Harmon.ie Unveils Top 25 Online SharePoint Influencers for 2012

Today, Harmon.ie announced its list of the Top 25 online SharePoint Influencers. This second annual list brings together bloggers, writers and other industry professionals who have made a substantial impact on the SharePoint industry.

Harmon.ie, a company that creates software solutions to improve the social experience for users, commissioned to see who within the SharePoint community was not only the most innovative, but who also were the most informed and influential in terms of building a strong collaborative and social enterprise. They looked at over 700 potential candidates and eventually whittled the list down to 25 people.

The Top 10 SharePoint Influencers, according to the list from Harmon.ie
 

How Does the List Work?

When Harmon.ie was trying to determine who would make their list, there were certain factors that played a key role in who was chosen. These factors which were weighed and then determined the rank of the candidate include:

• How frequently their tweets were re-tweeted
• How much visitors they had to their their blog and how far it reached within the SharePoint Industry.
• How many citations they were given by other bloggers and colleagues.

Two things are coming into play here — SharePoint has become a more strategic platform for businesses, while users are looking for better social solutions, adoption strategies and innovative approaches to business problems,” said Mark Fidelman, CEO of Evolve!, a social business consultancy, and leading social strategist of the Top 25 Influencer Award. “These 25 individuals are passionate advocates, who are re-defining the value of social community and collaboration.”

Who Topped the List?

The individual scores of the top 25 range from 5455 to 3025. While the list is available on the Harmon.ie website, the following are those who ranked in the top five.

• Joel Oleson: Joel, who has 5455 points in the ranking system, is a SharePoint content and collaboration solutions manger for LDS Church, a former Microsoft senior technical product manager and was part of a team who designed Microsoft’s global search, intranet and teams sites. In 2011, he was in second place on Top 25 SharePoint Influencers List.
• Mark Miller: Mark, with a score of 5450, is the founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com. He also helps organizations with their social media development and building their online community.
• Andrew Connell: With a score of 4975, Andrew is ranked third. He is a SharePoint developer and instructor who has a also co-founded Critical Path Training, which educates and trains individuals in SharePoint. He is also a Microsoft MVP for Office SharePoint Server.
• Laura Rogers: Laura has a score of 4520. With eight years experience in the industry, she is now a senior SharePoint specialist at Rackspace Hosting and is a Microsoft MVP. She’s also written a variety of books in the subject including: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Step by Step and Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint.
• John Mancini: With a score of 4490, John is ranked in fifth place. He is the president of the Association for Information and Image management (AIIM), which is a document and content management non-profit association.

A Big Year for SharePoint

With its 2013 version scheduled to be released this month and a conference next week, the list comes at an important time for those in the SharePoint industry. More and more products are being announced for the platform or are being updated so they are compatible with this new release. 

Recently, BA Insight announced use its Longitude Connectors to connect the newest version of SharePoint to about 30 different business related enterprise systems. And when Metalogix renamed its Migration Manager tool to Content Matrix they also announced that it could be used to move content from an older version of SharePoint to the 2013 version. But that's only a taste of what's to come.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Big Differences in Mobile Support for the Social Enterprise

If there is one feature that everyone can agree upon in the Social Enterprise market, it’s mobile computing. IT professionals think it’s an important part of the Social Enterprise landscape and vendors fervently concur. As always, the devil is in the details.

Although everyone agrees on the importance of providing for mobile endpoints, mobile platform support from social collaboration software vendors varies greatly.

Support Plays Favorites

The good news is that mobile is considered a basic function of social software. The bad news is that there are “haves” and “have-nots.” While almost every vendor supports Apple’s iPhone, Android implementations are spottier. This variance is surprising given the increase in Android endpoints over the past few years.

Tablet support is emerging but, again, iPad support is more common than Android tablet implementations. Support for RIM’s Blackberry devices is a hit-or-miss affair as well. Blackberry implementations of social collaboration software are more likely to come from ISVs with established enterprise applications, such as IBM or SAP, rather than from newer companies. As RIM’s problems have increased, the Blackberry is clearly being pushed to the end of the list for social collaboration vendors. Overall, mobile support is inconsistent among vendors.

