J.Boye UK SharePoint Group … J.Boye is hosting a SharePoint group meeting in London on June 16, with Shawn Shell talking about SharePoint in the enterprise. “Several organisations have embarked on complicated MOSS2007 / SharePoint projects. Our SharePoint group focuses on the challenges involved in such projects for the project managers; those responsible for managing content and other profiles critical to the successful outcome of SharePoint projects. Typical member profiles: those responsible for content, processes, strategy and organisation. Some will be project managers with some technical insight and experience. Members will be from both public and private sectors and could work on either web, intranet or extranet. The group is not open to consultants or vendors.” More

Google for Outlook = Winner … Michael argues that the recent Google for Outlook sync product is going to see a flood of firms ditch Microsoft for Google. “The main resistance to this change isn’t from IT or even rank-and-file employees, Laczynski told me, but rather in the C-level suites, where users are loathe to give up Outlook, which integrates calendar, appointment and contact features with email. The new connector to Outlook will allow software and service integrators like LTech “rip out the back end” while preserving the Outlook client for users who want to keep it. “This should help move the game,” Laczynski said.” More

Google for Outlook = Loser … Bill from the Burton Group argues that Google for Outlook is not going to work, due to the complexity of supporting Outlook. “Connectors to the Outlook are not new. For example, IBM and Novell have developed and supported an Outlook connector for years for their e-mail solutions. However, both of these vendors have dropped development of their connectors within the last year. Neither vendor has had wild success with their connectors and, I suspect, both found the engineering effort to be costly. I think a reason why is that these vendors were approaching it as an effort to make their product, each with more than a decade development, work like their product (not Exchange) in Outlook. This is a difficult task and one that requires constant vigilance to insure the connector keeps working as intended with each new patch, service pack, and release of Outlook .” More (see also Ed’s comments on IBM’s change in strategy vs. Outlook).

Improving Email … Craig offers 15 ideas for improving email, using attention management ideas. “The EAM architecture is intended for use by organizations to examine individual technologies or whole systems (such as the information worker desktop) that are suspected of causing explicit (information stress) or implicit (poor decision making, slow reaction to new information) information handling problems. With systems it can be used for gap analysis. Here I use it as an intuition pump to reveal a set of potential enhancements to e-mail software that would improve its attentional characteristics.” More

Other Items
– MarkSpace released the beta of Missing Sync for Palm Pre, for Mac users.
– Three helpful tools for Mac users: Propane, Mailplane, and Gdocsuploader.
– Charles hasn’t purchased a Palm Pre, because there aren’t enough applications yet.
– The report on the CalConnect Roundtable XV at Oracle on June 3-5 is now available.
– An approach to collaborating with yourself.