No Name Group

Chalk this up to the whole "google it" research method... This was the first real looking product that I didn't already recognize, so I took a look. It looks interesting. Except it's called "Zoho", which is a stupid name.

Even though everyone keeps saying to look at features, look at it from a user perspective, I think we need to be careful about reliability, support, and our capabilities to run the darn thing.

Another thing that is going to hurt something like this is that it's so different, we're just begging for widespread user discontent.

Posted by Jason Ramsey at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The presentation I attended was hosted by a Pittsburgh company, Allin Corporation. They are willing to do a free presentation or evaluation for us. They have a Communications and Collaboration Assesment they will conduct onsite that focuses on the ability to share, find, collaborate, provide remote access, and communication. They are a gold certified Microsoft partner.

Online meeting and collaboration tools
Document management, including profiling and version management
Content distribution to via intranet and data stores
Entrprise wide search capabilities

Sharepoint Portal Server

Phil

Posted by Phil Reinhart at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently attended a seminar that presented a brief overview on an collaboration software called Sharepoint. Its a MS product so it integrates with other MS products. It provides document sharing and tracking, ability to share links via calendars, it can utilize active directory to set file permission per user. It is advertised as a document management system. It keeps document history of revisions, it can be configured to notify users when a change has been made to a document as well as metadata being included with each document. Here's a link to some information, http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/techinfo/topten.mspx
Here's a word document with a list of the services, http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/f/2/2f292511-8865-43ce-a241-5a4cc6dbfd03/WSSVersions.doc
There is also a Sharepoint Portal App and here's that info, http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/prodinfo/overview.mspx. There are some additional add-ons that may be useful, including a form tool that is supposed to be user friendly and can export data is database format, a report builder, SQL reporting services that will gather data from different databases and servers, Scorecard manager which allows a quick overview of a document, or projects progress, ability to autopublish reports or email status or update notifications.

Phil

Posted by Phil Reinhart at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We had the first meeting of our group today. We discussed what it is the group should do and what types of products to look at. We came up with a starter list of products and services:

• Google
• MS Exchange (outlook)
• MS Terminal Services
• Samba
• Document Management Systems (Hummingbird, OpenDocs)

We decided to look around for services that would integrate Email, File Sharing, and Calendaring, preferably through a web interface. If, along the way, we find products that do other cool features, or cool products that just do one or two of these things, we'll take a closer look at those, too. For the next meeting we are going to bring some names and info on some of the products we think should be considered further.

It was mentioned that a prime consideration of any product should be how well it integrates with current products on campus and/or how well it may integrate with future products, like a portal. The question of whether we should look at products with only employees in mind or whether we should also consider student needs came up, but no decision was made.

We also briefly discussed a name for the group. No name was chosen.

Due to the break and travel schedules, and the need for time to do some research, next meeting will be Friday Jan 12, 2007 at 8:30 am in the CC. In the meantime, feel free to post to the blog if you find a product or article that you think is relevant to the group.

Posted by Susan Fenton at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)