Enterprise Content Management for SharePoint 2013

Enterprise Content Management for SharePoint 2013

The topic of enterprise content management (ECM) on SharePoint is always a hot one, and the hype is ever-growing with the 2013 release.

After all Microsoft is a Gartner MQ ECM Leader, so it must continue to innovate in this space to keep up with the other ECM leaders. At #spc12, I attended a session covering Microsoft’s efforts to increase their clout in ECM with SharePoint 2013. The presenters were Tejas Mehta, Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Jim Masson, Group Product Manager — Enterprise Content Management.

ECM in SharePoint 2010 vs SharePoint 2013

The session began with a quick recap of what Microsoft’s message was with the 2010 release and how that contrasts to the current message with 2013. In 2010, Microsoft really drove home the concept of combining traditional ECM capabilities with newer social capabilities on one platform. The impact of enterprise social was a major shift for Microsoft, and they drove that notion with much of the features in the 2010 Office/SharePoint products.
But we’re 3 years removed from that change, and most organizations are at the very least aware of enterprise social and looking at ways to invest in it. In 2013, the message with ECM is one of convergence and usability. This is in line with the greater Microsoft message about cleaner interfaces and better usability across all of their flagship products, which recently had brand new releases this year.

ECM in SharePoint: Create, Control, Protect

More specifically, the marketing team is selling the theme by highlighting 3 specific pillars, Create, Control and Protect.

Create: Content Creation & Access

The Create pillar is all about content creation and access. Microsoft is making it easier to find documents and e-mail together in SharePoint with unified views on team sites. For social, the newsfeeds are much more impactful for understanding how your colleagues are working with content that you’re interested in. The enterprise social features are much easier to use and they resemble the big social networks, as you can follow just about anything in SharePoint and even use mentions and hashtags, a la Twitter.

Control: Governance & Search Driven Experiences

The second pillar, Control, has a focus on a mixture of governance along with search driven user experiences. And although the oft-overused term of governance has been fairly played out, there were five specific things in the demo that showed how the product team is increasing value in this pillar.

First we saw a demo of dragging and dropping a document from Windows Explorer right into SharePoint without having to load any windows or apply metadata. This was also shown during the keynote, and for obvious reasons garnered several applauses. Right after that we were shown how you can edit more than one document at the same time from within SharePoint and apply different types of metadata than you could with 2010.

Specifically you can apply managed metadata terms en masse to all the documents in the library without much trouble. Again, applause from the attendees. The next is the ease of dragging and dropping e-mails from your inbox to Exchange site mailboxes, which can be unified with SharePoint documents on a team site. The great thing here is that any relevant retention policies will apply to both the documents in SharePoint and the Exchange site mailbox. The next was a really nice showing of the new metadata-based navigation with the content query web part in SharePoint. The idea is that you use a managed metadata term set to create a visually appealing navigation based on content already stored in SharePoint matching those terms. And last but not least, we were shown the support that SharePoint 2013 has for HTML 5 video content as well as its ability to automatically recognize video-based content when posting a link on the feed.

Protect: e-Discovery

The final pillar, and the most intriguing for me was the Protect pillar. This is where Microsoft is really adding a lot of functionality for end users, who are completely on the Microsoft stack. The key here is all about e-Discovery. As I mentioned briefly in the previous pillar, e-Discovery now spans documents in SharePoint as well as related e-mail in Exchange.

SharePoint 2013 now offers a fairly advanced set of queries that can help end users find content pertaining to a legal hold or some other reason. The pervasiveness without having to ask IT looks quite good so far, although a more in depth study will need to be performed to see how it will really compete with popular 3rd party e-Discovery tools. The demo of these new features also touched on the ability for a user to export the entire return set based on a query without having do much of anything with IT. Once content is found in SharePoint matching the query, the export will span documents in SharePoint, e-mail stored in Exchange, list data as an Excel file and webpages as an MHT snapshot. The pertinent e-mail is stored in a PST alongside the documents and Excel files. And it will even export a proper manifest in EDRM XML format for compliance reasons.

All in all, these e-Discovery features are quite promising, and it will be interesting to see how vendors respond to this and how they will adapt to remain competitive.

A more in depth look of the new e-Discovery features will be shown in a subsequent post detailing how these changes will be utilized across the entire Office platform.

