Company Net adds Gold Microsoft CRM Competency to Gold Sharepoint Competency



Company Net becomes the first company in Europe to achieve Gold in both Customer Relationship Management and Portals and Collaboration.

Company Net, the specialist provider for SharePoint and Dynamics CRM business solutions, today announced that it has been awarded the highest level of Microsoft Partner Network accreditation, the Gold Customer Relationship Management Competency, to add to the Gold  Portals and Collaboration Competency announced previously.

Company Net joins an elite group of less than a dozen organisations worldwide to be awarded Gold Competency in both Customer Relationship Management, and Portals and Collaboration.  This underlines its position as a global leader in combined Dynamics CRM and SharePoint solutions.

Microsoft Partner: Gold for Sharepoint and CRM

With the release of Dynamics CRM 2011, and its close integration with SharePoint 2010, Company Net is in a unique position to offer its clients the highest levels of technical skills and experience to build effective and innovative business solutions, maximising the complimentary capabilities of both Dynamics CRM and SharePoint.

Derrick McCourt, Regional Director Microsoft, Scotland & Wales commented:

“We are delighted to recognise this achievement and welcome Company Net onto the New Gold Standard within the Microsoft Partner Network.

Company Net’s SharePoint and CRM skills are now formally recognised at the highest level of customer satisfaction, project delivery and technical competence that Microsoft require. We would like to congratulate them on this excellent achievement and on their continued commitment to the Microsoft Platform.”

That’s not Sharepoint, is it?

Hymans Robertson, which provides advisory and management services to the occupational pensions market, has just gone live with a new public website for its Clubvita subsidiary.

And it looks great.

Hymans Robertson Clubvita Website

Gartner Predicts Bright Future for Sharepoint as Unified Content Management Platform

Following recent research by Gartner, organisations looking for a unified enterprise and web platform effectively have only four realistic vendor choices: Microsoft, Oracle, Open Text and IBM.

Gartner Enterprise Content Management Magic Quadrant (October 2009)

Gartner Web Content Management Magic Quadrant (August 2010)

With Open Text’s market share diminishing, IBM’s continued focus on enterprise scale organisations and Oracle’s lack of favour with those who have invested in a Microsoft infrastructure, the future looks bright for SharePoint.

Sharepoint Social – Raising a Glass to Enterprise 2.0

We at Company Net are currently engaged by one of a number of clients the drinks industry to design a global Corporate Portal for them on Sharepoint 2007. After extensive consultation with a wide cross-section of staff over recent weeks, one of the major themes to emerge was the importance of social element of the corporate portal – in particular: 

• allowing staff to use the native Wiki functionality of Sharepoint 2007, to form a structured Knowledge-base;
• providing blogging functionality to share experience, expertise and good practice; and
• MySite functionality to join up staff across the organisation – allowing them to profile themselves in a way which has never been possible before.

We were blown away by the enthusiasm and vision of the staff consulted.  They were quick to realise the benefits of the Sharepoint toolset, and identify areas where they could make use of these to improve communication and information-sharing throughout the business – despite the obvious cultural shift which this brings.

Sharepoint Social Computing

Those cultural considerations are well explored in Richard Dennison’s excellent blog article.  This documents some of the challenges experienced by BT in implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools for BT – and how they overcame them.   

Whilst BT did not use Sharepoint for its project, there are plenty of good news stories about those who have.  Check out  Social Computing with Sharepoint, which sets out the successes of the likes of Electronic Arts and Accenture in their implementations of Enterprise 2.0 functionality using Sharepoint 2007.

It’s no surprise that, in October 2009, Gartner placed Microsoft as Visionaries and Leaders in its Magic Quadrant for the ‘Social Computing’ category:

Gartner Magic Quadrant - Social Computing - October 2009

Gartner’s defines the ‘Social Computing’ category as follows: 

“We view this market as consisting of products that focus on team collaboration, communities and social interaction. The buyers in this market are looking for persistent virtual environments, in which participants can create, organize and share information, as well as interact with each other.”

Looking ahead to Sharepoint 2010, it’s clear that Microsoft are looking to develop the vision further and maintain their position as visionaries.  There’s a great blog article on the “New Social Computing Features” of Sharepoint 2010 on Microsoft UK’s Sharepoint Team’s blog.  One particular area of focus for Sharepoint 2010 has been developing the social potential of the MySite functionality, as well as further enhancing the existing blogging and wiki features.

