Writing in CMSWire magazine, Joe Shepley argues that whilst SharePoint adoption is an excellent way to ‘move off your current ailing repository of choice and provide improved document management to your organisation’, there is a danger that the platform’s benefits will not be realised if implemented ‘out of the box’, and without the benefit of any expert SharePoint development knowledge:

“Deploying a generic, one size fits all SharePoint environment will, four times out of ten, fail to gain the kind of adoption needed to make a difference in your organisation’s document management landscape”, he contends.

He further argues that even if adoption is successful, continued monitoring and governance is needed to ensure the platform carries on fulfilling its maximum potential.

Shepley is keen to emphasise that the dangers of poor implementation and improper usage are ones that can bedevil all IT adoptions, and that any subsequent ‘problems’ with SharePoint will almost certainly be down to the organisation in question rather than SharePoint:

“IT delivery isn’t done well at most organisations, so to expect IT to do SharePoint any better…is a bit unrealistic”, he says.

To implement SharePoint successfully for ECM, Shipley argues, organisations must go beyond seeing SharePoint as a mere document storage application, and more as an asset management platform ‘on which you must build applications’.

Admittedly, the statement did not reveal any details on the impending improvements to SharePoint. It did, however, when looked at in conjunction with what we also know about other impending Microsoft activity, hint at when we might see the new SharePoint version being released.

First things first: the statement itself.

This was issued by the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Office Division, PJ Hough, and confirmed that the new version of SharePoint would be released at the same time as the release of Microsoft’s new version of Office – the latter currently known as ‘Office 15’.

“With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio”, the statement said.

We know that Office 15 has already been released for technical preview, and that Microsoft intends releasing the public beta version late in the summer.

Now, the smart money among industry observers is on the full public release of Office 15 being made available at the end of the year. This is because it is anticipated to follow the likely launch of the corporation’s new Windows platform, Windows 8; which itself is expected to take place sometime between late summer and the end of the year.

Ergo, we would therefore hope to also see the new version of SharePoint in London at the end of the year.

The publisher focussed on data from its offices in both New York and Scranton, Pennsylvania as the source of its new intranet content. It says it has already migrated several of its existing Windows files from these locations onto its new SharePoint platform; including data from market research activity, files pertaining to press releases, and documents focussing on the company’s history.

HarperCollins says it now also plans to move its records management files, its legal files, and its corporate business documents onto the SharePoint site.

HarperCollins’s new SharePoint intranet solution is understood to be the corporation’s first true collaborative, communications-based enterprise web development platform.

The publisher admits that the process of migrating its complex realms of data to the new platform – particularly from its New York offices where a high volume of documents and files relating to the organisation’s human resources and corporate communication activities had been stored – had presented a particularly taxing logistical challenge.

The task, however, it says, was greatly accelerated with the assistance of specialist Axceler FileLoader software.

Senior manager of systems development for HarperCollins, John DeGiglio, explained the corporation’s initial concerns:

“At first glance, the movement of all that data was daunting. Doing it manually would have required months of time from our corporate communications team”.

Using the FileLoader software, the process is reported to have taken just under a week to complete.

According to the survey, carried out by Redshift Research on behalf of communications hardware supplier, Cisco, for every three smartphone requests by an employee, there is currently one request for a tablet. In the UK alone, 27% of senior executives are already being issued with tablets.

The survey found however, that security was a major concern regarding tablet use in the workplace, particularly in the use of apps. As a consequence, 56% of UK IT managers believed that access to apps should be restricted among employees.

Another major security concern involved the growing instances of employees bringing their own tablets into work, regardless of whether such actions were officially permitted. 51% of IT managers said they had noticed an increase in the number of such devices in the workplace.

On the other hand, the survey also revealed that 75% of IT managers believed document sharing to be a ‘must have’ feature; whilst around 50% agreed that employees needed to be able to access company databases.

The survey also showed that most IT managers believed that customised tablet apps would be good for their business.

The survey would therefore appear to suggest a possible future in which enterprise tablets and apps will be a common feature; accepted by employer and employee alike in order to help facilitate easy access to enterprise collaboration and file sharing platforms such as SharePoint.

The Nielsen Norman winners were chosen for qualities including operational effectiveness, strength in facilitating social networking, smoothness of information architecture (IA), effective content management and capacity for holding multiple document batches.

Among the ten winners were two companies from the UK – communications specialists Everything Everywhere, and business technology group Logica. The list also included three major household names – Staples, Skanska, and Scotts Miracle-Gro.

SharePoint is reported to have provided the basis for three of these top ten intranets; whilst a further two of the winners were also said to have utilised SharePoint for other employee collaboration purposes, and to have used SharePoint data for the provision of their intranet search results.

Commenting on the findings, SharePoint expert Susan Hanley, said that SharePoint would probably have featured in more winning corporate intranets had the enterprises concerned widened their search to look for the best platform, rather than simply rely on historical solutions.

Hanley says her assessment is supported by the fact that a few of the winning teams are reported to have expressed regret at not having carried out a more comprehensive assessment of intranet platforms in order to find a more appropriate solution for their particular needs.

Wales, who originally hails from Alabama, says he is so impressed with the Silicon Roundabout area that he actually prefers it to Silicon Valley.

