The Forrester Wave™ Enterprise Content Management(ECM) report for Q4, 2011 was published in November of this year. We reviewed an excerpt from this report and noted that SharePoint was not included in the top four spots for this category of application software. These four top spots were awarded to Microsoft Competitors in the ECM space, IBM and Oracle, along with EMC & OpenText who also have applications specifically written for SharePoint in addition to their own proprietary applications. Several points gleaned from our review of summaries of this report sound warning bells to our ears. For example, Alan Weintraub, who…
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Collaboration Across Enterprise SharePoint gets Sticky with KZO Innovation’s Business Video Offering
Unearthing legitimate, useful applications for collaboration, through social media features, for global business and other large organizations over SharePoint has been a difficult task. Nevertheless, as applications have evolved, social media capabilities, like group ratings and group comments, seem to be delivering meaningful value for global businesses over enterprise implementations of SharePoint. We’ve written earlier in this blog about Pulse V2 from Neudesic. We specifically applauded features of the Pulse product that leveraged group ratings and group comments to aid sales team that need to locate, review and digest all of the information about customers and prospects very quickly. Now…
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Look to OpenText Compliance Add-Ons for SharePoint to Unlock Mission Critical Value for Regulated Businesses
If highly regulated businesses are best positioned, presently, to derive the most benefit from SharePoint as a mission critical application, then look to OpenText’s ECM Suite for Microsoft® for a set of targeted applications to break down business silos within heavily regulated businesses. These targeted applications include: Application Governance & Archiving Legal Content Management Enterprise Library Web Parts Storage Services, and Web Solutions for Portals Our review of a customer success story about Central Vermont Public Service (CVPS), the largest electric utility in the State of Vermont, posted to the OpenText website for its OpenText Document Management with OpenText Records…
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PeopleCube has a Driver to Break Down Corporate Real Estate Silos: Priceless Business Intelligence (BI) about Facilities
In a press release published on December 21, 2011, PeopleCube Predict[ed that] Companies Will Strive to Maximize Efficient Utilization of Real Estate and Workspace in 2012. We spoke with Ward Russell, Director of Marketing and got the following insights into what PeopleCube’s solution is about: Why Sharepoint? The Press Release mentions “[o]ne technical trend PeopleCube foresees for 2012 is companies’ integrating business applications relating to resource, facilities, and energy management with information technology (IT). Real-estate and facility professionals working together with IT can eliminate redundant information databases, create centralized data repositories for analysis, and reduce the total cost of application…
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Realizing Critically Important Value from SharePoint is Easier for Regulated Global Businesses
Global businesses engaged in heavily regulated industries have an easier time positioning SharePoint as a mission critical application for the enterprise. The reason for this relative ease is that compliance efforts with responsibilities to manage activities like document creation across all business silos are already in place for these global businesses in industry sectors like Health Care, Energy, and Financial Services. In contrast, global businesses in non regulated industries, with lots of business silos, are generally hard pressed when it comes to implementing solutions like SharePoint for an enterprise-wide application like a common document repository. The key operating factor in…
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Incorporating Data Content Into SharePoint Without BCS or WCF? Consider Kapow Software
SharePoint is uniquely qualified to serve as the only platform capable of providing a panoramic, enterprise-wide document repository that can include the range of data content types utilized by a global business. Once taxonomies have been created (please take a moment and check out Mike Doane’s Overview of Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 and his Guide to Planning Taxonomy Implementations for SharePoint 2010, then content can be meta tagged and added into the document repository. The result, on paper, can be an impressive reduction in duplicated efforts, along with a matching reduction in the sheer size of the document repository and,…
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Honing SharePoint Into a Mission Critical Application for Global Business
In a White Paper, Delivering Business-Critical Solutions with SharePoint 2010, released on November 17, 2011, Microsoft elevated its market discussion of SharePoint into the realm where Global Business CIOs and CTOs spend most of their time: the land of mission critical applications. Mission critical applications are usually found running in corporate data centers, which are the most secure hosting option available for global business. The cornerstone of the argument, presented by this White Paper, for SharePoint as a mission critical application is that SharePoint, once implemented and correctly introduced to global business, is uniquely capable of delivering access to critical…
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Implications of Failing to Become a Social Enterprise for Global Companies
The Digital Landfill column of AIIM published 8 Tips for Transforming SharePoint into a Social Business Hub on December 1, 2011. We were struck by the following observation from this column: “Two thirds of global companies with annual sales of $1 billion or more are failing to become social enterprises, according to CapGemini Consulting global study released earlier this month.” While we agree with the viewpoint of the author (not clearly identified, but possibly attributable to the AIIM President John Mancini) that it would be valuable for two thirds of global companies to hasten their “evolution” into social enterprises, we…
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Use a Hybrid combination of On Premises SharePoint and Office 365 to Bring Enterprise Users to the Cloud
Enterprise business users have many reasons to very slowly approach the cloud computing opportunity. Not the least of these is a preference on the part of Information Technology management to go “on premises” wherever possible. This preference has been cultivated consistently over the years, dating back to the first efforts at equipping enterprise class business with data centers. Market leaders will do well to respect the trepidation of this important class of SharePoint users. Through the publication of a white paper by Paul Robinson, Microsoft Services, United Kingdom, Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365 Microsoft has provided some significant content…
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Successfully Reducing SharePoint TCO with Training Still Eludes Most Users
As noted on a web page for the State of Vermont that lists SharePoint training resources “there is an enormous amount of SharePoint content on You Tube. Content is from users groups, consultants, training providers and other sources”. Further, this web page cites additional free training resources available directly from Microsoft, including SharePoint training and Productivity hub. Finally, the web page suggests that inquirers might simply “Google” a question as past history indicates a high likelihood that “you will get all kinds of hits and potentially useful information”. If we are to believe the information provided by the web page…
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