Six Summer SharePoint Sizzers

Last weekend was one of those rare British sunny weekends, which meant it was time to get the old barbecue out and enjoy some outdoor cooking. After removing the cobwebs and encouraging a rather large (strangely spotted) spider that I didn’t really want an extra eight legs in my burger I was ready to light the barbie. Now, I don’t know how pyromaniacs manage it because trying to get wood to set fire is not easy. I was armed with a pack of little wooden blocks, purchased from the twenty-four hour garage, which according to their bag were ideal for outdoor stoves and heaters. Every time I managed to light one the flame went out within a minute. This frustration continued for over an hour and even the addition of a complete ‘People’ Sunday news paper and several fire-lighting cubes failed to start a blaze. So frustrating then, to see that on ‘Eastenders’ on Wednesday one dropped cigarette caused an instant raging inferno. Unperturbed I kept going and maybe it was the added white spirits that helped, but just one hour later we were tucking into various meat products on different shaped rolls.

So why am I talking about barbecues in my SharePoint blog? The reason is that like the meat that was sizzling on the Dale barbecue SharePoint has some add-on products that really make it very tasty. In a week that has seen a number of SharePoint applications being triumphant at Microsoft Tech Ed I would like to share with you my top six SharePoint Sizzlers that will really spice up any SharePoint Project. Now, each of these SharePoint ingredients has a very different part to play so I don’t think I can put them in any order of importance, instead I will just go for an alphabetical order.

Bamboo Solutions Webparts I have mentioned them before, but every SharePoint project can benefit from a piece of Bamboo. Their range of exceptional webparts make them the market leaders and if you want more from SharePoint take a peek there first. My current favourite is ‘Calendar Plus’ one that allows you to colour code your appointments. I have made all my Aston Villa fixtures for next season claret (sad – but true!!)

CADnection

Many companies have engineers and architects who produce complicate CAD drawings. With CADnection you can load them straight into SharePoint, edit them in SharePoint and it even copes with X-Refs.

Colligo Contributor

Award winners at Tech Ed 2008. Colligo is a real SharePoint gem because it provides easy offline synchronisation allowing laptop users to always have access to their most important SharePoint libraries.

DocAve

Another Tech Ed winner and a vital SharePoint Application. DocAve is the perfect Backup Application for SharePoint allowing instant backup and restore of individual items, lists or sites. No longer is there a need for you to backup using a combination of Symantec, SharePoint Backup and SharePoint Designer. They also have a great migration tool for when you need to move from 2003 to 2007.

Media Rich for SharePoint

As mentioned in last week’s blog Media Rich for SharePoint allows you to store thousands of high quality images, videos or audios in SharePoint.

Share Knowledge

An award winning application that fully manages E-Learning within the SharePoint environment. If you have got SharePoint already and you want to start E-Learning this is the package to use.

Now I am not suggesting you need all of these ingredients on your SharePoint barbecue but they are all ones that good SharePoint chefs should be aware of.

Now, roll on a wet August and the return of the football season.