Her request led to creation of the Forms Portal, a SharePoint site designed to replace the Excel spreadsheet and facilitate access to its valuable data to the whole company.

If you have issues with long file names in your SharePoint environment, then you probably have deeper issues with your Information Architecture.

The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference.

SharePoint Saturday: The Challenge of Unstructured Content, Concepts and Terminologies, Taxonomy and ECM Adoption Techniques, Why should Taxonomy matter to me

Support for in-place RM within all libraries is a major plus if you are looking for SharePoint 2010 to be your solution. Not only does this reduce IT overhead, but it allows your end users to live in the appropriate libraries for all relevant information. They won’t have to leave the confines of their collaborative environment to find a business record that relates to their project.

I describe a problem whereby document libraries having multiple content types use the default content type when documents are saved regardless of the selected content type.

Hopefully this will help you decide between when (and most importantly, how) to use SharePoint and when to use traditional file shares, for storing your files. A completely different conversation and should also be thought about, is the use of SharePoint versus document management systems like documentum or document locator. I never believe that there is a universal solution. A good solution depends on the problem it solves. There is always a very good reason to use SharePoint, file shares or a document management system depending on what business problem you are looking to solve. The only thing is, do your thinking & planning ahead of time – understand the problem or problems before deciding on the solution.

SharePoint is really a collection of capabilities. At its heart, it is a Portal that exposes information customized for a particular user. It has extended functionality to quickly build features inside this portal to enable Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search. It has ventured into Social Computing and Collaboration by creating shared work spaces, supporting blogs and wikis and allowing people search. With the inclusion of PerformancePoint in its licensing, it also becomes a strong Business Intelligence offering, though it will require expanded knowledge of that capability to implement. It starts to break down when pushed to work as a Business Process Management Suite or Application framework.

Not at all. The problem here is the way you think about your projects. If you are consistently talking about “implementing SharePoint” you are going in the wrong direction. If you are talking about implementing any platform, you are setting up for failure. Many of the problems we run into with SharePoint and other platforms arise from focusing on the technologies.

Most organizations have been using Excel to do analysis, create charts and design dashboards for years, yet there is a lot of functionality in Excel that is not easily accessed in SharePoint, sometimes even for those with Excel Services. The question becomes, how does one translate their work from Excel to SharePoint? This means more than linking to an Excel workbook in a Document Library; rather, it requires displaying the charts and dashboards directly within SharePoint.