A Matter Of Degree

The SharePoint Salon

Graphic courtesy of SoftArtisans

For the Boston area SharePoint crowd - the folks at SoftArtisans have started up a SharePoint Salon to discuss the latest and most challenging topics around this platform. Claire W., the organizer, ensures that a core group of local SP experts can attend, and then opens up the event to all.

The key point about the Salon, and what differentiates it from many other SP community events, is that it is all about conversation.  There's no lecturer, no slide show, just focused dialogue on subjects that matter.  Unlike a SharePint there's a topic to structure the interaction, and a guaranteed group of experts to keep the ball in the air. 

The third Salon is coming up on Thursday, October 27, at Eastern Standard, on the subject of data visualizations, KPIs, and the new Power View capability.  You can read about the event here, and respond if you will attend here.

My hope is that the Salon idea will spread and other geographic areas will start to have their own.  The product is so well-known and widely adopted now that we may be entering an era where it's less about expert-to-novice relationships and more about "all of us are smarter than any of us."

I hope to see you there!

SharePoint Conference 2011 - Day 1 - Keynotes - #spc11

I just came out of the SharePoint Conference Keynotes and wanted to share a few quick thoughts. 

First, a stack of statistics shared by the various speakers:

About the conference:
7500 attendees
240 sessions
200 partners/vendors
New track for end-user adoption (running lunch & breaks)

About SharePoint:
700,000 SP developers around the world
1162 books on SP (dev only?)
4x the visual designers for next version
Over 4,000 partners in SP ecosystem
93,000 people trained by partners on building solutions in SP
1,000 people just working on SP R&D  (implied: these are at MS)

General enterprise statistics - from DelBene Cloud keynote:
65% deploying at least one social software tool
84% of orgs have a remote workforce
70% of IT budgets spent maintaining inflexible & siloed systems
4 million millennials enter workforce each year

Next, my takeaway:

At the end of his keynote speech, Jeff Teper urged the audience - "Now don't you dare go home and say "I didn't know I could do that with SharePoint."

And the response of my colleague sitting next to me (a SP developer and administrator for a global company of 200,000 users, who gets my vote for Most Likely to Qualify for MS's New Certification "Microsoft Certified Architect for SharePoint" Without Taking Any Refresher Training) was:  "My users already know they can do that with SharePoint.  They want to know, 'Why can't I do that within my company?'  MS Access is not allowed, SharePoint Designer is not allowed..."

Which is a story I've heard from many different clients and community members, and which tells me that cultural issues remain one of the strongest factors influencing user satisfaction and adoption of SharePoint (and ultimately, its maturity within an organization).  And yet the track for end-user adoption, the "SharePoint Express," new to the conference this year, occurs only during lunch and breaks.  There are a few governance sessions at the conference; it will be interesting to see if they cover this problem of releasing control not only of SharePoint but of the complementary programs and systems that can make it a fully-realized solution for the users.

Recommended forum: Worldwide Intranet Challenge

If you have any part in owning or managing a SharePoint Intranet, I highly recommend Andrew Wright's Worldwide Intranet Challenge group on LinkedIn.  It's an active, well-managed group with great content, and does a good job of keeping the sales pitches out of the general forum.  Some of the posts are SharePoint-specific, and the vast majority of the rest deal with concepts that are platform-agnostic.  Here's a sampling of some of the recent discussions:

• What are your intranet's top-level navigation links, and why?
• How much control should Intranet managers have?
• Do you highlight user-generated content anywhere on your intranet?
• What social media options are you using for internal corporate communications?
• To which business unit does an intranet belong? HR? I.T.? Communications? And why?
• Looking for an analytics tool that can't pass info to an external server... what do you recommend?
• Why aren't intranets fulfilling their potential? What do you think?
• Now that intranets have moved from a straight content publishing model to a mix with collaboration and social media tools, how do you structure an information architecture ?

