SharePoint environment

I recently advised a global consumer goods firm about how to integrate their various Social Software implementations and where to place SharePoint in that mix. This was that rare company who had not yet implemented SharePoint hardly at all, beyond a few WSS pilots. In other words, that mythical "greenfield" environment that consultants can dream about, but rarely exist in real life. The firm is considering expanding their investment, including licensing MOSS. We discussed how they have a tremendous opportunity to do SharePoint "right" from the beginning, and avoid some common critical mistakes.

As one of the most widely used document collaboration tools, it is no wonder organizations want to understand how to build better business processes in SharePoint. Of course, not all documents are electronic. Organizations still deal with a vast amount of paper-based information. So you look for document imaging software to help you get those documents into SharePoint easily. But once they are there, how can you leverage the SharePoint environment to improve your business processes?

Businesses and established organizations are vastly different environments than the Web 2.0 social networking-centric universe. Where Web 2.0 is all about sharing information and engaging in two-way conversations, the enterprise concerns itself, in part, with individuals who are guarded with information and an organizational structure that disseminates information in top-down fashion. From my experience of evangelizing the benefits of social media at a mid-sized civil engineering company, I have learned many lessons on how the enterprise regards and judges social media.

“MOSS is very good for very good in smaller, workgroup environments,” says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, analyst, CMS Watch and his presentation on Evaluating SharePoint. “It’s not traditionally very good for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users.” CMS Watch’s approach / focus to evaluating MOSS:

Every day I am assaulted by a barrage of press releases, almost all of which contain nothing of interest. So it was a pleasant surprise to be hit early on a Monday morning by this one from Autonomy, "ControlPoint unveiled for Microsoft SharePoint information governance." In short the firm is releasing an updated system that they claim will provide wide records management capabilities across disparate and federated SharePoint environments. It is a system that builds on Autonomy's acquisition of Meridio technology in 2007. A closer look at this announcement reveals more in the way of federated records management than governance as such, providing a centralized RM policy hub to manage classification, preservation, and disposition of content assets. Governance is of course far more than this....but that's PR for you.

Last week Microsoft announced new licensing arrangement for its products, including SharePoint Server 2007. In particular the new licensing scheme will support those who want to virtualize their server environment, since in the past enterprises taking this route were somewhat punished financially. All in all the new approach is a good one and buyers should be happy. At the same time this raises questions about how many people actually want to virtualize their server environment, and what if any the drawbacks such an approach might present.

eCapture for SharePoint is a distributed document capture application that enables users in disparate environments to scan documents directly to selected SharePoint content repositories in one step, from a single interface. With eCapture for SharePoint, Daybreak introduces a fresh new concept in distributed document capture for SharePoint users, including cost effective concurrent licensing and no per click charges or page counts.