SharePoint Newsday: PowerBI, Sharp, ABBYY, RePoint, MobilityShield, Office 365

What a name---SharePoint. If Microsoft were to rename SharePoint, what would they call it? That random question popped into this SharePoint observer’s mind while walking the corgi at O Dark 30. Then the sun rose, splashing gold on the snowy Colorado foothills, and that cloudy question faded.  Now we’re sluicing through the Internet, looking for SharePoint gold on a Tuesday. What are you finding? Let us know by commenting below.

Help Me Excel

Continuing a strategy of beefing up the cloud while patting on-prem on the head, Microsoft announced PowerBI, a cloud-based business intelligence environment in Office 365. What sounds cool to this observer is this statement: “…with the Q&A features people can type questions they have of the data in natural language and the system will interpret the question and present answers in the form of interactive visualizations.”

Sort of a Siri for Excel, maybe? I wish. See the Microsoft website. 

Sharp Points Company Toward Cloud Collaboration Space

Sharp Imaging just put out a “first-of-its-kind software solution designed for an increasingly mobile workforce where companies need to share information while maintaining control and security over critical documents.”

Cloud Portal Office was designed to let users securely access business content anywhere and share files and folders. To learn more, visit Sharp.

I’m sorry—I keep typing SharePoint instead of Sharp.

In the World of OCR, Is SharePoint the Nexus?

ABBYY announced FineReader 12, the latest version of its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document conversion software. It also has made access easier to Google Drive, Dropbox, and SharePoint and Office 365, for document sharing. To learn more, see ABBYY.

In this digital age we’re still paper-oriented in so many ways, as those of you in document and records management are all too aware. You might say that SharePoint is the intersection where the paper age and the digital age meet and have a kid. Or try to.

Working For Gov. 2.0

RePoint Technologies today announced an expansion of their SharePoint Service to support Federal Agencies to help them meet systems requirements including Gov 2.0 social networking and the Open Government Directive. See RePoint Technologies for more.

Wikipedia says Gov 2.0 or Government 2.0 “refers to government policies that aim to harness collaborative technologies to create an open-source computing platform… to open government data to the public.” And SharePoint is a part of this. Of course.

Two Words That Are Almost Never Not Seen Together Now: SharePoint and Mobile

MobilityShield launched SharePointShield, which protects SharePoint against Active Directory credentials theft, blocks DoS, DDoS and brute-force attacks, and enforces connection to registered devices. For more information, visit MobilityShield.

Get the Kids on Office 365, Stat!

No, Virginia, Office and Windows are not irrelevant to today’s youth. At least not in Florida. Miami-Dade County Public Schools announced a rollout of 100,000 HP and Lenovo Windows 8 devices district-wide by August. Microsoft will provide Office 365 for all district students to use.

That Collaboration Software That Starts with S
What’s been happening since the cease-and-desist order about using the SharePoint brand name? After others appeared in the news for being told not to use the S word, expert Joel Oleson late last year wrote an update about the situation at his new site Collabshow.

That was December.  Microsoft has quietly been forcing people to stop using the SharePoint word in apps, Facebook pages, and other venues and products. Could it be a case of cleaning up the brand, tying up loose ends, getting the ducks in a row—what other clichés you like--before a forthcoming name change?