This is seriously good benchmarking for the Intranet owner who has needs beyond the technical.  For my day-to-day digest of what's top of mind for the community, I find this group more useful in many ways than some of the dedicated SharePoint groups.  From the list of members I can see that many of the consultants and practitioners I know and respect may share my opinion.  Nice work, Andrew!

Where To Find SharePoint Implementation Examples

My most recent Lijit stats email tells me that the top referring search term that brings readers to this blog is "SharePoint Implementation Examples."   This is one of the big questions on every SharePoint implementation owner's mind:  "What have others done?"

 

The bad news: I don't feature many examples in-depth on this blog.  The good news: I am amassing a store of case studies, screen shots, and resources on sharepointmaturity.com.  Currently there are two places on the site to look for resources:

1. Gallery of screenshots of intranet sites - A small but growing collection of SharePoint sites and applications that I envision will be as comprehensive as the collection of public-facing sites over at wssdemo.

2. Links to external resources - A list of sites that present intranet case studies, screen shots, and guidance on intranet design.  Not all the intranets featured here are based on SharePoint but many are.

If you are aware of great resources I can add to either list, please leave a comment and let me know!

 

Choose Your Resource: Two visualizations of the Business Intelligence Options in SharePoint 2010

[Update 9/3/11 - both charts have been edited to reflect Derek's input (see comments)]

I've been wanting to share this SharePoint resource for a while: two different views of the options for Business Intelligence / Data Visualization on the 2010 platform.  Both views break down the options in terms of dataset size and dynamic vs. static presentation; you can choose the format that works best for you:

2010 BI Solutions - Venn View:

 

2010 BI Solutions - Quadrant View:

  

My thanks to Chris McNulty, whose matrix of different BI options in SP 2010 provided the seed for these visualizations (the matrix can be seen on slide 28 of our joint presentation "See Beyond The Numbers"), and to Matt Jackson, who suggested the quadrant view and provided input on both views.

As always, I welcome feedback and suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who made the first SharePoint Saturday The Conference in DC a success! #spstcdc

 

[note: this is cross-posted on bluemetal.com]

I wanted to thank the 2,000 attendees, 190 speakers, 150 volunteers, and 60 sponsors who came out to SharePoint Saturday The Conference in DC this past weekend - the first multi-day event of its kind in the SharePoint community.  I was honored to be a part of it.  What other event spans the range from deep-dive technical sessions to executive-level workshops AND inclues a talent show?

For those who weren't able to attend, there's still an opportunity to learn!  Marc Anderson will be presenting a free, live webinar tomorrow, 8/16, on how he built "The SPSTCDC Web Site Speakers and Sessions Pages."  It's at 2 PM EDT.

You can view my presentation on Assessing Your SharePoint Maturity here.

See the following for more about this great conference:

The tweetstream

Wrap-up post from the conference organizers

Lessons Learned from Dux Raymond Sy

Videos from the talent show

Thanks again everyone, great job!

 

To Customize SharePoint, Or Not?

I often receive questions and enage in debate about whether it is necessary to customize SharePoint in order to reach a greater level of maturity with the product.  To start a community conversation on this subject, I've written an article for NothingButSharePoint that discusses my position, lists some common reasons why organizations don't want to customize, and provides a number of resources for additional reading on the subject.  If you have an opinion on questions such as:

Do you agree, or not, that it is necessary to customize in order to reach higher SP maturity?

If your organization has a “keep it out-of-box” mandate, why?  And how has this been a benefit or hindrance to your implementation?

- then please head over to my article on NothingButSharePoint and join the discussion!

How's Your Health? Diagnostic Tools for the Technical and Human Sides of SharePoint.

Last night, two of my friends and colleagues in the SharePoint community sent me links to new diagnostic tools, one specifically for SharePoint and one applicable to SharePoint, which complement each other nicely - one is about the technology, and the other is about community.  To receive them both in the same evening was such a happy coincidence that I wanted to share them together.

The first, sent to me by SharePoint developer Julie Turner, is the SharePoint Diagnostic Studio, announced on 4/23/11 by the SharePoint Product Team. 

