A Matter Of Degree

Rypple - a feedback tool for inside and outside the enterprise

ripples and blue, originally uploaded by zorg_the_indivisible.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last month, in the session "Metrics in the hands of users: empowering the Enterprise 2.0 Workforce", I learned about a feedback tool called Rypple, which self-identifies as a tool which "helps you get timely, specific, and actionable feedback from people you trust." It's like a survey tool that met Twitter and is considering signing up for FriendFeed. I can see this tool having particular usefulness within the enterprise, e.g. for soliciting after-action feedback from a project team that is comprised of internal team members, clients, and vendors.

Daniel Debow, co-CEO and Rypple founder, who spoke at the E2.0 session I attended, said that a key feature of this tool is its low transaction cost. He said "If you only put out one survey a year, it's really important that you distill out that one bit of message and then consider what it means to you based on the personality type. If the cost is low, you’ll do it much more often. A large stream of constant data means no individual piece of information is way more important than anything else."

It is simple to use - go to Rypple.com, create an account, and then ask one question. You're limited to 140 characters for the question, but there does not appear to be a limit on valid email addresses to which you can send your question.

Once you send the question, feedback from your respondents arrives via e-mail and is also collected online.   All responses are anonymous.

Rypple also encourages you to ask your question multiple times and to share it with the Rypple community (and promises that Twitter and Facebook broadcasting is coming soon.) As you ask more questions, you're able to see metrics about how the question ratings are trending.

One thing that stands out for me about the tool is that it's so simple and friendly for the "advisers" (the recipients of your question). They can answer the question by responding to the notification email, or online, and it's a much less intimidating format than a survey.

One of the compelling cases cited in the E2.0 session was how the head of orthopedic surgery at UPenn used it to get feedback from his interns on his teaching style. He wasn't able to get it from them in interviews because the cost of saying the wrong thing was apparently so great that it wasn’t worth the payoff. When he used Rypple, according to Debow, "all of a sudden telling him the truth cost less and signalled socially that he wanted to know."

Anonymity is likely to make your respondents feel more free to tell the truth, and the ease of use of this tool makes it convenient for both respondent and requestor.

Clickable world map for SharePoint to navigate global office locations

Inspired by End User SharePoint's Clickable Image Map of the United States, I made a world map version for my clients with offices around the globe.  I generally work with my clients to create a site or page for each of their office locations that includes local news, weather, and information, and the map can be a graphical way to provide navigation to those site-specific pages. With SharePoint Designer it's easy and quick to create the world map with clickable coordinates.  Here are the steps I took to make it:

1. Find a world map image you like and which can be used for free.  I found mine at WorldAtlas.com - I chose the "Political - Drop Shadow" version at size 390 x 240. 

Note:  As far as I know, it's not possible to put a border around a coordinate area, so you'll want to use a photo editing tool to put circles or dots on your map to show the desired locations.

2. Upload the image to an image library in SharePoint, and once it is uploaded, click on the image until it is alone in the browser window (no image properties showing), and copy the URL.

3. Open SharePoint Designer and choose File / New / HTML.  This will give you a blank HTML page.

4. View the page in Split mode.

5. Click into the code window at top and delete all the default code.

6. Choose Insert / Picture / From File, and in the File Name field at the bottom of the window, paste in the URL of the picture you uploaded to SharePoint.

7. If you click into Design view (the lower section of the Split view) your map will appear.

8. Open the Pictures toolbar (View / Toolbars / Pictures).  Toward the end of the toolbar there are three shapes - "rectangular hotspot," "circular hotspot," "polygonal hotspot."  These tools can be used to create your image coordinates.

9. Choose the hotspot shape you like (I used the circular one), and draw a section on the image map around the city of your choice.

10. An "insert hyperlink" window will appear, where you can type or paste in the URL of the page or site to which you'd like this location to point.  Click the "screentip" button to add a label that your users will see on mouseover.

11. When you've added all the desired coordinates, copy all the code in the code window, and then go to your desired SharePoint page.

