Greetings from SharePoint Conference 2011! I’m sure many of you by now have seen the latest version of our product at our booth (#601) or online, but I hope that most of you are downloading the beta to get first-hand experience! We are excited about the leap forward this represents for us, and on behalf of our product team, I hope you all enjoy the experience.
I’ve enjoyed seeing the new solutions being launched and previewed here at SPC, especially the announcements from several niche SharePoint solutions that are beginning to offer cross-product integration, something AvePoint has made a fundamental tenant since our first SharePoint solutions were launched in 2001. While many companies have been focused on acquisition over the years, we have been putting our developers hard at work in innovating the next wave of tools that are all fully integrated into one platform. We have one migration product to test and train on, capable of connecting to more than 14 legacy platforms. We have one storage solution, designed to support the full SharePoint lifecycle. We have one installation and one certification program for all our SharePoint solutions.
For those of you who have been with us for some time, I’m sure the question is being asked: Why upgrade a platform that has more than 3 years of solid deployments, and more than 8,000 deployments?
The question is duly noted – and it’s actually because of you, our customers, that DocAve 6 has been launched! DocAve 6 provides an enhanced user experience, smaller installation, lighter services, faster load and interaction times, as well as full .NET, SQL, and IIS integration. Give the beta a try and tell us what you think! You won’t need any additional hardware to test, as our platforms play well with your existing infrastructure.
But the other reason comes from the “innovation” part of our slogan. We used to have a slogan: “Changing the ways administrators manage SharePoint”. I personally still love that mantra as it brings us back to our core customers. As we’ve seen deployments of SharePoint move from single farms to dozens, a handful of servers to the hundreds, we’ve heard challenges and complaints from many customers who now have IT teams running at greater than 100 percent capacity just to support SharePoint! We didn’t simply want to bring another power-tool to the market. Many ISV solutions on the market, including DocAve, are an efficiency multiplier. But to paraphrase Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of the Office Business Platform at Microsoft, from the keynote at SPC 2011 – SharePoint really launched its success on the vision of empowering users with self-service collaboration. So we’ve asked, “If SharePoint is founded on this self-service model, then how do we give some of that control back without sacrificing governance?” I encourage you all to watch the presentations here at SPC around DocAve governance, watch our webinars to see how DocAve v6 and its services are helping enforce SharePoint governance!
We at AvePoint love SharePoint – as we’ve been a partner since the platform’s inaugural inception in 2001 – and we love to solve problems! So why not find out what problems we solve by talking to one of our 70+ Microsoft SharePoint Certified technical specialists who man our 24/7 live global support lines?
Thanks to the folks that have made DocAve possible!
John Hodges is Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at AvePoint, focusing on developing compliance solutions that address modern data privacy, classification, and data protection needs for organizations worldwide. Since joining AvePoint in 2008, John has worked directly with the company’s product management and research & development teams to cultivate creative ideas and bridge the gap between sales and technology – providing a practical target for innovation and a focused message for sales and marketing. John has been actively engaged in the SharePoint community for several years, working with many Fortune 500 companies to drive sustainable adoption of Microsoft technology and optimize SharePoint’s larger purpose-built implementations. John’s insights and opinions on modern Information Technology can be found in various industry publications, as well as throughout this numerous speaking sessions in webinars and at events worldwide.