Hello World!

I am Bill England and this is my first foray into a blogging. Barry Jinks, our CEO at Colligo, is a regular blogger (www.offlinesharepoint.com) and has been encouraging me to participate. Inertia has gotten in the way until now, but Jeffrey Gitomer was recently in town and helped me over come old Newton.

The primary purpose of this blog is corporate in nature, but other interesting tidbits will be included along the way. I have worked for Colligo Networks since mid-2005, which was just before we launched our SharePoint product family called Colligo Contributor. We are a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner developing and marketing software products extending and enhancing SharePoint. My focus at Colligo is North American sales, so my contribution to the community (hopefully) will be to provide comments on the client and prospect use cases. Other SharePoint information will be thrown in the mix here and there, as well as commentary on working as ISV in the Microsoft ecosystem.

My first article will be on the use of InfoPath and Form Libraries offline with Colligo Contributor. We have a number of current clients and prospects adopting a field reporting architecture that leverages these technologies. I will explore this topic further in the coming weeks.

Internet Research Group just announced the release of a new report on SharePoint entitled “Microsoft SharePoint (takes over the world)”. Cool Title!

The press release mentions Colligo and a number of other third parties in the SharePoint ecosystem, such as AvePoint, Quest Software, and K2.

I had a spin through the report and found a few interesting tidbits. It starts off with an estimate of the number of SharePoint licenses currently in use. There is a section on use cases that is quite comprehensive and outlines the primary reasons why companies deploy SharePoint. I agree with the reports conclusions on the two most impactful use cases as well. There is also a good section on key vendor implications and how SharePoint is changing the IT landscape, particularly for companies exploring web 2.0 applications. The section on the SharePoint ecosystem is a bit short in my opinion. I would have liked to see more depth there, but perhaps that could be the subject of another report.

I’d recommend this report to anyone who is looking for a quick overview of SharePoint and its implications.

If you want to enquire further about the report, you can send an email here.

I received the latest issue of Windows IT Pro by good old snail mail yesterday. Here’s a link to the online edition. Nice to see Colligo named a couple of times in there - once for the Best of Tech Ed Award in Productivity and Collaboration and once for Bronze in the 2008 Editors Best Award in SharePoint.

The other Editors Best award winners in the SharePoint category were Quest Software and AvePoint. We are really honored to be named alongside these leaders in the SharePoint space. In fact, Quest received quite a few awards as you can see from this press release.

Speaking of Quest, they released their Q2 quarterly earnings report yesterday. Revenue was up year over year by 22% and it was a record. It’s worth listening to their conference call to see the emphasis they are placing on SharePoint.

Yesterday Colligo Networks announced its second quarter financial results. I was pretty pleased with the progress the company is making - with sales up 100% year over year and strong funnel of business into 2009. But the big news in the quarter was how the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem is really driving our sales.

A bit of history. It was always our belief that the bulk of our revenues would be generated through Microsoft partners. However, like most ISVs, we started off in May 2006 selling our SharePoint product line direct out of necessity, while recruiting partners in parallel. On November 28, 2006, we announced the Colligo for SharePoint Partner Program. At the time, we had about 20 partners signed, though very little revenue flowing through the channel. By mid-2007 we started to see results. At the same time, we were pretty pleased to see an article in ChannelWeb with the title “25 ISVs You Must Know”, along with the quote:

“Colligo, Vancouver, British Columbia, was cited by several VARs for its technology that brings offline capabilities to SharePoint.”

Someone was finally noticing!

Fast forward to 2008. We are now seeing a significant amount of business coming from our channel partners, who number over 110 today. A lot of them are listed here. A few noteworthy partners that are kickin’ it are Blue Rooster in the United States, Mind Business in Germany, and Unique World in Australia. Thanks to all of you for your support.

Colligo sales through the channel tripled from first quarter to second quarter 2008. If there was ever any doubt about the power of the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem, it’s gone now! And, by the way, we couldn’t have done it without the support of the Microsoft field teams (sales reps, TSPs, etc.) and our partner account manager in Redmond.

If you are a Microsoft VAR, SI or consultant, we want to talk with you. We highly value our partner relationships and strive to provide you with exceptional value. Some of the benefits we can offer are listed here.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what one of our partners had to say:

“Our partnership with Colligo was a strategic decision,” said Tim Wallis, CEO of Content and Code Ltd. in the United Kingdom. “Colligo for SharePoint fits well with our business model and allows our customers to meet key requirements, including the capability of working offline and great drag-and-drop functionality. Colligo for SharePoint allows our customers to expand on an existing MOSS platform and opens opportunities to branch out within the organizations.”

If you like what you see, please apply here, or email sales@colligo.com, to become a Colligo for SharePoint partner today.

This year, the Colligo team distributed over 1,000 free t-shirts at the SharePoint Conference in Seattle and at the Tech-Ed IT Professionals Conference in Orlando, Florida. The Share. t-shirt has become so popular that we’ve received several requests to purchase it online.