Sharepoint 2010: All-up Positioning

Great Live Meeting today – an “All-up Positioning” piece – thanks to Chris Parkes and Hayley Rixon for that.

The Live Meeting was based around the Sharepoint 2010 Value Proposition wheel – effectively an evolution of the previous Sharepoint 2007 Proposition wheel:

Sharepoint 2010 Value Proposition Wheel

The premise of 2010 is set very much around the evolutionary step from Sharepoint 2007, rather than anything revolutionary.  Many of the evolutionary steps have been well-trailed (and well-received) – the introduction of the Ribbon and the cross-browser support, for example.

However, a few other nice features were presented today.  A couple really stood out – integration of PerformancePoint and Phonetic Searching (amongst other search improvements).

PerformancePoint Integration – PerformancePoint Services will be bundled with Sharepoint 2010, to effectively replace what was known as PerformancePoint Server – at no additional cost. 

This opens up a world of possibilities to what is now being referred to as “Insights” (formerly referred to as “Business Intelligence” on the 2007 value proposition wheel).  In-portal dashboards, scorecards, KPIs and charting (through native chart webparts) will all become that much easier to implement  than they are at present:

Sharepoint 2010 PerformancePoint

Searching – even before you think about upgrading to the impressive (but expensive) FAST Search, Sharepoint 2010 gives you some nice improvements on 2007:

• It now supports greater ‘intelligence’ through phonetic name recognition, so if I misspell a name in my keyword search, Sharepoint will bring back results with similar sounding words.
• recently updated content is flagged in the results page.
• results can be filtered much more effectively than the somewhat crude ‘dump’ of results provided by Sharepoint 2007:

Sharepoint 2010 Search

In terms of when Sharepoint 2010 will be released to the market – the official line is that it will be in the first half of 2010.  

The most basic offering will be ”Sharepoint Foundation” – which corresponds broadly to what has been known as WSS – and comes bundled with Windows Server at no additional cost.  There will then be Standard and Enterprise Editions of Sharepoint Server 2010.

And something else to look out for – Sharepoint 2010 will only be available in 64 bit.  There will be no 32 bit version.  And 64 bit versions of Windows Server and SQL Server will be required to support it – 32 bit versions will no longer suffice.

Design Considerations for a Public-Facing Sharepoint Site

I can recommend a great Live Meeting (first delivered on 2nd December 2009), entitled “Design Considerations for a Public Facing Site (in Sharepoint)“.  Delivered by Lori Neff, it lasts for one hour exactly and covers a lot of ground.

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

If you’ve got a reasonably high-level technical understanding of Sharepoint, and you’re looking to get some insights into how you can use Sharepoint to deliver your graphically-rich, public-facing web site (or Intranet/Extranet), then this is for you.

Lori covers:

• Graphical design considerations (in particular, working with a specialist design agency)
• Considerations for architecting your solution
• Considerations for deployment
• Planning site architecture
• Customisation
• CSS
• Master pages
• Page Layouts
• Accessibility
• Search Engine Optimisation

A few interesting other nuggets fall out of the presentation too.  For example, it’s been well trailed that Sharepoint 2010 will provide much greater cross-browser support, for Firefox in particular. However, it hasn’t been quite so widely publicised that Sharepoint 2010 will not support version 6 of Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser.

It seems a reasonable stance for Microsoft to take, given that IE6 was released in 2001 (where has the time gone?), and there have been two major releases subsequently. 

However, according to Bloom Media’s statistics (published September 2009), IE6 still represents 14% of the browser share.  And with online petitions such as SaveIE6 it would seem that the slow demise of the aging browser may drag on for a few years yet.

For those of you about to embark on designing public-facing Sharepoint 2010 sites – beware!

SharePoint 2010 Public Beta now Available for Download

The excitement surround Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 continues to build. 

Sharepoint 2010

Following hot on the heels of last month’s Sharepoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft today announced that the Public Beta release for Sharepoint 2010 is now available for download.

Company Net is Top for Sharepoint

We’re delighted that Company Net’s new web-site was accepted by the Top Sharepoint site today.  You can read more about Company Net’s submission on the Company Net blog.

