The Enterprise 2.0 Conference has added a great feature around proposal submission this year (the Call for Papers deadline was December 18th), and I wanted to blog about it because it's such a good example of an enterprise walking it like they talk it.
For the 2009 E2.0 Conference in Boston last summer, registrants had the ability to create a profile and connect with each other online more than a month before the event. You could see who else was attending, create a personalized agenda, and have discussions.
This year they've started the party (ahem, the networking and collaboration) even earlier, at the proposal stage. After registering with some basic information, speaker hopefuls have the ability to view all submitted proposals (filterable by keyword, category, author, etc.), comment on them, and connect with the submitters. (SpigIt is the partner providing this service.)
As a prospective speaker, it was hugely valuable for me to review the existing proposals, so that I wouldn't duplicate a topic already submitted. Once I submitted my paper, the experience became even richer. Within the hour I received a comment from another submittter, and we had a good dialogue around our differing perspectives on the issue. I learned some interesting information and made a contact I'll want to seek out at the conference and meet in person.
I'll also be able to see what stage of review my proposal is in during the process. Such a difference from the black hole I've experienced with some conference proposals.
Nicely played, Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
December 23, 2009
December 08, 2009
SharePoint 2010 - Global Navigation Tabs wrap!
I have been working with the beta 2 release of SharePoint 2010 for a few weeks now, and just today realized what I was seeing: the Global Navigation tabs now wrap when there are enough top-level sites that they don't all fit across the width of the page! No more scrollbar when you start to have "too many" sites!
When I think of all the client requests I received about this, and the custom development I saw implemented to achieve it, I'm very happy this is a feature of the new version - although the dark side of this is that folks may now be tempted to leave good Information Architecture principles aside and build top-level sites to their hearts' content. I think the dreaded homepage scrollbar of MOSS 2007 was a major factor in keeping top-level tabs to a minimum, as well as keeping the names of those tabs short and to the point, neither of which is a bad thing. With more freedom to build and name sites without the penalty of making the page too wide, site admins may be tempted to stray from the generally recommended 4-8 top-level tabs and potentially cause usability problems (especially if drop-down navigation comes into the mix).
But enough governance. Global tab wrapping is a seemingly small but often-requested piece of functionality that ultimately makes SharePoint 2010 a more flexible tool.
November 25, 2009
November 18, 2009
UNFRIEND is 2009 word of the year - NEXWORK for 2010?
Two days ago, the Oxford University Press announced that the word of the year for 2009 is UNFRIEND.
While I totally support the notion of keeping your friend list current by periodically shoveling out your stable of contacts, the fact that this represents a significant concept for 2009 is a little disheartening. This is the age of online community, social networking, joining, contributing, and linking, and the word of the year is "unfriend?"
For 2010 I'd like us all to think about how to turn this to the positive. As we continue to unfriend the contacts who don't give back, whose friend requests we accepted because we felt awkward declining, who we'd never pick up the phone and call, or who we wouldn't want to chat with in the grocery store, let's focus more sharply on filling out our networks with people we admire, those who have the potential of helping us get better at what we do.
As a personal example, I have built my Flickr contact base this way. The majority of my contacts aren't meatspace friends and family, but photographers whose work I admire. By using Flickr's search ranking, I find stellar photographs - the kind of work I wish I was doing - and then make those photographers my contacts. This subscribes me to their photostream, so that I see new work as they produce it, and I can comment on that work, ask questions, and build the relationship. The beautiful thing about it is that most of the people I've met this way are truly happy to share their knowledge and techniques, which helps me to improve. As I get better, I'm posting higher-quality photos and passing on my own techniques which on occasion have inspired others. (I don't currently have a web tool for doing this in my workplace, but we plan to implement it next year.)
I want the word of 2010 to be NEXWORK - a word that describes my contact list not just as "the people I know" or "the people with whom I've worked" but a network of experts - "the people I admire, each of whom has a unique and valuable perspective that can challenge and improve me." Our networks can be so much more powerful than an aggregate of activity from a collection of meformers. What can you offer your network today? And what can they offer you?
October 28, 2009
Meet the new SharePoint collaborators
In MOSS 2007 we got to know these folks:
They're the faces you see when you create a new site collection based on the Collaboration Portal template (photo filename: Newsarticleimage.jpg). There they are, actively collaborating in their high-tech cubicle-free office.
I'd like to introduce you to the new collaborators of SharePoint 2010 (photo filename: HomepageSamplePhoto.jpg):
Since they're included by default on every site homepage, not just on the site collection homepage, we're all going to be seeing a LOT of them with the new version. That window showing some green in the background (echoed in her shirt) hints that this is a more environmentally-friendly world... they're undoubtedly moving on to solve the next global business challenge!
October 21, 2009
SharePoint Governance with an Integrative Focus
20091021 - Scott Jamison and Sue Hanley at the 2009 SharePoint Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.
