Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Office 365 HIPPA Compliant

Pretty excited we are now supporting this HIPPA Privacy and Security Standards for Office 365 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_in_health/archive/2011/12/14/microsoft-office-365-cloud-based-productivity-service-complies-with-hipaa-standards-for-data-protection-and-security.aspx. This question has come up a lot and will allow health related organizations and agencies to get some real significant cost savings utilizing Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

SharePoint - Presidential Memo to Records Management

On November 28, 2011 a new Presidential Memorandum was sent out regarding Records Management - http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/11/28/presidential-memorandum-managing-government-records

In the Mandate there are two notable action items that should be top of mind with your customer and open the door for a discussion:

  1. “Within 30 days of the date of this memorandum, designate in writing to the Archivist of the United States (Archivist), a senior agency official to supervise the review required by subsection”
  2. “Within 120 days of the date of this memorandum, each agency head shall submit a report to the Archivist and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that describes the agency's current plans for improving or maintaining its records management program…”

This is a great opportunity for Federal Agencies to utilize what they own, specifically SharePoint, to assist you with building records management solutions. As a starting point, customers such as USDA where they have implemented a SharePoint 2010 Standard-only solution (no additional 3rd party software was required) to deliver cost effective Records Management - USDA Records Management Case Study.

If you required DoD 5015.2 certified records management solutions, Microsoft does have ISV partners that have built solutions that adhere to these standards.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Gartner Rates Microsoft a Leader in Enterprise Search

I am happy to say the Microsoft has again been ranked as a top Enterprise Search provider in the marketplace - http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1835DKL&ct=111123&st=sb. You will see that some Enterprise Search providers dropped in rankings and some were removed.

As you can see, FAST is not slowing down and we have an extremely strong roadmap for it. It is a very fiscally responsible Enterprise Search solution when you consider it as part of your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when investing with SharePoint Enterprise. FAST provides tons of added features and capabilities to solutions such as Portals, Sites, ECM, Document Management, BI, Social, Composites, Platform Development, etc. Plus if you know how to configure SharePoint Search; FAST search is configured and managed through the same screens and procedures thus requiring less ramp up time.

Even if an organization just needs a pure Enterprise Search solution, FAST is a great Enterprise Search platform. Having SharePoint in the mix, is great value additive because many other Enterprise Search ends provide you no user interfaces. Yes FAST does have services so that other applications tiers can tap into it. However having a web portal like SharePoint immediately available with numerous web parts to start building search screens and search applications is a huge time and money saver. Plus, when Enterprise Search is made accessible through SharePoint, you get to take advantage of all the other SharePoint features to deliver a more engaging user experience. For instance:

  • You can create blogs from the search team to the users
  • Wikis to explain to users how to do advanced search
  • Stream training videos
  • Maintain documents and FAQs
  • Create a Search Knowledge Base
  • Create support forums
  • Manage technical specifications about line of business data that is index
  • Etc.