A Matter Of Degree

First Look at Data from the SharePoint Maturity Model

A big thank you to all the folks who came out yesterday to the first ever SharePoint Saturday in Hartford!  The event was sold out and many of the sessions were standing room only.  The folks from New Horizons, Third M, and CTDOTNET did a great job organizing and running the event.

I presented the SharePoint Maturity Model (an updated version of the one I released on End User SharePoint back in November), and I want to extend a very special thank you to the attendees from my audience who turned in their SMM self-evaluations.  Your results are the seed of a data model that I plan to expand and build out in the coming months and years, to be a resource for those who are looking for answers to questions like:

• "For my industry and company size, how far along are similar organizations with their SharePoint implementations?"
• "After n years of SharePoint use, where do companies typically fall in the maturity model?" 
• "Is maturity correlated with number of years of SharePoint use, with SharePoint version year, or with investment in Enterprise vs. Standard?"

Although the data set is small and limited in the industries covered, I'd like to share yesterday's results here to give a sense of the potential of this assessment:

 

 

 

 
 
 
That last graph is making me smile - the insurance companies (which reported tens of thousands of users) are further along with their business process maturity, whereas the IT Consulting firms are big on the customizations - shocker!

My presentation from yesterday can be found on SlideShare. 

An Excel spreadsheet that you can use to graph your own maturity levels (with the format of the spiderweb graphs above) is available for download at http://bit.ly/SMMExcelTemplate.

Thank you again to everyone, it was a great day!

 

Comparison of User Experience / Usability differences from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint 2010

I've gotten some questions lately about differences the end user will notice between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010.  The differences definitely go beyond the ribbon, although I'm taking that as my starting point.  Read on for a sense of the user experience from one version to the other:

1. The Ribbon.

MOSS 2007:  This is the toolbar for a document library, with Actions expanded:

Sharepoint 2010:  Here's a section of the ribbon for a document library.  Note there are two tabs, both packed with features.

 

2. View control

MOSS 2007:  List or library view control is at the far right of the page:

SharePoint 2010:  view control has been moved into the ribbon (see above ribbon screenshot), but is also actionable through the breadcrumb, which is a nice new feature:

3. Site Actions menu

MOSS 2007: far right of the page:

SharePoint 2010:  Far left of the page (can you imagine the number of person-hours spent in discussions  at Microsoft about this change?)

4. Breadcrumb / Portal Site Connection

MOSS 2007 has a linked breadcrumb navigation and a configurable connection to the home page of the portal at the top left of the page:

SharePoint 2010 moves the breadcrumb to the page title area, and adds a folder icon which can expand to show the complete path. My opinion:  this folder is not the most intuitive thing for the first-time 2010 user to click.

 

  

5. Create Menu

MOSS 2007 - options for content that can be created are laid out in categories.  I've gotten a lot of questions from users over the years about how to create a new site - the placement and name of the "Sites and Workspaces" option, and the fact that the types of sites a user can create are not exposed, is not the most intuitive setup.

 

SharePoint 2010:  The menu is more graphical, and filterable by the kind of content the user wishes to create.  My opinion:  the fact that a content type is always selected by default is a big pain.  When I'm moving quickly, I'll forget to de-select the default option and pick the one I want, and end up having to delete that list or library and re-create.  That's user error to be sure, but I'm betting I'm not the only one who's encountering this, and it makes me wish that there wasn't one selected by default.  

In addition, the fact that the user needs to click "More Options" to be able to, e.g. use the top link bar from the parent site when creating a site, means that there are going to be a lot of subsites created that don't display the global navigation by default.

 

6. List Item Forms for New / Edit / View

MOSS 2007: The form for creating, viewing or editing any list or library item opened in the page and caused the entire page to refresh:

SharePoint 2010:  The new / edit / view form opens in a separate window, with its own ribbon, and the origin page is partially blacked-out behind it:

 

7. Page Editing - Adding a Web Part

MOSS 2007- when you edit the page and click Add a Web Part, the web parts menu appears in a popup window.  Web parts are categorized by group, but the order in which they appear differs based on the underlying site content type, which can be confusing to the content owner of multiple sites.

SharePoint 2010:  the Web Part menu appears within the page.  Web parts are categorized in folders, which requires more clicks and some hunting around to find parts that are not frequently used.  My opinion:  For power users, importing / uploading a web part is a better AND worse experience:  the upload menu is much more obvious and intuitive, but once you browse to your file and click the Upload button, the entire web part menu disappears, and you need to click Insert a Web Part again in order to see the new "Imported Web Parts" category.

8. Quick Launch

MOSS 2007:  Colors and lines separate headers from links.

 

SharePoint 2010:  Less grid, more flow.  View All Site Content has moved to the bottom, and People and Groups is gone (my opinion:  a good idea, because a fair number of my clients requested for this link to be removed from the site definition).

 

9. Calendar - adding a new item

MOSS 2007 - Difficult to represent in screenshots, but in Calendar view, when you double-click on the block for a day, nothing happens. 

 
When you click on the bar above the block that contains the date number (blue for all days but Today, gold for Today), that day's view of the calendar is displayed.

 

SharePoint 2010 - Double-clicking on the block for a day opens the New item form - a definite improvement! 

Clicking on the number bar over the block still takes you to the Day view, but it's harder to know that bar is there unless you hover over it.

 

This list is not (yet) comprehensive; I will be adding to it over time.  Please feel free to comment and let me know what I've missed, what your likes and dislikes are about the usability differences, etc.!

 

 
  
  
 
 

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!

