(Rating: 5 out of 5) by Kevin Gunther-Canada, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Working in higher education, I see the need for business process automation on an almost daily basis. Unlike traditional businesses, academia is a difficult environment to attempt to create or impose standardized automated business processes in any real way, since such institutions tend to be highly decentralized and complex environments. SharePoint is a tool that seems to have been developed to address these kinds of business needs: it offers a foundational architecture that suffers from relatively few of the restrictive rules of turnkey solutions, while still providing much of the flexibility of custom-developed applications to address the myriad of unique needs academic institutions tend to have.

 (Rating: 5 out of 5)
TunnelPoint is a hosted service provided by Zevenseas. It connects external services (for example SOAP web services) to SharePoint List data in your SharePoint Site. TunnelPoint uses the built-in SharePoint SOAP web services exposed by your SharePoint environment to read and write list data. Really, all you need to do is log in to TunnelPoint using your TunnelPoint account and use the web interface provided to configure which external services should map to which lists in your SharePoint site.

 We had a phone call at Officetalk this week that caused a lot of debate. The caller simply asked “How long does a SharePoint Project take for 250 users?”.  Based on my own experience SharePoint Projects can vary considerably and in fact we have recently completed a project in just ten days, but have another project that has already exceeded six months and is still not ready to Go Live...

(Rating: 5 out of 5)

CorasWorks offers a set of two great products that sit on top of Microsoft office SharePoint Server 2007 and help you to take full advantage of your SharePoint implementation. I have used Corasworks components at a few clients including one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.