SharePoint has been sold as both an application and a platform.  One of the biggest challenges in SharePoint deployments is often finding the core scenarios.  It’s easy to say it’s a portal, search, or collaboration.  What should it really be used for?  Is it a collaboration platform? Is it a portal?  Is it an ECM publishing site?  With EPM Live there is no guessing.  The rich enterprise project and work management solutions plug right into your SharePoint environment and provide the key scenarios.  In the case of EPM Live, it’s not about widgets and web parts.  It’s about full end-to-end enterprise project and work management that beat the likes of expensive line-of-business systems, which require additional hardware and specialists.  Why not take advantage of your existing investment in SharePoint for your EPM needs?  That’s exactly what EPM Live is positioned to do.

I recently spent some time with the people from Sazneo. The first thing I really noticed was their emphasis on providing real time actionable communication. They are focused on decision making and the ability for teams and people to communicate real time in the context of their data without having to factor in time zones or distance. Rather than taking you out of SharePoint, this tight integration provides rich chat and communication right in the SharePoint interface. If you've got users on the go, there's an iPad, iPhone, Android or BlackBerry web app to keep you connected.

I’ve attended many conferences and sessions about knowledge management and SharePoint over the years, and have come to realize that there is a lot you can learn from the knowledge management community as a whole. While broader in scope and essentially independent of SharePoint, knowledge management presents many great concepts that are highly relevant and applicable to SharePoint design and governance. In fact, knowledge management should be a high-level design goal for any information system architecture.

(Rating: 4 out of 5)

One of the most important words in any user adoption strategy with SharePoint is streamline, a.k.a., integrating SharePoint processes into your existing workplace culture.  I’ve been using harmon.ie for SharePoint for the last few weeks and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions.  By the way, harmon.ie is pronounced ‘harmony.’ (For those of us that get thrown off by the .ie top-level domain, it’s far from Ireland - the corporate offices are in California.).

In today's business environment, facilitating collaboration and providing ready access to important information is a necessity. For organizations that have chosen SharePoint as their enterprise content management system, extending its functionality through SharePoint/Outlook integration can drive immediate adoption gains.

While SharePoint 2010 is a step forward in ease-of-use, in some cases, users may prefer working in Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint. With effective Outlook to SharePoint integration, users can manage email with SharePoint the way they do with Outlook; for example, by seamlessly dragging and dropping email and attachments to SharePoint.

  If your company is using SharePoint 2010, your business benefits from its rich collaboration abilities and content management capacity. Departmental SharePoint sites multiply and grow, content is structured and classified, documents are shared, and collaboration and team work flourishes. You are getting great results – and then something goes wrong. Here is one of the examples: In January 2011 Delaware’s Chancery Court ordered defendants in the case of Victor Stanley, Inc. vs. Creative Pipe, Inc. to pay over $1 million in damages for the willful loss and destruction of electronically stored information.