Now you can now buy your own Share. shirts on the Colligo Online Store. In addition to the standard black and white shirt, there are also other styles and colors available. This is your opportunity to stand out at the next Microsoft conference. In fact, you will stand out anywhere. I recently wore my Share. shirt to the Vancouver Folk Festival. Lots of people commented on the positive message… I didn’t have the heart to tell them about the SharePoint connection

Get your Share. T-Shirt HERE

Colligo Contributor version 3.1 has just been released. The big news in this release is more advanced support for metadata, which is particularly useful for using SharePoint in ECM applications. Now you can set folder level metadata in SharePoint using the Contributor Client, Add-In or Pro - a feature not currently available on the server. The key enhancements in version 3.1 are highlighted below:

• Folder-Level Default Metadata Support SharePoint supports default metadata at the library-level. But with Contributor 3.1, users can set folder-level default metadata - to automate the classification of content. They can easily set default metadata once, and eliminate prompting at the time of drag-and-drop:
  
  1. Set default metadata properties at the folder- or list-level
  2. Set metadata prompting on and off at the folder- or list-level


• New Office 2007 Metadata Support - In addition to the “Edit Properties” dialog box in Colligo Contributor, users can now set document metadata right within Office 2007 applications (Office Button >Prepare >Properties). When documents are saved, changes made within Office applications are immediately reflected in the Contributor view of the document library (online or offline) and synced to the server (when online).


• German Language Support - Contributor Pro, Client, and Add-In for Outlook have been localized in German. Contributor is now available in English, German, and French. Stay tuned for additional language options.


• Add-In for Outlook Performance Improvements - Version 3.1 has now been optimized to support larger Colligo folder hierarchies in Outlook so the user experience is faster on startup and background sync.

You can get a FREE 30-day trial today HERE

For the past week I’ve been kayaking up Clayoquot Sound - a positively blissful experience. The trip was organized and guided by my dear friend Kim Crosby from Wildheart Adventures, who always puts on a terrific trip. But (sigh) now that I’m back to reality I noticed a few interesting blog posts that I wanted to share.

Andy Dale MCSE, who works for Officetalk in the UK, wrote a couple of interesting posts. The first one entitled “Six Summer SharePoint Sizzlers” highlighted a number of SharePoint Add-on products that he found interesting. His comments about Colligo Contributor were very flattering, indeed:

“Award winners at Tech Ed 2008. Colligo is a real SharePoint gem because it provides easy offline synchronisation allowing laptop users to always have access to their most important SharePoint libraries.”

In a later post, he did a more in-depth review of Contributor. I love the title: SharePoint “Open All Hours” and this quote:

“SharePoint is now at the heart of many businesses and the addition of Colligo makes it an even more powerful tool and a saviour for the customer facing staff who travel the globe visiting existing and potential customers.”

The next post, “Recording - Exchange Public Folders vs SharePoint - the battle (Community Day 2008)”, is by Joris Poelmans (AKA JOPX), Application Group Manager at Dolmen (www.dolmen.be), a leading Belgian IT services company and Microsoft Gold Partner.

The post is based on a session at “Community Day 2008”. On Community Day, 9 User Groups, Belgian Dynamics Community, Biwug, IT-Talks, Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, Visug, Winsec, and XNAbug combined their efforts and organized a joint-event.

The post features an interesting recording of a “battle” that pits SharePoint against Exchange Public Folders. This is very topical for me given the recent series of posts I did here on Email Management in SharePoint. In the recording, Ilse Van Criekinge, Exchange MVP (and Community Day keynote speaker) and Joris Poelmans (SharePoint MVP) stage a “punch up” to see if the new kid on the block, SharePoint, can give a black eye to the old master, Exchange Public Folders. I think SharePoint fares rather well and only comes out with a few minor scrapes. A special thanks to Joris for demoing Colligo Contributor Client about 30 minutes into the recording. I think that Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook can help SharePoint bulk up even more against EPFs because it enables users to drag and drop emails into SharePoint document libraries from right within the Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 interface. Now that’s a battle I’d love to see: SharePoint+Contributor Add-in vs. Exchange Public Folders - Las Vegas here we come!

This is the fourth and final post in a series based on a Colligo whitepaper called “Developing an Effective Email Management Solution in SharePoint”. If you’d like to read the full whitepaper or view the associated webinar with special guest speaker, Kathy Hughes, Microsoft MVP, you can get them here.

In the third post we outlined some of the tradeoffs that need to be made when developing an email management solution in SharePoint, then explored the capabilities of the out-of-the-box solutions. In this post we will take a closer look at our product – Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook. This is not meant to be an advertorial, but to provide a bit more detail on why we incorporated certain features into the product.

Colligo Contributor Add-In integrates many SharePoint elements into the Outlook interface, including document libraries, lists, metadata, views, and content types. It also includes special support for Outlook emails (discussed later). It’s a small .NET application that’s installed either by the user or, in an enterprise deployment, by IT using a silent install. There are a number of configuration options available that can be applied on the .msi during installation or updated using a login script. The Contributor Add-In does not require server installations or configuration other than conventional SharePoint (MOSS or WSS).

