Collaboration Now

Thinking about Requirements: Measure twice, develop once

Over the weekend, at SharePoint Saturday Baltimore (www.sharepointsaturday.org/baltimore) I attended several of the great presenations. Whether a deep technical dive or a throrough review of user adoption, most speakers assured the attendees that consulants aren’t avoiding a question when they answer “It depends”. Because there are so many ways of doing things with the dynamic SharePoint Infrastructure the answer does depend. In additions, in a time of “I need it yesterday”, tight budgets and the adoption of Rapid Application Development and Agile Methodologies it’s not hard to imagine (or remember) rushing through the requirements gathering process. Here’s a quick primer of SharePoint requirements depend on.

What are we designing for?
Internet
•Originally for scientists to share information worldwide
•Unkown Users (Anonymous)
•Insecure (or at least it puts you there)
•www = wild, wild, west
•For consumption (sales, marketing, etc.)
Intranet
•For company use only (behind firewall)
•Known users (employees)
•Secure
•Organize, aggregate, present, and collaborate
•SharePoint options
◦Publishing Intranet – Site Columns, Navigation different than site map, UI is highly customized
◦Collaboration Intranet – Content Types, Navigation is equal to site map, UI “out of the box”
Extranet
•Collaboration with partners
•Semi-known users
•Mostly secure
•Productivity
Things to look at that will get you the best return on gathering.
Information Architecture
•Taxonomy
◦People
◦Organization
◦Communications
◦Technology
•Who will be visiting a given site?
•What will they be doing within the site?
•What level of information security is necessary within the site?
Site Collections Considerations
•Security
•Sharing of Information
•Usage
•Database Size
•Organizations/Departments Changing (names, subsi
Content Types
•Definition (at least a best guess)
◦A content type is a reusable collection of settings you want to apply to a certain category of content. Content types enable you to manage the metadata and behaviors of a document or item type in a centralized, reusable way.
◦Or simply – Detailed information specific to a process •Where used
◦· Workflows, templates, auditing, expiration, site columns (metadata), Document Information Panel (DIP), Multiple items in the ‘New’ menu
•From Content Management Origins
Document Management
•Do you author documents?
•How many authors?
•What kind of documents?
•Who is the audience for these documents?
•Are they really forms?
•Are they sensitive?
•Do they have a shelf life?
Identifying Useful Content
•Current Location (File System, database, etc.)
•Classification (News, HR Policy, Form, etc.)
•How or where the content is used
•Content Owner/ Manager
•Where is the content managed
•Under what business event does the content change
•How the content effects other items (dependencies)
Workflow
•What do you do every day?
•What’s the most time consuming activity?
•How many people are involved?
•Do you work with forms or approvals?

SharePoint: We’re All In

Welcome to the introductory blog in a series of sharing my overall experience with the technology focusing on “What works” and “Where is it going”.
Last year Shadeed Eleazer was presenting the benefits of organizations being involved in the SharePoint community (See more at Shadeed’s Community Blog) and when I asked why the community even exists he quickly replied “We’re All In”…companies have already invested in the technology so why not take advantage of the great group of people working in the technology.
This message reiterates the impact collaborative technologies have had on the way we work, but also made me think about the simple solutions that make the infrastructure so powerful. The thing that I’ve also learned is that success more dependent on planning and follow-up than it is on any given piece of technology. As a result, my blogs will start with a quick review of Governance and suggestions about how to gather requirements, and then get into some “button pushing” action!
Here are the basic things to look forward to:
• Governance at a glance
• Requirements gathering suggestions
• Basic Collaboration Successes
• Advanced Collaboration Scenarios
• Continuous Collaboration – Champions and Support
• Eye on the Future – Social Enterprise

C is for – Collaboration, Community & Conference! What to expect tomorrow at #spsdctc

SharePoint: an open source community sharing more at DC’s SharePoint Saturday the Conference

I’ve made a bold statement “open source community” so let me digress for a second before giving you the juicy details of Community day at DC’S SharePoint Saturday the Conference (SPSTCDC). When I started my career I can vividly remember a joint user group or NT Server and Linux Administrators in New York City. In one corner the NT group, dark suits, short haircuts, and obedience to the technology provided. Sitting opposite were the Linux professionals, a varied array of khakis, jeans, and some t-shirts (gasp in NYC in the late 90s), long hair and beards, and a passion for pushing the technological limit. To say the least the different groups didn’t see eye to eye.

