A new tool that makes it simple to place Outlook emails into SharePoint and share those files within a document library has been released by nSynergy. 

eMail management has become a high priority for all businesses, both large and small, with most written correspondence being delivered in email form. Businesses can use tools like SharePoint to manage most of their important business documents, but the inability to easily place emails into SharePoint and share those files within a document library is a problem that many SharePoint users have encountered. nSynergy developed a tool called myDocs to integrate SharePoint and Outlook, and finally solve the problem of managing email within SharePoint.

With myDocs you can now use Outlook to drag and drop emails directly into specific folders that represent SharePoint document library folders. You can also view, open, create and access documents and emails directly within Outlook. With emails, documents and other files being accessible through Outlook, everyone in your workplace can use Outlook and SharePoint together to create a powerful yet simple document management tool.
The ability to automatically move emails from Outlook into SharePoint and create document library folders from Outlook is a process that will energize your SharePoint 2007 workflows.

Andrew Conry-Murray has written a good article in InformationWeek about the integration of collaboration software with enterprise content management.  The article is titled, A New Approach To Collaboration And Enterprise Content Management. The article focuses specifically on Microsoft's Sharepoint and Alfresco's Share being utilized with or sometimes replacing the traditional ECM products.

ECM products like Documentum have come a long way from their origins moving certain content through specific business processes, such as loan origination or check processing. This is still their primary role, but ECM vendors are broadening their scope to help companies manage new content types and encourage collaboration. Where does that leave your choices?

 

Companies will always have a mishmash of content repositories to deal with, so it makes sense to build a software layer that can reach into all them to apply uniform policies

I have only one complaint about the article, the article is poorly titled.  The process and workflows being described are not a new approach for enterprises, but rather an ongoing approach for bringing collaboration tools into an enterprise's content management system.

Many of us had originally thought that bringing Enterprise 2.0 into our organizations would be as easy as installing software on the server.  What we're finding is that for many of our workers, collaboration of content within an organization sometimes requires signficant changes to our business culture.  New ideas and new approaches are always welcomed.  However if you really want to see true collaboration in the enterprise, it is not always new approaches that are needed but a recommitment to the Enterprise 2.0 projects you started months ago.

Editor's Note: There have been moments here at CMS Report when I am amazed with the insightful and in depth comments written by some of our readers. This is one of those moments. Chris Jewitt, left us a comment regarding several popular content management systems (CMS).  The CMS mentioned in this brief review are Joomla!, Wordpress, Dotnetnuke, Plone, Drupal, Alfresco, and Sharepoint.

I moved Chris Jewitt's comments have been moved to the "front page" so the story isn't missed by those visiting this site.  Any hyperlinks found in this story have been added by the editor.

Below Submitted by Chris Jewitt on December 4, 2008 - 1:42am.  

pTools today announced the completion of a significant deployment of pTools Content Management Software (CMS) for the new ‘Transparency Initiative’ at the Irish Stock Exchange (ISE), the European leader for the listing of asset backed securities. The project builds on the existing pTools implementation of a multi-dimensional website using pTools CMS software in conjunction with the ISE’s SharePoint based systems. It serves to increase the level of data and documentation transparency in the asset backed securities markets.

pTools worked with ISE’s IT department to extend back-office systems to deliver financial product documentation to ISE’s Internet site. Technically, the Initiative is about exposing thousands of documents online that would otherwise have been locked inside in-house systems and unavailable to the market.

"Our prediction, though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped — a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment.

The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever-changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace."

- Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch, "Three Continents, One SharePoint Story", Intelligent Enterprise, October 1, 2008.

Redmond Developer: "Alfresco Software Inc. is taking direct aim at Microsoft SharePoint with the release of the Alfresco Labs 3 open source enterprise content management (ECM) system. The new version adds support for Microsoft Office SharePoint protocols, allowing Alfresco to serve as a fully compatible SharePoint repository.

Any organization using Microsoft Office can directly leverage the native Alfresco repository in the same way SharePoint repositories are used today, the company says. Alfresco President and CEO John Powell says organizations now have a choice of document repositories, even if they want to use SharePoint Server as a front-end."

Complete Story

SharePoint Designer tutorial: Working with SharePoint Websites is a new book from Packt, which teaches users different SharePoint features that will help them create a SharePoint website. Written by Mike Poole, this book is ideal for people new to SharePoint Designer who want to put together a business website.