helps with getting more content into SharePoint so it can be managed and shared.

It’s been awhile since I posted on this series. My last entry was on how standard templates can help you to get more from SharePoint. This time, we’ll look at the benefits of developing an excellent governance strategy.

Governance for SharePoint is worth a whole white paper in and of itself, and maybe even a whole book! So we don’t expect to address all of the key points of governance here, suffice to wave the flag that getting your governance strategy and approach in place before going too far with SharePoint is really important. Here’s why: on the social side, SharePoint can fundamentally re-wire the way that people get their work done and thus what is expected of them in order to carry out their work. Thus you have tremendous power over the way that people work. And on the technology side, there are a raft of decisions that you have to make that have deep technical consequences and implications for your business. A governance strategy ensures that this power is wielded well and for the good of the business.

The is the next post in the series I’m doing here on the offlinesharepoint.com blog. My last post, #4, was on re-examining how business gets done. Now let’s look at how you can leverage SharePoint templates to get more from SharePoint.

SharePoint offers many out-of-the-box capabilities for building “sites”, or places for people to do their work. There’s the document library, the calendar, the task list, the custom list, the announcements list, and many more. With such capability comes a huge degree of flexibility to create exactly what is needed by a local team to get their work done. And for those working in larger organizations, it is pretty much guaranteed that most teams will see their requirements as being “unique”, and therefore worthy of a site design that is different to everyone else’s.