Flash forward to today and probably some of the same Microsoft professionals have learned from their Linux/Open Source counterparts and we’re in an environment where User Groups present implementations, demonstrate theory, and SHARE code! In my opinion because the SharePoint platform is based on bringing value, productivity and collaboration to the workplace our community comes equals the open source community model, with the exception of some licensing issues (ok, give me some liberty here!). SharePoint User Groups all across the country are created to server specific user needs and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the tool that an organization has chosen to work with. We are lucky in this area to have the Baltimore SUG (http://www.baltimoresug.org/default.aspx), SUG DC  (http://www.sugdc.org/), and Federal SUG (http://www.fedspug.org/SitePages/Home.asp  ) specifically supporting SharePoint but also the Capital Area Cloud Computing Group (http://www.capcloud.org/ ) and the Capital Area .NET User groups (http://caparea.net/ ) integrating content when users request it.

SPSTCDC is bringing these groups into one location so you can learn what their niche is, when their events are, how runs them, and how you can participate as a user and/or volunteer. Thursday is Community Day and here is the schedule:

9:00 – 10:15 am  – SUG DC

Real Life value from the community

10:30 – 11:30 am – FEDSPUG

From Community meeting to Implementation: How Project Management was implemented after one presentation

11:30 – 1:00 pm Lunch
1:00 – 2:00 pm – Women In SharePoint

The Myth of the SharePoint Unicorn: Staffing, Recruiting and Developing a SharePoint Team for SP2010 and Office365 Success

2:15 – 3:15 pm – Baltimore SPUG

The Business Value of SharePoint Community What is the impact of SharePoint community for SharePoint practices, experienced professionals and newcomers to the SharePoint platform?

3:30 – 4:30 pm – SharePoint Community Panel discussion

A moderated panel discussion about the future of the SharePoint Community of the Washington DC area and beyond. Learn about each organization, and voice your questions and suggestions for the future of our community.

ALL DAY EVERY DAY – Visit the Community Booths to learn more about the organizations, meet the founders, and ask questions!

Office System Collaboration: Where are the benefits for government

What seems like a century ago (an entire two years) I was training users on the adoption of Microsoft Office 2007 and the wonders of the new ribbon. To quote Microsoft’s training materials “But it’s a good change”. Really? I have always wondered who the learning specialist was, and what type of sense of humor they had to have by including such an ironic line. In the realms of Change Management (the warm and fuzzy kind, not the system change management some of you developers just thought of) the transition from Office 2003 to 2007 was basically a nightmare. It was as if you were suddenly forced to buy a new car, and now you couldn’t find the ignition!

Now there is the much less awe inspiring transition form 2007 to 2010. Amazingly, as if the Windows 7 commercials were accurate, the new functionality in Office 2010 now compares to what web based rivals have been doing over the past two years and what users have been asking for! While this comes to no surprise to consultants, it is refreshing to see that the behemoth can change directions. Collaboration has now become the binding feature set of Microsoft Office. Here are some new features (in no special order):

1. Backstage – while this isn’t 100% new, it replaces the document management panel that has been available since 2003, but is now much more prominent and allows some cool direct interaction with document properties within SharePoint (and actually 2008 file servers).
2. Web Based Word, Excel, and OneNote – Excel has been available since MOSS 2007, but now it’s partners in crime Word and OneNote have been added to the Web Client List. Available using a web service methodology documents can be opened via the web and/or the client (beating out it’s competitors).
3. Simultaneous Editing - It’s been available for a while in other products, but now multiple workers can edit, and view other people’s edits, at the same time in Office Products.
4. Social Media within SharePoint Mysites – Tagging, rating and micro-blogging about documents in progress, all associated together in a folksonomy (instead of a taxonomy – you know created by the people, for the people)

Wow, it’s Gov 2.0, how exciting! But what’s the reality of just these few interesting pieces being used within the Government? This post is called “Office System Collaboration” because the tools mentioned above have been designed more than ever to be a single package. Remove one of the pieces and it seems that you get exponentially LESS functionality. Let me try to give you a scenario:

Soap Company A holds a conference to launch it’s new soap (let’s imagine it’s in October), all attendees are expecting to walk away with a bar of soap but it will be available in a few weeks instead. The key note introduces all of the amazing new capabilities of the new soap and attendees are excited to learn the details. The next day, during break out sessions the attendees realize one thing – the Soap smells good, but only if you use Soap Company A’s water at the same time (thanks Randy for the analogy).

In my small bite of reality (mostly Government) organizations are still using 2003 version of office products and are very slowly starting to use any type of Collaboration (especially SharePoint). So how can we think of using the new soap (SharePoint 2010) when there’s very little possibility of having access to the water (Office 2010)?

