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I have to admit, until a recent vendor briefing, I was unfamiliar with the term "communities of practice." But Eric Sauve, co-founder and CEO of Tomoye, was kind enough to enlighten me on the topic. Tomoye, (www.tomoye.com) whose name means revolution in the universe, was built around the concept of communities of practice, and last week released the next version of its collaboration offering, Ecco 2.0, which ties its collaboration offering to the Microsoft SharePoint platform. According to Sauve, the term communities of practice essentially means thematically driven collaboration. "They are peers that share common job title or focus, brought together across the enterprise to work together to improve their capacity in those jobs," he said. "They also extend typically into various different stakeholder groups--partners, supply chain, customers--which are brought into an internal company conversation." In the context of the Ecco product, the communities of practice concept encompasses four generic capabilities: • Questions and answers, which offer peer advice, similar to how Yahoo! Answers does. • Experts and networking in a group context, which captures people's interaction with each other and reveals the most helpful, relevant folks in a group context.• Community content, which includes content that you normally associate with rich communication, such as videos, tags, social bookmarking, wikis, and blogs, as well as the community around that content.• Leader and tech support, which offers support capabilities around metrics, security, and so forth. "So essentially, Ecco is a user-driven, social type of content and collaboration technology," says Sauve. "And we deploy the technology with a best-practice process model to help organizations make their communities the most productive and successful." And now, with the newest version, Ecco is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007-ready, allowing organizations to integrate the communities of practice technologies with SharePoint's rich document management and collaboration tools. This means you can add SharePoint documents to Ecco just as you would from your local hard drive; publish from a team site to an Ecco community for broader feedback or to take advantage of Ecco’s open security; and list SharePoint team sites directly from Ecco’s navigation. With both products on the same hardware, using Windows authentication, you can seamlessly go back and forth between the two products. Use them both to create a rich and full collaboration infrastructure.
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Companies are turning in droves to Microsoft's SharePoint platform, quickly recognizing the benefits of a system that enables better collaboration and document workflows, and therefore improving information worker productivity and efficiency. However, many processes and workflows require information that's available only in paper documents. I recently spoke with Bill Brikiatis, Director of Corporate Marketing for eCopy www.ecopy.com, one of a handful of companies providing solutions to integrate paper-based documents into an organization's digital workflows. Its eCopy ShareScan product, used with various connectors on a networked multifunction peripheral (MFP), lets you scan and send documents to desktops, networks, fax machines, email, or enterprise back-end application. One such connector, the eCopy Connector for Microsoft SharePoint, lets users quickly bring paper directly into the electronic world of collaborative software. "What sets us apart from most of our competitors, is that we target the average office worker," said Brikiatis. "Document imaging software has traditionally been used by what I would call a power user, whose sole job is to digitize documents. Instead, the people who use eCopy would be the person in the accounting department or ad department." This helps eliminate the bottleneck of centralized scanning and gets the information quickly into the hands of authorized information workers. Basically, an office worker walks up to an eCopy-enabled MFP, places the document on the glass scanning surface, and presses a button on the display panel. The user then navigates to the SharePoint repository in which he or she wants to store the document, and the document will be scanned and digitally stored in the SharePoint location of choice. Because eCopy authenticates against Active Directory (AD), the user will have SharePoint rights and permissions based on his or her AD account. SharePoint Connector also lets you encrypt documents, as well as create searchable text so that when the document is stored in SharePoint, the text is indexed into its search engine. Without that capability, some documents (e.g., PDFs) are simply image files and thus not searchable. And because eCopy ShareScan and eCopy Connector for SharePoint work seamlessly with existing Microsoft technologies, use a familiar UI, and present information in a familiar format, little training is required, leading to easier and faster adoption of the technologies.
