Archive for December, 2010

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December 17, 2010

So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?

I work with many organizations with SharePoint intranet sites that are simply a MESS!   Yes, that’s you and your intranet!   Admit it — your intranet sites look like they were built in 1999 with big fonts, bigger graphics, static and outdated links & content, and absolutely no organization of the information and navigation presented to the end user.

Over the last decade perhaps small enhancements or attempts at redesign evolved your intranet incrementally.  You now have some level of standards and branding at a global level. Perhaps your organization has finally consolidated and standardized on SharePoint and are even thinking about upgrading to 2010 in the next year or two.  You’re also focused on the latest buzz words like “social” and “collaboration” – baking them into your overall strategy.   However, down in the trenches you still have sites for functional areas or business units or regions that remain an unorganized mess of stale information.

I bet dozens of so-called team sites have also popped up with the intent of providing a better place for your organization to manage and update important content that really should be out on the intranet site for everyone to consume.  However, those team sites also added to the mess.  There’s even morenoise and confusion by limiting access and navigation to information with redundant content and links.

We call this information overload and have all read the stats on the hidden costs and wasted productivity because knowledge workers spend too much time looking for information.   With the amount of digital information continuing to increase beyond expectations, it’s now even more difficult to search, browse, filter, and find the information than it was a decade ago.  The year 2010 is coming to an end with over a decade of internet evolution and you ask yourself “Am I more productive today than I was 10 years ago?”

So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?

Now I’m sure you’re reading this post and immediately are Googling “New Year’s Resolutions” which returns top ten lists containing the resolution to: “Get Organized”.    No doubt you also Google “clean up information mess” and you find  a helpful article on Oprah.com about cleaning up clutter in your life.  One interesting comment the organizational expert on Oprah.com made was how he defined clutter:  ”anything that stands between you and the vision you have for your best life.”   You can’t go wrong if you quote Oprah.com and this statement is so true — especially in our professional lives.   Clutter is not necessarily an individual issue, but an organizational issue.  And if your SharePoint implementation is a cluttered mess of information, then SharePoint stands between you and the vision you have for your business.  And I have to highlight that the mess is not just something IT needs to address.  The business users owns the information inside of SharePoint and the clutter is a shared responsibility.  So what can you do?  What can the champions, managers, power & end users of SharePoint do in 2011 to get organized?

There are 3 keys to get organized and clean up the SharePoint clutter:

1. Information Architecture. A somewhat abstract concept for non-technical people.  This is not only about figuring out what you want your website to look like — the UI design perhaps.  It includes identifying the intended audience and the inventory of content you intend on managing within the site and the users intend on consuming.  It’s also about the underlying structure of the site or site collection and the images, documents, links, lists, and libraries you plan on managing and maintaining. Yes, it’s about metadata and your user’s ability to search, browse, filter, and find information.   So start by:

“categorizing your information and blueprint how content should be structured and stored within SharePoint and presented to the end user”

2. Security. Once you have an understanding of the information architecture, you can then ensure your information is secure.  Do you know if the content in your sites is secure right now?   Are you absolutely sure with 100% confidence?  Difficult questions to ask sometimes as politics always seem to play a part in the discussion with IT and Business here.  It’s amazing how SharePoint forces the conversation about ownership, roles, and responsibilities.  So sit down in 2011 and look at your security and answer the questions:

“In your SharePoint site(s), who owns what and who should have access to what?”

3. Governance. While governance is always a hot topic, the usual reference to this term is the overall SharePoint deployment with sub-topics such as backups, site creation, etc…  However, this also refer to site owners and site collection administrators.  Do they have a plan to ensure specific content has owners and is continually updated?   What the process to source new content and ensure that information is posted in a timely manner to those individuals who should consume it?   Who maintains membership to your site or site collection?  So…

Define what governance means to you in 2011 and start governing your SharePoint Sites!

For those fans of Dexter…”tick, tick, tick”….that’s the sound of 2010 coming to an end.  It’s time to get your information organized inside of SharePoint and focus on a clutter free world of sharing and pointing!!!

