Microsoft recently made available in New Zealand the following online services to all partners and clients under the BPOS banner (Business Productivity Online Services). This offering has some real value if your organisation is a small business who do not need to worry too much about managing your IT infrastructure on premise. MS has made available SharePoint, MS Exchange and Office Communications and Live Meeting which you can pay as you go for a fraction of the cost of hosting and managing your own infrastructure.   The registration process was very straightforward and I was able to get up and running within 10 minutes of going through the online sign on process. From a cost point of view a single mailbox for Exchange start at $17 or so. Check out the online calculator.   You can trial the “Business Productivity Online Standard S ...[Read More]

I posted about Michael's book Seamless Teamwork back in November. on 19th of February 2009 Michael is holding a webinar on improving your existing investment in SharePoint. In this webinar, you will learn 7 key strategies that you can implement today to: Drive effective collaboration, innovation and new business processes using SharePoint Expand SharePoint into new areas including document management, project management and email management Apply new tools and technologies such as wikis, blogs and RSS feeds to maximize communication and team collaboration Implement effective strategies and solutions to increase user adoption and improve the SharePoint user experience If you are a CIO, CKO, Line of Business Manager, IT Manager or SharePoint Administrator responsible for ensuring your organization is achieving maximum benefit ...[Read More]

I finally got my copy of Michael Sampson's new book "Seamless Teamwork".   Seamless Teamwork helps people in collaborative teams envision how to accomplish their work using Microsoft SharePoint. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate how SharePoint can be used to support team collaboration, innovation and the carrying out of daily business activities.   I recommend this book if you are a project/program manager or a team member of an organisation who has a SharePoint deployment and want to understand the context of how and when to use SharePoint to help form a team and work towards achieving an outcome. Michael's way of writing brings home some very common scenarios that typical projects go through and outlines how SharePoint can actually help facilitate the process. It's purely from a perspective of using the out ...[Read More]

Michael Sampson has published his white paper titled "The 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity: The Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Analysis" that he has been working on based on his previous "SharePoint for Business" framework. As usual it has drawn the attention of some as being a total shoot down of the capability of SharePoint. What I am referring to is the article titled "Study Takes Aim At SharePoint's Shortcomings" and Michael's response to various others. If one reads Michael's paper one should come to the conclusion that it highlights areas for positive improvement that can and rightly so should be done to match Michael's 7 pillars framework on IT enabled team productivity and collaboration and NOT that SharePoint is useless and no one should ever touch it. There is more than enough proof in the ...[Read More]

One of the projects that we designed and delivered has been just announced as one of the best ten Intranets on the Nielsen Norman Group's "Intranet Design Annual 2008: Year's Ten Best Intranets". The report can be downloaded from Nielsen Norman group web site. The 10 winning intranets featured in the report are: Bank of America, United States Bankinter S.A., Spain Barnes & Noble, United States British Airways, United Kingdom Campbell Soup Company, United States Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, United States IKEA North America Service, LLC, United States Ministry of Transport, New Zealand (Built with MOSS!!)New South Wales, Department of Primary Industries, Australia SAP AG, Germany Last April at the Wellington SharePoint User Group I did a session with Ari showcasing this Intranet solution in Phase 1 and hi ...[Read More]

Now this was something that I thought was about to happen! Great stuff, read the article here! http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/24cnd-facebook.html?ex=1350964800&en=c27e6c86844c7723&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all Lawrence Liu hinted at this sometime ago here. With SharePoint and My Sites you already get some of the Social Networking aspects already in your organisation if you are using SharePoint! Technorati Tags: Facebook, MSFT, Web 2.0, Social Networking ...[Read More]

I will be attending and presenting a session and case study on MOSS at the "7th Annual Strategic Intranet and Enterprise Portal Management Conference" in Auckland New Zealand on 28th and 29th of August. The session is on the deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.   Session details are as follows. Case Study: The NZ Government Embraces SharePoint 2007With the recent release of the new Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) platform, many Public Sector organisations are now considering deploying MOSS technologies as the foundation for their Intranet. This session looks at New Zealand’s first ever Intranet deployment using MOSS technologies. Following the project from design through to deployment, the presenters will talk about their approach to solving the Ministry ...[Read More]

Michael's collaboration firm has published the white paper "SharePoint for Business: A Six Step Strategy for Achieving Collaboration Success and Improving Business with SharePoint" This is probably one of the best white papers available which has a unique business perspective on SharePoint. Michael has done an excellent evaluation on this paper and I believe it is a must read if you are planning to implement SharePoint. The cost is US$49 per copy. Head over to his blog to view information on how you can purchase this white paper. Microsoft SharePoint is garnering much attention in organizations, with Microsoft's business partners, among the analyst community, and in the press. It is now a fundamental element of Microsoft's Office suite and servers. The technology of SharePoint has improved substantially with the 2007 edit ...[Read More]