Two extremely useful (and free!) SharePoint addons have updated commercial offerings
Several months ago, I posted a blog entry about two useful SharePoint addons, Telerik's RadEditor for MOSS 2007 and Colligo's Reader for SharePoint, that were available for free.
Telerik has just released the full featured edition of the RadEditor for MOSS 2007, which some very significant enhancements over the free (now named "Lite" version) of the editor, including the support for pasting rich text formatted content from Microsoft Word, which is a common complaint from customers, who are using the built-in SharePoint editor for wikis and blogs. Both the Lite and full featured versions of the RadEditor address another common customer complaint, which is the lack of cross browser compatibility with the built-in SharePoint editor. There's more info and a feature comparison chart showing the differences between the built-in SharePoint editor, the RadEditor Lite for MOSS, and the RadEditor for MOSS at http://www.telerik.com/products/sharepoint/overview.aspx.
Colligo recently released 2.1 of their Contributor for SharePoint, which provides similar synchronization and offline access capabilities for SharePoint content as their free Reader for SharePoint, but it offers update and sync back functionality that the Reader doesn't have. Contributor, just like Reader, can synchronize not only with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 but also WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003! Contributor also includes an Outlook Add-in that provides true 2-way synchronization between SharePoint document libraries and Outlook 2003 or 2007 folders, which is a very often asked for improvement over Outlook 2007's native 1-way synchronization with SharePoint document libraries. The Outlook Add-in also provides drag-and-drop archival functionality for relevant e-mails that are copied or moved to an Outlook folder that is then synchronized with a SharePoint document library. The Outlook Add-in automatically captures standard e-mail fields and maps them to metadata in the document library! Here's a screencast of how the Outlook Add-in can be used to significantly enhanced the Sales Lead Pipeline application template for WSS 3.0. For more information about Contributor for SharePoint, go to http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/contributor_home.asp.
While I generally refrain from recommending any 3rd party commercial products on this blog, I believe that these two innovative products deserve to be highlighted for all SharePoint customers to consider because they address several of the most commonly discussed shortcomings in SharePoint.
[Update 06/28: In fairness to Macroview, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Australia, I'd like to mention that they have a product, WISDOM Message, that has comparable functionality to Colligo Contributor.]
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