With Contributor Add-In, files and emails can be dragged and dropped into SharePoint document libraries that are accessible through the Outlook folder tree. Emails can also be moved or copied into SharePoint automatically using Outlook rules. Depending on the sync configuration and whether users are connected to the network, files and emails are immediately uploaded to the server or cached for automatic synchronization the next time users are online.

SharePoint libraries and lists are added to Outlook using the “Connect to Outlook” button that is automatically installed on the Internet Explorer toolbar. This enables users to create a SharePoint folder in Outlook in a self-serve fashion with no IT administration required. It reduces the hassle for both users and IT compared to Exchange 2007 Managed Folders with auto-copy as discussed in a previous post. Optionally, IT administrators can push out a configuration file to the client that automatically links a set of document libraries and folders to Outlook without user intervention. This file can also be used to manage a number of configuration options, including default metadata for individual folders (see discussion of version 3.1 launching in the last week of June 2008).

Colligo Contributor Add-In can synchronize many SharePoint elements, and has capabilities to handle emails and attachments. When an email is dragged from the inbox or other Outlook folder into an email library, an event handler on the client extracts the message fields and automatically populates the corresponding metadata fields before the file is stored in the document library. Users can also set the content type and add custom metadata at that time, or later (from within Outlook), for further classification. The email, attachments, and metadata are immediately uploaded to SharePoint as a .msg file with an automatically generated unique name.

Attachments can also be dragged and dropped into document libraries. Users can be optionally prompted to add custom metadata to classify attachments. Files stored in SharePoint document libraries that are cached in Outlook can be dragged onto emails as attachments. This highlights one of the advantages of Colligo Contributor, namely that users can set content type and metadata at the time they move content to SharePoint. The metadata editor shown below pops up when users drag-and-drop emails or attachments into document libraries through Contributor folders. With the Contributor Add-In, users do not need to go to the browser afterwards to set required metadata or change the content type – they always stay in the Outlook interface.

Metadata support is further enhanced in Contributor Version 3.1 (scheduled for release at the end of June 2008). Folder-level metadata support fills in a gap in SharePoint by enabling users, or IT through the configuration file mentioned earlier, to set default metadata properties at the folder- or list-level. Metadata prompting can then be turned off so users need only drop content into a folder to automatically upload and set default metadata. Also in version 3.1 is Office 2007 metadata support which enables users to set metadata through the “Document Properties” pane in Office 2007 as an alternative to the Contributor “New Item” dialog.

A standard SharePoint document library that has been setup with a metadata (columns) that represent email message fields (i.e. To, From, Subject, etc.) is all that’s required on the SharePoint side. An optional .xml file on the client can be used to configure the mapping of email properties to metadata fields. Email libraries with these characteristics can be setup by site administrators, designers, or end users through the use of content types that are available in SharePoint 2007. Content types can also provide a way to setup document retention policies, which can be used to determine when emails are to be deleted or routed for archival. There’s a good article on the Colligo Support site that describes how to setup document libraries and map metadata.

The Colligo Contributor Add-In can provide users access to SharePoint content and views whether they are on or off the network because it has the option to cache SharePoint offline. Local caching improves user productivity with instant access to content when working offline (e.g. when travelling) or over slow connections. Of course, for users who only work online, or for large email libraries, caching is neither required nor practical so the Add-In provides the option to cache on a library-by-library basis. Note that drag-and-drop and automatic metadata extraction for this library work in the same way as in the cached version. For office workers who will never require offline caching, Contributor Add-In is available in an online-only configurations.

For a closer look at the Colligo Contributor Add-In, you may want to view the Contributor (Outlook AddIn) Quick Overview screencast on the Colligo support site.

Windows IT Pro and SQL Server magazines announced last Friday that Colligo Contributor Pro won Best of Tech-Ed 2008 in the Productivity and Collaboration category. We had the pleasure of attending the awards ceremony on Thursday evening at the “Terminator 2″ in Universal Studios and were pleasantly surprised when they announced we’d won. Gotta say I’m really proud of the team at Colligo who created the product and then generated the market awareness that got it noticed. And thanks to the many customers who gave us the opportunity to prove that Contributor delivers tangible benefits.

Update July 20, 2008: Many thanks to Carla Gestach of Syntergy for the photo. Syntergy won the Attendees Pick Award that same night. Left to right are me, Genèse Castonguay (VP Marketing) and Bill England (Director of Sales for North America).

We’ve posted a link to the webinar (”Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Email Management”) that was held on May 29. I mentioned it a few posts back. It’s available here. For those that weren’t able to attend, this is a great way to catch up on the content you missed. It also includes the whitepaper (”Developing an Effective Email Management Solution in SharePoint”) that my series of posts on email management in MOSS was based upon.

Kathy Hughes, MOSS MVP, does a terrific job. She was such a pleasure to work with. A special thanks to her for creating and delivering such great content!

By the way, there were over 1,700 registrants for the live webinar. We had about 150 questions to answer by email afterwards. Wheh! And we’ve had hundreds of people download it in the last couple of days. Obviously a very active topic of interest to a lot of people.

During the webinar registration process, we conducted a little survey. The results were interesting and I’ll post them here.