e2.oh » sharepoint

Alfresco Share Heart SharePoint

Jay Hariani — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:44:22 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post; a longish assignment in Jakarta and the trials and tribulations of first time home ownership seem to have led my attentions elsewhere. Being overseas did give me the opportunity to sell a client on some new and interesting technology though – in this case, Alfresco’s Alfresco 3 / Alfresco Share web-based collaboration suite. Our client (a large intergovernmental organization headquartered in Jakarta) was interested in replacing a legacy document management system that had fallen into disuse. SharePoint was of course bandied about, amongst other things, but I ended up prototyping a beta of Alfresco Share:

Share combines social media capabilities like blogs and wikis with powerful search and an intuitive interface. Best of all, it has SharePoint Protocol Support. To Word or PowerPoint, Alfresco looks like a SharePoint repository, allowing Office suite programs to use Alfresco as if were speaking to SharePoint This has some interesting implications for organizations that want to move away from MOSS or WSS to something that’s open source, flexible, and relatively inexpensive (or free, if you can forgo support).
With Share, Aflresco steps into the Enterprise 2.0 suite category, a market niche that is getting a lot of attention lately. But, Alfresco’s differentiators here – that it has powerful ECM underpinnings, that prior revisions have been tested in the enterprise, and those users that are used to being able to use SharePoint document libraries are still able to do so – set it apart from its competitors.

For anyone out there that is heading down the E2.0 suite path, download their quick installer and give it a whirl. It’s worth a close look.

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SharePoint & Web 2.0 Part Deux

Jay Hariani — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:19:20 +0000

Since we come face to face with it so frequently in the enterprise, it’s always a good idea to keep abreast of what SharePoint offers when it comes to E2.0. I blogged before about how Microsoft is avoiding rolling content creation capabilities into the platform to preserve other revenue streams, but there is still a lot of attention being paid to how to make SharePoint credible for social media, folkonsmies, etc. SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff posted The Ultimate List of SharePoint Add Ons and Tools for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 And Social Networking Features . I’ll also take a moment to plug my personal favorite: Atlassian’s SharePoint connector for Confluence. SharePoint excels at wrangling Office-format documents, but will require substantial tweaking to be a viable social computing platform.

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SharePoint & Web 2.0

Jay Hariani — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:11:38 +0000

The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technology blog just posted on the best way to update a blog on SharePoint. They suggest two pieces of client software:

While I’m sure both of these are great programs, and good ways to generate rich content; promoting the use of client software as a way of interacting with web-based social media applications is a view that, in this day and age, might be held uniquely by Microsoft. SharePoint, which has gained admirable market share amongst “Old IT”, seems to eschew online content creation. While I’m not saying that TinyMCE (used as the GUI text editor in our firm’s Confluence deployment) or Google Docs are as feature-rich as Word, there is certainly a lot of effort being expended to get them closer. This begs the question: When will Microsoft start building web-based versions of Word and the other Office suite members? Albany seems a half-hearted attempt at a SaaS model.

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