A Matter Of Degree

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.

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.”

How Reliable is Your SharePoint Implementation? Eight ideas to make a SharePoint-based intranet or KM system more reliable.

Reliable, originally uploaded by Phill Price.

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

 

Six (additional) Worst Practices for SharePoint

This is broken, originally uploaded by Lodigs.

I recently saw that Ben Curry (of Mindsharp and the SharePoint Best Practices Conference) has a list of the Top 10 Administrative Bad Practices for SharePoint. I definitely agree with his choices.

The SharePoint Practice team at my company has been keeping our own list of Worst Practices for SharePoint, and I'd like to take this opportunity to expand on Ben's list and add a few that we have seen over the years.

Please note - this appears to be a list of recommendations; IT IS NOT.

1. Give all your power users and content owners Full Control.
When you can't decide which level of rights to give to your content owners (for example, those individuals who will need to create new metadata categories and build new lists and libraries as well as contribute content to a site), you can be confident that Full Control will give them all the rights they need, but there is a better way. Manage Hierarchy is often an acceptable level of security, which will let those power users do more than contribute, but not do irreversible damage to the site.

2. Don't use metadata to categorize documents or databases; just create a new folder, list or library every time you need a category.
While there are often reasons to create new lists and libraries to segregate content, and there can even be good reasons to use folders within a list or library, this shouldn't be your default content management model. This Worst Practice is related to Number Three:

3. Don't use metadata to categorize documents; just put all the information in the filename field.
Companies with document naming conventions are often used to long filenames that give a lot of information about the document. By using metadata instead, SharePoint (and similar content management systems) can free you from the need to keep all the information in the filename, and provide greater power for filtering and finding documents.

4. Use your old legacy servers for your new SharePoint implementation.
You're not sure if SharePoint is the right product for you, so you'd like to give it a test-drive without making a big investment in hardware.  Unfortunately, what we've seen many times is that running SharePoint on underpowered servers and forcing it to share space with other legacy applications may not give you an accurate test-drive of the product, and in fact could cost a significant amount in terms of time spent troubleshooting.

5. Don't set up any test user accounts.
When you're building out SharePoint, you're most likely logged in with the powerful permissions of a farm administrator, site collection administrator, or site collection owner with Full Control.  As you prepare for launch, moving around the site and testing functionality, you can see and do everything you need to.  Your end-users with Read and/or Contribute rights may have a very different experience - and you don't want to hear this from them on the day of launch.  Create, at the very least, one end-user test account, so that you can log in and out as needed to test your site.  Ideally you would create one for every location, department, or high-level user role, especially if you're using features like Audience Targeting, so you can really see what your different user groups see.

6. Use a folder or document library called “Old.”
Like a lighter held aloft at a concert, this practice keeps the spirit of the file share alive in your new SharePoint implementation.  Folders with names like "Old," "DO NOT USE," "Don't Need," and "Blurry Photos" can be a comforting structure for the end-user who's missing that big old P drive on the network.  In a system where content can easily be surfaced by Search rather than by browsing, however, it may not be apparent to the searcher that the likely-looking filename they've turned up is sitting in the "_delete" folder. 

For your long-weekend enjoyment, check out some more Worst Practices in the physical world at the "There I Fixed It" site.

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.

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!

How to make "This Site" the default SharePoint search scope

A client recently asked how to make "This Site" the default SharePoint search scope from the simple search box on all pages.  "This site" does not appear as an option when you try to manage this via the GUI (Site Actions | Site Settings | Site Collection Administration section / Search Scopes), so you can't set it as the default there.

I found the answer on this thread on SharePoint Blogs / SharePoint University:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/forums/t/16293.aspx?PageIndex=2

and I wanted to reproduce it here with a few additions.  User Monty Myers (monty.myers) posted the following; my additions are in red:

Add or Modify the following line in the OSearchEnhancedFeature.xml file located in 12\Template\Features\ : (The full path is C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\OSearchEnhancedFeature, then open the SearchArea.xml file in NotePad)

This is the line of code you will add:

<Property Name="DropDownMode">ShowDD_DefaultContextual</Property>

The bold line below shows where the line of code needs to be added: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
    <Control
        Id="SmallSearchInputBox"
        Sequence="15"
        ControlClass="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SearchBoxEx" ControlAssembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c">
 <Property Name="GoImageUrl">/_layouts/images/gosearch.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/goRTL.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageActiveUrl">/_layouts/images/gosearch.gif</Property>
 <Property Name="GoImageActiveUrlRTL">/_layouts/images/goRTL.gif</Property>
        <Property Name="UseSiteDefaults">true</Property>
 <Property Name="FrameType">None</Property>
        <Property Name="ShowAdvancedSearch">true</Property>
 <Property Name="DropDownMode">ShowDD_DefaultContextual</Property>
    </Control>   
</Elements>

After making the change, save the file and do an IISreset. 

Important:  when you customize the SearchArea.xml file, it is unghosted, meaning that future patches and upgrades could overwrite your changes.  As a best practice, you should create a feature to install this unghosted file to current site collections and deploy the change in this manner.

When search doesn't work from SharePoint MySites - Preferred Search Center Weirdness

I've seen this issue with two MOSS 2007 implementations now - end-users report that performing a search from a MySite returns Access Denied.  The typical scenario is that a user will do a People Search for an individual, click through to the result which puts them on that individual's MySite, and then from that Mysite they'll try another search for a different user.  At this point they get an access denied error or other weirdness.

The solution to this issue is to go to the Shared Service Provider in Central Administration, click on My Site Settings, and ensure that the Preferred Search Center URL is correct (i.e. that it points to the desired Search Center, typically the one used in your main SharePoint portal - like http://[sitename]/searchcenter/Pages/)

The worrisome aspect of this is that both times I've seen this issue, it has happened after a new site collection was created, and that new site collection's Search Center URL got plugged into the SSP's Preferred Search Center setting.  One of my colleagues theorized that this setting points to the most-recently-created Search Center (and a new Search Center is created each time you use the Collaboration Portal template for a new site collection).  I could not find a setting in Central Administration, or at the time of creation of a new site collection, to prevent this from happening.

SharePoint - The worm has turned! ("Just Make It Like Google" no longer!)

It's official - with SharePoint clients I am now hearing more "Just make it like Facebook!" and less "Just make it like Google!" 

A case in point - I have a client who's making really great use of a customized Task list to handle project requests that come to the IT Department.  Today my contact, the IT Director at this client site, was telling me that he wants the developers to be updating their projects "like Facebook" - not only changing the Status drop-down but adding versioned comments as well.

In an interesting governance twist, the developers asked him for a specification on when they should update.  (Welcome to the BizarroWorld of Enterprise 2.0!) 

Still, the upshot for me is that even conservative SharePoint users are starting to want the social-media look and feel from the tool.  A task list is not in the usual catalog of social networking tools within the enterprise, but this client has shown me how it can function that way.  I'm looking forward to learning more from my clients and colleagues about unexpected and/or underground ways they are trying to "make it like Facebook."