I thought that was a great way to explain SharePoint.  Just as a Swiss Army Knife keeps a number of tools connected so that they are always at the ready to do their individual jobs, SharePoint is a collection of tools that can address a variety of needs you may have in the course of doing business.  With SharePoint, you have six integrated capability areas or tools to work with:

Sites – provide a single infrastructure for all your business Web sites – intranets, extranets, and internet sites which enable you to share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.

Communities – leverage a single platform to manage all of your collaboration tools, making it easy for people to share ideas and work together.

Search-combine relevance, refinement, and social cues to help people the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.

Content – manage content by setting up compliance measures behind the scenes and allowing people to work naturally in Microsoft Office.

Insights – give people access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications so that they can make good business decisions.

Composites – create do-it-yourself, no-code business solutions to quickly respond to changing needs.

With such powerful tools combined into one solution, SharePoint can seem like a big, intimidating undertaking.  That couldn’t be further from the truth, however.  Everything from the implementation to the customization to the day-to-day usability of SharePoint is designed to be scalable and accessible to organizations of any size.

To learn more about how much SharePoint has to offer and how little there is to fear, attend our complimentary webinar on March 8^th at 1:00 PM EST!

External Content

All Office 365 midsize and enterprise customers now have access to Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SPO which leverages Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web Services endpoints to enable users to connect to external data sources.  That means that users can design solutions that extend collaboration capabilities that include external business data, even line-of-business (LoB) applications that sit behind customer firewalls or are being transitioned to the cloud are accessible now.  You can download SharePoint Designer 2010 at no cost to help make the connections.

External Sharing

As a SharePoint Online, you are now supported when working with people who are NOT part of your company, such as vendors, business partners, and customers. Leverage these external sharing capabilities to invite external users to view, share, and collaborate on your SharePoint Online sites. By default, this featured is turned off.  However, a SharePoint Online Administrator can enable external sharing for the whole company thereby empowering individual site collection owner administrators to decide if they wish to share externally.

Connected Systems

This update makes it easier than ever to connect to your own SharePoint Online sites now that more browsers are supported – including Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome along with earlier versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox.

SPO also easily connects with LoB applications like Microsoft Dynamics CRM. CRM users gain access to rich, SharePoint Online document management functionality directly within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application. Users can create SPO Document Libraries dynamically within CRM along with adding Document Management capabilities to entities such as Accounts, Opportunities, Cases or even custom entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Start a Free 30-Day Trial of SharePoint Online Today!

If you have received a “401 Unauthorized” error when trying to access SharePoint on your Droid or other Android enabled device, it is because the default browser on Android phones blocks the authentication pop-up window that enables a user to login to SharePoint.

To get around this problem, simply go into the Android Marketplace and download the Firefox browser app.  Firefox is approved by Microsoft to support SharePoint 2010.  Then use your new Firefox Android app to visit your SharePoint URL, login and access your site!

Contact us today for more information on SharePoint mobility!

There are three things that make the Search features in SharePoint 2010 great:

1. Empowers you to find content faster – This may seem like an obvious benefit of search functionality, but that doesn’t mean that you should underestimate its importance.  Most companies have lots of information in many different formats.  SharePoint 2010 helps you to find exactly what you are looking for quickly and easily with interactive search refinement tools, thumbnails and previews that allow you to recognize the right content quickly, and click-through relevancy which promotes the most frequently accessed information.
2. Quickly and easily connects people – The more quickly and easily your people can find each other, the more they can share ideas and expertise to solve problems, improve processes, and foster innovation.  Based on user profile information in “My Sites”, you can search based on expertise or other people-specific information and include colleagues and Outlook contacts in your search results.  Get more accurate and broader people searches by automatically including phonetic spellings and common nicknames.
3. Customize your search experience – Because people use search in many different ways, SharePoint 2010 search platform is customizable to meet many different people’s needs and preferences.  With advanced content processing, the terms and language unique to your business become part of the search experience.  The contextual search functions deliver results based on an individual’s role and search history while the relevance model can be tuned to meet the needs of an individual user.

Search happens two ways in SharePoint 2010 – SharePoint 2010 Search and FAST Search for SharePoint.  To understand the differences between these two search tools, download an evaluation guide for each of SharePoint search options.

Cincinnati Bell Technology Services keeps fostering team spirit amongst their employees a top priority.  They rely on their SharePoint intranet site to not only facilitate teamwork, but also to promote it.  We helped them to create a custom theme and web-parts so that their intranet site would be both visually and functionally consistent with the corporate branding and external facing website.  Read more…

In order to combat the many errors and inefficiencies brought about by unorganized Office document templates, we helped Nachurs Alpine Solutions leverage SharePoint’s document management capabilities to create a standardized Office template library.  We also developed custom workflows to ensure that the document approval process was streamlined and effective.  Read more…

Sarnova uses their SharePoint intranet site to share personalized business intelligence data with the individuals across their organization to which it is most relevant. We helped them to create financial and operational dashboards so that each user has an accurate and timely picture of the health of the organization as it pertains to their individual roles.  Each salesperson now has a personalized snapshot of the sales, invoices, credits, and backorders that are their responsibility.  We also helped them to set-up InfoPath forms with workflows to route the set-up tasks for new employees through the appropriate teams.  Read more…

Those are just a three examples of how real businesses are using SharePoint intranet sites to streamline their processes, improve business decision making, and further company priorities.

How can your business benefit from SharePoint?

Get some ideas of the many ways your organization can leverage SharePoint by reviewing its various capabilities in the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Evaluation Guide.