Favorite Things in SharePoint 2013

Favorite Things in SharePoint 2013

This year at the SharePoint Conference, Greg Brill and myself had the opportunity to present two express sessions. Our sessions were relatively short sessions, designed to quickly highlight key features with SharePoint 2013. One of the sessions was designed to cover five simple improvements in SharePoint 2013 that will make everyday tasks easier to complete. In this article we will be reviewing the five features that made it into my top five list!

1. Sharing Content

The first feature to make the list was Share. Within 2013 there are now easy ways for users to see who has access to the content they are reviewing, as well as a way for them to easily share the content with users. The Share features depend on the User Access Request settings being configured and they follow a process so that if a user doesn't have the permissions required to grant access that the request is first filtered through the site admin. This allows for users to quickly and easily share content with other users, but doesn't allow permissions to be granted on a whim.

With this new scenario a user really only needs to understand that they want to share data, click the link and enter the user's name. The admin will then get the request and then grant access or deny the request. 90% of the time in previous versions of the product it seemed like permissions where being managed correctly, but when that last 10% hit it could often result in a large mess that needed to be corrected.

Because of the risk, it was often required that only a small subset of users could manage permissions. This could cause issues because it became a large bottleneck of requests. With this new approach you get the best of both worlds because users can Share content on their own directly from the document or site and then the admin can intersect the request and ensure that permissions have been configured correctly. This is a great example of empowering the users to complete common tasks without assuming a great deal of risk.

2. New Task List Features

Second on the list was the features included in the new tasks list, specifically the timeline features. Gone are the days of a non-customizable Gantt list view that was difficult to read and process. Instead, with this release the SharePoint team and the Project Team worked together to provide us a way to view tasks in a configurable manner. An example is shown below in the image (Fig. 1):

Figure 1

 Any task in the list can easily be added to the Timeline view and then each task can be configured to have its own display style. All of the customization is done in the Ribbon menu that is only selected when you click on the timeline.

In addition to the easy customization options there are improvements with the way that the date format is displayed. SharePoint 2013 includes a setting for each column of the type data that allows for a display in what is referred to as the friendly display. This allows for dates to be displayed in very friendly terms such as “Tomorrow” and “Yesterday” or “A Few Second Ago”.

Having this enabled provides a very natural user experience. And finally, the last win to be highlighted in the task list is the fact that by default, without any configuration, conditional formatting is applied to the contents in the list. This allows for dates to be displayed in Red when they are past due.

3. Following Content

Third on our list of favorites is the ability to quickly follow content. For sites and documents within a site there is an associated Follow link that when used with add a link to the user’s personal pages, allowing them to easily return to the content at a later point in time. This functionality comes with the latest set of Social features that are available in SharePoint 2013.
 
But it is important to note that the following features goes beyond just saving a link to content. With the new Social features also comes the ability to Micro Blog, including the ability to tag a user in a post. When a user sees that they have been tagged in a post they are able to select an option allowing them to “Follow Up” on an item. Once they select this link to follow up a Task will be created for them in their personal page, which also will synchronize to their Outlook tasks (Fig. 2).

Figure 2.

4. Interacting with Search Results

The fourth item to make our top 5 was the ease of interacting with and working with the search results. With the integration of Office Web Apps into the search experience, users can easily see real time data of the content that has been returned in their search results. When a user completes a search they have the ability to see a full preview version of the document that they can interact with, without having to leave the search results. (Fig. 3)

Figure 3

5. Team Mailbox

The final feature in our top 5 is the ability to set up a group mailbox within a team site. Users are able to easily create a shared component in the site that allows for emails to be easily sent to a common shared address. Using these features allows for a team to have access to a shared email account that can easily be managed within SharePoint but still allow for users outside of SharePoint to interact with the team through standard emails.

Just a Few of the Many

This article summarizes just a few of the newest tips and tricks available within SharePoint 2013. The emphasis of this release is definitely about bringing refinement back to the basics. A new take on an old classic! One of the best selling points for moving to 2013 is looking at how all of the small wins and changes can have a big impact in your environment.

Nintex, Colligo, Workshare Add Mobile, Cloud, Collaboration Capabilities to SharePoint

 

A variety of IT vendors debuted add-on solutions that bring functionality including mobile, cloud and collaboration features to SharePoint at last week’s SharePoint Conference held in Las Vegas, NV. Solution providers making noteworthy announcements included Workshare, Colligo, Nintex and Axceler.

