Yes, I know have been very quiet this year, but I am determined
to get back to weekly SharePoint Blog writing. I could blame the worry of the
Villa’s Premiership safety or the excitement at publishing my first threebooks, but in truth SharePoint has just gone a little crazy lately. With different the
versions around the UK now stretched from 2003 to 2013. Office Talk now
has customers on 4 different versions of SharePoint and that isn't even including
WSS and Foundation.
Despite so many versions of SharePoint and it approaching its
troublesome teenage years people still ask ‘What Does SharePoint Do?’ The
answer is really whatever you want it to do. Well, maybe not make the perfect
cup of tea or help Villa climb to safety, but when it comes to storing
information it does the lot. It can be a reporting tool for your database
systems, it can content manage your website, it can create surveys on what
should the venue be for this year’s Christmas Office Party or it can add
automation to any paper system. I am sure we could list over 100 polite uses
for SharePoint, but the top one for most size organisations is ‘Document
Management’.
Whether it is Private or Public Sector they all want to have
a system for storing their ‘Controlled’ documents. The type of documents that
legally shouldn't be deleted, the type that need some level of security,
probably the sort that needs to keep old versions and be have an audit trail.
As SharePoint puts a big tick in each of these boxes it is the tool that the
majority of organisations turn to. The only issue is that they have had
electronic documents for the last twenty plus years and they need a way to get
these into SharePoint.
Often organisations have very large shared network drives
that contain lots of valuable documents. Now uploading into SharePoint is not
quick but can be done. The popular Explorer View is always and easy solution,
but there are drawbacks. The major one being that you lose the author name and
date created straight away. It turns into the account used to do the upload and
today’s date. It is as if the past never existed and there wasn't life before
SharePoint. But we need to Time Travel back to get the original properties.
So how can we keep the original properties from the Network Share
and take them into the Document Libraries? Many Office Talk customers already
know the answer but for the rest of you I will let you into the secret…….
It is DocKit from Vyapin. Over the last three years DocKit
has been Office Talk’s biggest reselling product. To find out more and try it
out just visit the DocKit
page on the Office Talk website.
If only the Villa could convert their recent good
performances into Premiership points as easily. With ten games left I have calculated
that they will get ten more points before the final game. I have also estimated
that Wigan will get eight points before the last game. So if I am right the
Villa will go to Wigan for last game of the season two points ahead. In the
words of Sir Alex, ‘it’s squeaky bum time’.