This morning I attended the session “SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning and Implementation” presented by Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley. They’re both dynamic, confident speakers with years of in-the-trenches experience, and their stories and passion about the subject actually make Governance concepts seem interesting and engaging.
Hanley said the most important thing in starting a far-reaching project like a SharePoint implementation is to think about “What am I trying to accomplish?” For example, it’s not good enough to say “We need social computing.” You need to know specifically what you want to get out of it. She urged the audience to think about the technology “not in IT terms but in business terms.”
This dovetails with one of the principles in the book The Opposable Mind, by Roger Martin, which I was reading on the flight to the conference. In the section “Specialization and its Discontents,” Martin says:
“Business’s dominant mode of specialization is the functional area – finance, marketing, production, sales, human resources, and the rest of the organizational chart. Each functional area has its own accepted range of salience, its own accepted causal relationships, its own training, its own insiders’ language, and itst own culture…. But specialists aren’t optimally suited suited to solve the biggest problems businesses face, because [as Peter Drucker pointed out], ‘there are no finance decisions, tax decisions, or marketing decisions; only business decisions.’”
Here are some of the ways, discussed by Hanley and Jamison in the session, to move away from a “specialized” view of your SharePoint implementation (i.e. “The Human Resources department needs an onboarding workflow,” or “The CFO wants dashboards,)” and move toward a more high-level, business-oriented perspective:
• Centralize your SharePoint service.
• Treat it like an enterprise application – have a corporate-level taxonomy and establish metrics for success.
• Have an executive sponsor.
• Divide SharePoint logically from the topmost level for all users, through divisional and team levels, down to individual contributors
• People can’t remember policies – so for successful governance system-wide, come up with catchy short phrases that people can remember. (Hanley’s example – “Send links, not documents.”)
• Provide a consistent user experience
• If the goal is knowledge management, default access should be “read” for everyone in the enterprise.
These ideas represent the kind of integrative thinking which Martin advocates in his book – not to let what is optimal for one sector of the business take precedence over what is optimal for the entire business. Approaching the system holistically and integratively is ultimately the path to success.
Switching gears: one surprising piece of the content for me was this recommendation:
• In SharePoint 2007, the best practice was: use metadata, not folders.
• In SharePoint 2010: use folders, inherit metadata.
I’ll need to learn more from these two experts and work a lot more with the product if I’m going to get over my anti-folder prejudice!
October 20, 2009
20091020 - Ryan Duguid Document Management Session at the 2009 SharePoint Conference
20091020 - Ryan Duguid Document Management Session at the 2009 SharePoint Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.
I just came out of the Document Management Deep Dive session presented by Ryan Duguid (shown above). In addition to presenting some compelling numbers regarding how content storage needs relate directly to retention policies, he also demo-ed a tremendous number of improvements and new features for Document Management in SharePoint 2010. I wanted to share a few of the key features here:
Document ID field – This new field, provisioned at the site collection level, assigns an (administrator-customizable) ID to every document, and lets the system find the document no matter where it is.
The ability to select multiple documents in a document library – functions like batch checkout are now possible.
Declare record – Records management is now handled differently, living at the document library level rather than in an archive site. There is a button to declare a record right there in the document library; you no longer need to move it to a separate repository.
Stubs – When you move a document you now have the option to “move and leave a link.”
Managed metadata – This is an important new feature set, like site columns on steroids, which includes auto complete / suggest, nested term sets, and the ability for end user to email a suggestion to add a new term or (depending on the administrator's setting) to a pick list.
Content type templates – these are now available from the Office applications. If you have a content type with a template assigned to it, which you want to be available to end users as they create documents, you can tell Office which library to look in for that template, and it will display it to the end user from the Office application. The template knows where in SharePoint the file needs to be saved, and it will automatically save it to that location. As my colleague, sitting with me in this session, observed, “You can save users from themselves.”
October 19, 2009
Memorable moments and quotes from the 2009 SharePoint Conference Keynotes
This morning I attended the keynotes at the 2009 SharePoint Conference. I wanted to share just a few memorable quotes from the nearly three hours of buzz, content, and live demos about SharePoint 2010:
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Tom Rizzo shared the fun facts that there are over 7400 participants at the conference - up from 3800 at the 2008 conference in Seattle.
There are two couples getting married at the conference.
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Question 1 from an audience member: "With the current version of SharePoint it was difficult to find service packs and updates – will there be a page for the new version that contains the most current information?"
Steve Ballmer - “The right answer is yes - [turns to Tom Rizzo] what is the current answer?”
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Question 2 from an audience member: "Given the way things are changing on the web, and development cycles are quite long, how is development team keeping up with what’s on the web?... What are you doing going forward?”
Ballmer – "This notion of how fast things move and don’t move on the web is an interesting question." [He claimed that code is "not able to be written faster than it was 10 years ago – but it is able to be deployed faster than it was 10 years ago.” He finished up by saying that this foundation (SharePoint) is so stable that it gives partners a platform for development.]