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Success in the business world increasingly depends on distributed teams of people working together. People need to collaborate, communicate, and interact with partners, vendors, customers, and internal team members, and organizations are embracing collaboration technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint to do so. I recently spoke with CorasWorks (www.corasworks.net) founder and chief workplace architect William Rogers to get his thoughts on trends in the industry and what the future holds. Rogers happened to be attending Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008 when I got hold of him and I thought it was interesting that he said most of the attendees were new to SharePoint. "SharePoint is exploding, and a lot of people are just starting out or at what we call the first level or the first mile," he said. "What Microsoft has done brilliantly is made that first mile incredibly easy. People get Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), which is basically free, and start to use it. Average business people with no technical skills can create sites and start sharing information, and it starts to spread virally. So you get this massively growing group of people that have gone the first mile in SharePoint." But as the companies that have succeeded in the first mile of SharePoint implementation begin to realize its potential, they want to do more with it. These companies can hire people with SharePoint expertise--developers, programmers, administrators--or, according to Rogers, they can use CorasWorks. "With CorasWorks Workplace Suite for MOSS 2007 modular software, the people that use SharePoint can change it to meet their needs themselves. Our product takes them to level 2, 3, and 4 and lets them develop office management solutions, sales force automation solutions, and Help desk solutions, and tie all these solutions together without requiring any custom development." According to Rogers, from an end user perspective, there's really only four things that are in every business application:
- Navigation
- Information display
- Data connections
- Tasks that users can do (e.g., add or change information)
"So what CorasWorks has done," he said, "is make all these components easy to drag and drop, configure, and snap together. We're like the Legos of software. Our whole mantra for the future of software is that the people who use the software, should be able to design, build, and modify it to meet their needs." When I asked Rogers about Microsoft's recent announcement about its SharePoint Online hosted service, he responded that he thinks it'll very good for a very mass audience, who want to go that first mile in SharePoint. He added, "The challenge Microsoft must overcome with the service is how to allow customers of third-party software vendors, such as ourselves, or custom developers to install modular components on their servers." He believes Microsoft will be very successful and will eventually commoditize the price point so that there's little financial incentive for companies to offer a bland native SharePoint server. "CorasWorks has started talking with SharePoint services vendors about adding our software to their systems because they have to move up the stack in adding more business value. I expect in a few months there will be a number of vendors in the hosted-SharePoint space announcing that they are launching a service that leverages SharePoint and CorasWorks, enabling customers to move up that value stack."
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The days of the centralized corporate workforce are waning. In a recent briefing, Gareth Taube, Vice President of Marketing for Certeon (www.certeon.com), said that there's evidence that more than 60 percent of employees of major corporations are located outside of corporate headquarters. As businesses become more and more decentralized, they must learn to meet the challenges of supporting globally distributed workforces. Unfortunately, most companies have taken applications that were originally designed to run on a LAN and made them accessible to remote workers. "When you do that, the WAN gets in the way," said Taube. "Networks are usually bandwith-constrained, they have lots of latency, and they have lots of packet loss. Large documents can take minutes instead of seconds to move across the WAN, and that's painful. So people tend to replicate files and store them locally, which defeats the purpose of having a Web tool environment and tools such as SharePoint for collaboration."
About 2 years ago, a group of products called WAN optimization controllers sprung up to try to negate some of the impacts of the network. These products use various techniques, such as optimizing the TCP_IP protocol, packet compression, packet differencing, and Quality of Service, which identifies certain streams of traffic, and decides which stream is more important. Certeon has taken a different approach to WAN optimization with its S-Series application acceleration appliances that are preloaded with Certeon’s Application Acceleration Blueprints for Microsoft Office System and Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. These blueprints understand the semantics that Microsoft uses for SharePoint and knows what SharePoint objects look like. Therefore the appliances loaded with the blueprint can difference on the entire file as opposed to the pieces of the file that are made of packets, thus turbocharging the response time of the blueprinted application
"Companies have spent time and resources to deploy SharePoint in branch offices all over the world only to find they can't use them because of the network," said Taube. "With the Certeon solution, people are actually using SharePoint as their supposed to."
So what's next for Certeon? According to Taube, Certeon will be following the trends in the marketplace. "Virtualization is a very hot technology," he said. "Later this spring, we'll announce that Certeon will follow the industry trend led by Microsoft and others and allow for application acceleration in a virtualized environment."
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Companies today rely more than ever on the ability to share information with employees, partners, and customers, and solutions have evolved from simple fileshares and document storage systems, to more elaborate content management and collaboration applications. Microsoft's SharePoint platform has fast-become the leading contender in this space, providing a set of productivity and collaboration tools that let information workers access information and share it with colleagues. In fact, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, in his keynote address at Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference 2008, stated that SharePoint is one of the fastest-growing products in the company's history. A robust collaboration platform is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity, and workers have become used to having ready access to all the information required to perform their jobs. This "I want it all, and I want it now," expectation gets a bit more difficult in environments with a mobile workforce and globally dispersed offices. When a worker in London, for example, wants information stored in a central SharePoint site in the main office in Houston, the low bandwith and high latency over the WAN provides an unsatisfactory user experience.
According to Jeffrey Wolff, Vice President of US Operations and Technical Director for Infonics, (www.infonics.com), if the user-experience is horrible, then users will blame SharePoint (even though the WAN is the bottleneck) and instead of using SharePoint, will go back to emailing documents around. "To ensure the success of a SharePoint site and the happiness and productivity of your users," he stated, "you need to have a strategy for global replication." Infonics saw this need and developed a solution so that rather than have users come to a central location, companies could replicate SharePoint content and server farms to branch locations. With Infonics Geo-Replicator, the user experience is the same whether you're working in a branch office or the home office. The underlying technology for this server-to-server solution is Epsilon, a byte-level differencing technology that significantly reduces replication traffic by recognizing byte patterns and sending only the unique patterns.
