There has been rumours and innuendo regarding what’s happening with SharePoint, if you attended our briefings at the end of last year and the beginning of 2010 you may have seen an insight. I have seen a few references and posts regarding this on the internet recently, firstly “Moodle Killer” the phase is simply alarmist and certainly is not true, “Moodle integration” absolutely, and it is here where Microsoft have been investing their $9.5 Billion a year in research and development.

In fact pretty much every product that Microsoft are launching this year features integration highly with other products including integration with open source products and other vendors – i.e the agreement with Novell around SAML and SUSE linux.  Take GrIDsure, this is a fairly small independent company (with a great product incidentally - see here) they approached Microsoft and asked if they could have a look at this for integration purposes (it uses AD) and now Microsoft have designed a pathway for integration with Forefront Identity Management  and Unified Access Gateway.

So the “Big Picture” with SharePoint 2010, FIM2010,  UAG2010, Exchange 2010, Office 2010 and Live @ Edu and Office Web apps  is all about easier integration and working smarter and improving the look and feel and user friendliness of their solutions. No daft codenames, No hidden agenda’s in fact no big secret at all really, sorry to disappoint!

Okay there are going to be big improvements particularly around Business Intelligence and easier creation of reports and forms also SharePoint 2010 features integration Access  databases and AJAX support something that people who have MOSS2007 and 2003 will really appreciate.

So enough babble from me....Let us give you a full overview of what this actually looks like, how it will work and most importantly what benefits that a fully integrated collaborative service can bring to your institution. Salford Software can offer a wide range of solutions to improve user engagement allowing them to create, capture and share knowledge using a large selection of collaborative tools  this  includes document management, workflow, shared workspaces, portal Integration with VLE’s, integrated web based environments and implementation of server and/or hosted email solution’s.

Call me today on 0161 906 2233 or by email david.poole@salfordsoftware.co.uk