Year: 2011

We’re Riding a Big Wave and Loving It
We’re Riding a Big Wave and Loving It
Blog Posts

In case it wasn’t clear before, the release of Forrester Research Inc.’s first ever August 2011 “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011” report further cements what we at NewsGator have been experiencing first hand – enterprise social is not a niche, fad, or point solution, it is the future of work in the enterprise and that future is now.

NewsGator is positioned solidly among the handful of Enterprise Social Platform leaders, all selected, “due to breadth and depth of functionality and long-range strategy.” That last part is key. We were early into the social computing revolution and our close relationship with Microsoft gave us an inside track on delivering social capabilities to the enterprise as a global platform capability – not just a siloed, point solution.
When we first partnered with Microsoft and began building what would become Social Sites, it was with a goal of targeting the entire enterprise, infusing it with a new connective tissue for communicating, collaborating, and working

5 Easy Ways to Turn SharePoint Workflow Solution into a Failure
5 Easy Ways to Turn SharePoint Workflow Solution into a Failure
Blog Posts

SharePoint is a great tool and adding workflows to it makes it a marvelous one. Tasks automation and process streamlining mean less work and much efficient information flow. Unfortunately, like with any powerful tools, deploying workflows in a wrong manner can lead to results opposite than expected. There are many ways to achieve given functionality, but only one can be the optimal one. With so many switches and levers available for workflow designers, working on top of highly customizable platform like SharePoint, process implementation can become a disaster if performed without basic knowledge about workflow architecture and environment it works in. And usually it does not matter if you use SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio or third-party tool to define the workflow.
If you are responsible for designing and implementing workflows read on to learn about five most common things you can do to turn your workflow solution into a failure and, fortunately, advices how to avoid these traps.

Modern Quality Management
Modern Quality Management
Blog Posts

Designing, implementing and monitoring quality standards is a challenge. In order to efficiently provide a proof of compliance you need an integrated quality management solution with intuitive usability. Data One Portal QM has been developed to meet these requirements.

A pivotal component of Data One Portal QM is an integrated document management system based on Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007/WSS 3.0/SharePoint 2010/Foundation 2010). It ensures a quick, precise, and pragmatic access to all quality-relevant information and documents

Content Services for SharePoint 2010 and the Web
Content Services for SharePoint 2010 and the Web
Blog Posts

Hyper.Net is an enterprise Web Service that automatically re-purposes documents and other information managed in SharePoint and other document storage solutions into user-optimized, multi-format content that is ready for deployment in archiving systems, intranets, information portals, Web sites and social networks. The product is widely used internationally to completely automate the flow of corporate information to the end-user community. The new version, which offers full support for SharePoint 2010 and all Microsoft Office 2010 formats, also provides full, unrestricted support for SharePoint Foundation, a battery of new content re-purposing functions, new features enabling the rapid creation of compliance solutions and an improved administrator’s interface. A special highlight of the new version is a Web Service interface that enables organizations to use Hyper.Net as a centralized, platform-independent service provider that can accept transformation requests from any application or technology and return the published results synchronously or asynchronously.

New Collaboration Tools Present a Challenge for IT Professionals
New Collaboration Tools Present a Challenge for IT Professionals
Blog Posts

Demand for Cloud, Mobile and SharePoint Growing

A survey of CIOs and IT directors shows that the sharp increase in cloud and mobile platforms is changing how people collaborate in the workplace, and presenting new challenges to corporate IT departments.

Although desktop email remains the preferred collaboration tool for 71% of workers, 87% of survey respondents generally and 92% of organizations with 3,000 or more employees have deployed SharePoint. While 53% indicated that SharePoint is helping their employees collaborate with colleagues, clients and suppliers, many respondents also expressed concerns about it. For example, 64% of respondents in the financial sector reported that SharePoint requires a high level of customization. SharePoint’s limited reporting and analytics features were another sticking point for senior IT management, as was its poor user interface.

Box.net versus SharePoint 2010 – The Bell for Round One
Box.net versus SharePoint 2010 – The Bell for Round One
Blog Posts

While attending a major ECM conference earlier this year, 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!

Five Powerful Tools to Enhance your SharePoint Content Management Initiatives
Five Powerful Tools to Enhance your SharePoint Content Management Initiatives
Blog Posts

Have you analyzed your document management challenges and realized that it takes too much effort, wastes valuable dollars, is not being adopted by your users or does not fulfill the needs of your organization? Read how the Microsoft Content Management Partner of the Year, KnowledgeLake addresses these concerns with Enterprise Content Management solutions for SharePoint:

Connect – Save electronic documents to SharePoint from any desktop application. Connect enables users to save content on an ad-hoc basis – such as Office documents, PDF files and email messages in a single step. Improve user adoption and empower everyone in the organization to be content contributors.

Multiple Document Assembly to PDF in SharePoint
Multiple Document Assembly to PDF in SharePoint
Blog Posts

One problem that we hear about from customers when we talk about document conversion to PDF in SharePoint is the inability to merge multiple documents into a single PDF file.

There are a lot of uses for document assembly, the most common being the creation of proposals for RFPs (Requests for Proposals), and Meeting Books for Boards or Trustees.

Creating a single, cohesive PDF file from a collection of documents in different formats such as Microsoft Word, financial information in Excel, engineering data in AutoCAD DWG format, PowerPoint presentations, etc., produces a more professional looking result, and makes it much more efficient for the reader to use this information. The merged PDF file can be made much easier for users to navigate through its contents with the addition of a table of contents and PDF bookmarks for the entire document, and an index of terms used along with a hyperlink to the exact location

Getting
Getting “Grips” on SharePoint Governance
Blog Posts

SharePoint is a great productivity tool with almost endless possibilities in customizations and flexibility even for endusers. This is exactly what endusers want, because the have lot of ad-hoc requirements besides the strict processes and core-it-systems.

SHAREPOINT IS EASY TO DEPLOY, EASY TO USE AND EASY TO ADAPT!

So, a lot of companies startet with SharePoint years ago without regarding concerns of a lot of IT departments, that moaned about possible problems with “manageability of such a tool, where everybody can do what he wants“ – but as IT is known to always have pessimistic thoughts about risk and flexibility or unplanned and ad-hox usage of tools,, a lot of companies startet SharePoint on a broad base with optimistic estimations and hopes.
It took no wonder, that SharePoint spread in a lot of departments and gained appreciation by endusers, as the collaborative abilities of SharePoint are really useful in daily business and especially in conjunction with the usage of Office-Documents and “Daily”-Workflows.

The Migration Transformation
The Migration Transformation
Blog Posts

Migration is not just a technical activity – it is a metamorphosis. More and more companies are beginning to understand this as they hear stories from the field, learning from the experiences of those who have made early migrations to SharePoint 2010. While Microsoft would love to see everyone make the jump to 2010 (and renew their enterprise licenses along the way), many companies are actually slowing their upgrade plans in order to spend more time planning. They are thinking more about the impacts, about what needs to happen to allow them to maximize the value of their SharePoint investments, and to take advantage of this move as an opportunity to rebuild, redesign and transform.
But where should companies start? On which areas should they focus their planning?
Based on recent interactions with several customers in the midst of migrations, I’ve come up with a short list of things that every company should be doing as part of their planning process. The list is not all-inclusive, but it is a place to begin: