New SharePoint On-Demand Release from Ascendum Seeks to Ease SharePoint Implementation
May 9, 2012
SharePoint is becoming the industry standard for content management with over 65,000 companies using the software and more than 100 million licenses in place worldwide. In “Ascendum Unveils Latest Innovation: New SharePoint On Demand(TM) Changes the Rules by Taking Away the Hassles but Not the Power of Industry-Leading Platform,” Eric Weissmann discusses a new SharePoint On Demand ™ program that seeks to take the worry and hassle out of managing a SharePoint integration. The release aims to meet the needs for companies that have limited budget and administration resources but are still looking for the full power of the SharePoint platform.
A spokesperson from Ascendum comments on the release:
This simple yet powerful solution will unleash the true power and functionality of the SharePoint platform for our customers,” said Tim Ryan, Ascendum’s Vice President of Business Development. “This new product shows again how we at Ascendum are continuously innovating to meet the needs of the market here in Cincinnati and throughout the Midwest.
Two levels, Basic and Advanced, are available in SharePoint On Demand ™ and each comes with a set amount of administrative time from Ascendum and off-premises hosting. Ascendum is a global IT services firm headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. The firm focuses on IT consulting, application development management, infrastructure management services, talent management, and on-demand services.
The press release is a brief read that may be worth looking at to stay in the loop on the new application that may help your company implement SharePoint. To maximize your SharePoint investments beyond implementation, consider Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Part of the full suite of solutions is the Fabasoft Folio Connector, which provides uniform, reliable management of your digital content. Here is a highlight:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is able to search all data sources connected to the platform simultaneously. In addition to data from, for example, Microsoft Exchange or the file system, the Fabasoft Folio Connector allows to query information objects and documents from Fabasoft Folio, too.
With on-premise and Cloud information pairing capabilities, Mindbreeze provides a comprehensive and enterprise-grade solution that adds rich value to your business knowledge. Read more at Mindbreeze, where they seem to have the benefits of a proper installation down pat.
Philip West, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Heat in SharePoint Semantics April 27 to May 3
May 8, 2012
This week SharePoint Semantics published several pieces that showed readers some interesting tips on how to incorporate social media strategies and web design techniques into SharePoint
The post, “Discussion on SharePoint and Social In Light of Harris Interactive Enterprise Social Networking Survey,” discussed the fact that social networking in enterprises is a growing field that is filled with potential.
Jared Spataro of SharePoint offers the company’s point of view on the research:
“it’s not necessarily about all the bells and whistles and new “Facebook-like” features. As it’s pointed out in the Harris Study organizations are looking for functionality like instant messaging, email, video conferencing. Likes, activity streams and microblogging are not top on the list. These are the tools, Spataro says, that people are familiar with, so bring those capabilities into the social software solution and focus on productivity.”
In the realm of SharePoint and social media, “List of Useful Microsoft SharePoint Blogs to Track on RSS,” provides a list of 25 blogs that offer helpful tips, opinions, and news on SharePoint.
When discussing the blogs that he personally refers to from the list, Ken Toth states:
“Many of the blogs on this list are ones we read regularly. SharePoint Joel – SharePoint Land, Laura Rogers @ Wonderlaura, Marc D. Anderson’s Blog – A Management Zealot Speaks Out, and Waldek Mastykarz’s Innovation Matters are four we refer to often. Some that are new to us are SharePoint Dragons, The SharePoint Guys from the UK, and harbar.net. We look forward to checking them out.”
“Make Your Public Facing SharePoint Site Look More Polished With Easy Tips,” advises on ways to make your SharePoint site look more polished and professional by changing the colors/theme and upper left image from the standard template.
Toth states:
“There are many online resources that provide copyright-free images for your use, and the article provides links to a few of them as well as directions for how to change those and the theme. Also, Neal advises that your images should have a transparent background so that it blends seamlessly into your ribbon. The article includes step-by-step directions for this as well.”
For those who are new to social media and web design and would like a more out of the box solution for your SharePoint needs, consider using Smartlogic’s semantic technology solution called the Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform.
Jasmine Ashton, May 8, 2012
Managing Change and User Adoption during a SharePoint Deployment
May 8, 2012
Symon Garfield discusses transition in the 16th installment of his Art of SharePoint Success series at the CMSWire.com Blog. In the article, “The Art of SharePoint Success: Transition – There’s No Such Thing as a SharePoint Project,” Garfield uses Transition as an umbrella term to include change management and user adoption. He also looks at Transition as the fourth element, behind Governance, Strategy, and Architecture, in a four point framework for ensuring long term return on a SharePoint investment.
SharePoint’s potential as a catalyst for a big change in an organization means you need a plan. Garfield explains:
A structured approach means that we have a plan. Transitioning from the current state means that you understand the current situation and know where you are starting from. A desired future state means you know what you are trying to achieve and will recognize when we have done it. A controlled manner means that you have some means of measuring your progress. If you don’t have all of these elements in place then you’re not ready to start.
Because SharePoint can facilitate change in business processes, organizational structures, power shifts, individual behavior, and business relationships, Garfield stresses understanding the different types of change and how to plan for them. For example, an incremental or gradual change, versus a radical or fundamental change, is often the secret to success with SharePoint, according to Garfield. Other types of changes, including organizational versus sub-system and remedial versus developmental, are also covered. Managing change and user adoption is no doubt a challenge for organizations. Garfield brings up some valid points that may be worth the read if you’re implementing a SharePoint system.
To help manage the change, consider a quality third party solution, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, that gets your users the right information and the right time. Mindbreeze can really get you the most out of your enterprise search investments and extend the capabilities of your SharePoint system. For a deep solution that connects your business information with the Cloud and gives your users the search and navigation experience they need, check out Mindbreeze.
Philip West, May 8, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Server Administrator Training Opportunities Announced for Multiple Cities
May 7, 2012
Upcoming SharePoint Server Administrator continuing education opportunities are discussed in the recent Virtual-Stretegy.com post, “SharePoint 2010 Server Administrators Training Now Available in Multiple Cities.” The three-day training session titled Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators is scheduled for May 15 – 17 in Nashville; June 5 – 7 in Washington, DC; and June 26 – 28 in Chicago.
The course, which is intended for server administrators seeking to learn best practices for installing, implementing and managing SharePoint 2010 servers, is explained:
The course serves as an introduction to both SharePoint Foundation 2010 (the free edition of SharePoint 2010) and SharePoint Server 2010 Standard and Enterprise Editions. It uses a sample company in the lab exercises to teach IT professionals how to apply SharePoint 2010 from concept to implementation in a typical environment.
The course author and Senior Instructor for SharePoint Solutions, Ricky Spears, explains the expected student outcomes:
Students will learn how to determine which edition of SharePoint is best for their organization; the tasks end users perform most frequently with SharePoint; and how to establish site security. Then, they will set up SharePoint 2010 from scratch under the watch eye of a Microsoft-certified SharePoint 2010 administrator.
The training may be worth checking out if you need to boost your implementation and administration in SharePoint 2010. But we also know that valuable development resources are often limited. Consider a comprehensive out of the box solution, like Fabasoft Mindbreeze, to extend your SharePoint system without the need for extensive training.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise:
finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users.
Further, Mindbreeze offers enterprise-grade support and training to help you along the way and maximize your enterprise search investments. The solution is worth a second look at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
Philip West, May 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New Formotus Release Seeks to Provide Enhanced SharePoint Mobile Experience
May 4, 2012
Formotus recently announced a new version of its mobile business application platform with enhanced SharePoint integration and capabilities. The new release is discussed in the Virtual-Strategy.com press release, “Collaborate without Complexity: SharePoint Mobile Workflow Platform for iPad and Android Released by Formotus.”
The new release is summarized:
Formotus makes it possible for organizations to create and deploy custom mobile business applications built around Microsoft® Office InfoPath™ forms. The new feature set announced today enables companies to implement flexible collaboration frameworks with robust forms that can be routed and shared among mobile users in a wide variety of ways. Formotus mobile workflow forms require no SharePoint modifications and work with any version including on-premises, hosted, and Office 365 SharePoint Online.
The new possibilities, such as mobile workflow forms and social collaboration, are discussed in the release along with example scenarios that are now supported. Formotus CEO Adriana Neagu says that the new version is “a whole new task-oriented mobile experience that is easier, smarter, more beautiful, more powerful. The fact is, a person using our platform on an iPad or Android tablet, won’t be able to tell that there is any SharePoint behind the workflow.” These are big and exciting claims for not only workflows, but the whole mobile experience.
SharePoint is no doubt the go-to content management system for all kinds of organizations and enhanced mobile capabilities will surely be an appeal for users. But for complex workflows and successful social collaboration, users also need efficient and effective access to valuable business knowledge. It seems that the experts at Fabasoft Mindbreeze understand the value of powerful search and mobile access.
makes company knowledge available on all mobile devices. You can act freely, independently and yet always securely. Irrespective of what format the data is in. Full functionality: Search results are displayed homogenously to the web client with regards to clear design and intuitive navigation.
With the full functionality of Fabasoft Mindbreeze for Enterprise and united on-premise and Cloud data, users will be able to act quickly in business matters with smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Read more about the full suite of solutions at http://www.mindbreeze.com/.
More on Formotus: Founded in October 2005 by Adriana Neagu, co-inventor of Microsoft Office InfoPath, and serial entrepreneur Joe Verschueren, Formotus technology enables companies to rapidly create a business solution ? without any coding ? that works across platforms so companies can design once and deploy anywhere. Formotus looks to future-proof companies because the same forms that work on today’s devices will also work on the new devices that they will support tomorrow.
Philip West, May 4, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
A Love Letter to SharePoint
May 3, 2012
SharePoint is indeed everywhere. A reader cannot avoid the topic in the blogosphere. And while SharePoint adoption at times seems obligatory, loving SharePoint does not have to be. Andy Moore tackles the topic of SharePoint devotion in, “SharePoint, I Love You.”
Moore begins:
That conquering sound you hear is SharePoint, and it is nothing short of apocalyptic. You’ll see it mentioned elsewhere a couple times in this White Paper: The fastest growing business application in Microsoft history (making it pretty much everyone’s history), 20,000 SharePoint users have been added every day for the last five years. That’s kind of astonishing.
The white paper he mentions is a KMWorld offering available for download at the above link. Among the reasons listed for SharePoint dominance are: integration between the front office solutions and back-office repository, ubiquitous nature of other Microsoft solutions, and an affordable price point. One contributor talks of a “synergistic combination of tools that you can’t find on any other platform.”
We agree but disagree. Fabasoft Mindbreeze, a leading third-party enterprise solution, boasts an integrated suite of solutions to meet all of your companies information storage and retrieval needs. Products include web site search, mobile appliances, enterprise search, and connectors to address interoperability with other software.
The center of excellence for your company’s digital knowledge, information pairing brings enterprise and Cloud together.
Understanding content, semantic search
Mobility – Access on smartphones and tablets
In real-time – Search as Cloud service
Access to all data sources
Extensible with connectors
Fulfills compliance requirements
While SharePoint may hold the lion’s share of the market, we expect smart third party solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze to make bigger and bigger market gains.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint Sites Offers Customized Solutions
May 2, 2012
Perhaps one of the more useful aspects of SharePoint 2010 is the Sites feature, allowing customization of numerous sites based on included templates. Jennifer Mason of CMS Wire explores in, “SharePoint 2010 Sites: One Infrastructure for All Your Business Web Sites.”
Sites are one of the most powerful components within SharePoint. In fact, they are the foundation for many of the different solutions that can be built within SharePoint. By using Sites we can quickly build many different focused solutions, including items like:
Team Collaboration Areas
Corporate Intranets
Public Websites
Blogs
Database Tracking Solutions (Access Templates)
The solution is essentially one of convenience, as the templates themselves are not touted as anything beyond ordinary. Users often remark on SharePoint’s ability to keep them on the one platform, looking internally to SharePoint for all of their information needs.
We propose Fabasoft Mindbreeze as a smart third party solution and compliment to an existing SharePoint infrastructure. While a web site is relatively easy to create, endowing that web site with a smart and efficient search feature is much harder. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite provides unrivaled searchability for your public facing web sites.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite…
- is intuitive and user friendly.
- is instantly ready for use as a Cloud service. It turns your website into a user-friendly knowledge portal for your customers.
- recognizes correlations and links through semantic and dynamic search processes. This delivers pinpoint accurate and precise “finding experiences”.
- is the perfect website search for your company.
No installation, configuration or maintenance required.
So if your organization is looking for a way to take your public web sites to the next level, improving user satisfaction, consider adding Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 2, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Heat in SharePoint Semantics April 20 to April 26
May 1, 2012
This week SharePoint Semantics shared a plethora of information that can be useful for Microsoft SharePoint novices and experts alike.
In the post, “SharePoint Governance Plan Perceptions Survey Phase One Released by Axceler” we learn that while many companies believe that SharePoint governance is important, almost 40 percent do not have clearly defined governance plans and 9 percent have no plans at all.
Ken Toth excerpts a portion of the article:
“Not only that, 64.9 percent viewed SharePoint as a strategic enterprise platform. It seems more than contradictory that these organizations lack a coherent governance plan, yet view governance as important and SharePoint as a strategic platform. It doesn’t bode well for these companies if they don’t see planning for governance as part of their mission.”
Another noteworthy post that would be beneficial for those using SharePoint in the field is “Improve the SharePoint Experience for Field Personnel Through Best Practices.” According to the summary of the article, there are six best practices for site-based tasks to be completed in the field.
Those best practices are:
“Keep essential information on the same page, display multiple List View Web Parts in a single page view, create a flat site structure and implement enterprise cache management to support offline work, display recent changes to the site, develop search scopes for frequently requested items, and create separate SharePoint sites for different groups of users or products.”
When we are discussing best practices, it is important to also remember that many Sharepoint end users also make the same mistakes. “Top Technical Mistakes to Avoid in Microsoft SharePoint” covers a variety of angles to worth a close look during your deployment process.
When describing the number one blunder the writer highlights the Big Bang Roll Out:
“Someone sends out an email that the new intranet site, My Sites, and collaboration platform are available. Suddenly everyone in the organization comes flooding in, and in the process, they put the entire farm underwater. The servers encounter more load in an hour than they’ll typically encounter in weeks of operation, and a great environment is tarnished by one big email. Rather than doing one big-bang email to everyone, stage your communication over the course of a day or two to even out the load a bit.”
While reading best practice and top mistake articles can help many end users address a multitude of issues that can arise when dealing with Microsoft SharePoint, at times when that just isn’t enough, we recommend that you look into a third party solution like Smartlogic’s out-of-the-box enterprise semantic technology.
Jasmine Ashton, May 1, 2012
GSX Streamlines SharePoint Monitoring
May 1, 2012
Every SharePoint developer knows that a SharePoint infrastructure requires a lot of love and attention. Monitoring is essential to heading off major problems. GSX Solutions is now offering an automated way to monitor enterprise environments. Market Watch gives a full report in, “GSX Assures Around-the-Clock Performance for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint.”
GSX Solutions, the global leader in proactive, consolidated monitoring and reporting of enterprise collaboration environments, including Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and Lotus Notes, today announced its latest release of GSX Monitor & Analyzer assures around-the-clock availability and performance for Exchange 2010 and SharePoint. The new release provides pinpoint alerts that enable Exchange and SharePoint administrators to head off emerging issues before they impact the business and dramatically reduce user complaints.
Claiming that the service can alert you to your emerging enterprise issues before they impact the line of business, GSX definitely has a market. Such monitoring can save a SharePoint team a lot of costly time and energy in manual monitoring. We think an addition of a third-party enterprise solution may also help ensure that problems do not occur in the first place.
The suite of solutions offered by Fabasoft Mindbreeze lead the pack in terms of interoperability and ease of use. They function on their own or in addition to an existing SharePoint installation. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is an intuitive, efficient enterprise alternative, that has been proven to save users time and improve user satisfaction.
Be well informed – quickly and accurately. The data often lies distributed across numerous sources. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise gains each employee two weeks per through focused finding of data (IDC Studies). An invaluable competitive advantage in business as well as providing employee satisfaction.
It is important to have a lot of tools at your disposal when overseeing a large SharePoint installation. But as hotly anticipated as SharePoint 2013 may be, we believe that the wave of the future will be smart, agile third party solutions such as the ones created by Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Be sure to check out all that they have to offer.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 1, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Prepare Your Organization for SharePoint 2013
April 30, 2012
SharePoint users are hotly anticipating the release of SharePoint 2013. Will the changes be large or small? How will it affect an organization’s existing infrastructure? Market Watch turns hypothesis into practical action, discussing the upcoming release and also preparations that you can take now to prepare your organization. Read the full report in, “Eight Ways to Prepare for the Next Release of SharePoint Now.”
Quest Software, a provider of enterprise tools for SharePoint, offers the following:
Microsoft is gradually revealing details on what users can expect in the next version, which many anticipate will be available in early 2013. With widespread expectations beginning to surface around social capabilities, the cloud, and a new interface, the early anticipation indicates users are already thinking about what’s next for SharePoint. As organizations start considering the next version, there are many ways they can prepare the environment to gain immediate benefits now, and be ready to quickly take advantage of new features later.
Quest goes on to layout what it calls a “next version readiness” plan. However, we think that things could be made a bit simpler. Microsoft is known for its ritualistic three-year cycle of software overhaul. However, smart third-party enterprise solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze update on a timetable that is much less disruptive. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise unveils new releases quarterly for on-site installations, and even more often for Cloud installations.
Updates are performed seamlessly, requiring no major overhauls or contingency plans. Rather, updates make the user experience even more pleasant. Above all, findability and efficiency are increased with Mindbreeze, whether it stands alone or works in tandem with an existing SharePoint infrastructure. Explore the entire suite of offering by Fabasoft Mindbreeze and see what they can do to improve your organization’s information management system.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
