There is an ongoing debate in SAGE about the value of SharePoint. For years, the platform has held tremendous promise, but mid-course changes by Microsoft and the complexity of the product has meant its promise has gone largely unfulfilled. Now there is tremendous buzz around the latest version in Sharepoint 2007 (still in beta), where every software vendor seems to be jumping on the bandwagon and praising it as the backbone of their systems. While we have always been cautious about SharePoint in the past because of Microsoft's continuing fiddling with the source code and deficiencies in the feature set, the new version has won some champions inside SAGE. They point to its ability to connect disparate information sources and content management features. Others, however, still feel its complexity and lack of a clear business problem that it solves means that it will still sit unused in legal IT departments.

Where do you stand on SharePoint? Do you see SharePoint 2007 solving real problems you have in IT or is it just more hype? Let us know in the comments.

SAGE will be soon launching a new hosted service for clients that will allow them to easily perform daily checks on the servers, and then monitor there critical functions throughout the day. Sentinel has had a long gestation at SAGE, as we have internally struggled with the right mix of features and functionality, but we are soon about to unveil it to the public. Our OnSight clients will get it at no extra charge as part of the OnSight service.

We wrote an article about Sentinel's genesis in the last Wisdom Newsletter which is well worth a read as it describes how we face many of the same problems of our clients in keeping not only our servers, but also our many clients, performing optimally.  From this necessity Sentinel was born as we looked for ways to be more efficient and effective in performing server checks and monitoring.

Sentinel has some very exciting features and technologies.  Sentinel uses non-intrusive software agents to gather information on servers, that is flexible so we can ask them more probing questions about the health and operation of the software. We also worked a lot on the web interface so SAGE staff, firm IT staff and administrators, can know almost with a glance what the health status of the network and individual servers.

We will be having an upcoming webinar on Sentinel on September 13, 2006 at 2 p.m. Sign up for it if you would like a complete overview. So stay posted as more information comes out.