by David Gormley

The Microsoft® SharePoint 2009 Conference took place recently at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and it was sold out, with over 6,000 attendees.  It seems like many are surprised at how quickly SharePoint use has grown over the past couple of years. This rapid growth has created a situation where many enterprise IT groups are now scrambling to improve the management and security of their SharePoint environment.

As individuals and groups continue to create large numbers of SharePoint sites and load them with content of all kinds, it becomes increasingly important to have strong access controls, data loss prevention policies and search capabilities so that the right people can find and easily access the information that they need. CA had a booth at the show and we had a good flow of traffic from companies that were looking for ways to help secure and manage SharePoint in a way similar to how they secure and manage their other enterprise-class applications.

For example, our security customers are looking for a way to extend their CA SiteMinder-enabled authentication and single sign-on capabilities to this platform.  Many of them are getting pressure to allow additional groups (contractors, partners, customers) into parts of their SharePoint environment.  We provided demos of the new CA SiteMinder Agent for SharePoint and got additional applications for our already oversubscribed beta program.  The response was very positive and we are looking forward to a strong beta program and the release of the agent in the spring.