Comments on: Q&A: SharePoint Webinar and Whitepaper (Part 6)

By: Q&A: SharePoint Webinar and Whitepaper (Part 6) | Information … « Social Computing Technology

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 01:19:13 +0000

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By: R. Barnett

R. Barnett — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:23:30 +0000

Hello, I read these comments, and I think you’re right, there are many ideas to solve problems in SharePoint.

By: berndburkert

berndburkert — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:17:22 +0000

Carl,

it may be a little late to comment here, but to me the insights in this blog are still worth the while, so why not carrying it on?

I'm product manager of onion.net, a 100% .NET based CMS product from Germany (call it a WCMS if you like, the language in this field is not easy.)

onion.net with it's model driven approach, follows a somewhat different vision than most competitors (refer to http://onion.net/vision for more info.)

Customers tell us, that the management of complex web-sites is much easier with our product, as compared to most WCMSs. onion.net is not site-centric (like SharePoint) but content-centric. This makes re-use of content (text, media, logic, ...) much easier. Those who produce content do not neccessarily need to know, when and where the content is consumed. Thus our integration promises to offer the best from both worlds, use SharePoint as employee facing portal, re-use SharePoint content on external internet sites easily (and without the security concerns mentioned earlier) via onion.net.

To yourself and all of your readers: My personal opinion may be biased, thinking onion.net a good part of the day. See the onion.net SharePoint integration yourself at the upcoming CeBIT2010 in Hannover Germany (check the "events" section of our web-site for details). I shall be personally available at our stand, and of course I'm happy to see you, and learn from your opinions.

Regards, Bernd

Q: In the WCM / DAM space, how does SharePoint fare against other products like Interwoven, FatWire, SDL Tridion etc.?
A: You may have noticed, Simon Cole of Autonomy commented on an earlier blog post on how the Autonomy product stacked up against SharePoint? He focused on the records capability of Autonomy/Meridio. Any other solution providers want to weigh in on this? Is the list of competition provided here (Interwoven, FatWire, SDL Tridion) all inclusive? What other products belong on this list? How would you rank them? Solution providers and users with experience comments all welcome, but please identify who you are.

By: Sadalit

Sadalit — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:59:51 +0000

To weigh in on the site template best practices question: Because it is not possible to view or modify a site template file directly, I always advise my clients to keep a "live" instance of a site for which they have created a template. Call this live instance something generic, like "Project Site Template," secure the site so that only the SharePoint administrator or the template owner has rights to see and modify it, and ensure that it is not visible in the navigation to your end-users. This way, if changes are requested to the template, you can go to the "dummy" template site, make changes there, and then re-template-ize. (At the moment of re-creating the template, I recommend going to the site template gallery, copying the name of the site template, deleting that file, and then creating the new template with exactly the same name as the old one, so that end-users won't be confused by a name change the next time they try to create a site from that template.)

To note – although the template can be modified in this manner, the changes will not be deployed to any existing sites created from that template. There may be custom deployment jobs that can handle this, but it doesn't occur out-of-box.

By: Mike Gilronan

Mike Gilronan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:58:40 +0000

As a partner in a SharePoint consulting firm, I'll field the "sophomore year" question. We have seen a decided transition in our clients' needs along a couple of vectors:
1. Where Year 1 was more about architecture and configuration, Year 2 has been more about extension and integration. Hence, we've seen somewhat of a shift from System Engineer & Analyst to Developer capabilities, and are investing accordingly.
2. Where Year 1 projects were more likely to be oriented around core components like Collaboration Sites, Portals, and Search, Year 2 projects are taking advantage of the more complex (and comparatively newer) capabilities of MOSS: Workflow, Forms, Line-of-business integration, and Business Intelligence.
I would also recommend Joel Oleson's excellent blog article on what skills a good SharePoint Architect requires: http://tinyurl.com/d7srcb