Content Management Software

Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 is a useful content management solution that helps users manage documents, set up websites, and publish reports. Business users can share information with their colleagues or even their customers, which increases collaboration and overall customer satisfaction. SharePoint gives everyone access to the databases, reports, and business applications which helps users find the information they need to make the right business decisions. The single platform makes Microsoft’s application easy to use.

Telus, a Canadian national telecommunications company, decided to implement Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 to help improve their inner collaboration and sales techniques. This large company, with approximately 35,000 employees, wanted to keep their employees up to date on Telus’ latest practices and policies. For companies as massive as Telus, frequent training and updating is essential to make sure all employees are on the same page. Also, these companies are continuously hiring new employees. Telus spent $28.5 million in 2009 on a learning budget for their employees. The training was expensive and unscalable, which prompted Telus to seek out a new social learning platform. Telus used Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 before, but were enticed by SharePoint 2010 because of its new and advanced features. SharePoint 2010 has integration capabilities, social networking abilities, a complex user interface, and multilingual features. Telus decided to connect all of their systems with Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Telus integrated SharePoint 2010 slowly into their company. This past April, they introduced ‘Out of the Box My Sites’, which is an internal social network which includes blogs where users could share advice or information. Telus also introduced ‘My Communities’, a forum where project teams could share documents, information, and could work together. Also, users were able to create individual profiles. Telus is very gradually working SharePoint into their business processes so that employees can learn about each feature of SharePoint, as opposed to it all at once. By next year, Telus Tube will be launched through Sharepoint. Telus Tube is a video pilot where users can post and view user generated videos.

So far, the Microsoft SharePoint approach has been well received by employees. Employees are pleased with the new social capabilities of SharePoint 2010, as opposed to SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2010 is expected to save Telus around 20 %, or $5 million) by 2011. Slowly, it will change the way Telus’ employees work and seek support.

Telus is one of several organizations that have implemented SharePoint 2010. You can read more about Microsoft SharePoint 2010 on Microsoft’s website.

Don’t worry about upgrading to Office 2010. Microsoft Office competitor, Central Desktop, has created a new collaborative framework that allows users to open, save, edit and co-author files on the Microsoft Office Cloud.

Central Desktop is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) social technology platform that provides its users with the ability to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. The SaaS provider has a suite of online collaboration tools including wikis, document sharing, task management, web conferencing, calendar sharing and micro-blogging.

Central Desktop uses OffiSync technology and is compatible with Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. Once the SaaS is downloaded, Central Desktop for Office adds a toolbar in Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint and Word, that gives users the power to co-author documents in real-time from within Office. Here’s a screenshot of the application:

Central Desktop also allows users to comment on files, manage subscribers and track version history. With the new tool, users can edit Office files, simultaneously, by tracking and syncing changes made by collaborators and combine them correctly into a single updated version.

Microsoft Office offers similar multi-author collaborative tools in the new web-based Office, but Central Desktop provides the service at a lower cost than upgrading to the new web-based Microsoft Office. There are several other products that offer real-time co-editing and collaborative tools, like Central Desktop. This movement towards web-based real-time collaboration platforms is the next step for content management.

For all those keeping tracking SharePoint 2010 progress, today there was some exciting news: May 12, 2010 will be the official launch date for the CMS/collaboration platform, as well as for Office 2010. The president of Microsoft’s business division, Stephen Elop, will do the honors, and will be introducing the new portal through a live virtual event.

Microsoft SharePoint has endured some friendly fire from Salesforce.com of late, when Salesforce released the beta version of what some are terming the “SharePoint killer,” Salesforce Chatter. The argument is that Chatter is a sexier collaboration tool than SharePoint, as the latter is considered by some as primarily a repository with dry collaboration functionalities—“dry” meaning the collaboration features offered are not as tied to social media platforms as those offered by products like Chatter, Socialcast, and Jive.

Still, even though Chatter advocates are slamming SharePoint for not being as social, and therefore modern, a collaboration platform, a survey by CMSWire.com shows that most SharePoint subscribers use it for the platform’s collaboration capabilities. In addition, SharePoint is gaining a reputation as a Document Management solution, widening the reach of its collaborative functionalities.

We’ll have to wait until May to see how far SharePoint has come, of course, but we at ContentManagement.net have a feeling it’ll be a great product. The marketers behind Salesforce Chatter will continue to tout that platform’s Facebook-like features and call SharePoint an antique—that’s just business, and it’s to be expected. But those claims shouldn’t convince everyone that SharePoint 2010 won’t measure up to Chatter. It will be interesting to see the two square off against each other in the coming year, and see the effects of a social-heavy platform versus those of a more traditional one.