Microsoft SharePoint 2007
Immediacy has long recognised the steadily growing adoption
of Microsoft SharePoint in areas such as lightweight document
collaboration and structured information management.
Given Microsoft’s ubiquitous presence for Office desktop
software and email/messaging solutions, it has always been in the
strongest position of all the biggest Enterprise Content Management
vendors to connect everything up to enable new ways for people
to collaborate and share knowledge. Its latest releases of Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
and Exchange 2007, take these capabilities further.
However, it is becoming increasingly acknowledged that web
publishing and content management remain a key weakness of the new
releases, with a lack of standards compliance and complexities in
implementation that extend project cycles and increase deployment
costs.
Immediacy has invested considerable resources in understanding
the new Microsoft SharePoint platform and how and where it makes
most sense to integrate with it.
Our SharePoint Connector capabilities enables organisations to
exploit the List functions that are core to the Windows SharePoint
Services (WSS) platform and other SharePoint implementations.
SharePoint Lists are essentially a non-technical interface to
data held within SQL databases. They enable organisations to create
templated lists or even basic applications for handling all manner
of data needs, from sales leads, holiday requests and product
comparison data to marketing campaign tracking, inventory lists and
contacts directory.
Teams within an organisation can use the collaboration
capabilities, that SharePoint is essentially designed for, to
compile list data and then have it displayed in relevant formats
via Immediacy driven sites.
Feasibly, this means that organisations can have the ‘best of
both worlds’ – the Office and Exchange integration and
collaborative capabilities of SharePoint with the ‘best of breed’
web content management capabilities of
Immediacy.
With Windows SharePoint Services increasingly being available at
low or no cost within the server infrastructure, organisations can
exploit these capabilities via a lower cost and more affordable
Immediacy solution, without having to find ever larger budgets for
additional Microsoft server licences and Client Access Licences as
their SharePoint deployments expand.
Beyond SharePoint List integration, subsequent releases of the
Immediacy SharePoint Connector will be providing similar
capabilities for Library and Web Part integration, as well as
‘specific services’ such as accessibility checking, image editing
and auto-categorisation that can work on top of wider SharePoint
implementations and enhance capabilities that are acknowledged to
be lacking in the Microsoft solution.