Another benefit of a replication solution is that it allows for continuity of business operations, Wolff said. "If the WAN connection goes down between your satellite and main office, you have a fully functioning, up-to-date SharePoint site at each location. Users can continue to access either site, and when the WAN is restored, the sites will automatically synchronize themselves when the WAN comes back up."
Geo-Replicator's Server to Laptop solution further enhances the user experience by providing the ability to take SharePoint offline. By creating a replica of portal content on their laptop, Geo-Replicator provides offline users with uninterrupted access to critical information.
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This week, Microsoft and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium announced a joint standards-based development project that will provide assistive technology to computer users who are blind or print disabled. This open collaboration project will result in the “Save as DAISY” feature, a free, downloadable plug-in for Microsoft Office Word that will enable the translation of millions of Open XML documents into DAISY XML, the foundation of the accepted standard for digital talking books. The “Save as DAISY” feature will give people with print disabilities better access to the information in billions of documents. You can find more information about the Daisy plug-in at
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/nov07/11-13daisy.mspx
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Microsoft has released the 2007 Microsoft Office Security Guide, a free set of tools that can help organizations of all sizes improve the security and privacy of desktop computers. The recommendations and resources included in the guide were created and tested in partnership with businesses and governments around the world. The toolset lets customers get the most benefit from the improved security features in the 2007 Office system. You can find additional information about the security guide at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/clientsecurity/2007office/default.mspx
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I want to let you know about a new SharePoint presentation located on our sister site, WindowsItPro.com. This podcast discusses using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to manage information throughout the enterprise. You'll learn the basics of the content management process and how workflow and information management policies are implemented in MOSS 2007. You can download this podcast at
http://www.windowsitpro.com/go/podcast/corasworks/enterpriseinfo
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Congratulations to Quest Software for winning BEST OF TECHED in the SharePoint category. Their suite of tools provides important functionality to administrators supporting WSS and MOSS. Definitely worth checking out! (www.quest.com/sharepoint). Congratulations also to the other two finalists, Colligo (www.colligo.com) and CorasWorks (www.corasworks.com).
These three companies represent best-of-breed in what was (in my opinion) an outstanding and exciting (and growing!!!) field of ISVs providing solutions for SharePoint. At TechEd, there were vendors with amazing offerings for end users, developers, and IT pros, for WSS and for MOSS, and for just about every business scenario imaginable. What an incredible year it's been for SharePoint, and I think it's only the beginning.
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TechEd is a marvelous event for a lot of reasons: networking, learning about product roadmaps, discovering new third-party solutions, etc.
For me, personally, the “sessions” are by far the weakest part of the event. One of the things that drives me nuts about TechEd, and about Microsoft “Technical Sessions” in general, is the painfully shallow level of technical content in the vast majority of their presentations. Let’s face it, Microsoft is in the business of getting you to buy their software, and they only need to give you just enough information to get you “hooked.” They don’t have a business driver to help you to actually do the things they told you that you could do. I understand that. Microsoft tells you “this is what you can do”, not “this is how to do it, this is where you might run into trouble along the way, and here’s how to fix it.”
Microsoft also has a “global reach” which means that when they do tell you something, they need to say it in such a generic way that it should, theoretically, apply to any customer, big or small, in any country, in any industry. By trying to be everything to everyone, they lose the ability to be anything to anyone, at least as far as “knowledge transfer” goes. Again, this is just my feeling, but I know I’m not alone.
So even most of the “Level 300” and “Level 400” sessions were nothing more than tours of features I could have read about on the Microsoft web site. My guess is that Microsoft was so strapped for content that they decided if a speaker opens a Virtual PC to show a feature, not just talk to a slide, that makes it a Level 300 session.
There is definitely value to be had at TechEd—I just wish I could challenge Microsoft to really raise the bar for content they deliver at their premier event. For those of you looking for independent, in-depth content, join our experts at the Connections event in Vegas, November 5-9 (www.winconnections.com).
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Welcome to the new Office and SharePoint Pro blogs. We're just getting off the ground with a new site, new people, and even better Office and SharePoint content. But this is your community, so don't be shy about letting us know what you'd like to see here and on the Office and SharePoint Pro site in general. This week, we'll be blogging from Tech Ed in Orlando, so if you weren't able to attend the conference, come back here each day to see what's happening. And if you're attending Tech Ed, make sure to stop by the Windows IT Pro/MSD2D booth to say hello, and be on the lookout for Dan Holme, the new Office and SharePoint Pro community leader.
Another event I'd like to encourage you to attend is the Virtual Exchange and Office 2007 Deployment Workshop on June 12. Virtual conferences are a great way to keep up with the industry from the convenience of your own home or office, so check it out at http://events.unisfair.com/index.jsp?eid=187&seid=7&code=MSD2D. Hope to see you there.
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