We're pleased to announce integration with Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 server. With this new connector, SharePoint users can send documents and files from their document repositories to external recipients easily and securely.

A few nice things about integrating with SharePoint:

• Completely secure collaboration

• No need to set up a separate external SharePoint site for external users

• Collaboration can happen without any tedious user setup in Active Directory

• All deliveries are tracked and logged

• Leverage your existing BDS application

For more information, see the new BDS for SharePoint on our Web site.

Microsoft's biggest SharePoint show of the year in Las Vegas was a pretty big success. They were sold out (7400 attendees) completely, and the Microsoft fanboys were out in force. Luckily, Microsoft was there feeding them some good information on SharePoint with a plethora of classes, sessions, and discussions.

We had a booth out there showing off our SharePoint integration with our SFT and fax products. Some good interest. Didn't notice any other MFT/SFT vendor there however. We got quite a few SharePoint system integrators and developers who were interested in our Web services APIs to add secure file transfer and inbound/outbound fax to their solutions.

I attended several of the sessions while I was out there. One of the most lively was an analyst panel which was probably the most intense and argumentative events I've seen. Most analysts either seem to agree for the most part, or politely disagree. At this session, phrases like "you're wrong" were flying back and forth. That was fun.

Otherwise, the big news is SharePoint 2010 and various announcements surrounding the next release. The analysts suggested waiting for the first service pack before moving it into production, which is of course the wise, conservative approach.

SharePoint 2010 sounds like a pretty big step up from 2007. A lot more functionality, flexibility, search power (adding FAST searching), and focus on personalization, a la FaceBook, and community. One of the cooler demos shown was the ability to directly pull data from SQL databases and show that data in a list. Users can also make CRUD changes from within SharePoint and have it automatically update the back end database.

Of course, Steve Ballmer was there at the keynote. I was hoping to see some crazy dancing, or at least some hopping around, but no, he was pretty calm. Of course, he's so loud he really didn't need a microphone to reach the entire auditorium.

Just had a conversation with Mark Gilbert at Gartner a few days ago. That guy knows his stuff! We updated him on Biscom's SharePoint development and that we'll be exhibiting at the Microsoft SharePoint conference this Fall (October 19-22, 2009 in Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas). If you're a Gartner client and have SharePoint questions, want to know who the players are, and where Microsoft is going with this technology, Mark is the guy to talk to!

A whopping 90% of business leaders surveyed had concerns that SharePoint might enable data theft because they did not have the tools in place to monitor and protect data as it's being shared. That's a significant percentage!

BDS is adding a layer of protection that doesn't come out of the box with SharePoint to provide secure collaboration with external users. Not only does BDS lock down the delivery through a secure file transfer interface, but it also tracks everything so you always know exactly who sent out documents and who accessed them.

SharePoint deployments are becoming increasingly common, and we've been hearing a common concern from IT folks who have installed SharePoint in their network. As usual, Microsoft is trying to do a lot with SharePoint, including collaboration, content management, business intelligence, enterprise search, and portal development. However, it seems that many companies are using SharePoint primarily for file sharing. CMS Wire noted this concern last year: SharePoint Security Concerns Simply a Lack of Governance?

Many of today's corporate environments are embracing enterprise CMS solutions as a way to disseminate and share information amongst workers and workgroups. Microsoft SharePoint is a popular choice because it aligns well with an existing Microsoft-powered network and project groups’ workflow. However, according to new research from Courion, companies who are deploying SharePoint are doing so in a manner that might be putting crucial data at risk.

According to Courion's web-based study, 86% of IT managers are concerned about sensitive data being exposed on SharePoint sites when SharePoint is used outside of applicable data security guidelines.

Think about it -- companies can put a lot of sensitive information on their SharePoint sites, and because SharePoint can give almost anyone the ability to publish content and files out to both internal and external users, IT managers have a new hole to plug: unauthorized SharePoint sites that are exposing confidential corporate data.

We've announced our support for a solution that will help IT managers provide a method of sharing files through SharePoint securely using Biscom Delivery Server.