 

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December 17, 2010

Demystifying Business Intelligence on SharePoint

One of the more confusing aspects of SharePoint is its Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities.  Why is it confusing (at least for me)?  Well, this is AIIM and we spend most of our time discussing information involving unstructured content as opposed to data.   And the BI world involves databases and data warehouses and OLAP cubes and other related buzzwords like EPM or business analytics.  BI is really its own unique niche.  Leave it to Microsoft to build BI capabilities into SharePoint along with everything else and in the SharePoint 2010 wheel — it’s called “Insights”.  Whatever you call it, the hidden value of SharePoint is its ability to manage data and content together.

One typical example of a SharePoint solution involving BI and data is a performance reporting portal.  In generic terms, this is what a Performance Reporting Portal might include:

While I hesitate using the word “portal” in today’s world of social sharing & collaboration, business users love their portals and dashboards.   This is also a request I am seeing more and more of as business users are beginning to realize that SharePoint can be used for more than just intranet pages, team-sites and document libraries.   Additionally, there is real business value that executives recognize in this type of solution (and they’re more willing to approve funding for this type of project).

Now this type of solution is just one example.   As Microsoft defines it, there’s also business intelligence for the community as well as the organization.   I’ll reference this Technet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx on “Choosing a business intelligence tool in SharePoint Server.   There’s a great diagram and related information that map the capabilities of SharePoint BI tools to the appropriate business scenarios where they might be used.  While you may not require all the services SharePoint provides, you’ll want to identify your requirements and business needs.  You might also consider drafting a roadmap for your business unit or organization that outlines your use of SharePoint in the short and long term.

In some cases, you might find yourself completely replacing your Hyperion or Cognos applications with Microsoft’s SharePoint Business Intelligence.   In other cases, you might think about how your SAP reporting and SharePoint can work together more seamlessly.  There are obvious cost savings in consolidating platforms and vendors and it’s quite possible that 80% of what you use your existing BI tools for can be migrated to and managed on SharePoint’s platform.   Furthermore, there are also added benefits of combining data, dashboards, and reporting with all the collaborative and social features that SharePoint provides.   And perhaps one day, we can end the use of the word “portal”!

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Reference: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167170

This covers an overview of business intelligence in SharePoint Server and provides you with an overview of each business intelligence service and when you might use the service, architecture for application of the business intelligence services and how they work together in a topology, a list of possible data sources for each business intelligence service.

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December 8, 2010

A Look at Microsoft BPOS

It’s the time of year that many IT organizations are finalizing their 2011 budgets and strategy.   One of the things on the radar screen for many organizations is Microsoft BPOS (aka as business productivity online suite which will soon fall under the umbrella of Office 365 now in Beta).  BPOS is a set of hosted messaging and collaboration solutions for the “cloud” comprised of SharePoint, Exchange, and Communications (and soon Microsoft Office).  I don’t intend to discuss how to migrate Exchange mailboxes or SharePoint sites to BPOS as other resources on the web already address that more technically.  I do, however, want to begin the BPOS conversation because I have yet to see anything written about it on AIIM Communities to date.

One of the first questions I had about BPOS was “is it any different than web hosting?”   Generally, when I think of web hosting, it’s a situation where the hosting company supports the hardware and operating system but not the applications.   With most hosting agreements, you’re charged a fee for hosting, storage and bandwidth.   With BPOS, it’s a service charged per user per month where the applications are supported by the vendor (e.g. Microsoft) and you simply administer the application.   At least that’s how I differentiated the two.

Another question I had was which version of BPOS do you need?  Well, there are currently 2 versions: BPOS-S and BPOS-D.    BPOS-S is the Standard suite where you’re essentially renting 1 or more SharePoint site collections with web based administration (and 250 megabytes of storage allocated per person).   BPOS-D is the dedicated version which requires a minimum of 5000 seats and longer term agreement with more granular administration and unlimited site collections.  There will also be a government version as well with more attention paid to security, privacy and compliance.

The third question I had was simply “why BPOS”?  And the answer is simple economics.  BPOS reduces the administrative burden and associated data center, hardware, and software costs as you’re shifting to a pay as you consume service model for your messaging and collaboration infrastructure.  Organizations won’t have to worry about backup/restore, disaster recovery, hiring technical resources to support the infrastructure, etc…  You’re essentially shifting some risk to a 3rd party vendor.  Another key advantage is time to market.  In most IT organizations, it can take months to go from approval of funding to implementation of the technology solution.   BPOS can help you accelerate the deployment time for solutions.

