A Matter Of Degree

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!

 

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!

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.”

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