Joel Oleson’s Analysis & Review of OnePlaceMail

It’s always exciting to read reviews about your own product and hear feedback from users. So today I sat down with my morning coffee to read through Joel Oleson’s analysis and review of OnePlaceMail Release 6.4. I have to admit I was a little bit nervous having someone as well known to the SharePoint community as Joel Oleson analysing OnePlaceMail and publishing his thoughts and comments to the world. Would he like it? Would he get the business messages behind what OnePlaceMail is trying to achieve? My fears were soon quashed as I could see Joel had picked up on our vision of bringing SharePoint to the user in the applications they work with every day, making SharePoint feel like it is part of these applications and not some extra “system” that they have to go to a browser to access. Here’s some extracts from the review that brought a smile to my face:

OnePlaceMail team has focused on getting real ROI out of SharePoint by focusing on adoption challenges, compliance, and records management capabilities right where the users "live."

The real focus of OnePlaceMail 6.4 is to deliver broader adoption of solutions on the SharePoint platform. SharePoint is deployed in over 88% of Fortune 500 companies according to recent AIIM research, and unfortunately, broader adoption beyond basic file sharing and collaboration hold it back.

It can definitely be considered part of any adoption strategy to help those business users who are looking for a step that brings SharePoint to a familiar tool like Outlook, Office and File Explorer. Want users to save their content into SharePoint? Need to encourage better classification of content? Want to provide fast access to SharePoint content from Outlook? Now there’s a tool that makes it that much easier.

OnePlaceMail lives up to its name of trying to unite collaboration. It brings the richness of document management into Outlook and helps encourage users to do the right thing.

Enterprises that are having adoption issues and trying to address compliance and records management issues will find that SharePoint drag-and-drop does lose out on a lot of the metadata that enterprise content management strategies will be attempting to enforce. OnePlaceMail provides an interface that will capture this content as it comes in from various places including file shares, network drives, office applications, and from email. With SkyDrive Pro and the SharePoint Site Mailbox many will look again at moving public folders and file shares into SharePoint, and OnePlaceMail can be part of that enterprise strategy to eliminate the inefficient sources for document storage.

I was very impressed with the OnePlaceMail Express Edition and everything it includes for FREE. What a great way to encourage business folks to try it out for themselves to see if it lives up to its name!

Read the full review at SharePoint Joel’s SharePoint Land website

Thanks for the kind words Joel and for highlighting the business value and proposition that OnePlaceMail provides for those organisations having already deployed or looking to deploy SharePoint.