SharePoint Product News & Resources 

  There's an old adage in IT that 'nothing ever goes away'. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

I’m a hopeless book hound, and in my life have spent more on books than on cars. I have thousands of books. The last time we moved, we had 60 boxes of books, and my wife made me a proposition: We would unpack the five boxes that contained the books we knew we wanted, and leave the rest in the basement for two years. Over the next two years, I opened a few more boxes and pulled out what I needed. At the end of the two years we donated the rest to the local library. Needless to say, our bookshelves were much more organized, and had a lot less junk....

(Rating: 5 out of 5)
Javascript is a powerful client-side scripting language that allows a developer to do some great things at the presentation layer. jQuery is a robust library that allows a quasi-developer / super user to walk through the DOM with simple commands that wield incredible Javascript power.

The jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) bundles into jQuery the vast methods and massive amounts of data contained within SharePoint. This space isn't big enough to mine all that wealth the last sentence contains. But, suffice it to say: everything that SharePoint knows about itself is exposed through its built-in web services. SPServices puts that knowledge at the fingertips of the user / site administrator / library maintainer...

  Why use a SharePoint migration tool when you can upgrade using the built in upgrade methods? Maybe you want to skip 2007 going from 2003 to 2010, or get out of your MOSS enterprise and move into Standard or even WSS. Maybe you want to get out of a site definition or template or from one language template to another.

Another reason to use a migration tools is if you already built a rock solid 2010 deployment and just want to get the data moved in. May be you’re finding that moving data on your own with the import or export is changing dates and making you “own” everything… Built in upgrade is designed to get from point A to B, without transformation. But transformation may be your goal. ...

(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 ...

Business Case Study: The German company Wisag needed a help-desk solution. They implemented SharePoint and KwizCom's List Forms Extension Feature and gained field level security.

Wisag (www.wisag.de) is one of Germany’s top one-stop solution providers for facility management with over 40 years of experience. Their service portfolio encompasses everything from cleaning and security to electrical engineering and building maintenance. It is essential to ensure short response timeframes for their customers ...

 (Rating 4 out of 5)

A few years ago some big companies started to consolidate their Microsoft environment and decided to use SharePoint as their collaboration platform. Without data, software is nothing, so migration phase is really important. There are tools that are available in the market for migrating data from a Lotus Environment to a SharePoint environment...

 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 ...

 Client-to-server replication delivers immediate access to SharePoint sites by caching content locally on laptops and PCs. Caching improves user productivity by delivering a consistent SharePoint experience whether information workers are on or off the network and regardless of slow (LAN or WAN) networks performance ...