12. Add a Content Editor Web Part to the page, open the Modify Web Part pane, and click the Source button. 

13. Paste all the copied code into the window and click Save, then click OK at the bottom of the Modify Web Part pane.

14. That's all!  If your image doesn't appear, make sure that the link in the code of the content editor web part matches the link of the actual image.  You may also want to add a friendly title to the web part.

For the more adventurous, you could try adding an interactive map to your SharePoint site using Virtual Earth. 

Thanks again to Mark Miller and the End User SharePoint team for helping me to see the possibilities!

How the Apollo 11 moonwalk became a tagging and records retention tale of woe

Stepping Onto the Moon's Surface, originally uploaded by NASAImageoftheday.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, and this morning's NPR story "Houston, We Erased The Apollo 11 Tapes" is a classic tale of tagging, search, and records retention policies (or lack thereof). The article and broadcast are really worth a read/listen, but to sum up:

The original recording of the moonwalk was not in a format that was compatible with television, so the recording was converted for the TV broadcast in 1969 - and degraded in the process. Engineers knew there was a better-quality recording from the camera on the moon, but for years they couldn't find it. They had to search a vast repository of content using much-used terms like "Apollo" and "tape." It turns out that the recording was most likely recorded-over due to NASA's increased need for magnetic tapes in the 1980s.

This scenario makes me think of my clients - many of whom have expressed to me, in the process of converting to a SharePoint implementation, the notion that "any content over five (or three, or six, etc.) years old is worthless." I understand the concept - policy and regulation changes, business and market trends, and fresh research and information all change the relevance of older content. But as the NASA story shows, you may not realize now what's going to be gold in 40 years.

If you're managing content (and who isn't, whether on an organizational or individual level?), do you have record retention policies in place to expire content after a certain time, and if so, are you notified to check the content first, or is it automatically deleted? Are you at risk of having files erased due to exigencies like lack of storage space? Are files backed up on a regular basis, and if they are, could you restore those backups successfully? Have "delete" permissions been given to those who may not fully understand the importance of the content? In your search results, are the "gold" files getting buried under layers of more recent sediment?

NASA invested time and resources to restore and improve the quality of the recordings they did have, since they couldn't access the original. While you're pondering these questions, you can see the video here. (Personally, I'm a fan of the grainier original look; by removing noise they've flattened out some of the detail, a metaphor to explore another time...)

And a nod to you conspiracy theorists out there - pretty convenient that they "lost" those tapes, eh?

Thanks, Microsoft, for providing More White Guy

Thanks, Microsoft, for providing More White Guy, originally uploaded by sadalit.

Microsoft just launched the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek site - where the target audience seems apparent from the images they chose to represent the different roles.

When I think of all the women I know who use, configure, and develop for this software product, I feel this new homepage is a misrepresentation. It reminds me of reading an an article or textbook from the 1960s where every pronoun is "he" or "him." Why not mix it up a little?

See the full home page here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010/Sneak_Peek/Pages/default.aspx

Upcoming Talk about Knowledge Management for Professional Services with SharePoint

Herding Cats, originally uploaded by Nerdimus Prime.

My client and colleague, Glynys Thomas, will be speaking at the Boston KM Forum next Thursday afternoon, July 16, on the challenges of supporting KM at a Professional Services firm with SharePoint.

If you're in the Boston area and are facing similar challenges (for example, how to get the do-ers at your organization to adhere to the desired KM processes as well as adopt a new software system) I hope you will attend her presentation.

On this subject I highly recommend the article Knowledge Sharing in a Global Professional Service Firm from MIS Quarterly Executive Vol. 7 No. 3 / Sep 2008. (Note: the full article requires a subscription or reprint fee.) It discusses KM at a large global PS firm, detailing four processes of knowledge management (creation, development, re-use, and transfer), the reasons why employees may not share knowledge, the roles which make the processes successful, and the supporting technologies. I feel that it's a must-read for anyone working through these challenges.