Posts Tagged 'sharepoint'

SharePoint Event Calendar for 2010

The world may be flat, connected and sharing, but keeping track of the various events, user groups, best practices and conferences about Microsoft SharePoint can be a taunting task. Joel Oleson started this, with his ‘If you could go to one SharePoint conference this year, what would it be?‘ post, and I picked it up from there.

After exhibiting at The SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last year, I’ve been working on finding out which events are planned for 2010, who’s attending, what are the topics, who’s speaking and more. Sponsorships are an important aspect of our marketing strategy, and has its advantages such as strengthening our brand and increasing our public exposure to relevant stakeholders (customers, analysts, VCs), but there are other aspects to the mix – such as PR, advertising, online, professional publications and others.

I’ve compiled a spreadsheet trying to summarize the SharePoint related events in 2010, based on my own research, and added some events Joel described in his post. Feel free to add events to the spreadsheet, using this form. Once moderated, your entry will be shown in the spreadsheet below.

10 simple rules for winning through web analytics

One of the people I started following and RSSing is Florian Pihs from MRM Worldwide in Beijing.
I really liked his ‘10 simple rules for winning through web analytics‘ presentation as it outlines in 7 slides why web analytics is important for any business, regardless of your audience.

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Amidar Housing picked IBM WebSphere Portal

Amidar Housing, the government agency responsible for housing in Israel, has just launched its redesigned website, developed over IBM WebSphere Portal Express software. Excellent gift for the holidays!
During the 2nd stage of the project, Amidar – along with Web-Tech Innovation, IBM BP specializing in portal and KM solutions – will launch a new intranet website, that would connect Amidar’s 500 employees spread at 50 locations across the country.

Amidar picked IBM in July 2008, with a definite roadmap to launch the redesigned site by the end of the year. The solution, WebSphere Portal Express V6.0 (packaged for small-medium businesses), along with WebSphere Dashboard Framework, provides the perfect platform for Adimar, and cost-effective one, to develop and deploy 2 portals over a single infrastructure – exploiting the solution’s capability of ‘Virtual Portal’.


Amidar also took advantage of some innovative web 2.0 technologies embeded in the solution, by deploying the map you see above, of the various locations across Israel. The launch of the redesigned site, as well as the internal portal (to be launched soon), are part of Amidar’s 2009 approach of focusing on the customer’s needs.

Yaacov Brosh, Amidar CEO:

Access to public housing and learning the rights every citizen entitles to, demand first of all – access to information. The redesigned website provides just that.

Amir Belferman, Amidar CIO:

Building over WebSphere Portal technology enabled us flexibility in content management, easy setup of the different pages/categories and operational efficiency, under a very short time frame. We plan to maximize the platform in the future, by enhancing the services and information we provide to our customers online.

Links:
Amidar website
Amidar improves customer care by launching a redesigned website built over IBM technology
IBM web portal software
WebSphere Portal Express software

I want a facebook thing. I think

Just wrapped up my presentation at KM Annual Conference (another one), where I got 20min (but took 30) to talk about Enterprise 2.0, or ‘I want a facebook thing. I think‘.
The event was more about traditional knowledge management (aka – documents), and how to maintain a document library within your internal portal, so my Enterprise 2.0 portion was unique and different. I like to be unique.

I adopted some tips from Ed and Alan and came with Jeans and a buttoned shirt (short sleeves – it’s Israel), instead of my usual dress-code. Being the last speaker before lunch is not easy, especially where you consider who came before me. If you happen to follow me on twitter, you know I was up with some fierce competition, as all the speakers before me, and sponsors outside, were MOSS/WSS/Sharepoint integrators. One hilarious moment came when a presenter took the stage to demo a solution over Powerpoint 2007 – but the main hall laptop had Office XP.. :-)) The laptop refused to open the Office 2007 file. LOL

The important thing, I ROCKED !!
And mentioned how IBM beat Sharepoint in Enterprise 2.0 face-off earlier this week.
And gathered some business cards for future opportunities.
I talked about social computing in general (what is facebook), then dived into Lotus Connections (I want something like this…) with references from Ernest & Young and Sprint, and finished with three first steps for piloting/adopting (COOL!! How to get started?).
With little time to spare I didn’t talked about the barriers to adoption, but Enterprise 2.0 Conference already covered this in one of their discussions.

You can view the embed slides below, or download from slideshare.net/dvirreznik.
The slides are in Hebrew – will prepare an English version over the weekend.

Not scalable, SQL only, but still wanted. Why ??

Earlier this week I read an interesting article on InfoWorld, ‘Microsoft SharePoint takes business by storm‘. The article discusses how MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) penetrated the corporate market, reaching 17,000 customers worldwide, using a clever marketing program that entitled the solution to Windows Server customers, thus reaching 100 million licenses.

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped-down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test-drive the software, and soon, end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.

Indeed, excellent marketing and packaging strategy – start by giving something for free, charge the users later. When they are already deep in it, and can’t say no. At first read it can be considered a very pro-Microsoft article, when in fact it’s not that pink.
There are some black spots.

SharePoint, however, isn’t without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.

and

SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.

Regardless of what platform you’re using for corporate portal, this is an article worth reading. The comments are also worth your time. Gia Lyons wrote about this article as well.

Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint’s portal capabilities still don’t measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.

“I think there is going to be some buyer’s remorse,” Gotta says.

About half the customers I met since starting this job some 8 months ago asked me about MOSS. I don’t tend to discuss the competition with people I meet, yet alone their disadvantages or marketing strategies, but this article opened the door for me. Between all the good things written, there are some things worth paying attention to – like scaling, supported DBs and social-networking capabilities.

The social-networking tools are uninspiring, and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.

In my opinion, the main message from this is ‘nothing’s free’. There’s always a price – either in licenses or in configuration. And I didn’t mention the SQL Servers (and only SQL) your company will need to buy to support the growing amount of data you store.

InfoWorld: Microsoft SharePoint Takes Business by Storm




Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.