Product Description

WISDOM Message allows organisations to manage their incoming and outgoing email messages easily and effectively, reflecting the fact that email messages today are a critical part of the documentation trail for projects and client / supplier relationships. WISDOM Message links Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft SharePoint so that important messages can be saved securely, shared with other users and searched for successfully. WISDOM Message enables email management solutions that not only improve business productivity but also ensure compliance with legislation and regulations concerning the retention of emails.

Microsoft SharePoint uses .Net technology to facilitate the creation of collaborative web sites that can be used to store and share data and documents. Importantly, SharePoint is designed for use by non-technical staff. SharePoint is a very flexible platform that can be used for many types of business applications. SharePoint comes with built-in capabilities for managing documents and other enterprise content.

Users find that working with WISDOM Message is easier and more intuitive than with the interface to SharePoint that ships with out-of-the-box Microsoft Office.

Installing WISDOM Message customises and extends Microsoft Outlook so that you can simply drag and drop to save email messages to Microsoft SharePoint. As it saves to SharePoint, WISDOM assists with classifying the email messages so that they can be organised and searched for more effectively. Classificatory details such as the name of the Client or Project to which the message related can be set automatically or retrieved directly by WISDOM from existing databases and line-of-business systems.

With WISDOM you can drag-and-drop to save messages when you are working offline. WISDOM facilitates working with attachments to email messages and provides a familiar tree-view display of the messages and other files that have been stored in your SharePoint environment. WISDOM respects the security model of Microsoft SharePoint, which is quite comprehensive.

Innovation

In developing WISDOM Message MacroView has undertaken significant technical innovation in extending a new Microsoft product to enable it to be used in an industry best-practice fashion.

From a technical standpoint WISDOM Message needs to be tightly integrated with the latest versions of Microsoft SharePoint. This has meant that in developing WISDOM Message MacroView has had to work at the leading edge of SharePoint .Net technology. Available documentation has been very limited or non-existent, which reflects the fact that the SharePoint software is new and also that we were working at a deep technical level. 

MacroView has been working with SharePoint since its initial release in 2002. We also benefited from our involvement in the Technical Beta programme conducted by Microsoft in respect of SharePoint 2007, which provided us with access to versions of the new software before its general release to the Public.

As part of that involvement, Microsoft invited a senior MacroView technical staff member to participate in the ‘Deep Dive Accelerator Lab’ for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This was conducted at Microsoft headquarters outside Seattle in August 2006. It provided an opportunity for MacroView to discuss technical issues with the SharePoint Development Team at Microsoft concerning SharePoint 2007 and how best to integrate with it from WISDOM Message.

Microsoft SharePoint is a new entrant in the Document Management field. MacroView has extensive experience with Document Management systems from other vendors, gained in the course of creating custom document automation systems in Microsoft Word for large law firms over the last 10 years. MacroView applied the knowledge gained from working with these other ‘best of breed’ systems to extend SharePoint so that it was even better for managing email messages.

Performance

Organisations around the world are faced with the need to manage and retain their email messages more effectively. The fact that they choose WISDOM Message over the many competing products and approaches is good evidence that WISDOM Message performs as required.

“MacroView has already sold WISDOM Message to clients in Australia and six other countries – Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, UK and USA.”

The following testimonial has been received from Cohos Evamy – a leading Canadian architectural services firm with 300 staff and offices in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto:

"Since email has become the most common method of written communication in our office, there has been an increasing need to file and retrieve project related email information easily and efficiently. WISDOM Message provides the necessary tools to make SharePoint a viable solution. There is no better product available that enables Outlook to communicate properly with SharePoint than WISDOM Message." 

Michael Auschrat, IT / CAD Manager, Cohos Evamy, Canada

WISDOM Message has been selected by Ontario Power Generation as the basis for their email retention solution for use by their 12,000 staff. OPG generates all the electricity used in the province of Ontario. The selection followed an evaluation of alternatives by Eidenai Innovations, a Toronto-based Microsoft Gold Partner organisation. A key justification for the new email retention solution at OPG is the need for compliance with regulations, including those applying to the nuclear power stations operated by OPG.

The following testimonial from Alan Parker, Information Systems Manager at OneSteel Australia is further evidence of the good performance of WISDOM Message:

"WISDOM operates well and has excited all of the people I've demonstrated it to. It really does open up SharePoint and makes it a much more viable Document Management tool." 

Potential

The commercial potential for WISDOM Message is excellent, based on three key factors:

1) Increasing regulatory pressure on organisations around email retention
2) Rapid growth in popularity of Microsoft SharePoint
3) Excellent reference sites for WISDOM Message 

In the USA the failures of Arthur Andersen and Enron have led to new legislation such as the Sarbannes-Oxley Act and in turn to new SEC regulations that require every public company to have an effective means of saving and retaining emails. The saved emails must be classified by subject matter. WISDOM Message is purpose-built to handle this saving and classifying of emails.

Microsoft reports that SharePoint is the fastest growing product in its history. In part this is because the base version of SharePoint is bundled as a no-extra-charge part of the Windows Server operating system. The recent release of the third generation of SharePoint (SharePoint 2007) has led to a dramatic increase in its rate of adoption. Organisations around the world are moving to adopt SharePoint and are looking to make use of its many features, including the ability to manage documents.

Users new to SharePoint find two aspects of SharePoint somewhat frustrating. The first of these is the lack of a tree-view display showing all the documents, messages and other files stored in the various areas of the SharePoint store – such as they have been used to with Windows Explorer. The other frustration is the awkwardness of working with attachments between Outlook and SharePoint. WISDOM Message addresses both these issues.

The successful implementation of WISDOM Message in organisations such as Ontario Power Generation provides reassurance with prospective customers that the combination of WISDOM plus SharePoint can cope with high volumes of users and messages.

Other information the judges should know

WISDOM Message is part of the WISDOM Document Management Framework, which links other parts of Microsoft Office and Windows to SharePoint to facilitate document management. Installing WISDOM DMF adds ‘Open from SharePoint’ and ‘Save to SharePoint’ customisations to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It also makes it easy to upload non-Microsoft Office files to SharePoint from Windows. Also part of the framework is WISDOM Explorer, which provides a Windows Explorer-like display and functionality for working with a SharePoint document store.

In 2005 WISDOM DMF received the MSD2D People Choice Award as the best Document Management Add-on for Microsoft SharePoint. MSD2D is a leading international community site for Microsoft developers with over 50,000 subscribers.

Further evidence of the potential of WISDOM Message is the number of organisations that have downloaded the self-running demonstration of WISDOM Message from the MacroView web-site. Organisations that have recently proceeded to the evaluation stage include Chevron, GNF, RDA Corporation and the US State Department in the USA, Navantis (Canada), RaboBank (Netherlands), ENI (Italy) and Alicante (France).

Wisdom Message Brochure (pdf) Opens in a new window

Downloads: WISDOM Message self-running demonstration – download from www.macroview.com.au/srd/message