The world may be flat, connected and sharing, but keeping track of the various events, user groups, best practices and conferences about Microsoft SharePoint can be a taunting task. Joel Oleson started this, with his ‘If you could go to one SharePoint conference this year, what would it be?‘ post, and I picked it up from there.

After exhibiting at The SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last year, I’ve been working on finding out which events are planned for 2010, who’s attending, what are the topics, who’s speaking and more. Sponsorships are an important aspect of our marketing strategy, and has its advantages such as strengthening our brand and increasing our public exposure to relevant stakeholders (customers, analysts, VCs), but there are other aspects to the mix – such as PR, advertising, online, professional publications and others.

I’ve compiled a spreadsheet trying to summarize the SharePoint related events in 2010, based on my own research, and added some events Joel described in his post. Feel free to add events to the spreadsheet, using this form. Once moderated, your entry will be shown in the spreadsheet below.

Updated Feb. 11th.

A month into 2010 and we’re working hard on making CardioLog better. Following a successful 2009, with numerous new customers, we sat down – product and marketing teams, trying to prioritize the requests we received from our customers, our partners, our own vision regarding the product, analysts perspective on analytics and Microsoft’s direction with SharePoint 2010. Not an easy task.

From all of that input we compiled our roadmap for 2010, which is available here. We welcome your feedback, and will take any request under consideration, but we cannot promise it will find its way to production. Some highlights that will become available, soon:

• CardioLog 2010 Enterprise
• Integration with SSP Profiles
• Retrieval of the Portal Tree structure with the SharePoint API
• Import usage data from SharePoint 2010
• Report segmentation by user profiles
• Report segmentation by SharePoint groups and audiences
• CardioLog Lite for SharePoint 2010
• Funnel reports
• Site overlay
• And more

Again, the full list is available on our website.

We also launched ‘CardioLog 2010 for SharePoint 2010 Beta Program’, which will allow our customers to evaluate the integration with SharePoint 2010. We have big plans for the next release of SharePoint, here’s what we’re working on:

• As with MOSS, CardioLog will provide an independent JavaScript tracking agent for collecting browser activity for SharePoint 2010
• Usage reports will be available for data collected by either CardioLog or SharePoint 2010 (Logging DB)
• CardioLog will continue to provide enhanced reporting segments through integration with SharePoint 2010 SSP Profiles, SharePoint 2010 groups and security info, SharePoint 2010 document metadata, Active Directory user attributes, and more
• We plan to track usage within the SharePoint 2010 Workspace (offline experience)
• CardioLog reports will be available as SharePoint 2010 web parts

As you can tell – we have our hands full.

We also made some adjustments to our Support Policy, and continue to update the Forum and FAQs with feedback we receive from customers, analytics tips and best practices. Now is also the time for you to start following CardioLog on twitter – to receive product updates, tips & tricks, announcements and more.

CardioLog Standard

We also introduced a new addition to our portfolio – CardioLog Standard. The new edition is ideal for small and mid-sized companies, starting to explore the possibilities of analytics, looking for an affordable yet accurate solution – designed for Microsoft SharePoint portals. CardioLog Standard boosts roughly the same features as our Professional Edition, with some limitations (see table). If you’re looking for a small-sized, on-premise web analytics solution, our Standard Edition is your choice. You can download a free trial version now.

3 days into my new job at IntLock and I have lots of items in my To-Do list, the most important ones are a) learning how Sharepoint is built (from an architecture point of view, web-parts and all) and b) terms and definitions relating to web analytics. Getting to know IntLock and CardioLog goes without saying…

IntLock was founded is 2005 and operates in the web analytics scene. Our solution (video), CardioLog, is considered one of the leading Sharepoint Usage Reporting solutions. CardioLog integrates with the portal structure (tree) and ‘knows’ its content and metadata as well – thus enabling us to present an accurate snapshot of your website: customer site (B2C), partner/agents site (B2B) and employee portal (intranet). CardioLog can also pull data from your AD (active directory) to provide a deeper understanding of how your users (and groups) access the site.