As mentioned in a previous post, I believe that SharePoint 2010 can stand on it’s own in most cases because the ribbon functionality highlights SharePoint as a collaboration tool. Another aspect that could get buy-in from technology organizations is the increased out of the box compliance with 508 standards. It seems however, that the interdependence of the Office System actually creates a larger burden or Governmental support organizations to determine the ground up requirements to enable full integration. Hazzaaa for all of the vast improvements in Office 2010, but like past upgrades, will the users ever get to experience the functionality?

What do you think?

Happy New Year – A decade in review and new resolutions

My daughter’s 10th birthday was a few days ago, but it wasn’t until the drive home from work yesterday when every radio show was talking about “The decades 10 best…. the decades 10 worst….” that it hit me, a decade has passed, and wow what a decade it was. If I wrote down the activities going on right now they would seem very similar to 10 years agon on the surface, yet differences like living in New Jersey and living in Maryland are greatly significant. I’m not here to write a memoir of the last 10 years, but to publicly acknowledge all that has wonderfully changed.

Resolutions

1. Relax and enjoy. When I worked in New York City I was onced asked if I was from California, because I was so laid back. Now, well, that’s not the case. So while this is not a SMART goal (see www.ipeccoaching.com for definition) I will stop looking for what’s next at every moment, and enjoy what I’m doing instead. Which is:
2. SharePoint in Government - I will be working to bring the best SharePoint solutions to all of my consulting engagements. I’d share my exact tactics, but some things need to be kept into suspense until they’re released (ok, several white papers at least)
3. SharePoint User Group – Participate in a local DC SharePoint user group as a leader (or maybe even create my own adventure)
4. SharePoint Presentations – Present at at least 2 SharePoint Saturdays, and build some core presentations around government Collaboration.
5. SharePoint Blogging – Post at least once a month, more if possible.
6. Relax and enjoy , That includes a vacation without e-mails, blogging or tweets!

What are your resolutions?

Calculate Business Days between start and complete date

My client has a Human Resources (HR) form that is supposed to be completed within a 25 business day window. The goal for my C-level client is to have 80% of these forms throughout the year. Unfortunately the forms are created in another system, so all I’m building is a tracking list. To preserve the innocent business process I have recreated a generic version of the list for review.

Columns:
Division, Sub-Division, Form For, Form Number, Date Form Issued, Date Form Expires, 15 day Notes, Extension Request Date, New Expiration, Date Form Completed, Form Administrator, Business Days for Completion

INSERT IMAGE HERE

The basic formula to calculate the difference between two dates is =DATEDIF([Start Date],[Completed Date], “d”) This, however, does not take into consideration business days.

If found a great post – SharePoint List Calculated Column – Calculate Business Days that demonstrates how to calculate how many days are left until an item is due (not exactly what I was looking for).

Following the logic of that post I translated the calculated column into:
=(DATEDIF([Start Date],[Completed Date],”d”))-INT(DATEDIF([Start Date],[Completed Date],”d”)/7)*2-IF((WEEKDAY([Completed Date])-WEEKDAY([Start Date]))>0,2,0)+1

INSERT IMAGE HERE

How’d I do that? Well I found a great post Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns that describes how the WEEKDAY formula works and understood that I just needed to change my references (and not touch the WEEKDAY function).

To track my client’s goal, I then created a KPI to determine the percentage of forms where the Business Days Completed were less than 26.

INSERT PICTURE HERE

This is not a perfect solution because it does not consider holidays, and of course my client is in government so there are a LOT of holidays. Luckily, if the goal of 80% is met with this calculation then it could only possible be higher if holidays were considered.

Images will come soon (Doing some maintenance on my sample Site Collection). Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped.

SharePoint Saturday DC – Making Government Collaboration Stick

SharePoint Saturday DC (December ’09 Edition) was a huge success even in the snow! In my unveiling of a new series of presentations I attempted to record the presentation. Note, I said “attempted”. Unfortunately all of the “OHHHHHs” and “AHHHHHs” from the audience – thank you everyone for your participation – were lost. But to keep in the spirit of SharePoint and Twitter and the unbelievable community I’m posting a very quick and rough screen capture of my presentation. I will be creating 5 follow-up posts detailing each solution.  ENJOY, and let me know what you think.

Post Conference Short: Why Does 2010 Matter?

Ok, so there’s a lot of cool stuff in SharePoint 2010 that all of the 7500 attendees, their co-workers, and blog followers are very excited for… Why does it matter? Well, in my opinion, it matters because it focuses even more energy directly towards collaboration, when collaboration is needed.

