Imagine this situation – Its 8:37 a.m. and you are traveling from Madison to Chicago when someone bumps your arm and your laptop smashes to the ground… rendering it inoperable.

You have to edit documents and create new ones for a meeting at 3 p.m. so what do you do?

This is where SharePoint Office Web Applications come to the rescue.

Luckily, your organization uses SharePoint 2010 so all of your documents are centrally managed and easy to locate within your SharePoint site. So as soon as you land in Chicago, you locate the closest internet café, log into SharePoint and open Word from the browser to start editing documents. The Word Web Application is lightweight, yet robust enough to manage your document creation and editing needs.

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There may be instances in which data *gasp* resides outside of SharePoint, but still within the scope of the enterprise’s operations, and you will want to incorporate this data into the SharePoint platform. As an example, you may have a database of all your sales opportunities in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison but would like to have this data available on your “Sales Team Site” within SharePoint.

SharePoint Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is just that… the management of the Enterprise’s content. The question then becomes how to interact with information in databases outside of SharePoint, but manage the content within SharePoint. The solution is through the use of External Content Types and External Lists.

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Client: “HELP! SharePoint is broken. Can you come to Chicago today and fix it?”

Concurrency: “Sure, can you tell me what is broken?”

Client: “Our users can’t find what they are looking for, no one is storing documents in the right locations, we have offices in Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago that are supposed to collaborate with each other but can’t.”

Concurrency: “Would it be correct to say that nothing is technically broken, but the Information Architecture of your SharePoint environment is not meeting your needs and your SharePoint governance policy is not being enforced?”

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Wherever I go, my SharePoint tattoo travels with me. It is a part of my identity, a unique identifier that is ever prominent and always with me… a permanent reminder of one crazy night in Vegas that anyone can use to identify me.

Within SharePoint 2010, documents (and records) can have a Document ID attached to them that is carried throughout their lifecycle. By maintaining this unique identifier, a document can be clearly identified and if the document is moved to another location (such as a different document library) the Document ID is carried with it.

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There are many situations in which a set of content, such as Word and Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations, and images are all interrelated. In previous iterations of SharePoint, as well as other ECM systems, these items would be treated as separate identities. Managing these items would be on an individual basis, even if they were organized in a folder. In this scenario, if you wanted to enact a workflow across the documents it would require each item having the workflow placed on it, rather than the sum of content being treated as one set and managed appropriately.

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SharePoint 2010 has been released with a roar and the world is buzzing about the features it brings to the table.

Beyond providing a best in class collaboration platform, its core capabilities of document management, content management, and records management have been greatly enhanced. In fact, some of the most common questions I get while involved in a SharePoint consulting engagement revolve around SharePoint content management and SharePoint collaboration. It is important to note that collaboration extends past the value of a centralized SharePoint portal and into areas such as SharePoint project management options.

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Here are my Top Ten quick takes on new Document and Record Management capabilities in SharePoint 2010:

10.Unique Document ID’s: Every doc has a unique identifier and unique link. I can send you a link to a specific document and the link will work no matter where the real document lives.

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Hi my name is RUSK_510210v2_Draft.

You would never introduce yourself in this manner, so why do your documents?

In the apparent never ending anarchy of naming conventions gone awry and file plans gone mad, there is a simple and pure piece of salvation… metadata.

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There is a mindset within records management that “If it’s not complicated, it won’t work”. While establishing a solid records management process is not easy per se, it should not be made more difficult by proprietary vendors who have lost focus or never had a focus on usability. Many tools overcomplicate the storing and finding of records. If a system is not easy to us it will not succeed, no matter the brand name or promises by the vendor.

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