I'm curious to know which commercial sites, particularly of high-profile organizations, are running on SharePoint. I actually live on Maui, traveling to and remotely supporting clients on three continents, so I fly Hawaiian Airlines now and then. If you missed the announcement a while back on the SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, Hawaiian Airlines is a SharePoint site. How can you tell? Just dig for your favorite SharePoint URL... You'll see. Let's make it a game! Ask anyone in the office to bet that it's not, and that if you win, they'll buy you a ticket to visit the beautiful islands!
What other commercial SharePoint sites have you found? Send them to me at danh \\{at\\} intelliem \\{//dotkom\\]!
How To Make SharePoint Look... not Like SharePoint
HOW DID THEY DO IT? How can it look so different from SharePoint? Well, you can find out how to build non-SharePoint-looking sites on SharePoint! One of my "people who I'd like to meet and learn from," Heather Solomon, is delivering what is sure to be the authoritative workshop on making SharePoint sites shine. Her SharePoint Branding Bootcamp will be offered December 3-7 in Houston.
Learning How To Brand SharePoint
Can't wait until December, or until Connections in Las Vegas to learn about branding? Heather has posted some fantastic guides:
- Branding SharePoint - Part 1: Designing your SharePoint Site
- Branding SharePoint - Part 2: Creating the Design in SharePoint
- Minimal or Base Master Pages
- MOSS 2007 Design Component Relationships and Diagrams
- CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint
It's people like Heather, who find ways to share critical knowledge and experience for free as a service to the community, that make our community shine. I guess I'll proclaim her our first official "To The SharePoint Superstar" for her contributions. I'll be highlighting other superstars in future newsletters, and feel free to send me your thoughts on who deserves "Superstar" status (email me at danh \\{at\\} intelliem \\{//dotkom\\])
Cool product spotlight: Workshare EDC
If you've ever worked on a document that required any kind of workflow, particularly entailing review and version tracking (think "contracts" for starters) you know the kind of pain points that are involved. This week, Workshare releases its Enterprise Document Control (EDC) Solution, which addresses document management, collaboration and security with some exciting approaches. Most importantly, the solution integrates directly into Office 2007 and SharePoint. In my experience, the number one problem with document management solutions begins when users have to leave their primary productivity tools (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) to deal with document management, revision, comparison, security, or publishing. Often, the users do not, and the usefulness of the document management solution is immediately diminished.
Workshare includes a client-side component that plugs into Office so that users aren't forced to learn an entirely new tool. The solution also has a server side component that enables document management and the ability to expose collaboration securely in both intranet and extranet scenarios. Working on a document with a partner? Now it's easy on your extranet. So the ease and speed with which actual users can make actual use of the product stands out to me. The "review" and "compare" capabilities are pretty understandable, but unusually robust.
The protection of content sounds particularly intriguing to me. The solution uses content analysis technology to automatically identify and classify content so that rights (provided by MS Rights Management) can be applied, and I love the word "automatically." Of course, everything can be tweaked, but for a tool to spot the word "confidential" in a document header and to automatically apply the correct rights-- nice! That should really help reduce information leakage problems.
Finally, I was impressed by the fact that while the tool integrates directly into Office and SharePoint, it also supports other platforms and formats, including downlevel Office file formats, other document management systems such as Documentum, a variety of email applications including, Lotus Notes and, most importantly, PDFs. Workshare seems to do wonders with PDFs, allowing not only comparison but, even better, the ability to use PDFs as the "endpoints" of document lifecycle. PDFs may come in to your organization, but then Workshare converts the document into Office formats for review and collaboration and then, allows the publishing of documents in PDF format, with all kinds of metadata scrubbing along the way to ensure compliance.
I was impressed by what I saw. If you're looking for document management, compliance, audit trail, secure publication and robust collaboration, check it out!
