A growing number of global pharmaceutical companies are deploying SharePoint as the means to manage teams and projects.   Microsoft reports the following as SharePoint adopters:

Companies cite two principal reasons for adoption: one the need for a flexible platform that provides a basis for ad hoc collaboration of project teams without the intervention of IT, and two, the need to consolidate the plethora of legacy systems acquired over decades, which are expensive to maintain.  For example, Bill Louv, CIO of GlaxoSmithKline notes that

“GlaxoSmithKline has more than 100,000 employees, hundreds of business partners, and locations around the world, so effective collaboration is critical to our business.” 

And Karen M Shegda from Gartner (Research Note G00163873) notes that

“Pfizer had to accommodate highly regulated documents and records, but it also needed a way to support the more ad hoc and collaborative processes.”  Pfizer consolidated some 125+ different document management systems to operate as One Pfizer.  “By standardizing on two platforms (Documentum and SharePoint) for clearly delineated tasks, it can eliminate servers and support for legacy systems.”

A surprising element of these deployment decisions, is that some companies, notably Novartis and GSK, have elected to deploy SharePoint as a service hosted outside of their firewall (Business Productivity Online Suite [BPOS], Microsoft Online Services ).  The idea of placing the management of the “crown jewels” of a pharmaceutical company, its intellectual property, into the hands of a third party outside of the firewall would have been considered pure heresy just a few years ago. The change of attitude reflects the fact that security risks inside and outside of the firewall have achieved parity and the fact that the new needs of large pharmaceutical companies drive changes. In the words of pharmaceutical executives:

“We have chosen Microsoft Online Services because it promises to deliver a simple intuitive Information Workspace that should not only value to the company through simplification, but provide an improved experience and ultimately create a more productive GSK.” Bill Louv, CIO, GlaxoSmithKline

“We chose Microsoft Online Online Services for our collaboration applications in the cloud for our 100,000 employees around the world. It will enable our large research and development population to better collaborate to innovate. We can trust Microsoft to provide the enterprise capabilities our company requires to further improve personal productivity and collaboration among our associates so we can focus on our core mission–improving the lives of patients worldwide.” Leon V. Schumacher, Group CIO of Novartis

“The move to Microsoft Online Services will help GlaxoSmithKline cut operational costs by an estimated 30 percent.” Ingo Elfering, VP of Information Technology Strategy, GlaxoSmithKline

Join DoubleBridge Technologies at EMC World in Las Vegas, NV this week! We will be demonstrating our Documentum-based solutions as well as some SharePoint-based alternatives. Come visit us at the DoubleBridge Booth!

Subscribing to a document (object) in Webtop allows you to have immediate access to it without having to navigate to its location. In practice, a subscription is a shortcut to an object. Have you ever wondered how subscriptions work? Simply, subscriptions are relationship objects (dm_relation) that relate an object in the repository to a user. A subscription’s relation type, or name, is dm_subscription. 

You can count the number of subscriptions each user has like this:

select u.user_name as user_name, count(*) as subscription_count from dm_relation r, dm_user u where r.relation_name = ‘dm_subscription’ and u.user_name = (select user_name from dm_user where r_object_id = r.child_id) group by u.user_name;

To view all objects and users involved in subscriptions, use this DQL:

select r.r_object_id as relation_id, r.relation_name as relation_name,o.object_name as object_name, u.user_name as user_name from dm_relation r, dm_user u, dm_sysobject o where r.relation_name = ‘dm_subscription’ and u.user_name = (select user_name from dm_user where r_object_id = r.child_id) and o.object_name = (select object_name from dm_sysobject where r_object_id = r.parent_id) order by u.user_name;

You can also create subscriptions using DQL, you just need to know the r_object_id of the user (dm_user) and the r_object_id of the object (notionally a dm_document but it could be anything). That DQL looks like this:

create dm_relation object set relation_name = ‘dm_subscription’, set parent_id = (select r_object_id from dm_document where object_name = ‘’), set child_id = (select r_object_id from dm_user where user_name = ‘’);

There are three important things to remember about creating subscriptions:

1.The name of the subscription (relation_name) must be ‘dm_subscription’,
2.The user’s r_object_id must be assigned to the child_id attribute of the dm_relation,
3.The document’s r_object_id must be assigned to the parent_id attribute of the dm_relation.
I recently had an interesting application for subscriptions. During the processing of a case in a workflow, each participant that contributed to the case needed to have a quick and easy way to access the case, even after the task had left their Inbox. This was true until the final disposition of the case, at which time their access to the case was revoked. To accomplish this, I set up an automatic workflow method that created a subscription for the user just as the task was passing from their control to the next participant’s. At the end of the workflow I ran a query that deleted all the subscriptions for the case (i.e., where parent_id = ).