Workshare Solutions Improve SharePoint Protection, Comparison, Collaboration

During the SharePoint 2012 Conference, secure document collaboration software provider Workshare demoed four solutions designed to ease the secure sharing and tracking of SharePoint documents outside an organization’s firewall. The four solutions are:

• Workshare Point – This solution allows direct exchange of documents between Microsoft Office and SharePoint, allowing users to perform both Office and SharePoint document tasks with a single platform.
• Workshare Professional 7 – Direct integration of Office document sharing and review capabilities including comparisons, version controls and metadata management with SharePoint enhances their effectiveness.
• Workshare Protect 7 – This solution integrates SharePoint with Microsoft Outlook to automate real-time removal of, or warning about, email attachments of SharePoint documents that include sensitive or unnecessary data such as tracked changes, speaker notes, author names and last time of editing.
• Workshare Compare 7 – This comparison tool is designed to streamline the review of SharePoint documents and PDFs and ease the identification of changes.

Colligo Enables Mobile SharePoint Content Management

SharePoint app provider Colligo introduced Colligo Briefcase, a mobile app for secure SharePoint content management that runs on the Android, Mac OS X and Apple iOS platforms.  Targeting organizations with BYOD policies, Colligo Briefcase enables secure access to SharePoint on Apple iOS, Mac OS X, and Android, including full offline access to all features. (Fig. 1)

Figure 1

In addition, the app offers centrally-configured and managed SharePoint access across user devices and integrates email and metadata management across devices. (Figure 2)

Figure 2

 

Nintex Provides Mobile, Social, Cloud Capabilities

SharePoint workflow solutions provider Nintex is offering mobile, social media and cloud computing capabilities via its new Nintex Workflow 2013 and Nintex Forms 2013 modules which are aligned with the release of SharePoint 2013. Following are brief overviews of how the new applications will deliver functionality in each of these three areas.

• Mobility – Nintex already supports basic mobile usage of SharePoint for Windows 8 and iOS users. New mobile features will allow users to create and respond to HR items and also support touch input, location data, camera photos and digital audio/video.
• Social – The Nintex SharePoint workflow platform already supports major social media networks such as Yammer, Twitter and Facebook. Nintex says it is continuing to add social connectivity and provisioning to provide users with direct access to social media platforms and SharePoint social feeds from one dashboard.  
• Cloud – Nintex has been offering cloud-based SharePoint services for two years, but is now allowing users to directly run SharePoint workflows in the cloud and use combined online/onsite workflows.

 

Axceler Enables SharePoint Change Management

Enterprise collaboration technology specialist Axceler released ControlPoint Change Manager, a solution designed to aid change management across SharePoint 2010 environments. ControlPoint ChangeManager allows SharePoint administrators to copy and restructure SharePoint sites and content, deploy and manage SharePoint workflows, and analyze SharePoint content type and web part usage.

An intuitive user interface allows management and restructuring of SharePoint content from any location, while granular control enables filtering, configuring and refining of content sets. In addition, content can be copied from one source to multiple destinations and users can employ Excel spreadsheets for online and offline editing and data transformation.

 

ControlPoint Change Manager will be generally available in early Q1 2013.  The introductory price will be US$ 5,100 which includes maintenance, with a pre-order promotion price of US$ 2,975 in effect now through December 15th, 2012. 

New SharePoint Development Model Raises Hopes, Questions

According to IDG News Service, the new SharePoint development model has “piqued the interest of ISVs and enterprise developers who create applications for Microsoft's enterprise collaboration server.” While the new standards-compliant model is designed to simplify the development and release of applications for the on-premise and cloud versions of SharePoint 2013, it is still not clear exactly what types of functionality Microsoft will support, or what types and price points of SharePoint apps will best fit within the promised SharePoint app store.

SharePoint 2013, Heavyweight Contender

As CMSWire reported in July, the upcoming release of SharePoint 2013 marks the entrance of the platform as a “heavyweight contender” in the WCM space. New WCM features for SharePoint include SEO tools, URL control, improved on page content management and content aggregation, enhanced mobility and multi-channel management, flexible meta-data driven Information Architecture (IA), search based user experiences (using FAST technology that is now fully integrated, catalog management and integrations with Independent Solution Vendors (ISVs).

But it SharePoint role in enterprise content management space where you see most third-party providers, like those above, offering enhanced capabilities. Governance and compliance are key areas of concern for many. And now even more organizations are looking for third party solutions that make working with SharePoint in cloud environments easier.

The four new third-party SharePoint solutions highlighted in this article are just a small representation of all the new applications showcased at last week’s conference. Expanded internal functionality and external partnerships give SharePoint the potential to rearrange the content management marketplace in the coming months.