Microsoft has first achieved this by retooling the interface with the ribbon. The ribbon is important because it solidify’s SharePoint’s use as a functional tool! SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) has an identity crisis – is it an internet, and intranet, a tool? Now, while still having all of those different personalities a user of collaboration will focus less on the ‘how’ of working and be able to focus on the ‘what’ of their content.

Live Blogging Summary: Day Three of the SharePoint 2010 Conference

Using Enterprise Content Types and Managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 Daniel Kogan

There are new ENTERPRISE content types and Metadata features,
- “Think about the new scenarios and possibilities we’ve opened up”

Using Enterprise Content Types and Managed Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010 Daniel Kogan
There are new ENTERPRISE content types and Metadata features,
- “Think about the new scenarios and possibilities we’ve opened up”
It’s all about governance, management, consistency and standardization -> Managing the business process
No longer are you content types stuck in a site collection – app to app site to site etc, everything we’ve been asking for

Content Type Syndication – consistent across the entire enterprise, will be able to apply policies from one location
Publishing Content Types – connects to “the hub” the centralized content type store, records all of the corresponding columns and the association with the workflow (not the workflow itself) From the hub you can publish, unpublish, republish (update), Roll-up errors from all consuming site-collections. For the consumer themselves you will be able to create a new content type based off the hub, view import errors.

New on Content Type page “Manage Content Type Publishing”
Site Collection Administrators can look at the hub to see the different services and the Content Types that are being consumed.

Metadata driven strategies – Daniel has broken it down by Local vs Global and Managed Taxonomy to Open Hirarchies, to Open Folksonomy (tagging)
Different ways to apply metadata – through the web browser, through the office client (document information panel in 2007 and backstage in 2010)
Managed keywords – centrally stored words when the user starts typing sharepoint presents alternatives to the meaning. With the centralized information this creates true value for keywords
If a term is unknown a user can navigate through a taxonomy tree to find the correct value
Using the taxonomy creates a pivot that you can filter by a parent value, and then you can filter again by a child value
Managed Metadata – A “super choice field” connected to central database to pull information, New Column Type, standard selection, and then user can select from services that are available, and if the item is not there (and you have the right priviledges) you can add a term set without going to the centralized store.
Term set is comprised of synonyms that will guide user to the “approved” value

Term Management – Term set about 1000 terms, Term can contain 30000 items, decision needs to be made of how to organize to meet value
For a term you can have the default language, the description. The Default label, and the alternative labels
If a term value changes and it merges with another it becomes a synonym across all enterprise
With the installation of language pack you can support mulit-languages
Can import Excel/CSV into a hierarchy

What’s the business value of all of the keywords and tagging?
Metadata can be switched between language when stored in the central location.
Filter column is now inclusive or exclusive – a hierarchy built within the filter UI
Gives the power to actually realize a combination of tightly managed to social tagging information.
In beta Managed Keywords will be in the Base Content Type but full ship will probably be different

Burton Group: Governance, Politics, and Diplomacy with SharePoint: Success factors beyond Technology
Most of presentation is aimed at organizations with approx 7500 users, but smaller organizations can get ideas and not follow all of the steps (too overwhelming)
Why governance
- Internal competition between groups, products, etc. creating interpersonal conflict
- Inconsistency of information
Why SharePoint specifically?
- Ease of deployment and grass roots nature of empowering the end users who are sometimes minimally monitored (with out governance)
- Frequently overlaps with other installed capabilities
Focus on people, policy and process not technology
Have a separate maintenance manual, standards list, and information architecture which would fit into the governance framework

The key audience are the owners of the SharePoint sites the business owner and maybe their IT partner
Make sure to include compliance to not only set up ‘why’ something is done, but ‘how it will be tracked’

SharePoint 2010′s Hidden Gem: HiSoftwares’ Roundable on Accessibility with Time McConnell microsoft’s program manager

Why this wasn’t a main presentation I’m not sure. The gentlemen from HiSoftware, Thomas and Ken, shared the history of accessibility, the current state, and provided insite into where web accessibility is possibly going.

Tim walked through all of the efforts that have been made to make 2010 accessibly. In short SharePoint masterpages, layouts, and standard features meet the WCAG 2.0 AA standard that most websites are built to today. As usual if we make customizations, we’re responsible for making it follows the same high standards.

In short there is a lot more context for users with skip navigation, skip ribbon, skip quick launch, the content editor is using all html controls, and Microsoft has followed the new ARIA standard to provide full context for assistive devices. Time also stressed that while they have updated technologies that have made every effort for older assistive systems to work as well.

Thomas from HiSoftware showed compliance sheriff and how it even more closely integrates with SharePoint 2010. This continues to be a highly adaptable product that can keep your company out of trouble, or completely within compliance.