SharePoint Content Management: Give Users What They Need, But Only That

It might seem contradictory to the stated mission of SharePoint, which is to enable collaboration, but sometimes you enable that by limiting the amount of information your users see. You give them what they need and no more, a sort of least-privilege riff on content management.

"Salespeople, attorneys, project managers-we've seen so many scenarios where limiting the information they see works," Barry Jinks of Colligo said. "We're seeing a lot of board members being issued iPads--they want the latest materials but only what they need. We limit the amount of information the user has to traverse."

Colligo Briefcase enables you to do just that, pushing to, say, an executive's iPad just the sites he or she needs, thereby reducing the amount of content and complexity. Your executives can click on a link you send them via email, it installs the app, and offers just the sites they need. The solution can cache content and sync when there's a high-speed connection available.

Jinks said Briefcase is linked into its other products as well. "We're finding that the iPad isn't the only device--they have a laptop and an iPad. We provide an identical view on laptop and iPad. We plumb SharePoint into different desktop and mobile devices." Colligo Briefcase is meant to work seamlessly with all of Colligo's email management solutions for desktops, laptops, and smartphones, to provide a unified, centrally-managed, enterprise-class solution for email and document management in SharePoint, including online and offline access, on-premises or in the cloud.

Colligo's larger aim is to provide a common view of SharePoint for the administrator while providing alternative UIs to SharePoint, tailoring user experiences to different scenarios. "We allow companies to narrow the type of content they have. SharePoint permissions give you a broad view, but we let companies push out separate folders to separate projects," Jinks said.

Besides looking forward to Windows Phone 7 and increasing integration with mobile devices, Jinks says Colligo was one of the first Office 365 customers to display Office 365 compatibility. "You don't have to install any of our products on the server. And we do quite well in a hybrid environment--from the user's point of view, it's identical. We can help companies make the transition" to a cloud environment, he says.

To that end, a fairly high percentage are experimenting with the cloud, Jinks says, and trying to determine how it will affect their IT infrastructure. "They're getting pressure from reduced budgets and cloud provides an advantage. We think Microsoft has it nailed with Office 365 as far as the security model and AD." To learn more about Colligo's products, visit its website.