In the current version of Communicator you only get to see you contact’s status in the Communicator client and in Outlook.

Communicator 14 to Integrate with SharePoint 2010 Activity Feed is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

In short, SharePoint is a business collaboration platform. It enables employees to publish, share, search, analyse and manage information all through a browser. This video gives one example of how you might use it:

What Can SharePoint Do For Me?

Search

Ever wondered why you can search the entire Internet in 0.2 seconds, and yet finding information in your own organisation is next to impossible?

SharePoint plugs into your existing intranet, file shares, databases and applications to become the Google for your company, One central location to search for everything, regardless of where it might be stored.

Collaboration and Knowledge Management

How do you make sure knowledge stays in the company if employees leave? How can you make sure knowledge is shared across the organisation instead of having staff repeatedly solve the same problem, simply because they don’t know a solution already exists?

With SharePoint you can create community sites (sometimes called communities of interest, or communities of practice) where staff can share knowledge and best practices. You can create blogs and wikis, and each employee gets a personalised home page -  just like you are already familiar with in Facebook or LinkedIn – but with all the appropriate security, and none of the risks, of using public collaboration tools.

Document Management and Compliance

Have you ever been stuck waiting for someone to finish making changes to a document before you can add your contribution? Or worse still, edited a document only to find someone else has accidentally deleted your edits because they didn’t realise they had the wrong version?

SharePoint provides one central place to store documents, track changes, group related documents, retain, archive and manage records. SharePoint 2010 also adds new features supporting eDiscovery – helping you find and place holds on information subject to legal process and enables several people to edit the same document simultaneously meaning you never have to wait for your colleagues again!

Manage Teams and Projects

Coordinating and managing teams and complex projects can be a tricky task, but SharePoint enables everyone to work together effectively with shared team calendars, contact lists, task lists and document libraries. SharePoint becomes the central information hub that staff collaborate around, rather than having documents and information locked away on personal hard drives and in email. What’s more, if you’re a mobile worker, SharePoint Workspace let you take that information and continue to work on it while you are offline.

Track Your Business Performance

How often have you gone to a meeting and looked at print-outs of charts or data, and then tried to figure out who has the most up-to-date or correct version? SharePoint enables users to upload charts and data visualisations they have created in Excel and share them across the company without sharing the underlying data set or formulas. This means you get one “version of the truth” that the whole company can use to track your monthly business goals and understand how their performance contributes to the overall number.

How Can I Try It?

You have the choice of a traditional in-house deployment, or a cloud-based subscription offering.

The hosted cloud offering has the advantage that you can get started right away, there are no up-front licence fees or hardware costs to pay, and you don’t need to spend time and money training in-house IT staff on how to operate SharePoint before you begin. Sign-up for a 30 day free trial, or learn more about our hosted offering first.

If you prefer in-house deployment we can provide you with a 180-day trial licence for SharePoint and share our expertise to help you get up and running with useful sites and solutions tailored to your business for a small cost. To find out more, contact us at info@connectegrity.com.

SharePoint Explained is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

Yesterday Microsoft announced the successor to their current crop of Windows Mobile phones, to be called Windows Phone 7 Series. Interesting in the announcement was built-in SharePoint integration, shown in the image above. I wonder… might it just start to make an impact on Blackberry’s dominance in big business?

Neat demo of the phone’s capabilities here:

Windows Phone 7 Series – SharePoint Integration is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

Interesting stuff I came across this week:

SharePoint for Legal Project Management–A Retrospective – “To help you understand the power of SharePoint, I thought I would share what I was able to start doing with it within a week of it having it set-up…”

Case Study: Alternative Fees – “We are at the tipping point when it comes to the billable hour, and one law firm leading the way into the future is Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP…It studied what clients stated in writing what they wanted, gave it to them, and generated lots of new business.”

Get Connected or Get Out of the Kitchen – “I’ll make a prediction here that I’ll review this time in 2011. There will emerge two types of solicitors firms by the end of the year: those that have fully adopted IT systems for service delivery and those that have not.”

Web Favourites Jan 18 2010 is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

(The picture here is from NASA’s Terra satellite last week and show the extent of the snow and icy conditions on frozen Britain.)

