BillCan's Place : Collaboration

Released: The External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint!

BillCan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:32:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce that the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint has been released and is now available at http://www.microsoft.com/collabkit. This toolkit helps you easily deploy a SharePoint-based external collaboration facility at your organization. Once this facility is in place, end users can quickly create a new collaboration site (using a SharePoint site collection) and add internal and external users to that site. Both these process can be workflow enabled so that an administrator must approve both site and user creation.

The toolkit runs on both MOSS 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. It also leverages SQL Server 2005 and ADAM. All external users are created in the ADAM directory so they are segregated from your primary user store.

Please take a look at the External Collaboration Toolkit for SharePoint. If you have any questions, please let me know.

Bill

Help us develop a new Solution Accelerator focused on Secure Collaboration

BillCan — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:27:00 GMT

Employees need to share documents with individuals from other companies, such as partners and suppliers. These documents often contain sensitive information that needs to be kept safe and secure. Microsoft SharePoint products deliver the document collaboration capabilities, but many IT departments have been reluctant to use a SharePoint infrastructure with external parties because of concerns about security and user management.

Project Inverness is an effort to address these concerns. This project will provide authoritative guidance and tools to help your organization set up SharePoint to provide users with the flexibility they need to collaborate easily with external people while simultaneously allowing the security manager to rest assured that confidential data is protected. This Solution Accelerator will be freely downloadable from TechNet.

To help us develop a Solution Accelerator that really helps address our customer's pains, we need customers like you who can review our designs, preview early versions of the guidance and tools, and provide valuable feedback. The benefit to Microsoft is obvious: with your help, we can provide a Solution Accelerator that better meets the needs of our customers. You can also benefit from participating in our development process. You will help ensure the final deliverables meet your specific needs, get early access to the solution accelerator so you can begin planning your implementation, gain access to Microsoft experts, and be acknowledged for your contribution in the final deliverables. In addition, we will provide a nice thank you gift to those users who make a particularly significant contribution to the project.

If you are interested in helping out, please visit https://connect.microsoft.com/InvitationUse.aspx?ProgramID=1657&InvitationID=PRM1-C3FJ-W3FP&SiteID=14 and follow the instructions to enroll in the program.

Thank you,
Bill Canning
Sr. Program Manager
Solution Accelators - Security and Compliance

Successful side meeting today

BillCan — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:09:00 GMT

Today I conducted what I would characterize as a very successful side meeting at the Peobody hotel. The side meeting was focused on secure collaboration, and ran about 2 hours. We got about 60% of the RSVPs that attended which seems to be about par for the course.

Generally speaking, the things we were thinking about are also on our customer's radar screen. We did gather some interesting new information that was a bit different than what we suspected. For instance, some of the interesting findings were that the customers seemed much more worried about strong authentication than I expected them to be (now that I think of it this isn't actually that surprising). In addition, they also seemed more open to CardSpace than I expected.

Collaborating Outside the Firewall (Tech Ed Side Meeting)

BillCan — Thu, 31 May 2007 04:40:00 GMT

I'm now envisioning my next project for the Solution Accelerators for Security and Compliance team. As a bit of background, my team provides prescriptive, tested guidance to help customers solve tricky security problems quickly. My new project is going to focus on collaborating securely outside the firewall. While this topic could be pretty broad, I'm thinking that Sharepoint will be involved, but that's not cast in concrete.

Anyway, that's where you come in: I am hosting a side meeting at Tech Ed next Wednesday to discuss this topic. If you are going to be there and would like to provide input on what problems you are facing related to secure collaboration, I'd love to invite you to meeting. Attending will give you an opportunity to have your specific requirements heard right from the beginning, and will allow you to help shape the solution accelerator that we deliver. Oh, and we will be providing munchies and maybe a bit of schwag as a thank you!

If you are interested, please use the email link above to get in touch with me: I will let you know the particulars. For those of you not going to Tech Ed, get in touch too. While I can't guarantee munchies, I would love to be able to bounce ideas off as many customers as possible!

Stop by and say "Hi" at Tech Ed

BillCan — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:44:00 GMT

If you are going to be at Tech Ed the week after next, I'd love to meet you. I'll be doing a TLC chalk talk session at 10:30 on Monday entitled "Your Customers' Laptop Data Is at Risk! Protecting Customer Data with the Data Encryption Toolkit for Mobile PCs" (SEC01-TLC). The rest of the time I'll be off and on at the "Security and Compliance" booth.

My next project is focusing on secure collaboration. If you have some thoughts on this topic, I'd love to hear them. If you really want to get talkative on the subject, we're doing a side meeting on Wednesday where you can fill me in on just what you need from Microsoft in this area.

See you in Orlando!

Secure Collaboration: What's it mean to you?

BillCan — Sat, 19 May 2007 07:56:00 GMT

I'm wrapping up my current project in the next couple of weeks and starting to think about my next project. This next project will focus on "Secure Collaboration". I've got some ideas about what we could do in this area, but the most important thing is to help solve our customers' problem. Therefore, I'd like to know: when you think about secure collaboration, what do you think about?

I'd really appreciate any feedback on this topic. What guidance and tools would really help your organization collaborate securely, especially with people outside the firewall (customers, suppliers, partners, employees, etc.)?

By the way, I am going to be hosting a side meeting at Tech Ed to get input from customers on this topic. Let me know if you are interested and you're going to be at Tech Ed and I'll make sure you get an invite.

Thanks!