In order to provide more specific guidance on how to use these technologies together, this updated positioning focuses first on the xRM framework, what it is and what it delivers to customers. Instead of a “build anything with xRM+SharePoint” message, this positioning provides very specific scenarios for xRM (‘customer-like’ relationships) and the go-to-market approach (‘CRM-out’) and then highlights how xRM surfaces Microsoft Application Platform technologies, including how xRM and SharePoint enhance each other when used together.

Download White Paper:

• xRM and SharePoint

Also known as “mashups,” composite applications can be created by advanced end users to support tactical business requirements. Composites in SharePoint have a short time to launch and leverage the platform’s many rich user interface and integration features.

An example of a composite application might be connecting to the database of an existing line of business application using Business Connectivity Services (SharePoint 2010), creating a customized SharePoint form using SharePoint Designer, and drawing and posting a human workflow using Microsoft Visio Designer.

Similar to the creating the right conditions for deploying SharePoint in the EIM space, making effective use of it as a sandbox for composite applications requires careful governance planning. While SharePoint 2010 helps IT departments manage end user created applications using the sandbox concept (a dedicated amount of computing resources within which the application is allowed to run), a careful analysis should be undertaken of the conditions and parameters according to which composite applications will be allowed in the enterprise SharePoint farm.

This governance analysis may include answering questions such as:

• What databases/views into line of business applications to make available using Business Connectivity Services in order to support interactive composite and business intelligence applications
• Whether to allow certain standard databases to be accessed bi-directionally through Business Connectivity Services
• The types of customization that should be allowed using the various tools, such as SharePoint Designer, Visio Designer, etc.
• Whether to enable Excel Services and Access Services.

Properly planning the resources and building blocks available to creators of composite applications up front goes a long way towards ensuring that the full business value of SharePoint as a sandbox application development platform is realized in the enterprise.

Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls, Ontario

Join NetDexterity, Microsoft and other vendors, as well as representatives from Canadian municipalities, at the 2010 Municipal Information Systems Association annual conference and tradeshow. MISA is an established Canadian association of municipal government representatives and others interested in the effective use of information technology to provide better and more cost-effective services to municipal taxpayers and clients.

NetDexterity and the Region of Niagara will be co-presenting a workshop on using SharePoint to deliver user-friendly document and records management.

http://www.misa.on.ca/en/conferences/annualconference.asp

Date: March 30, 2010 8:45 AM – 1:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Microsoft Canada
1950 Meadowvale Blvd.
Mississauga Ontario L5N 8L9
Canada

Hugo Bernier, NetDexterity’s Chief Architect, will be a featured panellist at Microsoft’s upcoming event “Align IT”. More information on this event is included below.

In order to thrive in today’s marketplace, businesses need to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Creating an agile, productive workforce by enabling people to work in a way that’s faster, easier and more intuitive whether they’re on the road, in the office, working solo or as part of a collaborative team can become a key business differentiator.

IT managers from small to large enterprises are invited to join us for a look at why a business productivity infrastructure strategy matters and how you can implement a solution with the flexibility and control IT needs while enabling people to work the way they want. During this complementary morning event we’ll focus on three main challenges to worker efficiency – being productive as a road warrior, finding information how and when it’s needed and effectively collaborating with colleagues and business partners. You’ll learn how IT shops can leverage the unified business platform of Office 2010 as the frontend, SharePoint 2010 on the backend and the new Office Web Apps in the cloud to build a strategic framework that promotes business productivity and growth while helping to drive down costs.

For more details about the Align IT program including podcasts, webcasts, blogs, etc. visit www.microsoft.ca/alignit

Subscribe to the TechNet Flash newsletter today to keep you and your team up to date with the latest IT News from Microsoft. www.microsoft.ca/technet/flash.

Microsoft Canada
1950 Meadowvale Blvd.
Mississauga Ontario L5N 8L9
Canada

NetDexterity is actively recruiting for key roles, and will be a featured vendor at the upcoming MSEmploy Canada Career Fair. Jobs we will be hiring for at this event include:

• Application Architects
• Senior SharePoint Developers
• Senior CRM Developers
• Business Analysts
• Project Managers.

For more information on these position, please see our Careers section. For more information on the MSEmploy Canada Career Fair, and to register, please visit http://www.msemploy.ca.

Date: April 8, 2010, 8:00 AM – 11:30 AM
Hyatt Regency Toronto

Steve Kopstick of NetDexterity will be joined by Microsoft Canada at this ARMA event to present our vision for effective, user-friendly document and records management implementation on the SharePoint platform.

Efficient, productive, flexible, and profitable: four attributes that every business strives to achieve. That much hasn’t changed. What has changed is how to get there and how to get there fast.