CardioLog comes in 3 flavors: Lite (free), Professional and Enterprise. The main differences are outlined in the table below, along with cost of course. The main diffrentiators are what reports come out-of-the-box, the # of page views per month supported and # of years saved for hostory data. Wanna build your own reports? Get your copy of our SDK and start building. You welcome to download CardioLog Lite for free right now, and start making sense (and $$$) of your traffic. You can also download a free 30-day trial of our Enterprise Edition, with more features and reports. As always, we’re here to help.

CardioLog offers much more than the built-in Sharepoint 2007 Reporting, and is also an excellent alternative for Google Analytics. Here’s what made the difference for some of our customers:

• Independent JavaScript agent
• Data aggregation according to portal hierarchy (not URL-based)
• Data filtering according to portal metadata
• Tracking of portal-specific user activities
• Visitor segmentation by Active Directory attributes
• Exporting reports to SharePoint 2007 web parts
• Built-in integration with other enterprise applications (e.g., CRM, ERP)

While you’re downloading CardioLog and analyzing traffic, I’ll get back to my reading: Web Analytics – An Hour A Day, by Avinash Kaushik for now (1 hour per day) and some Sharepoint tutorials and blogs for later. If you have any favorite blogs, tweeple or sites, comment away

Amidar Housing, the government agency responsible for housing in Israel, has just launched its redesigned website, developed over IBM WebSphere Portal Express software. Excellent gift for the holidays!
During the 2nd stage of the project, Amidar – along with Web-Tech Innovation, IBM BP specializing in portal and KM solutions – will launch a new intranet website, that would connect Amidar’s 500 employees spread at 50 locations across the country.

Amidar picked IBM in July 2008, with a definite roadmap to launch the redesigned site by the end of the year. The solution, WebSphere Portal Express V6.0 (packaged for small-medium businesses), along with WebSphere Dashboard Framework, provides the perfect platform for Adimar, and cost-effective one, to develop and deploy 2 portals over a single infrastructure – exploiting the solution’s capability of ‘Virtual Portal’.

Amidar also took advantage of some innovative web 2.0 technologies embeded in the solution, by deploying the map you see above, of the various locations across Israel. The launch of the redesigned site, as well as the internal portal (to be launched soon), are part of Amidar’s 2009 approach of focusing on the customer’s needs.

Yaacov Brosh, Amidar CEO:

Access to public housing and learning the rights every citizen entitles to, demand first of all – access to information. The redesigned website provides just that.

Amir Belferman, Amidar CIO:

Building over WebSphere Portal technology enabled us flexibility in content management, easy setup of the different pages/categories and operational efficiency, under a very short time frame. We plan to maximize the platform in the future, by enhancing the services and information we provide to our customers online.

Links:
Amidar website
Amidar improves customer care by launching a redesigned website built over IBM technology
IBM web portal software
WebSphere Portal Express software

Mainsoft announced yesterday of a new solution, Sharepoint Integrator for Lotus Notes (free 30-day trial), that enables Lotus Notes users to access Sharepoint content, via an Eclipse plug-in, at Notes 8 sidebar. You can download the solution sheet (PDF file) or watch a demo (WMV file).

The new integrator was previewed at Lotusphere 2008 in Orlando back in January, and Ed Brill already managed to talk about it, on his way to Turkey, couple of hours before the announcement.

Many companies are using Sharepoint Server as ‘content repository’ to store files, but still want to enjoy the benefits of Lotus Notes as a platform, and not ‘just’ another messaging application. This new Sharepoint Integrator for Lotus Notes provides just that. You can keep your Sharepoint content and work with it, inside your Lotus Notes client. For the Israeli market this announcement is big news, since many customers are using Sharepoint Server to store/share files, but are looking at Lotus Notes as a collaboration platform. [click the image for a larger format]

Excerpt from eWeek:

Mainsoft is essentially cozying up to Notes users by letting Notes and SharePoint content coexist, Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen told eWEEK.

“Customers are sick of all these migrations,” Cohen said. “Customers are saying, ‘Show me how I can leverage what I’ve already purchased.’”

Some features of the SharePoint Integrator, which Cohen demoed for eWEEK May 6, include the ability to drag and drop Word documents, Excel worksheets and PowerPoint presentations from a Notes sidebar into Lotus Notes e-mails, calendar appointments and task lists. This is extremely useful for Notes users who need to make SharePoint files actionable through Notes.