A Matter Of Degree

How SharePoint Can Foster Negotiation Within Your Organization

Demotivator - Negotiation, originally uploaded by hypno_bedhead.

You hear a lot about how SharePoint enables collaboration, less about how it can foster negotiation, but I have a client who's making great use of it for that purpose.

This organization has a busy IT department which had been tracking work requests (i.e., requests for changes or new projects from the organization's internal customers) internally using an Excel spreadsheet.  At the beginning of this year we converted the spreadsheet to a SharePoint Tasks list, and added many custom metadata fields including Requestor, Executive Sponsor, and Estimated Hours to Complete.  I used Christophe's technique of color coding the list items based on status to put a colored indicator on each task, and the client was thrilled with the ability to expose work request status graphically on the department's home page.  Now, anyone in the organization could see right away how busy the department is just by seeing the number of active requests and the work in progress.  (At this point we're moving forward with a custom workflow which will route each request through the approval process and update its task status automatically, but that's another post for another time!)

But more than this, the list can now encourage conversation within the organization.  By making requestor name and executive sponsor name visible and obvious, the vision is that a requestor will go to the list, see other projects in the stack, and, instead of wrangling with IT to force the new request into an already full pipeline, that requestor will approach other requestors or sponsors directly: “I see you have this project in the queue – can you put it on the backburner so my project can receive the resources?”

This new system is bringing a lot of hope to my client because the truth is, we don't always collaborate with a single purpose in mind.  Often, prioritizing projects can get political and the person who screams the loudest wins.  (I imagine that exposing richer business data, such as revenue by project team, practice area, or geographical location, would generate negotiation as well - for example, around recruiting and hiring.)

Is negotiation like this (based on a sunshine principle of allowing everyone access to departmental or business information) happening in your organization?  If it is, how do the tools and culture support it?  If it isn't, how might they be changed to facilitate more debate and compromise?

Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

The First Headline, originally uploaded by skyo.

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance. Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.

(and p.s. - I get it: we need to move into the next century, make the news more collaborative, eliminate the tree-killing use of paper and the energy used to distribute the paper versions. Let's talk about what the world would look like without newsprint but with excellent online news that is still community-oriented.)

Newly Uploaded and Checked-Out Documents Are Invisible Even to the Site Collection Administrator

In an e-conversation I had with Sue Hanley last week, she alerted me to a potentially troublesome situation involving documents that are checked-out on upload.  Only the author can see these documents; even the Site Collection Administrator (and in fact even the System Account) does not have rights to see them - so to all other users of a site, they do not appear.  She describes this scenario in detail in this blog post, which I highly recommend reading, and I want to emphasize that for anyone using site collections as collaborative client extranets, if the right conditions are met, your internal users will not see documents uploaded by the client, and vice versa, unless the uploader knows to check them in. 

Sue and I agreed this could be better handled, and I've added this to my wishlist for the next release, in the Security/Permissions section.

SharePoint Discussion Board in Content Query Web Part (CQWP or CBQ) Returns (Blank) for Replies

I just had a great collaborative experience with a client.  Last week she contacted me about an issue she was experiencing when displaying a discussion thread on their SharePoint intranet.  She had tried to display the RSS feed of the discussion thread, and had encountered the authentication issue we all know and love when you try to use Sharepoint's built-in RSS reader to display a SharePoint list or library:

My developer colleague was at their site that week, and he suggested using the Content Query Web Part as a way to display the information.  She set this up successfully, with one hitch:  replies to posts appeared as (Blank):

    

She tried on her own to fix this, then asked me for help.  As with so many situations in SharePoint, this issue is related to content types.  Discussion board posts are of content type "discussion," whereas replies are of content type "message" (which does not contain a Title field, which is what the CQWP is looking for).  My client did not want to show the replies to posts, so I was able to filter them out by setting the CQWP filter as follows:

Good to go!  She can now display her company's bulletin board anywhere on their Intranet. 

This solution felt good because it was a tripartite collaboration - the developer's suggestion of the CQWP to get around the RSS issue, the client's independent and successful setup of the CQWP, and my tweak based on prior experience with content types.  My company's goal is to empower our clients to make the most of their SharePoint implementation once we get it up and running.  It doesn't always work out that way but it feels great when it does.