Did you know that more than 50 percent of enterprise content management (ECM) implementations fail due to low user adoption? Are you realizing the true value of unstructured information and reducing risk by engaging all your users in the content management life cycle?

Join the conversation to learn how business productivity solutions are transforming the workplace –leveraging more intuitive and collaborative ECM solutions to increase employee engagement, help lower operating costs and help reduce risks.

Join us on April 8, 2010 and learn how to give your employees great productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser. In this interactive session you will gain valuable insights into how customers are applying technology to solve real business challenges and see examples of these solutions in action. What’s more you will have the opportunity to network with experts with field-tested experience and to test drive the new business productivity platform through an immersive hands-on experience.

In appreciation of your attendance, you will receive a complimentary Business Productivity Starter Package including Beta Copies of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010, Microsoft Project Professional 2010 and Microsoft Visio Premium 2010.

Register now to reserve your seat – seating is limited.

Agenda:

8:00 – 9:00 Breakfast and Registration

9:00 – 9:05 Welcome Message from ARMA President

9:05 – 9:40 The Future of Business Productivity
What will the workplace look like in 10 years? While the future is impossible to predict,this thought provoking session will take you on a journey to explore how emerging technologies may impact the way organizations collaborate and operate in the future.

9:40 – 11:00 The Future is Now – Catch The Next Wave of Business Productivity
Dissatisfied end users often bring unsanctioned technology into the workplace, exposing the organization to undue risk and compliance issues. Hear how companies have overcome these challenges to help mitigate risk and reduce cost by providing an intuitive and versatile ECM experience.

In this session you will learn how to leverage Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010 to:

• Stimulate end user participation to drive value out of your existing ECM investments
• Drive Compliance and Help Reduce Risk of all content and metadata without sacrificing access and usability
• Consolidate Systems and Simplify Integration

11:00 – 11:30 Post Event Networking
Take the opportunity to network your peers and take Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010 for a test drive yourself!

Microsoft does ship SharePoint with a standardized web service connector allowing the transfer of single documents, one by one, from document libraries throughout the SharePoint farm, into the Records Center. After some planning, this functionality can easily be turned on by making some simple configuration changes. In its most basic form, a “Transfer to Records Center” link can be made available for every document in every document library, requiring users to decide when a document becomes a corporate record and ‘manually’ transferring it at that time. Based on configurable routing rules, the new record can then be managed by the Records Center to ensure compliance, etc.

At NetDexterity, many of our records management solutions are more complex than this simple scenario. Most typically, they involve creating high value, document centric business process applications in the ‘front end’ of SharePoint by building specific business rules and context into SharePoint’s collaboration functionality. These business processes and their associated metadata can then be leveraged to automatically ‘close’ files, transfer them to the Records Center, and manage them there according to a matching set of retention rules.

But this kind of EIM implementation on SharePoint also opens the door to connecting a more diverse portfolio of line of business applications, proprietary and legacy systems to the same SharePoint Records Center. Due to the decoupled, modular nature of the Records Center, it is possible to create a number of different web services to receive incoming documents and data, and manage them as corporate records based on business and retention rules. For systems that do not ‘naturally’ produce documents as part of their everyday activities (e.g. customer or inventory databases), an additional, custom step might have to be added to periodically and deliberately create document sets at predetermined points in the business lifecycle of the data and export them to SharePoint’s Records Center.

In this way, SharePoint’s records management functionality can truly become a flexible and scalable backbone for an enterprise information management strategy to ensure compliance in a cost-effective manner.

The good news is that Windows Phone 7, recently announced for the end of 2010, will address some of these shortcomings by offering an “Office integration hub” to allow users to access certain assets securely through their phones. So far, we haven’t seen much more than conceptual mock-ups, but Microsoft has shown prototype phones at the MIX10 conference, and many ‘activity hubs’ (e.g. social networking) have already been completed, so we can safely assume that it’s more than slideware at this point.

In other good news, there are rich SharePoint client applications available for phones from other manufacturers. For example, Australian-based Spyk Software, a Microsoft partner, has published iShare, a free SharePoint client for the Apple iPhone, which works very well. There is no equally obvious choice for BlackBerry users yet. While there seem to be a number of companies working on client software for the BlackBerry, I didn’t find anything that was marketed as more than a prototype, concept or as a ‘solution’ with no immediately obvious price tag.

However, whether Windows Mobile 7 will begin to displace the BlackBerry as the enterprise smart phone of choice remains to be seen. Initial indications are that it is aimed at consumers and being positioned as a direct competitor to the iPhone and the various Google Android phones.

Organizations will increasingly need to extend the availability of their internal knowledge assets and business process applications to the smart phones of their employees to meet the demands for “mobile EIM,” and Windows Phone 7 may well prove to be an important step in that direction.