Of course the broader conversation here beyond Microsoft’s BPOS offering is collaboration and ECM in the cloud.    It’s about trusting a 3rd party to manage your messaging and unstructured content and hopefully providing better capabilities for end users at a lower cost.   And for anyone interested in understanding more about the value of Microsoft’s online service offerings, I’d recommend checking out the following:

http://www.microsoft.com/online/partner/solutions-showcase.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/tags/customer+story/

 

 

Posted in cloud, sharepoint | 2 Comments »

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December 2, 2010

How Facebook Messages Will Influence SharePoint…

The other week Facebook announced a new capability called Facebook Messages — their new email/SMS/chat functionality that doesn’t care what technology you use to reach your friends.  Mark Zuckerberg called it “next generation messaging” and described it as seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, and short.   In an interview with Joel Seligstein, the Engineering Manager in charge of Facebook’s new Messages product, he was quoted as saying:

“One main thing that we noticed was that lots of communication was happening both in Facebook and outside Facebook. I’d send emails to people all the time — that means I have to check my email address many times a day. I’d really rather have that personal, people-to-people communication along with my other Facebook messages. Same thing over SMS — as I moved to an iPhone, for example, I was kind of obsessed with how those messages came in through that channel. So really what we’re trying to do is figure how to bring all personal communication together.”

While Facebook focuses on our personal lives, the important take-away from their recent announcement is how Facebook is providing the capability for its 500 million global users to consolidate both synchronous and asynchronous communications into one unified platform and interface.   Similar to how communications are happening outside of Facebook, business conversations mostly occur OUTSIDE of SharePoint.   As knowledge workers, we continue to use email and mobile devices which has made it more and more challenging to track:

  1. what was said and who said what
  2. who is talking to who and who should be talking to who
  3. what decision was made and approvals
  4. what the resolution on a specific issue was
  5. status of projects, issues, ideas, etc…
  6. threaded discussions and responses
  7. what tasks are assigned and when they’re due

Of course it’s not just about digital communications in email.  There’s IMs, voicemails, web conferences, phone conferences, etc…   Enter Microsoft Lync 2010 just announced today which aims at enhancing that unified communication experience.   From what I’ve seen, Lync looks promising.   Perhaps Microsoft is working closely with their Facebook investment behind the scenes as the timing of Facebook’s and Microsoft’s announcements seem coordinated.  However, I’m wondering exactly how Lync will actually provide an easier way to capture and manage all of the threads of synchronous messaging information into an organized “context”?   And more importantly what integration will Lync have directly into SharePoint?

In an ideal world, SharePoint should provide similar capabilities as Facebook — integrating synchronous messaging more seamlessly into the platform and providing a more organized “context” to manage this information.   For example, the business context might be a project team site — a concept we all understand.   Ideally, all related project communications and activity streams might be captured inside a team site or perhaps in some organized fashion within my sites.   As a project manager or executive, I might want to view the status of all project issues in a SharePoint list and see the all the related synchronous messages associated with each issue.   Why can’t SharePoint capture or tag all related messaging threads related to a project?   Why is that I can’t see all the activity streams AND emails AND instant messages AND web/conference recordings related to a project all in one place?    Why is that compliance and e-Discovery aren’t easier by consolidating all communication streams within 1 organized business context?

Just as Facebook has said their new messaging capability is not meant to replace email, I don’t see our corporate mailboxes disappearing anytime soon.  I’m hopeful that Exchange, Lync and SharePoint together will enable us to better manage both asynchronous and synchronous information together in a single unified interface just as Facebook is doing with the release of their next generation messaging.   The capabilities of Microsoft’s platforms all represent a promising eco-system for business communication, collaboration, and information management.  And I’m optimistic that Facebook will influence SharePoint for the better and allow for more effective business communication and collaboration “in context”.

References:

Interview with Joel Seligstein, the Engineering Manager in charge of Facebook’s new Messages product:  http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/15/inside-the-war-room-answering-the-questions-behind-facebook-messages

Facebook Messages Walkthrough Pics: http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/facebook-messages-walkthrough-pics/

Facebook Messages on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzuFG6q63k

4 Reasons Why Microsoft Will Shift the Business Productivity Paradigmhttp://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2010/11/16/Microsoft-Unified-Communications-Collab-SharePoint-Lync-Exchange.aspx

Microsoft Lync Overview: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/technology-overview.aspx

 

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