Interesting stuff I came across this week:

A Case for Operating in the Cloud – “Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ enabled me to survive this downturn, will help me thrive in the upturn”. One law firm explain how they cut costs and moved to Exchange Online and SharePoint Online with Microsoft BPOS.

10 Things SharePoint can do for Your Law Firm – How to use SharePoint to “improve attorney effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs”.

Why Some People Are Reluctant to Share – Rajesh Shetty explains the knowledge capture problem of KM tools: When something becomes obvious people tend to stop sharing.

Web Favourites Jan 10 2010 is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

In its current state, KM has turned into a mechanism that attempts to capture explicit knowledge in a way that is seamless to the person creating that knowledge. The results turn out to be databases filled with retrievable information presented as contributed knowledge from someone within the firm. So, we end up with CRM databases, document management systems, research capturing tools and expertise databases. All of which are simply ways that KM has attempted to capture the explicit knowledge of those within the firm as it written down in order to be retrieved at a later time by others in the firm. Unfortunately, this has become the classical KM routine, and the resulting product turns out to be a rarely used resource because the data is either ‘dirty’, obsolete or irrelevant to the current needs of those within the firm.

The Geeks are right. KM as we know it is dead. And the sooner we all realise that, the better.

The key problem of traditional KM tools is a human one: When something becomes obvious, people tend to stop sharing. It becomes implanted in their subconscious as background thinking and they cease to write it down. Rajesh Setty explains this phenomenon beautifully in Why are some people reluctant to share?

What is needed instead are simple tools that connect people to people and their knowledge. And they are not always technology tools…

In my 7 years at Microsoft plenty of KM initiatives came and went but nothing was anywhere near as successful these simple social business tools:

1. Searchable discussion forums – by far the most important mechanism for sharing knowledge. Why? Because it is based on need. People ask questions, and they get a response, as and when they need it. (Too many KM system entries are based on what experts think people need, or what they think is good for them)
2. People Search - the ability to search for people based on their area of expertise, see where they sit in your social graph, and get an introduction.
3. Instant Messaging - to be able to ask questions of experts in time critical situations. You should aim to create a flat organisation. Create a culture where staff are empowered to ask questions of experts and where experts are rewarded for sharing knowledge.
4. A buddying system for new hires to coach them on the company culture and processes – all the stuff that isn’t in the training manual.
5. A mentoring programme for all staff to help people build connections both up and across the business.

Blogs and Wikis also had a place too, but to a lesser extent. Blogs were good for keeping up to date with news from various parts of the company. Wikis useful when a group were collaborating to solve a problem or document a process for the first time.

Finally, in 2008 a prototype twitter-like service called TownSquare was introduced which was incredibly was useful for keeping up to date on what your network was working on. This will see the light of day in SharePoint 2010 later this year.

So there you have it… my take on knowledge management and the use of social tools to capture and share knowledge. 

What tools and techniques have you found most useful for sharing knowledge across your organisation?

Social Knowledge Management is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services

Following on from my summary the other day of official SharePoint 2010 resources, here’s a list of 20+ official Microsoft Office and SharePoint product team blogs that you can count on to have the most up-to-date product information as we head towards launch.

SharePoint Server 2010 Blogs

• SharePoint Team Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Social Computing Blog
• Business Connectivity Services (BCS – formerly BDC) Team Blog
• SharePoint BI Blog
• SharePoint Enterprise Search Blog
• SharePoint Content Management (ECM) Team Blog
• Records Management Team Blog
• Office Web Applications
• PerformancePoint Services
• Unified Communications Blog

Office 2010 Client App Blogs

• Office 2010 Blog
• Outlook Team Blog
• Word Team Blog
• Excel Team Blog
• PowerPoint Team Blog
• SharePoint Designer Team Blog
• SharePoint Workspace Team Blog
• InfoPath Team Blog
• Access Team Blog
• Project Team Blog
• Visio Team Blog

Have I missed anything? Leave a comment below to let me know.

Official SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Blogs is a post from: Connectegrity providers of SharePoint Solutions for legal, accouting and professional services