 
 
It's a complement to SCOM and the SharePoint Health Analyzer which, in the product team's words, "presents server diagnostic information in a visual and structured way that enables Developers and IT Professionals to quickly diagnose and act upon intermittent performance, reliability and functionality problems in a SharePoint 2010 environment."  Essentially, it provides graphical reporting in the categories of base, capacity, performance, availability, and usage, and provides insight into the issues that impact these areas.

For more information:

• read the full announcement
• read the TechNet article
• download the free toolkit

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 The second, sent to my by Mark Miller of NothingButSharePoint, is the Lithium Community Health Index. 

 

This is a free, downloadable 20-page paper which presents a model for measuring the health and activity of online communities.  It defines a set of common characteristics, briefly listed here:

• Members (growth)
• Content (usefulness)
• Traffic (popularity)
• Responsiveness
• Interactivity
• Liveliness

and also:

• Positive Atmosphere
• Civil Behavior
• Degree of Trust

It then shows how these standard metrics can be used not only to measure an individual community but to compare against other similar communities.  But more than helping to measure community health and providing a means for benchmarking, it can also validate perceptions, and serve as a basis of ROI calculations.

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 Both of these tools would be excellent for anyone considering their SharePoint maturity in the Infrastructure & Administration and/or People & Communities competencies, and I've posted them as resources on sharepointmaturity.com.  Personally I appreciate their focus on visualization and graphical display of information. If you decide to give one or both of them a try in your own environment, please leave a comment and let me know how it goes!

Round-Up of SPTechCon Boston 2011 Wrap-Ups #sptechcon

If you're in withdrawal from SharePoint conference fun after last week's SPTechCon, you can re-live some of the magic through the follow-up and summary posts that the presenters and attendees are publishing.  Here are a few that I've found; please send me other links that you know of!

Marc Anderson (@sympmarc):  http://sympmarc.com/2011/06/05/sptechcon-boston-2011-wrap-up/

Ruven Gotz (@ruvenG):  http://spinsiders.com/ruveng/2011/06/04/sptechcon-singapore-for-your-supper/

Andrew Connell (@andrewconnell) http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2011/06/04/recalling-my-sessions-from-sptechcon-boston-2011.aspx

Josh McCarty (@josh_a_mccarty):  http://joshmccarty.com/2011/06/thoughts-on-sptechcon-boston-2011/

Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam) http://www.helloitsliam.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=277 

Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), about the demo: http://www.buckleyplanet.com/2011/06/sptechcon-the-building-of-a-demo.html

& about the party: http://info.axceler.com/Blog/bid/59196/The-SharePoint-Party-at-SPTechCon-Boston

David Rubinstein, Chariman of SPTechCon - http://www.sptechblog.com/2011/06/thoughts-from-best-sptechcon-yet.html

22 Things Learned at SPTechCon from the folks at SoftArtisans:  http://wiki.softartisans.com/display/BLOGS/2011/06/07/Things+Learned+at+SPTechCon

See also my shots of Christian and Joel Oleson planking during a break.

 

 



SPTechCon Boston - Session Mapping to the SharePoint Maturity Model

SPTechCon Boston kicks off a week from tomorrow!  If you're wondering which of the 94 technical classes to attend on Thursday and Friday, you might want to take a look at my mapping of all the sessions to the SharePoint Maturity Model:

• Session mapping for Thursday 6/2
• Session mapping for Friday 6/3

Session placement in the matrix is less about the complexity of the solutions or the technical-difficulty level of the talks, and more about where a SharePoint implementation owner would be starting to look at the concept(s) as the next step in improving / maturing their SP environment. 

Some of the sessions are out of the scope of the current version of the Model (which does not (yet) include branding, regulatory issues, public-facing internet sites / WCM, and Being A SharePoint Rockstar In The Community At Large (shoutout to @gvaro & @buckleyplanet - that's going to be a really fun session), but I plugged them into the places where I thought an attendee would get the most benefit as they're considering the basic competencies.

Speakers, as always, feel free to give me some feedback on how your sessions are mapped!