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Question 3 from an audience member: "We're already talking about web 3.0, semantic web, social computing – what is vision for social computing moving forward?"
Ballmer - "We have taken a lot of steps not only toward the web 2 but the web 3 path. [Cited FAST, SP in the cloud, etc.] “With sharepoint 2010 we’ve taken a huge step forward, and I’m sure you’ll give us some push on some additional steps we need to take.”
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[Question 4 was about governance and I was not able to catch the response.]
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Question 5 from an audience member: "I build solutions for K-12 market... we have thousands of teachers who want to be able to update their sites, and they love their Macs. What are you doing to make that experience better for them?”
Ballmer – “There will be some things undoubtedly that only work on the PC, I need to be blunt about that.”
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Question 6 from an audience member: "Can we use VS 2010 to develop for SP 2007?”
Rizzo – "Unfortunately the answer is no."
Ballmer – "The VS improvements are targeted at the SP 2010 runtime…. This is a classic dilemma we face in the operating systems space... and SP is becoming more like an operating system."
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Jared Spartaro during his demo of the end-user features of SharePoint 2010, where he showed a document that was being edited by three users at the same time:
“The nice thing about co-editing is that I can watch other people do my work for me.”
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That's all for now - off to attend the afternoon sessions - more to come from this exciting conference!
October 16, 2009
How Reliable is Your SharePoint Implementation? Eight ideas to make a SharePoint-based intranet or KM system more reliable.
Last night I attended a presentation by Simon Trussler and Anna Gilpatric from Health Dialog on the subject "Getting the most KM bang-for-your-(Information Technology) Bucks. They discussed and demo-ed their use of out-of-box SharePoint as a knowledge management system ("Health Dialog University"), and true to their presentation's title they have really leveraged MOSS 2007 for their needs without investment in third-party tools or custom code.
From their talk and screenshots, I saw quite a few reasons for their KM system's success, mostly based on human time and effort:
- a great-looking interface with graphical elements and usability emphasis
- a dedicated knowledge broker resource to populate the system and review metadata
- active promotion and training
- use of metrics, tracking, and KPIs
- development of workflows and content types to automate processes and make file types more consistent
Trussler summed up the presentation with his three keys to success: promotion, reliability, and usability. I wanted to focus on the "reliability" factor because I feel it's not typically emphasized for the end-user experience of SharePoint implementations as often as the other two concepts.
Some of these points will overlap with usability, but I think it's useful to look at them in the light of reliability - can your end-users depend on the system, and know they will get the same result each time they use it?
1. Are your files and metadata consistent and standardized? Health Dialog University's dedicated knowledge broker reviews the metadata of every document subitted to the knowledge library. Pick lists help standardize the choices, and content types are used, in Trussler's words,"to simplify data entry and hide complexity from the user." There is continuous quality control and quality review of the material.
2. Is your material up-to-date? When files are uploaded to the HDU system, they are automatically assigned an expiration date which lets the knowledge broker know when they need to be reviewed. Different kinds of material have different expiration dates - e.g. quarterly vs. yearly.
3. Can users find what they need? Although SharePoint's out-of-box search capability can be used to find material in the system, HDU also offers a browse-based navigation based on document metadata, in addition to featuring different views of the knowledge library. Some of these topics and views are a direct response to user requests.
4. Do users receive timely feedback? When end-users submit a document to the HDU system's pending area, they receive an immediate feedback email (generated by a SharePoint Designer workflow), and are also notified when their document has been approved and moved to the knowledge library, with a path to the new location.
5. How is the response time for approvals? For HDU, the knowledge manager relies on a system of workflows and alerts, and can act quickly to review and approve pending documents.
6. Do links take the user where they expect to go? Beyond the issue of broken links, do links behave in a consistent manner (e.g. either all links open in a new window, or none do), and do users know what they're going to get when they click on a file (i.e. will they know they're opening a Word document, a PDF, or a web page)? (This one's firmly in the "usability" realm but a bad experience could cause the user to feel the system is less reliable.)
7. Where can the end-user turn for help? On many of the HDU pages, Gilpatric has included a graphical link to a brief training screencast on how to use the features on that page. This seems to be a really effective way to provide more specific on-the-spot training than the generic "help" link that SharePoint provides out-of-box.
8. How is the overall performance of the system? Entire books have been written on this subject, and there are many factors to consider which are out of the scope of this post, but Trussler and Gilpatric mentioned that their KM system has experienced no crashes and very little, if any, downtime, and this certainly contributes to a feeling of trust for the end-user.
Some additional reading on SharePoint reliability (There are thousands of pages of material out there on this subject - please drop me a comment if you know a particularly good resource!):
10 suggestions for a reliable, low-latency Search deployment
Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and the 2007 Microsoft Office System
A Matter Of Degree
- Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say “this we know.”
- T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888–1965). From Eliot’s doctoral dissertation in philosophy; submitted to Harvard in 1916.
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