SharePoint 2010: Promising Preview

SharePoint has evolved significantly over the past decade from a simple intranet/extranet content management tool set to include functionality from business intelligence to corporate social networking. Microsoft is touting the 2010 release as its biggest Server product release ever. From my perspective, here are some of the top enhancements:

1. Business Connectivity Services (BCS): The ability to access and edit data from external systems using built-in features is absolutely the biggest enhancement. While SharePoint 2007 could only retrieve data (editing was a custom development job), the 2010 release supports editing without writing custom code or installing external plug-ins. This bi-directional ability dramatically increases both productivity and the scope of what the system can do out of the box.
   
   
2. Elegant and Intuitive Designer Tools: The look and feel of SharePoint applications have been a sore point for sometime now. Starting with 2007, complete page layout freedom was given to .Net developers. However, with 2010, both SharePoint Designer and the Visual Studio extension have been dramatically improved. The simplicity and elegance of the ribbon-like contextual menu makes design and development a whole lot neater.
   
   
3. Search: The FAST search feature is simple and intuitive. The Bing-like interface with an ability to preview documents in-place as well as shortlist by a variety of filters (some of which are automatically and intuitively generated meta data) makes finding information a whole lot easier. The capability to index both structured and unstructured data (with minimal customization) will allow information to be found from many more places.
   
   
4. Deeper Integration with Office: Once you find what you’re looking for, you can edit Office documents in place without leaving the browser. The versioning and history is essentially taken care of automatically; this could be a huge time saver for end users. Further, cutting and pasting between Office applications like Word/Excel and SharePoint will be much less of a hassle.
   
   
5. Workflow Enhancements: Custom workflows can now be created with SharePoint Designer without custom code. These templates can be easily imported into Visual Studio for further enhancements. Additionally, Visio documents can now be opened and edited in browser in real-time (without a Visio installation on the end user's computer); interesting, to say the least.
   
   
6. Business Intelligence (BI): The BI Server was earlier sold as a separate product whereas it is now included as a part of SharePoint Enterprise Server. The claim is that users will easily be able to assemble dashboards to analyze data from disparate systems; sounds promising.
   
   
7. Corporate Social Networking: A lot of excitement here. The community features will analyze data from user profiles, Outlook accounts, organization positions, project involvement, and areas of interest to update and connect people.
   
   
8. Browser Compatibility: The range of browsers that will be able to render SharePoint sites properly now includes FireFox and Safari. This will come as a big relief to many IT departments and end-users alike who will be less constrained by browser requirements.

What I've described here is just a tip of the iceberg. The product's value to a firm could increase exponentially as data from disparate applications can easily be brought into one place, and then shared and modified using its toolkit. At Trioro, we are quite excited about this release and look forward to uncovering its full potential.

Engaging Media – Value of the online newsroom

As the media landscape changes - reductions in traditional full time media and an increase of a disperse set of bloggers and citizen journalists - public relations professionals (our clients) are getting more creative in order to generate earned media. Whether it’s High Road (client) tailoring their ‘media events’ to accommodate bloggers’ day jobs by planning an after work bloggers reception for FORZA Motorsport 3, or Media Profile taking a laser focus on piquing a journalists attention in five words or less, change is in the air.

The creativity however, doesn’t stop with traditional word smithing and event planning. Instead, industry leaders are challenging their colleagues to make the experience for traditional journalists, bloggers, and citizen journalists better, while saving time in the process. They’re asking:

• How do we continue to engage media after the face-to-face interaction?
• Media liked what they’ve heard, now how do we make it easy for them to access the information they need to write their article/blog post?
• With so many bloggers and citizen journalists, how can we save time providing digital resources like photos, fact sheets, etc?
• How do we connect with our audience when they’re using social sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flikr?

Though the audience and engagement strategy will differ by client, we found that an online newsroom tailored specifically to the clients engagement strategy can be a great enabler and launching point to get creative in answering these questions.

Here are a few good examples to get you thinking:
http://news.microsoft.ca/
http://pressroom.toyota.com/
http://www.timhortons.com/ca/en/about/about_media.html

When PR professionals approach us to help them unleash their creativity, whether for an online newsroom or something else, we take down the technical barriers and fit the technology to their strategy – not the other way around.

It just keeps getting sweeter

We've been busy over at Sweetspot. Sweethome.ca, a site dedicated to living comfortably, has recently launched. A members section for all the sweetspot properties and a new homepage design are also new additions. Just like the existing Sweetspot and Sweetmama sites, this new site fully leverages the existing content management system we built. The members section includes some fun features such as commenting on articles and creating your own personal sweetpicks (a collection of your favorite articles). Meanwhile, the new homepage design includes a more impactful featured section, and is organized to more clearly highlight the most recent content.

Check it out, and make sure to sign up to be a sweet insider!

Shopping Guides on Sweetspot & Sweetmama

We recently launched Shopping Guides on Sweetspot.ca & Sweetmama.ca. This is a fun section that features a variety of products in different categories, cities, and price ranges. The ladies over at Sweetspot love it because it is easy to manage using their CMS web interface. They get to load product images, descriptions, and categorizations all in one screen - and it's pink too!

Check out the Shopping Guides they've created
Sweetspot Shopping Guides
Sweetmama Shopping Guides

The new Sweetspot.ca

After a summer of developing at break-neck speed, we've launched the new Sweetspot.ca and Sweetmama.ca. These sites are built off a sophisticated custom CMS that we developed which allows Sweetspot more flexibility than they ever had before and improves efficiency in their editorial process. We've been getting great feedback on the usability of the site and the design, and have started seeing the results of this in the web statistics.

Congratulations Sweetspot on your new sites!

Trioro in the news

Yesterday ConnectIt news ran an article about our work to build Sweetspot.ca a robust custom content management system on a .Net platform. Check it out.