When it comes to SharePoint Server 2007, there is no shortage of third-party products that can help enhance your SharePoint Server 2007 experience and increase the ROI on your product. In this blog post, I'll highlight many of the third-party products that I recommend to customers, depending on their needs. Not everyone needs every product here, but many running SharePoint Server 2007 will need at least some of the products. So, let's get started.
Collaboration
If you need to aggregate data, represent data and customize data views and roll-ups without hiring a bunch of developers, then you should take a look at the products from CorasWorks. Their end-user initiated and created web parts will help anyone better work with and understand their data as well as enable them to turbo-charge their collaboration. They have been around nearly since Day 1 in the SharePoint space and continue to have a great presence in the collaboration space.
Security, User Account Management and Permissions Management
If you need to manage user accounts and alerts from either a centralized administrative interface or give your site collection admins and site owners the same functions for their part of the SharePoint world, then you should take a look at DeliverPoint 2007. DeliverPoint will enable you to do five very important security and user account management functions:
- Clone a user/group account and alerts to a new user/group account or set of accounts
- Delete a user or group and their alerts
- Transfer a user or group's permissions and alerts to a new user/group or set of accounts
- Permissions discovery on a user, farm-wide
- Permissions discovery on an object, farm-wide
Note that the permissions discovery will show you nested AD group accounts and visually display how the user has inherited permissions via nested groups in AD. It will also give you to confidently know who has access to your critical files and generate reports for security and compliance purposes.
DeliverPoint 2007 is fully embedded in the SharePoint UI and appears in the right places if/when a user has permissions to manage user accounts and alerts. I'll also add a disclaimer that Todd and I own the company that has produced this product.
Search and Relevance
At the SharePoint Conference show, I finally got a chance to take a look at BA Insight's products on search. Very cool. This product will assign relevance at the page level of a document as well as assigning relevance on the document itself. In addition, their tool will allow a faceted search, so that metadata that is associated with the content items in the result will appear as links in the right pane, allowing the user to query for documents that have been assigned a particular metdata assignment. The ability to perform a faceted query is one of the cool features that I liked in their product.
The other tool to check out for SharePoint security is Microsoft's ForeFront Security for SharePoint. This tool can send all document transfers through up to five anti-virus engines. Plus it has the ability to help you find purposefully mis-named files that are meant to by-pass your blocked file types rules. It is a sweet product that will help you better manage your SharePoint environment.
Workflows
K2. Need I say more? Simply the best in the field for workflows.
Document Administration
If you need to copy/paste documents between libraries, bulk upload documents to a library or replicate documents between libraries, then please check out Syntergy's tools. I think you'll find them to do what you expect. For those who need these discreet functions, their tools will be invaluable.
You should also take a hard look at the products from Infonic. Not only do they have a SharePoint replication tool, but they also have solid document management tools as well. Be sure to check them out.
Upgrade and Moving Content
Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint is a tool that nearly everyone who needs to do upgrades raves about. I've not heard one negative comment about the tool or it's functionality. If you need to move content from 2003 to 2007 or between sites in 2007, then the Metalogix tool is the tool you should use.
I'll add to this post later as time and events warrant.
Bill English
Mindsharp