A Matter Of Degree

Survey to our Clients reveals that SharePoint in its Sophomore Year Promotes Collaboration & Knowledge Management

Honey Bees, originally uploaded by david.nikonvscanon.

This month, my company surveyed our clients and associates about their use of SharePoint, now that many of them (58% of respondents, to be exact) have been using the product for over two years. I'll be presenting the data at a webinar for the SLA next Wednesday (8/26/09). Registration for the webinar is closed, so I wanted to share some of the key data points here:

75% report that collaboration is happening within their SharePoint implementation.
62% say that SharePoint has improved collaboration within the organization.
71% state that SharePoint is facilitating knowledge capture and knowledge management.
37% are capturing or leveraging email within the SharePoint implementation.

In addition, the data shows a significant increase in the use and acceptance of social computing tools within the organization. To learn more about this, you can tune in to KMA's webinar on Enterprise Social Computing: Leveraging Your Investment in SharePoint, presented by my colleague Mike Gilronan, with Gil Yehuda and Laura Farrelly, also on Wednesday 8/26.

It's encouraging to see that this tool is enabling collaboration, KM, and search, although our respondents were well aware that human resource and business process issues are part of the equation.

I'll be presenting the full set of data at a KMA webinar later in the Fall, to be announced.

Augmented Reality, Hobo Symbols and Online Reviews - What Goes Around Comes Around

hobo signs, originally uploaded by rosidae.

A little over a week ago I heard the term "Augmented Reality" for the first time. Two days after that, I was chatting with a friend who told me about a project her company did for a client, using this technology to attract customers to conference booth.

One evening that same week I saw an episode of Mad Men (Season 1) entitled "The Hobo Code." A little research online about hobo signs and symbols supported the message of the episode, and it struck me that there's not much difference between a hobo chalking a symbol on a fence post outside a house, a driver flashing headlights at another driver to warn that a police car is up the road, a mother writing a review of a toy on a website, and a tourist leaving virtual geotagged notes about places he's visited using his mobile phone.

We're all leaving messages to help each other. We've done it for a long time. Although marketers, developers, and entrepreneurs will always find game- and toy-like uses for social media and augmented reality, and the resulting over-hype will inevitably turn people off, I believe that at heart, our human drive is to help each other, make each other smarter, and keep each other out of harm's way.

For a laugh, check out this chart of "New Symbols for the Discerning Hobo."

The MOSS Publishing Portal - fewer options, easier for the end-user

One Way Through The Viewfinder Photo Print, originally uploaded by Scarlet_Beautiful.

I attended a discussion yesterday morning of the Boston KM Forum - the topic was "Decision-Making: How Knowledge Influences Outcomes." The conversation around the table brought a bit of clarity to some SharePoint work I've been doing this week.

My company is redesigning our public website and moving it to the SharePoint platform. The infrastructure engineer who built the site in staging chose the Publishing Portal site collection template as the basis for the site. It's clear that this is a good choice for an external-facing site, however all the MOSS 2007 implementations I've worked on have been intranets built on the Collaboration Portal template - so I have been out of my comfort zone with the Publishing Portal site.

I'm running into situations where I can't build functionality into the site the way I'm used to doing, because there are fewer options for list and library templates as well as fewer web parts available. (For example, there is no Links list template out-of-box; you're steered toward using the Summary LInks control embedded in the page.)

For me it's been perplexing that this functionality isn't included up-front (you can activate the Team Collaboration Lists site feature to get the usual templates like Links and Surveys on the site); however I have been working with the site out-of-box, without enabling additional features, to see if I can do what I need to do in different ways. This has been working, and yesterday morning's conversation about "how we decide" made this more clear:

Fewer options = fewer decisions = EASIER TO USE.

The Publishing site is designed to simplify page creation and content display. It puts more emphasis on workflow (i.e. approval of page content) and less emphasis on collaborative team- or project-oriented functionality. Rather than lighting up the templates I'm used to seeing from the Collaboration Portal template, I'm going to leave the site in its out-of-box condition as long as is workable, so that the solution I'm building for the content owners is as simple to use as possible.

More blogs to come on this subject as I accumulate the Lessons Learned!