 

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

 

Webinar on SharePoint - the Sophomore Year

Tomorrow, 9/30/09, I'll be co-presenting a webinar on SharePoint - the Sophomore Year.  My co-presenters are Bob Lincavicks of Microsoft and Marc Solomon of PRTM.  Bob will discuss five aspects of SharePoint that customers find most effective and useful; Marc will speak about five areas where users struggle with SharePoint (and how the challenges can be overcome), and I'll present the data that my company gathered from our clients and colleagues this summer on their experience with the product now that their implementations are more than a year old. 

At the dress rehearsal for this webinar last week, I was impressed by the content of both my colleagues; they have boiled down their deep experience with the product and its users into clear, strategic points with well-thought-out, actionable recommendations.  I gained new insight from hearing their presentations and I recommend this webinar for anyone implementing SharePoint or moving into the second year of implementation.

You can register for the webinar here.

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!

Clickable world map for SharePoint to navigate global office locations

Inspired by End User SharePoint's Clickable Image Map of the United States, I made a world map version for my clients with offices around the globe.  I generally work with my clients to create a site or page for each of their office locations that includes local news, weather, and information, and the map can be a graphical way to provide navigation to those site-specific pages. With SharePoint Designer it's easy and quick to create the world map with clickable coordinates.  Here are the steps I took to make it:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR MOSS 2007 WITH SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2007 (for 2010 versions, see below):

1. Find a world map image you like and which can be used for free.  I found mine at WorldAtlas.com - I chose the "Political - Drop Shadow" version at size 390 x 240. 

Note:  As far as I know, it's not possible to put a border around a coordinate area, so you'll want to use a photo editing tool to put circles or dots on your map to show the desired locations.

2. Upload the image to an image library in SharePoint, and once it is uploaded, click on the image until it is alone in the browser window (no image properties showing), and copy the URL.

3. Open SharePoint Designer and choose File / New / HTML.  This will give you a blank HTML page.

4. View the page in Split mode.

5. Click into the code window at top and delete all the default code.

6. Choose Insert / Picture / From File, and in the File Name field at the bottom of the window, paste in the URL of the picture you uploaded to SharePoint.

7. If you click into Design view (the lower section of the Split view) your map will appear.

8. Open the Pictures toolbar (View / Toolbars / Pictures).  Toward the end of the toolbar there are three shapes - "rectangular hotspot," "circular hotspot," "polygonal hotspot."  These tools can be used to create your image coordinates.

9. Choose the hotspot shape you like (I used the circular one), and draw a section on the image map around the city of your choice.

10. An "insert hyperlink" window will appear, where you can type or paste in the URL of the page or site to which you'd like this location to point.  Click the "screentip" button to add a label that your users will see on mouseover.

11. When you've added all the desired coordinates, copy all the code in the code window, and then go to your desired SharePoint page.

12. Add a Content Editor Web Part to the page, open the Modify Web Part pane, and click the Source button. 

13. Paste all the copied code into the window and click Save, then click OK at the bottom of the Modify Web Part pane.

14. That's all!  If your image doesn't appear, make sure that the link in the code of the content editor web part matches the link of the actual image.  You may also want to add a friendly title to the web part.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR SHAREPOINT 2010 USING SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2010:

1. Find a world map image you like and which can be used for free.  I found mine at WorldAtlas.com - I chose the "Political - Drop Shadow" version at size 390 x 240. 

Note:  As far as I know, it's not possible to put a border around a coordinate area, so you'll want to use a photo editing tool to put circles or dots on your map to show the desired locations.

2. Upload the image to an image library in SharePoint.

3. Open SharePoint Designer 2010.  Click Open Site and open the site where you have the image stored.

4. Click the File tab, Add Item, More Pages.

5. Select the HTML option and click Create.  Give the page a name.

6. View the page in Split mode.

7. Click into the code window at top and delete all the default code.

8. Choose Insert / Picture / From File, and in the File Name field at the bottom of the window, paste in the URL of the picture you uploaded to SharePoint.

9. If you click into Design view (the lower section of the Split view) your map will appear, and so will the Picture Tools section of the ribbon.

10. Click the Hotspots button on the ribbon.  There are three shapes - "rectangular hotspot," "circular hotspot," "polygonal hotspot."  These tools can be used to create your image coordinates.

9. Choose the hotspot shape you like (I used the circular one), and draw a section on the image map around the city of your choice.

10. An "insert hyperlink" window will appear, where you can type or paste in the URL of the page or site to which you'd like this location to point.  While in this window, click the "screentip" button to add a label that your users will see on mouseover.

11. When you've added all the desired coordinates, copy all the code in the code window, and then go to your desired SharePoint page.

12. There are two web parts you could use at this point - the Content Editor web part or the HTML Form web part.

   A. If you choose the Content Editor Web Part, add it to the page, click on "Click here to add new content," and in the ribbon, in the Format Text section, click HTML / Edit HTML Source.  A new "HTML Source" window will open where you can paste your HTML.  Click OK when you have pasted it.

    B. If you choose the HTML Form Web Part, add it to the page, choose Edit Web Part, and click the Source Editor button.  Delete the code that's there and paste in your own code.  Click Save.

13. That's all!  If your image doesn't appear, make sure that the link in the code of the content editor web part matches the link of the actual image.  You may also want to add a friendly title to the web part.

 

For the more adventurous, you could try adding an interactive map to your SharePoint site using Virtual Earth. 

Thanks again to Mark Miller and the End User SharePoint team for helping me to see the possibilities!

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.