Accelerate Your SharePoint Adoption: Ford Foundation and Forrester Make the Case for Smartlogic, Semantics & Semaphore. Free Webinar 4 May 2011

London, United Kingdom, April 21, 2011 --(PR.com)-- New research sponsored by enterprise semantic software provider, Smartlogic, shows that Microsoft SharePoint is emerging as the industry standard for enterprise information management with statistics showing an increasingly significant awareness of the platform and its uses among enterprise and organisational managers and directors.

Key findings of this independent research study, recently summarised in a white paper available from the Smartlogic website [http://bit.ly/h5qZOi], explore what it is that managers and directors in the US and Western Europe know about Microsoft SharePoint and its implementation as a building block for effective content management and enterprise search.

Also ‘on topic’ is that while SharePoint Server 2010 ships with new term enhancements that encourage enterprises to upgrade or adopt, it still lacks meaningful semantic capabilities - like auto classification and entity extraction - that manifest as "gaps" in the system. Quality metadata is a critical factor in the success of SharePoint deployment, and more and more organisations designing and deploying SharePoint are beginning to recognise this, with the most forward-thinking realising that the most effective SharePoint-based solutions tend to combine the platform’s powerful capabilities with a specialist application such as Smartlogic’s Semaphore, designed specifically to address gaps in functionality and enable automatic classification and semantic search.

Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic CEO and author of the white paper, explains: "These combined SharePoint solutions deliver performance that is noticed and appreciated by general management, whose awareness and buy-in is essential to the further development of the SharePoint-oriented enterprise. The integration of semantics with SharePoint through taxonomy and ontology results in an acceleration of SharePoint Adoption and ROI, with elevated metadata quality, improved findability and an enhanced end user experience. It's a win-win situation."

Smartlogic, in conjunction with guest speakers from the Ford Foundation and Forrester, will be discussing the findings of this research as well as looking at the ways in which Semaphore integrates with SharePoint in a free recorded webinar, scheduled for 4th May 2011. Registration details are below.

Toby Conrad, Smartlogic Senior Consultant, will be introducing the webinar, focussing on how semantics supports SharePoint objectives, such as improved sharing, workflow, records management, compliance and findability. He has been a Senior Consultant with Smartlogic for over seven years and has advised organizations such as NASA, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Schlumberger. Featured Guests are Leslie Owens, Forrester Senior Analyst and Nicolette Lodico, Ford Foundation Manager, Information Management.

Leslie Owens, a leading expert on enterprise search, semantic tools, information classification, and taxonomies, will open the discussion with the lay of the land in the adoption/ migration to SharePoint and present the challenges organizations may face in this process. She will detail the gaps that organisations can encounter while trying to adopt/ upgrade to SharePoint and how they can chart a course to bridge these gaps.

Nicolette Lodico will then present a case study on how the Ford Foundation have adopted SharePoint successfully.

Forrester Research is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology, working with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. The Ford Foundation is an independent, global organization with a commitment to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice and advance human knowledge, creativity and achievement.

Both organisations have massive information management demands thus are well placed to illustrate the benefits of Sharepoint adoption and combined integration solutions such as Semaphore.

The webinar, scheduled to take place on Wednesday, May 4, 2011, promises detailed information on how to:

• Semantically enable your SharePoint (2007 and 2010) implementation with navigational taxonomies, ontologies and automated classification to significantly enhance your metadata quality.
• Utilize Semaphore for enabling effective migration, records retention, disposition, and data loss prevention within SharePoint.
• Ensure that your SharePoint investment will provide a solid ROI for your enterprise.

You can register online here:
Session 1: 6am PDT | 9am EDT | 2pm GMT http://bit.ly/fD21K1
Session 2: 10am PDT | 1pm EDT | 6pm GMT http://bit.ly/gwjPjj

For more information on how to improve your SharePoint adoption experience with Semaphore you can visit the Smartlogic website at http://www.smartlogic.com

Download the free white paper 'Accelerating the Adoption and ROI of SharePoint Using Semantics' here: http://bit.ly/h5qZOi

About Smartlogic – www.smartlogic.com
Smartlogic is a software company that specializes in semantics. Smartlogic’s Semaphore is an Enterprise Semantic Platform that augments traditional information management systems like search, content management and business workflow engines by adding advanced content classification, metadata and navigation capabilities to deliver a more complete enterprise information management experience. Smartlogic clients are organizations across the globe who value their information assets and Semaphore helps these organisations derive meaning and value from their information by adding a semantic layer to their existing systems as well as use Semaphore to mitigate the risks associated with those same information assets. Semaphore does this by capturing an organisation's subjects and topics into models, and then puts these models to work. More than 200 companies like NASA, Bank of America, AutoDesk, Occidental Petroleum, Ford Foundation, Pitney Bowes, The National Health Service, UBS, ABN AMRO, The Office of Public Sector Information, Yell.com and others use Smartlogic today.

###