Spotty Solutions

The mobile and tablet user experiences are, arguably, different from the desktop or laptop experience. The user interface (UI) of mobile and tablet products differ, often dramatically, from the desktop UI. Smaller screen sizes, lower bandwidth, a plethora of platforms and a different set of needs by on-the-go end-users drives user interface design choices. For some vendors though, these choices amount to limiting features rather than reimagining the UI in terms of the mobile or tablet environment.

The unfortunate result of inconsistent support for mobile platforms is that many mobile users still cannot access their social software on the go or can do so only in a very limited manner. Some vendors are looking for solutions that can supplement or supplant their native mobile platform applications.

HTML5 has emerged as the lowest common denominator for reaching all end-points — including desktop/laptop platforms — in the absence of native applications. While native mobile applications have a number of advantages including offline operation and integration with special features of the mobile device, HTML5 brings a rich user experience to any platform that supports a compliant browser, albeit at a higher need for bandwidth.

As the Social Enterprise market evolves, mobile computing is evolving with it. Support for current and new platforms as well as HTML5 will be on the rise and will be a core part of the Social Enterprise feature set.

Editor's Note: Another article by Tom Petrocelli you might enjoy is:
— Microsoft SharePoint Powers Social Applications

About the Author

Senior Analyst Tom Petrocelli covers the Social Enterprise for the Enterprise Strategy Group. He has more than 27 years of experience in technology, technical marketing, and management. Tom is the author of the book Data Protection and Information Lifecycle Management as well as many articles and two blogs dealing with technology and business.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Diversity Drives Innovation #ILTA12

Today starts our week-long coverage of ILTA 12. Though the International Legal Technology Association brings together a variety of legal professionals, the focus of this year’s conference relates to most, if not all of us in the enterprise — Act, Collaborate to Drive Change (AC2DC).

At the Corner of Diversity & Innovation

This morning’s keynote address, which featured Frans Johansson, author of "The Medici Effect”, laid a foundation for what the next few days are likely to bring, namely innovation at the intersection of disciplines and cultures. Mr. Johansson highlighted the different ways different companies have either embraced or foiled a culture of innovation to make inspired, meaningful changes to the way they work, develop and distribute products and services.

Mr. Johansson says that diversity drives innovation. Whether it is a diversity of culture, generations or experiences, when people of different backgrounds come together, the potential for innovation is at its greatest. Of course, it usually doesn’t start that way, because we usually refuse what we don’t understand. However, if you think about it from the perspective of innovation, consider Mr. Johansson’s facts about innovation:

• #1 all new ideas are combination of existing ideas.
• #2 people who change the world try far more ideas
• #3 Diverse teams can unleash an explosion of new ideas

At the intersection of culture we come up with better ideas, which is the reason why, when you embrace diversity, it can drive innovation.

Become Enabled to Make Things Better

How is this useful to you, the legal professional or enterprise worker? No matter what we do or at what level in our company we operate, we can leverage diversity of our organizations for new insights. We can use technology to drive (not just serve) new business models. We can make it easier to collaborate with everybody. Empowered employee meet diversity.

Find New Ways to Collaborate

How much innovation can you draw from a photo of a Formula One pit stop crew? Johansson asked audience members to stand up and discuss with the person beside us about how we can collaborate better based on information we gleaned from a photo.

In 3 minutes the person next to me and I came up with a few interesting ideas. Imagine if we doubled or even tripled the amount of time — 12 minutes at most? What if you and your colleagues spent 12 minutes a day or a week trying to figure out solutions to problems — how far would you get? What ideas could be dreamed up? How many of them can be useful?

Find New Ways to Be Inspired

If you truly want to drive change, find a way to think differently about things. Find a way to work together with new people, with new perspectives and see what can happen. Of course, this is a legal technology conference, so while it's great to start the first day with a sense of discovery and unlimited possibility, it's important to keep it real.

Many firms are still struggling to adapt to new types of new technology, never mind ready to drastically change how they work. Hopefully, however, Mr. Johansson's wisdom will stay alive throughout the week, reminding us that it's not the technology that's broken, it's our culture that needs to be fixed.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com