In August, only 8% of survey respondents had deployed SharePoint 2010 and only 13% of respondents were planning an upgrade to 2010.  However, 44% of survey respondents in January were using SharePoint 2010.  This shows that as organizations became more familiar with the new features and benefits of SharePoint 2010, upgrading to the current version became a greater priority.  But what was it about SharePoint 2010 that has made upgrading so compelling?

The survey also revealed what current SharePoint users think of the newly released 2010 version.  Current users of SharePoint 2007 view improved workflow design and the new and improved application development experience as the top two features that most appealed to them in SharePoint 2010.  Of the SharePoint 2010 users surveyed, most indicated new and improved application development experience and enhanced social computing tools as the top benefits while improved workflow design was seen as a top benefit by only 7%.  This shows that organizations who upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint are taking advantage of and benefiting from more features than they anticipated. 

To learn more about all of the new SharePoint 2010 functionality that your organization could take advantage of, download this brochure.  

In order to be considered as a leading portal vendor, an organization must display a balance of its:

Ability to Execute – Solutions contain a breadth of functionality supporting different portal deployment scenarios, long-term vendor viability, a demonstrated track record of meeting customer needs, and a successfully expanding market presence. 

Completeness of Vision – Vendors demonstrating an understanding of their customers’ evolving needs, incorporating new customer demands into their product strategies, and exhibiting technological innovation in their portal products.

Microsoft SharePoint achieves this balance better than any other vendor in the marketplace and also displays the other criteria for leadership, which includes a full range of capabilities to support a variety of portal deployment scenarios, consistent product delivery in meeting customer needs for a substantial period of time, significant product innovation, and success in selling to new customers across industries.

Learn more about Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Internet.

Some of the improvements that SharePoint 2010 features that help further it as a social solution are its:

• User friendly wikis
• Ability to mine Outlook and Exchange for knowledge
• New APIs allow for customization and extended functionality
• Social computing, search, and content management function better together

These improvements have helped to place Microsoft in the leaders quadrant (along with IBM and Jive) of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace.  Gartner also lists Microsoft as the only challenger in the Externally Facing Social Software market, with a stronger ability to execute their software’s vision than any other product in that market-space. 

To see how Sony is using the social features of SharePoint 2010, view this video:

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a versatile technology that enables organizations and business units of all sizes to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, SharePoint Foundation 2010 gives people access to documents and information they need. People can access collaboration capabilities through a familiar, Web-based interface and everyday tools including the Microsoft Office system of productivity programs. The familiar and intuitive look of SharePoint Foundation 2010 means it can be deployed rapidly with less disruption to current work practices and with less demand for training and support.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 also gives organizations a cost-effective foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments an effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 helps you to:

• Collaborate easily and effectively: Connect teams and increase productivity by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information they need through out-of-the-box SharePoint Foundation 2010 elements, which include blogs, wikis, team workspaces, and document libraries. This provides employees with the ideal way to share information and collaborate around a customized Web site.
• Deploy a manageable infrastructure: SharePoint Foundation 2010 offers tools like Windows PowerShell™ Administration to boost administrators’ productivity and health monitoring to provide deep insight into server performance and health. This enables you to make the most of your organization’s resources by deploying a manageable, scalable, and reliable collaboration platform that enables self-service by employees.
• Build Web applications: Increase business process efficiency by creating Web applications and workflow scenarios on the highly customizable, extensible platform of SharePoint Foundation 2010.

For additional information, please visit Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 site.

Read the complete Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 whitepaper

Learn about SharePoint solutions from Socius

What is Enterprise Content Management?

According to The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system helps businesses manage all data, including structured data captured in LOB systems, such as CRM, ERP, or Sales databases, and unstructured data including all documents, spreadsheets, and other files.

For more information, please read AIIM’s article, “What is ECM?”

Why ECM?

Enterprise Content Management provides a management framework for all data and for the creation and archiving of information. A comprehensive ECM solution helps bring structure and management to all types of documents and information and regulates and tracks them from a single set of tools.

Why Microsoft ECM?

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 delivers a platform approach that can manage unstructured data and address many, if not all, deployment blockers with:

• Tools that enable and encourage user interaction
• Architecture and tools that provide security and help manage compliance and policies
• Guidance and technology that helps avoid high costs of ECM point solutions

User-Centric Content Management

ECM in SharePoint Server 2010 provides users with both a platform and individual solutions for developing, using, and managing documents, with familiar Office Client applications deeply integrated for document viewing and editing.

SharePoint Server provides:

• Easy to use, integrated tools and features for managing, finding, and sharing documents to enhance productivity
• Easy to add and identify document metadata to track, find, and share documents
• Non-invasive inputs built into standard save and upload functions

Balance Between Flexibility & Control

SharePoint Server provides:

• Compliance Everywhere- Any document, record, or other stored information can be managed right from SharePoint
• Risk avoidance features which include information architecture, taxonomy, branding, provisioning, and search
• Management of accessibility to information to the people who need it

Save Costs and Consolidate Systems

SharePoint Server provides a platform for comprehensive, integrated content management, reducing complexity and time and saving costs. Leveraging a single platform also leads to improved reporting and analytics, resulting in cost savings by avoiding wasteful spending by manually generating reports or dealing with consequences of not having content insight.

Organizations can reduce IT costs and complexity by consolidating multiple product investments into a single infrastructure, by reducing infrastructure and support costs, and by getting all enterprise solutions under a single product license.

For more information about SharePoint Server’s user-centric platform, flexibility and control, and cost effectiveness, please visit our SharePoint 2010 page or visit Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 site.

Read the entire white paper, “The Business Value of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Content Management”.