| Having trouble reading this newsletter? Click here to see it in your browser. You are receiving this newsletter because you are a customer, a partner or you signed up from our web site. Click here to unsubscribe. |
 |
 |
In this Issue In Other News SharePoint Patch Update If you haven't already patched you SharePoint portal, please note the recent SP2010 cumulative update release News Anthony Appadoo – London Marathon 2011 AvePoint Special Offer - 30% off until March 31st
Cloud2 in the Press!
Events Goldman Sachs Small Businesses Programme
Follow us on Twitter Follow our news and blogs via RSS Let your friends know about the news and events... |
|
|
It's been another extremely busy month for us as the financial year draws to a close and budgets become finalised. We've been travelling all over the country, to attend the HFMA/ASSIST conference in Blackpool, and to attend the Goldman Sachs Small Businesses project that began at the end of last year. The inititive has now finished, but the ongoing support of the GS group is still available to us, and we are proud to say that we successfully completed the course, which led, in turn, to Cloud2 winning the Venturefest award last month. But enough of our successes, the rest of this newsletter looks at some of the add ons and applications available if you have or are considering SharePoint. This is just a small selection, so get in touch if you want to know more. Extending SharePoint - apps, add ons and enhancements Our Solution Accelerator has really been turning some heads lately. Not to blow our own trumpet, but it seems we've impressed a lot of people with how quickly solutions can be implemented when the Solution Accelerator has been put in place first. To give you a bit of insight into what it actually does, here's a bit more of an explanation. The SharePoint Solution Accelerator is an approach Cloud2 adopt for delivering better SharePoint projects. It places Architecture before Applications (IA) and Configuration before Development, to offer a broad and deep framework for an intranet which includes elements of document management, collaboration, information storage and retrieval, extranet and more. The core framework, features and functions meet about 80% of the company’s needs, leaving more project time to focus on the unique and important differences. There are loads of ways to get SharePoint-based projects wrong - we've talked about these in the past and pulled most of the good hints and tips together into a well-regarded document you might like to read. See how many of these you are getting right (or wrong!) in our Hints and Tips info sheet and keep up to date via the Head in the Clouds Blog. Roger Stocker of Intuitive Business Intelligence described our Solution Accelerator as"...the most advanced solution of it's type on the market," which might go some way into explaining how it keeps getting us nominated for Innovation in IT awards! 
An technology we've been working with for years and increasingly over recent months is the award-winning DocAve Software Platform . DocAve is a comprehensive suite of tools for Microsoft SharePoint to help with infrastructure management and protection and administration. It integrates AvePoint’s powerful backup, administration, and other tools to make SharePoint easier to manage and live with. It's all browser-based, uses a fully-distributed architecture and you can buy as many of their modules as you need. We particularly recommend clients buy the backup and recovery solution, though migration tools are often part of the mix. Until March the 31st, we are offering a 30% discount and 50GB free data migration when any DocAve licenses are ordered within the public sector - for more information, follow this link: AvePoint Offer or email us at sales@cloud2.co.uk. You need to act fast, but we can do it if you can. We have developed SharePoint solutions for managing board assurance, IG Toolkit Response and CQC audits, which we've rolled together into our Governance Pack. The pack has been designed to make implementing SharePoint-based governance for the Health Sector as easy and pain-free as possible, with ready-to-use search functionality, readily-available graphical data representation and password protection/log-in requirements. It's also rapid to implement, with an average turnaround of about 9 weeks. 
In response to the recent needs of one of our clients, we came accross a fantastic service desk/help desk application based entirely on SharePoint. We like it a lot because it's powerful, flexible and realistically priced. It's not going to replace the likes of LANdesk etc, but for new organisations with less complex needs or where cost savings are needed or you' need a service desk approach for other aspects of your organisation, Facilities or HR for example, then Crow Canyon might be just what you're looking for. Let us know if you want to take a look! 
Something we've discovered while working with the senior team at the NHS is how paper-intensive and time consuming the administration around board meetings and executive-level meetings are. In advance of key meetings PAs take a lot of time sorting and preparing the documents, minutes etc. and then ensuring they are distributed. A powerful approach would be to use a SharePoint site to manage these types of meetings since it provides a central place for all the documents and other tools such as task lists, diary dates and more. In combination with slate computers or even Kindle devices it's possible to minimise the amount of paper, eliminate the time between preparing documents and making them available to the antendees and also encourages collaboration. A number of our clients are working to get their mangers and senior executives on board with this approach, as challenging as this might be! We recently took a more in-depth look at this... We've been pulling together lots of the different solutions we've developed for Human Resources into an HR pack. These include both complete SharePoint sites and very sophisticated electronic forms. Currently, we have solutions for:
For more info, contact us directly. The finance team are responsible for lots of activities and tend to have existing systems for many of them, however we have some solutions built in SharePoint that assist with finance processing and reporting. Another key task that tends to fall to finance is provision of Business Intelligence. Our Rapid BI approach forms part of the finance pack and provides some great tools for enhancing the existing intelligence and reports bound up in Ecel and Word, together with mechanisms for presenting those elegantly, simply and interactively to other parts of the organisation. We;ve been getting some great feedback from the demonstrations of this, and we'd be happy to show you too. Request a demo or read more. 
We have talked about our exciting Business Intelligence developments over recent months in blogs and previous newsletters and ahve run several demonstrations for NHS trusts that have all be highly successful. We have now named our approach RapidBI, as it can be implemented in a matter of weeks as well as providing the roadmap to more extensive BI solutions. For more information, take a look at our RapidBI fact sheet and our BI overview. 
It's obvious if you've ever spoken to us that we are very enthusiastic about slate computing. The Zoostorm SL8 enables the user to access their Microsoft applications including SharePoint from anywhere, and despite the current view that slates are primarily for leisure use, we believe they can bring a whole new dimention of efficiency and ease to the corporate world. With slates, it could be possible to run "paperless practices", placing all information and data instantly into a hospital intranet, where it's immediately available to those who need to see it. No more clipboards, no more intrusive and unweildy PC stations, no more lost forms. Following on from the popularity of the Zoostorm SL8 within hospitals and practices, we are now evaluating the practicality of Kindles within the workplace - we feel they'd be especially appropriate for non-execs who don't have access to the full trust network. By publishing information onto a Kindle, this makes it readily available to those who are seeking it, but also ensures that it cannot be tampered with or edited. The usefulness of slate computers isn't reserved for use within the health sector, though. We think that all businesses could benefit from them, given the amount of paper and information they accumulate on a day-to-day basis. One example we've been toying with is the idea that company executives could find them extremely useful when attending meetings. People attending higher executive meetings take a lot of paper, in the form of documents, briefings and minutes. PAs take a lot of time sorting out the useful documents, the minutes and the paper; a much more efficient way to operate would be to use a sharepoint portal to manage the meeting, create the minutes and tasks, making the information immediately available. We think there's considerable potential for using our slate computers in this scenario - they're lighter, they're easier to use, to search through and to edit, and they are definitely more instant. We've written more about it in a blog post, which you can find here on our blog. Next month we'll be talking about our Clinical Pack and also our excursion to the HC2011 conference and exhibition. We were hoping to talk about our faceted list web part but we ran out of space. Watch out for it in our next newsletter. |
|
|
Registered in England and Wales No: 6742545 |
|
