SharePoint New and Improved Solutions: Mid-Summer 2012

SharePoint solution providers are jockeying to announce their compatibility withSharePoint 2013. Meanwhile, there are some other interesting SharePoint solutions that solve problems you might have right now. Here's a quick rundown of a few that caught our attention.

Agentless SharePoint Backup and Archiving Tool
MetaVis SavePoint lets you keep a local backup of a cloud-based SharePoint implementation. It also allows customers to restore SharePoint items, documents, lists, libraries and sites, including metadata from a local drive. Pricing for SavePoint starts at $495 per year.

SavePoint is agentless. Using it, you can save SharePoint content to local and cloud-based storage and restore individual documents without having to restore an entire environment. It lets you archive and copy SharePoint content to a file system, freeing up SharePoint space.

SavePoint supports all versions (hosted and on-premises) of SharePoint 2010, 2007, and Office 365. To learn more, go to the MetaVis website.

Outlook Add-In To Bring Users to SharePoint
Quest Software brings SharePoint users painlessly to SharePoint, without switching desktop environments, with its new free tool, AttachThis. An Outlook add-in, it uploads email attachments to SharePoint and replaces them with secure links in the body of the email. To learn more, see the Quest Software community website. 

SharePoint Document Generation Tool
Windward announced SharePoint Document Generation, a document creation and management tool. The complete solution is composed of three parts: the AutoTag tool for designing document templates, the Windward engine for generating documents, and Windward's open-source SharePoint add-in, Arrow, which offers additional SharePoint functionality such as scheduling and version control.

It offers the familiarity of Microsoft Office programs,built-in version control, organizational tools, and a native scheduler. Users can schedule items to be created and run automatically, so documents are being generated while they're working on other business tasks. To learn more, see the Windward site.

Zero-Client Viewer for SharePoint
Informative Graphics announced Brava! 7.1 Viewer for SharePoint 2010. Brava provides a zero-client viewer for SharePoint end users and administrators, offers improved search and markup capabilities, and allows for secure document sharing, as well as video markup capabilities.

Additionally, Brava Protected Libraries let users view but not download or change sensitive documents in the repository. The solution is compatible with SQL Server 2012. To find out more, visit the Informative Graphics site.

Drag-and-Drop Tool for Building Electronic Forms
K2 released K2 smartforms, a browser-based, drag-and-drop interface for building electronic forms, tying them to workflow, and integrating line-of-business data. It supports SharePoint, as well as SAP, Salesforce.com, and more.

K2 smartforms provides a set of visual tools and controls that eliminate the need for code. Form fields can be clicked and dragged from a sidebar onto the form being built, and form components can be reused across multiple forms and applications. To learn more, see K2's website.

**Find more SharePoint product news at the SharePoint News and Products blog. And check out more SharePoint articles at SharePoint Pro.