Walk down memory lane with SharePoint and CorasWorks!

I just past a six year milestone in my personal SharePoint history which coincidentally aligns almost perfectly with the history of CorasWorks. I started at another company as the primary manager for SharePointTrial.com - don't click it because that site is now dead replaced by SharePointSite.com. This was and is delivered as a hosted trial of SharePoint by another Northern Virginia based company - Apptix (see: www.apptix.com). The original SharePoint Trial site was a joint effort between CorasWorks and Apptix delivered under contract to Microsoft and was part of the original marketing efforts by Microsoft to promote the 're-launch' of SharePoint as part of the Office 2003 suite of products. This was the first "authorized" commercially available hosted SP solution. Apptix is still a CorasWorks partner and we are also a customer of their Hosted Exchange offering - I highly recommend you take a look at them. It was a truly amazing time being on the front lines of such a rapid technology adoption. The Microsoft marketing engine very effectively and efficiently delivered hundreds of new registrations every day. As a product company, CorasWorks had the unique opportunity to interact with this enormous user base and create software to specifically overcome the challenges they were facing. As the front door to most user calls, I would get inquiries every day asking, "How do I get rid of Quick Launch?" or "How do I see all my tasks and not just the ones on this site or that site?" In nearly all cases, CorasWorks had an answer. That continued for the next couple years until I changed teams and left Apptix for a sales role at CorasWorks. In truth that paradigm continues to this very day. Usage has matured since those early days and the questions from prospects and customers have evolved to"How do I replace my current Help Desk application with a SharePoint based solution?" and"How do I integrate my customer and employee data into MS Virtual Earth?" In most cases, CorasWorks still has an answer! And the evolution continues, coming very soon will be the CorasWorks version of an App Store for SharePoint. In concert with our partners, we are building the solutions most in-demand by our users and then we are making those solutions available as downloadable applications. These applications will be available for free and others for a fee via our ever improving Community site: (http://community.corasworks.net) .

I am looking forward to this next step in our growth - but it never hurts to take a look back to see how far you have come.

Why CorasWorks is Cool....

Yesterday we held a very successful Web cast titled simply, "Cool Topics". As you can see from the attached graphic, we covered topics ranging from the mildly cool - aggregation of project data across sites into a variety of parent/child displays to the very cool and visually appealing - integration with MS Virtual Earth and all the other BI charts and graphs included in our product.

While these may not be the primary challenges facing organizations trying to get real business value from SharePoint, they are among the most interesting. It is also most interesting to me to note that I find our biggest challenge at CorasWorks to be showing people precisely how easy it is to do these things with our tools - not how complex. Most prospects are expecting reams of code and 100's of hours of consulting and that is quite simply not the case. It is important to remember that CorasWorks tools are a mass market product designed to deliver the greatest value to the greatest number of organizations. We meet the challenges that are not necessarily unique to any one business or industry. Instead, we allow companies to save the coding and the consulting for those things that are unique to their company or their industry. Our customers can focus on gaining competitive advantage over their rivals rather than re-inventing the SharePoint wheels that we have already delivered to 100's of other companies.

We will repeat this series throughout the summer and we are looking for new 'cool topics' to present. If you have any ideas, tweet me @pblegere or email @ plegere@corasworks.net

Have a great day!