“Silicon Roundabout”, he says, has “a lot of energy and a lot of people doing interesting things”:

“If you’re looking for a stimulating environment with different people and art to fuel the soul, London is a great city in a way that Silicon Valley isn’t”, he says.

In contrast, Wales describes Silicon Valley as ‘sprawling and empty’:

“Nobody really wants to live in Palo Alto’, he says; adding that ‘there’s nothing in terms of cultural amenities that would be of interest to creative, highly intellectual people”.

Wales is now said to be on course to up sticks to London and live there with his fiancée, Kate Garvey.

Silicon Roundabout, the focal point for the ‘Tech City’ area between Shoreditch and Stratford in East London, has truly blossomed from its 2008 total of just 15 technology-based companies to the 250 or so techy companies that are estimated there today.

We at Web Media 360 have to admit that Silicon Roundabout provides the perfect stimulus for our creative SharePoint development work.

By the way, if you don’t believe the great things we and countless others say about Silicon Roundabout, you might want to look the place up in Wikipedia…

Microsoft enjoyed a 5% rise in revenue over the same quarter in 2010 – from $19.9 billion to $20.89 billion. At the same time, the net income for the corporation stood at $6.62 billion, equating to a better than expected earnings per share ratio of $0.76.

Although Microsoft’s consumer sector did not perform as well as the corporation might have wished, its business division appeared to be going from strength to strength; and it was this latter performance, from applications and platforms such as SharePoint, which significantly helped to boost Microsoft’s overall performance.

Revenue from the business division rose by 3% on the previous year, to $6.28 billion. Revenue from SharePoint specifically, combined with Microsoft’s lower capacity collaborative application, Exchange, rose by 10%.

The strength of SharePoint did not come as a surprise to many industry observers, given the platform’s current dominant position in the global documentation and collaboration sphere.

With so many different companies the world over still discovering for themselves features such as the SharePoint Org Chart and the solutions contained in their SharePoint Service catalogue, it is no surprise to many that Microsoft has said it is upbeat regarding the prospects for 2012.

Anywhere Working is designed to help enterprises make the best use of new technology in order to reduce their dependence on employees having to travel to work or to attend meetings.

The consortium has now set up an online portal which enterprises can use to access further information and guidance to help them participate in the initiative, and to provide them with other relevant items such as product purchase incentives.

The launch of the portal presages a planned push for the initiative during Anywhere Working Week, which kicks off on 27th February.

Commenting on Microsoft’s commitment to Anywhere Working, the corporation’s UK managing director, Gordon Frazer, said:

“It’s no longer viable for businesses to stick to rigid, inefficient ways of working if they want to compete successfully in the market”.

Frazer revealed that the consortium had received: “fantastic feedback from people who want to learn how to work in a more dynamic and collaborative environment, anytime, anywhere”.

Microsoft has of course itself taken huge strides towards helping enterprises achieve this goal; through, for example, the launch last year of Microsoft Office 365 – its online suite of applications and platforms that includes SharePoint, the globally popular solution which so many of our clients use for their file storage and collaboration needs.

The survey, carried out by security consultants, Cryptzone, was based on the views and attitudes of SharePoint users canvassed whilst attending a SharePoint conference in the UK last November.

Among the findings of the survey was the revelation that 45% of respondents had copied documents from SharePoint onto low security media such as email; with 18% admitting they regularly carried out such copying.

Although 92% of those surveyed said they were aware that copying SharePoint documents in this way undermined the system’s security, many said they felt they had no choice in the matter, largely owing to the fact that those with whom they wished to communicate did not have access to SharePoint.

Tying in with this, 56% of respondents claimed the organisations they worked for did not permit access to SharePoint by selected third parties; even though there was a legitimate business need to share crucial documents and other information with these outside contacts.

Overall, of those who admitted moving documents out of SharePoint, 33% claimed they did not consider the potential threat to security, whilst 30% claimed that operational requirements left them with no other choice. 23% meanwhile claimed that the documents they had moved did not have any security implications.

In light of the survey, Cryptzone has recommended a number of measures including encrypting the most confidential documents.

We were, for example, extremely interested in the findings of research recently undertaken in the US by international technology analysis firm, Nucleus Research, into the financial benefits of introducing an electronic enterprise content management (ECM) system.

The research identified that the average return on investment (ROI) from introducing such a platform amounted to $6.12 for every dollar invested.

The research also revealed that the financial advantages of adopting an ECM system did not only relate to the direct cost savings afforded on items such as stationery and third party storage costs – savings which accounted for an average 62% of ROI; but also on indirect gains, such as ECM’s acknowledged capacity for helping firms increase their productivity -a benefit which, on average, contributed 38% of ROI.

Microsoft SharePoint is of course much more than an ECM platform: being at once also a framework tool for enterprise web development – including the creation of enterprise intranet and extranet portals; as well as serving as a means of facilitating collaboration between employees.

However, its strengths as an ECM platform are well documented.

It is also interesting to relate comments by Nucleus Research, claiming that cloud-based ECM platforms are likely to increase the adoption of ECM among smaller firms, to the fact that SharePoint was included in the launch last year of the online package, Microsoft Office 365.