Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is about a company's data. In today's tech savvy industry, documents generated by the hundreds every second, not to mention the plethora of legacy paper documents that have to be stored for the next seven to ten years. The issue is that there is a great deal of business intelligence in those documents that are scattered around a company and that can mean real money lost or gained. Indeed in today's business with ISO-9000, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPPA (to name a few of the regulations and standards) content management takes on a whole new meaning.

What is ECM?

According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) Enterprise Content Management (ECM) encompasses the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information wherever the information exists.

Who are some of the technology providers of ECM?

When you look at the ECM market, there are some large names from a variety of vertical markets associated with the technologies. Companies like Xerox, Oracle, IBM, EMC, Pitney Bowes, and Microsoft to name just a few. According to Gartner, the largest ECM providers in 2007 were Open Text Corporation, EMC/Documentum, IBM, and Oracle.

Where is ECM headed?

Having the content is good but there is better. The content is just data until it can be turned into information for running the business, known as Business Intelligence (BI). When you combine ECM and BI you get Enterprise Information Management (EIM). Companies with an Enterprise perspective are taking a growing interest in EIM.

As one looks at the market place they can not help but notice how Microsoft has entered the market and started commoditizing ECM with their SharePoint product. SharePoint works well as an ECM product and with the additional Performance Point product, the BI is added to the ECM capability of SharePoint; making it a viable EIM product. Indeed according to Gartner, Microsoft's entry into the ECM industry has started a transformation of the industry.

An additional benefit of ECM is the "Green Movement". By using a good ECM system, any business can make a significant step towards going paperless. That can be a significant savings and is a worthwhile effort in and of itself. Additionally, companies that have a number of locations will find an additional benefit of an ECM due to the collaboration capability.

All:

Aivea, Microsoft Gold Partner and a premier SharePoint Consulting Services provider for Microsoft is conducting an excellent SharePoint 2007 Architecture and Administration class in beautiful Portland, Oregon on 05/19 – 05/20, The training fees include Hotel and Meals. If you are interested, please call 1-800-779-7506 or e-mail consulting@aivea.com

Please find the course details at:
http://www.aivea.com/sharepoint/aivea_sharepoint_arch_admin_training.pdf

Thanks

-Pradeep

Many businesses are now investing starting $250 per employee with Aivea for Collaboration Tools that delivers operational excellence.

SharePoint Technology Solutions delivered by Aivea can promote a greener computing and work environment.

1. Reduces Printing, Faxing and Shipping by having documents, directories, profiles, lists and items dynamic and viewable in soft copy online and offline and most even in mobile views. SharePoint can store million of documents and allows google type search that delivers results in split seconds.

2. Promotes Server, Network and Storage Platform Consolidation - Having Search, Content Management, Collaboration/File Sharing, Portals, Dashboards, KPIs, Reports, Email enabled lists, Surveys, Doc Mgmt, Records, Team Calendars, Forms, etc... Shut down many old systems that are no longer needed.

3. Reduces Business Travel - being able to quickly and efficiently communicate over long distances more and more people can get their jobs done remotely and on the go.  Partners can collaborate with partners, business to consumer, CEO to the employees, teams and v-teams all can more efficiently communicate with each other.  Obvious integration with Live Communication Server and Office communicator/Windows or MSN Communicator even real time presence is available.  Without contacting a person you can understand what meetings they have (with Exchange integration) and when they are available.  Out of a group of people you can quickly view who is available and reduce the amount of time it would take to get information saving power.  Reaching out and using Live Meeting obviously reduces the travel by having the meeting online, but getting connected and sharing the files, team calendar, reports and information over SharePoint is a major part of that exchange.

4. Reduces Energy Consumption - Think how much time you save by finding documents and information via search.  Search itself reduces a ton of work that would otherwise be duplicated.  So much of our time is spend looking for resources and references.  The time we save here is energy even lights in our office we otherwise would spend looking for data.  This time we save would be wonderful if it meant we spent less time in the office, it may mean a shorter weekend and less time in the office, but otherwise, it simply means you get more work done in the same time it would have taken.  You don't spend less time at work, you're simply more efficient.  That energy may reduce the time the company would have spent and reduce the amount of employees the company would have to have thus reducing the amount of office space and hence power, heat, light, etc... so by making employees more efficient they can either reduce the employees or simply get more done with less which is likely closer to reality. 

5. Reduced Emissions Remote Employees & Telecomuting - One key scenario for reducing emissions and not burning fossil fuels is simply not to come to work.  I like that idea. 

Go Green! Save the planet!

The download links for the SharePoint Administration Toolkit

x64:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=F8EEA8F0-FA30-4C10-ABC9-217EEACEC9CE&displaylang=en

x86:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=263CD480-F6EB-4FA3-9F2E-2D47618505F2&displaylang=en

We are happy to announce the release of Aivea® RFP Manager™ software available on Software + Service model. Customers can buy the software or use the SaaS edition running in Aivea Datacenter in Beaverton, OR.

Aivea® RFP Manager™ is a web-based RFP/RFQ, Bid and Quotation Management Software solutions that allows your company to electronically manage RFPs, RFQs, RFIs, Bids and Quotations across multiple offices, vendors and suppliers. Using only a web browser and it is the easiest way to use the power of the internet to provide a scalable business-wide RFP/RFQ, Bid and Quotation Management solution for your company or governmental agency.

