Colligo Networks Brings Uncomplicated, Yet Powerful Offline Access to Microsoft SharePoint Users

Vancouver, British Columbia (PRWEB) April 3, 2006

Colligo Networks Inc., a leader in offline collaboration solutions for mobile workers, today launched Colligo ReaderTM for SharePoint® and Colligo ContributorTM for SharePoint®.    These products enable organizations that have deployed online SharePoint web sites to increase the productivity of their laptop users by allowing them to use these sites offline. Created to deliver rich functionality in an uncomplicated way, the Colligo product family is the easiest offline SharePoint solution to deploy, install, learn and use. It is also the only SharePoint product line that offers a free offline reader that is widely available for download on the Internet.

Microsoft SharePoint® enables corporations to deploy document and project portals on the Internet or corporate Intranet. These organizations, however, struggle with the lack of offline support for this collaboration tool for their mobile workers. Colligo’s SharePoint product family was created to bring users a seamless online and offline experience in an intuitive user interface. Its rich desktop clients are the first to support advanced SharePoint features that are used to manage business processes.

“Colligo for SharePoint is able to do things can't, like integrate custom lists, metadata and views, which are all key for enterprise use,” said Sara Palmbush, Analyst with The 451 Group, a technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation, in her report. The report continued, “The main message here is that Colligo worked very closely with Microsoft to make the experience of using SharePoint offline as close as possible to using it online.” This comment appeared in an independent report, titled “Colligo bets on Microsoft's SharePoint,” which was published on December 15 of 2005 (see Editor’s Note below).

“Microsoft recognizes the needs of mobile workers to leverage SharePoint when they are working offline out of the office,” said Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic & Emerging Business Development of Microsoft. “Colligo Networks is one of the most innovative partners that we are working with to solve this problem. They are leveraging the power of .NET to build these sophisticated products quickly and efficiently.”

Colligo ContributorTM and Colligo ReaderTM are the lightest weight (3.3MB download) .NET 2.0 clients, require no server components and are compatible with version 2 of Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server. They provide a new level of SharePoint feature support in a client-only implementation, including document and InfoPath form libraries with custom metadata and views, custom lists and many standard lists including events, issues, links, contacts, announcements, tasks and agendas. The Colligo products extend the breadth of SharePoint content available offline well beyond that of current or announced solutions.

“This product line fills a gap in the market for busy laptop users that need offline access to SharePoint team sites,” comments Barry Jinks, President and CEO, Colligo Networks. “Our beta testing with over 200 existing customers and prospects for the past five months has uncovered many interesting applications from professional services to manufacturing to retail.”

Louisville, Kentucky based Strategic Aeronautics, a company that develops cockpit information systems, uses Microsoft SharePoint as a project management tool for its distributed offices across four states. The company has been beta-testing Colligo Contributor over the last three months. “Colligo Contributor has significantly improved the ‘velocity’ of our business activities,” says Jon Paris, CEO of Strategic Aeronautics. “The SharePoint sites for our government customers experience dozens of changes daily. Using Colligo Contributor, I can now take those sites with me as I travel and review the materials when I want and where I want – time better spent that has saved me several hours a week. The offline product allows me to better manage the technical workforce across all four states and ensure developers always have a common picture of the projects.”

Another Colligo beta tester is Axion Systems, GmbH, an IT consulting firm based near Frankfurt, Germany that specializes in the financial, health care and legal industries. “Colligo Contributor eliminates a major barrier to using Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) as a full blown document management/workflow platform,” comments Nikolaos Tavridis, Managing Director of Axion Systems. “The offline product dramatically expands WSS, making it easy for road warriors, like myself, to take the whole site with them. The User Interface is impressively easy to use, the program is responsive and does not hog laptop resources.”

“Simple yet powerful. That’s the best way to describe the new addition to the Colligo suite of products,” said Dustin Hannifin, Colligo Contributor beta tester in his blog “Dustin’s Tech Notes” (http://www.technotesblog.com/). “If you’re looking for the ability to take your SharePoint documents with you on the road Colligo for SharePoint looks like a real winner.”

Colligo ReaderTM for SharePoint® provides read-only access to SharePoint content offline and is available free of charge at http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/reader.asp. This is an ideal solution for laptop users who are periodically offline since the application is so simple that user training is typically not required. Deployment to end users is very easy since SharePoint site administrators can simply put a link on their SharePoint sites that enables users to readily download the application and thus provide self-serve access to offline capability. Leading SharePoint hosting providers are already including a “Get Colligo Reader” button on their default site templates to help users acquire the software when they need it. The combination of rich features and no-cost licensing provide a breakthrough for IT administrators who have hesitated to deploy offline SharePoint solutions due to their high cost and complexity.

FrontPages Web Hosting Network, a Missouri-based Microsoft services hosting company, will make the Colligo for SharePoint products available to its customers. “Colligo has created a unique strategy that helps us solve a critical problem for our customers – the ability of their mobile workers to gain easy access to SharePoint content when offline. The free Colligo Reader allows us to offer an immediate offline solution at no extra cost. We will be making Colligo Reader available as a free download from our site as well as offer upgrades to Colligo Contributor,” says Robert LaMear IV, President, FrontPages Web Hosting Network.

Colligo ContributorTM for SharePoint® is targeted at laptop users such as project managers, engineers and sales people who need to frequently modify content while offline and then synchronize it back to the SharePoint site when online. In addition to viewing SharePoint content, Colligo Contributor users can create and edit documents, forms, list items and their associated properties. When a user returns online, their changes are synchronized back to the server. A key technology in Colligo Contributor is derived from the expertise gained through the development of Colligo’s award winning synchronization solution that enables offline replication of IBM Lotus Notes® databases. Colligo Contributor’s conflict resolution engine solves a major problem with taking content from portals, such as SharePoint, offline by enabling users to effectively manage conflicts that occur when changes are made simultaneously to the server and client versions of a document. Colligo Contributor is available through volume licensing for medium to large enterprises. Price quotes and product delivery options can be obtained now. Individual copies may also be purchased online at the end of April at a special introductory price of $99/seat from http://www.colligo.com/store.

About Colligo Networks

Colligo is a leading provider of offline collaboration solutions for mobile workers. Its software extends the use of applications such as Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Notes, and CaseWare into offline settings where users often have no access to the Internet or corporate servers. Colligo is a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV partner and IBM Business Partner. Its solutions are deployed in many large enterprises, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, General Motors, Qualcomm and Grant Thornton in North America, Europe and Asia. For more information visit http://www.colligo.com.

Colligo is a trademark of Colligo Networks, Inc. All other corporate names and / or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Editor’s Note: The 451 Group’s report, “Colligo bets on Microsoft's SharePoint” referenced above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored by nor otherwise funded directly by Colligo Networks. The report and its entire contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2005, and are reproduced here by permission. The entire contents of this report are available at http://www.the451group.com.

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