Editors' Best Awards and Community Choice Awards Announced for 2010

Editors' Best Awards: SharePoint

Congratulations to the gold, silver, and bronze winners of the Windows IT Pro Editors’ Best Awards for 2010. The winners this year represent a variety of product areas within SharePoint.

Gold: Social Sites for SharePoint 2010 • NewsGator

Silver: Idera SharePoint admin toolset 2.0 • Idera

Bronze: SharePoint Website Accelerator • Aptimize

Why NewsGator won: SharePoint is only as useful as the ease with which users can use it—and NewsGator offers a way to help users find information, share ideas, and collaborate with their peers, making SharePoint collaborative in real-life and not just on paper.

Social Sites for SharePoint 2010 has helped Medtronic, a global leader in medical technology, to enhance its SharePoint collaboration capabilities, according to Mary Maida, information solutions manager at Medtronic. The company is far-flung, with 120 locations—an ideal poster child for using SharePoint for collaboration. Medtronic uses SharePoint primarily for internal websites, Maida said.

However, in spite of SharePoint's capabilities, the company still wanted a way to enhance SharePoint "to help make people and information more obvious." NewsGator's familiarity with the SharePoint environment made it "a natural fit" to work with Medtronic, Maida said.

"We encourage employees to connect in new ways. The use of Social Sites makes it easy for employees to asynchronously engage in open knowledge sharing that drives learning, new ideas, and innovation." Maida said that since the company started using Social Sites a year ago, she's been "encouraged by the increasing engagement of our employees."

Community Choice Awards: SharePoint

In 2010, the readers of Windows IT Pro magazine were invited to vote for their favorite products in many categories. The top vote getters in SharePoint were the following:

Gold: Symantec Enterprise Vault for SharePoint • Symantec

Silver: EMC SourceOne for Microsoft SharePoint • EMC

Bronze: NetWrix SharePoint Change Reporter • NetWrix

Other hot vote-getters in this year's survey included the following:

    * Colligo Network's Colligo Contributor Pro for SharePoint 2010

    * Axceler's ControlPoint 3 for Microsoft SharePoint

    * Quest Software's Site Administrator for SharePoint

To view the rest of the winners of the Editors' Best and Community Choice Awards, see this link at Windows IT Pro magazine.