SharePoint Products,
Reviews and Resources

(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: 4 out of 5)
Most businesses want an open and communicative environment.  This most commonly includes the display of an organization chart on the company intranet.  For the growing number of companies who implemented SharePoint as their intranet, Microsoft left a gaping hole in the out-of-the-box functionality of both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 when it comes to addressing this need. Content and Code’s 1OrgChart is one of the better products that has appeared on the market to fill the gap ...

 (Rating: 5 out of 5)
For server administrators, backup and restore processes are essential in production environments. This is obviously no different for SharePoint farms, but out-of-the-box (OOTB) features for backup and restore are certainly lacking in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. The Selective Restore Manager Pro from Metalogix is one such product that aims to fill the void left by Microsoft ...

 (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 ...

 (Rating: 4 out of 5)

One column type missing from SharePoint that I've always found useful is the cascading list. Not only is a cascading list a staple field type on most web forms, but it is a big favorite with end users. It magically narrows down your choices on the next column once you've made a selection from the previous column! Big deal right? We've seen these things for years on the web, but Microsoft just did not feel comfortable with making these an out-of-the-box option. Luckily for us, we've got options from 3rd party developers...

 (Rating: 4 out of 5) Have you been looking for a tool to help you manage your conference rooms in SharePoint? There are not a lot of 3rd party tools available and ACAR has created a tool that may keep others from jumping on this bandwagon.  ACAR describes the product this way: “Room Manager Suite for SharePoint is an easy to use room scheduling software solution for SharePoint. It is simple and powerful.  Consists of a set of web parts which makes room reservation simple for end users.”

 (Rating 3 out of 5)

Lightning Conductor effectively wraps the built-in Content Query Web Part (CQWP) from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a user-friendly interface.  Whereas the CQWP requires that the user modify either the Web Part Definition XML file or the ItemStyle XSL file to accomplish common tasks (such as adding fields or converting data types), Lightning Conductor wraps this functionality in user-friendly controls exposed via the tool pane ...