SharePoint Product News & Resources 

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 2012, governance is a hot topic in SharePoint. New adopters may wonder what all the fuss is about, but, as SharePoint continues to see double digit growth year after year, all those new users surging onto the platform will require care, channeling, guidance, and oversight. Governance can take many different forms; but, at its most elemental level, governance is really guidance.  It not only keeps things on track, but it is an essential response to widespread adoption and a necessary component for fostering sustained growth and usage.

As you might expect, there are many competing definitions of governance. I’ve heard antivirus software described as governance. I’ve also heard site provisioning workflows described as governance. Establishing and sustaining governance programs is twice as hard if you can’t get agreement on what governance means ...

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 ...

One of the biggest paradigm shifts in today’s computing environment is the influence of social networking, and how it affects day-to-day business activities. So how will SharePoint 2010 (news, site) get with the times when it comes to social networking?

The same engine that helps you upload and share pictures of your last backyard BBQ is also helping Fortune 500 businesses make billions of dollars through creative marketing campaigns. In fact, the 2010 #1 ranked Fortune 500 company, Walmart, has a Facebook page with nearly 1 million fans and counting! The idea of not being part of a social network like Twitter or Facebook has become much more uncommon than it was in the early days of SharePoint 2007.

MySites in SharePoint 2007 are looking pretty bland these days when compared to modern social networking sites. In each of the sections below I’ll show you what’s new and improved, and it won’t take long to identify Microsoft’s commitment towards the social experience in SharePoint 2010.

Read more on CMSWire.com...

As the upcoming releases of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 draw closer, I’ve been highlighting some of the best new features that will be available this spring. This time, I’ll show you a very exciting feature that will allow your end users to work on their Office documents in a zero-client environment from within SharePoint 2010.

Working from the Cloud

When Google unleashed Google Docs to the world in 2007, they made it very clear to consumers that being able to create and edit documents from the web is very cool. And not only can you just create documents for viewing later, but you can easily share those documents with others so they can edit them too.

Read more on CMSWire.com...

It’s no secret that the new managed metadata service in SharePoint 2010 (news, site) will be a welcomed addition to the product. What may not be apparent is exactly how this service will benefit your end-users. It will. Here's how.

With SharePoint 2007, managing your metadata has been more of an operational hazard than a real feature. In an enterprise document management environment with many site collections and content databases, providing a unified set of metadata creates an increased workload for IT that is rarely a top priority.

In the field, I generally find that many organizations just don’t have the expertise or resources to create a clean and centralized taxonomy. I attribute this to a very cumbersome and often frustrating metadata architecture in SharePoint 2007, and how it affects your content.

Read more on CMSWire.com...

Business Case Study: Australian not-for-profit organization Windana Society chose Virto Ajax Calendar as a solution for a set of planning related issues.

The Windana Society (windana.org.au) is a non-profit organization with more than a hundred employees working in the drug and alcohol recovery sector, based in Melbourne, Australia. The adopted business processes required to provide employees with a tool that would allow them to immediately find out who is available for a project at a particular date and time ...