Top Sharepoint

Top Sharepoint is a great showcase of what is possible with Sharepoint. I’d encourage you to take a look and also place your vote or leave your comment on what you think of Company Net’s new Sharepoint site.

Introducing Sharepoint Workspace

Check out this quick demo of Sharepoint Workspace – the replacement for what was hitherto known as “Groove”:

Sharepoint Workspace really looks to have moved things on as a collaboration tool.  The rich client interface looks fantastic (supporting drag and drop of files) , as does the ability to synch effortlessly items between your local PC and server.

Microsoft Office 2010

There’s a whole load of other quick video demos around Microsoft Office 2010 available on Microsoft’s Office Business website.  Thanks to Chris Parkes for bringing those to my attention.

Big Up to the Company Net MOSSIF

Today, Company Net launched its new website.  It’s a MOSSIF web site (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server Internet Facing) – a public-facing website developed in Sharepoint to you and me.

We’re delighted with the results, which you can see at http://www.company-net.com.

Company Net Website

It demonstrates the rich graphical potential which Sharepoint has to offer when it comes to designing and developing your public-facing web site.  It doesn’t need to look like a standard, out of the box Sharepoint site.   And, if it’s good enough for Ferrari, then it’s good enough for most of us.

What’s more, you can make your public-facing Sharepoint site fully accessible and xHTML compliant.  The Company Net blog explains more about how we set about this.  You can also download a great White Paper which we’ve written on the subject.

Sharepoint 2010 ‘Sneak Peak’

Following on from Arpan Shah‘s excellent ’sneak peak’ of Sharepoint 2010 at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans last month, Microsoft has unveiled Sharepoint 2010 to a wider audience.

You can view the presentation on Microsoft’s Sharepoint site at: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/Overview-Video.aspx.  I’d encourage you to take a look. 

In September 2008, Gartner had Sharepoint 2007 (in September 2008) in the ‘magic quadrant’ for its ‘Enterprise Content Management’ and ‘Horizontal Portal’ categories:

Gartner Quadrant: Enterprise Content Management (September 2008)

Gartner Quadrant: Horizontal Portals (September 2008)

With Sharepoint having recently crashed through the 100million seats license sales barrier, early indications suggest that Sharepoint 2010 is set to further develop Sharepoint’s position as a true ‘heavyweight’ enterprise level platform.

Microsoft WPC Day 3: “Compete to Win” Today & the Vision for Tomorrow

Picking up on Bob Muglia’s “seize the day” theme from yesterday’s Keynote, Kevin Turner (Microsoft Chief Operating Officer), urged the assembled partner network to “respond with urgency” to the current economic “reset”.  

Turner’s line was that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”, unveiling a twofold strategy which comprises:

1. Innovation now to benefit in the longer term; and
2. Growing our market share, relative to the competition, in the short term.

For Turner, point 2 served as a launchpad to blast into Microsoft’s competition, his targets ranging from Google to VMware, from Linux to OpenOffice.  The latter two received the harshest treatment, with Turner referring to “the fraudulent perception of free.”

It wasn’t all negative though.  Turner buoyed up the audience with the competitive advantage offered by Microsoft’s tremendous innovation drive – the fact that it had invested $9.5 billion on R&D in FY09, with the same amount forecast for FY10.  The tangible outcome of this investment was clear for all to see in the assembled Microsoft product stack, with more to come in Windows 7 and Office 2010.   Special praise was reserved for Sharepoint – “the hottest single product in the history of Microsoft, the fastest product to $1 billion.”

Earlier in the day, Stephen Elop  had painted an inspiring and optimistic vision of the future.  The pinnacle was the ‘Productivity: Future Vision’ video, which you can view below:

It picked up on a theme started by Steve Ballmer on Day 2 – the move to more “natural” and human-centric interfaces with the technology we all use.  Microsoft Surface is only the beginning of the shift towards a much more tactile relationship with the technology which serves us.  The days of the humble mouse appear to be numbered!

Watson’s Day 3 Keynote included a session with Bill Buxton (Microsoft Principal Researcher), Microsoft’s very own mad professor.  Buxton provided some fascinated insights, explaining that there is typically a 20 year gestation period for new products; anything emerging in the marketplace today will have been in gestation for 10 years, and will take a further 10 years to reach full maturity.  So, we all need to seize the day – the future has already started.