Colligo Blog: Events & Takeaways

The Colligo team is very excited to be heading to the International Legal Technology Association Conference 2011 in Nashville, TN, from August 21-25. As a Microsoft SharePoint partner for nearly 7 years, Colligo has a significant customer base of professional service organizations and we have been eagerly anticipating the move of legal firms to SharePoint from their legacy document management solutions (DMS).

Congratulations to Microsoft for <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/office365/online-software.aspx" target="_blank">releasing the public beta of Office 365</a>. The buzz that we’re hearing about <a title="Office 365" href="https://www.colligo.com/sharepoint-solutions/business/office-365-cloud/">Office 365</a> 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 <a href="/news-releases/colligo-networks’-contributor-pro-suite-introduces-industry-leading-support-for-microsoft-office-365/">announce support for Office 365 </a>and actually had Microsoft demonstrate <a title="Colligo Contributor" href="https://www.colligo.com/products/contributor/">Colligo Contributor</a> 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.

While attending the AIIM/Info360 conference a couple weeks ago, it was obvious that Box.net had decided to use the event as their “coming out” party. Box.net is a cloud content management company that is positioning itself directly against SharePoint 2010. In fact, they are claiming that 73% of Fortune 500 companies are already using their service.

On their website, Box.net invites people to compare the cost of SharePoint to Box.net through the use of a simple calculator. So being the inquisitive type, I decided to give it a try!

The Colligo team has just returned from the AIIM/Info360 conference in Washington, DC, where Colligo was exhibiting in the Microsoft pavilion and presenting as part of the SharePoint track. It was definitely an action packed 3 days and I’ve noted some personal highlights and general observations from the conference below:

Colligo’s booth in the Microsoft partner pavilion

Colligo was ideally positioned in the Microsoft partner pavilion and this definitely drove a lot of traffic to our booth. As always, there was tremendous amount of interest in SharePoint 2010 and we talked with many companies and agencies that now have actual funded projects to surround/augment/replace their legacy ECM/DMS/RM solutions with SharePoint 2010.

The Colligo team recently participated in another interesting conference, this time it was the LegalTech East Conference in New York City. LegalTech is an important event for law firms and legal departments looking for practical information on technology to better manage their practice. This year’s conference attracted more than 14,000 attendees.

Colligo was definitely busy at the show and it was great to meet up with many of our east coast based customers and partners. In addition to having a booth at the conference, Colligo was also invited by Microsoft to speak at their very well attended “Super Session” on SharePoint. Trevor Dyck, Colligo’s Director of Product Management, did a presentation to a full house on how law firms and legal departments are deploying SharePoint client solutions for email and matter management and the importance of integrating Outlook with SharePoint. The session was moderated by Norm Thomas of Microsoft and also included Kevin Griffie of AIS and Matt Koch of Metalogix who did presentations on their company’s respective SharePoint solutions.

The Colligo team recently participated in another very interesting conference, this time the 2010 ARMA conference in San Francisco. The conference brings together records and information management professionals from across North America. Once again, SharePoint 2010 was very much front and center with this group. It was easy to see the importance that Microsoft is putting on the new records management functionality of SharePoint 2010, as they had a huge presence at the show, with an extremely busy booth and an always full SharePoint lab where they would walk people through the new records management capabilities of SharePoint 2010.

We’ve had a very busy couple months, attending a number of conferences and events all across the country. We were at the Architecture, Engineering and Construction Technology Conference in Las Vegas, and the Office and SharePoint 2010 launch events in cities all over North America. Next week we’ll be in New Orleans for Tech-Ed 2010 and I’m sure that SharePoint 2010 will be a hot topic in the sessions and among the attendees.

We’re really excited to be partnering again with Microsoft for an upcoming webinar on June 17: SharePoint 2010 – What’s New for Email Management? This time we’ve tapped another of our excellent Microsoft contacts, Ryan Duguid, who is Microsoft’s Senior Product Manager for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Ryan is very well known in the SharePoint community and in fact, he’ll be in Wellington the week before our webinar, doing the keynote address at the New Zealand SharePoint Conference. We’re really happy to have Ryan participate in what’s sure to be another great webinar focused on a topic that is near and dear to our hearts, email management in SharePoint 2010.