Aivea® RFP Manager™ is built on the latest Microsoft.NET 3.5 Framework, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 using ASP.NET, AJAX, C#, XML, ADO.NET, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and SQL Server 2005.

More details at http://www.aivea.com/aivea-rfp-manager.htm 

SharePoint Engineers at Aivea has been running SQL 2008 for serveral months, yes x64 bit on Windows 2008 as well. Aivea SharePoint test labs now have about 4 physical machines and 7 VMs on MOSS 2007 - Windows 2008 - SQL Server 2008. Here are the top 8 reasons for using SQL Server 2008 for MOSS 2007 implementations

1. No more 2 Gig per File Limit, SQL 2008 has 8 Gig per File and you can stream out the BLOG objects. No need to wait for ClouldSpace as well
2. Backup compression (25-35% at least) - huge cost savings and hey it's native!
3. Transparent Encryption - transparently encrypt the data without the application needing to be aware or know about it.
4. Database Mirroring Enhancements - compressed tlogs, more automatic failover options
5. Policy Based Administration - manage policies across databases and even across instances and servers
6. Cluster enhancements - easier to configure and more scenarios that it supports including many in WS08 that provide more intelligence for failover
7. Resource Governor - limit wild database resources or control one database resources from another!
8. Reporting Services in SharePoint Mode (report builder rocks!) - easy reporting solutions built to leverage SharePoint mode with more flexibility and with ease.

The final and complete edition of the end-user Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training is now broadly available!

The training comes with rich set of videos, tutorials and articles that help end users learn the basics of SharePoint. The kit can be installed directly to individual machines (stand alone edition), or directly onto a SharePoint environment (portal edition). IT Departments, or even groups such as HR, Corporate Learning and others will be able to use and customize the kit to train users on SharePoint usage.

· Portal Edition: built on the Microsoft SharePoint Learning Kit (‘SLK’), the Portal Edition must be deployed onto a SharePoint Server site by a server administrator. It includes a reporting function that allows an administrator/trainer to track learners’ completed training topics. The content is compliant to the e-learning standard SCORM 2004.

· Standalone Edition: can be installed by an individual and easily accessed from a desktop icon. It does not allow customization or reporting, but give customers the ability to view the training before they deploy the Portal Edition on a SharePoint Server site.

Training topics included in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training:

· Collaboration: team sites, permissions, Web parts, libraries, lists, blogs, wikis, and workspaces.

· Enterprise Content Management: document and records management, protecting files, using workflows, compliance, and more.

· Search: finding files, Web sites, information and people.

· Portals and personalization: My Sites, targeting content, and managing My Site access

· Business processes and forms: streamline business processes, gather information with forms, and configure workflows.

· Business intelligence: share Excel workbooks, work with a Report Center site, use dashboards, integrate internal data, and more.

The SharePoint Conference was excellent! With 3,800+ attendees and a long waiting list, this was a big, BIG conference. Aivea team is excited to host our customers and partners in the Seattle area.

Aivea was showcased in the Day 2 videos and our booth got a ton of kudos!

http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0803/32436/32436_sharepoint_2_500k.asx

The following is a table of topics and links on SharePoint Architecture, some of them were presented at the conference.  

Title	Streaming Video	White Paper
Overview: Office SharePoint Server server farm architecture	None	Download
Overview: Configuring server farms	Watch	Download
Securing server farms	Watch	Download
Configuring performance options	Watch	None
Backup, Restore, High Availability and Disaster Recovery	Watch	Download
Operations and management	Watch	Download
Capacity planning	Watch	Download
Search architecture and configuration	Watch	Download

Aivea is a exhibitor at world's largest SharePoint conference. Please see us at booth #1003. We will be doing demos of Aivea SharePoint solutions at the booth as well as in the private suites. The conference is sold out! Over 3800 registered participants.

Please see details at http://www.mssharepointconference.com/pages/sponsors/exhibitors.aspx

The benefits of implementing an Enterprise Intranet by using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server  (MOSS) 2007 to enhance collaboration and maintain consistency throughout your organization are clear and well-documented.

However, without proper governance, even the best planned intranet can eventually become out of control and lead to chaos.

What can you do to prevent this and get the most from your Office SharePoint Server 2007 investment?

Here is a whitepaper from Microsoft that would help - http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102321871033

The SharePoint test data load tool (WSSDW.exe) is a performance testing tool that populates data for testing deployments of Office SharePoint Server 2007. The SharePoint test data load tool is available as a command-line executable program that accepts an XML configuration file that specifies the objects to be populated. The SharePoint test data load application calls a Microsoft .NET assembly (WSSDWLib.dll). WSSDWLib.dll can also be called from other applications.

This is a must use tool for all deployments over 50 users.

Here is more -- http://technet2.microsoft.com/Office/en-us/library/301ed832-95da-4251-b266-7be6288f7ea01033.mspx?mfr=true

We got an R&D server farm running with MOSS 2007 SP1 on SQL 2008 and Windows 2008.

Here is an interesting blog from the SharePoint team http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/01/16/windows-server-2008-and-sharepoint-resources.aspx

We will be posting the results of our testing very soon!