Helping Out for the Holidays

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clip_image002This is always a tough time of year to write about SharePoint. Monday was the first day of our fiscal year which means it was also the first day of the process known as year-end. We also have a lot of activity associated with the policy renewals that happen on January 1st, so there usually isn’t a lot of time for SharePoint. Fortunately, a bunch of holidays occur in between our year-end and those renewals.

Last year, one of my coworkers decorated her office door. She did a great job, but there are a lot of doors and hers was the only pretty one. This year, she wanted to try and encourage others to join her. A few ideas bounced around a few heads, and a contest was born. The cool thing is that the winner gets to choose a charity to benefit from the proceeds of the contest. Of course, we’re going to use SharePoint to handle the contest. The process is pretty simple, but I learned a bunch of things about SharePoint that I didn’t know, and they might come in handy if you ever have a similar need. I didn’t figure any of this out; I just searched and picked one of many available answers. I’ve included the links here, in case they’re interesting to you.

Photos can be rated – We don’t deal with photos very often, in fact this might be the first time we are “dealing” with photos. Other photo libraries that we have are holding logos, pictures from business events we have held and pictures of things we want to put in a report. Not exactly stuff anyone cares to rate. We decided not to use this feature because we want a more direct way of choosing a winner and we don’t want to make people assign a value to every picture, but it’s pretty cool none the less.

There are Thumbnails – Well, of course there are thumbnails, that’s what we are looking at when we look at the standard library view, but those thumbnails aren’t directly available, or are they? Well, I found a short article from Stephen Wilson at Rackspace for accessing the thumbnails in SharePoint 2013. I tried his technique and it worked in our 2010 libraries as well. I spent a little time trying to wire up a related list that would show the thumbnail and let people make a choice (like a survey would be if SharePoint surveys worked better), but that didn’t pan out. The reason we’re doing this in SharePoint is because we have some remote workers who can’t see the actual doors. We don’t want them to have to go to the list, click on the thumbnail to see the photo and then go back to the list to vote. This needed to be simpler.

You can make workflows easier to use – One of the things people hate about workflows is that you have to do the whole right-click – select Workflows – select the workflow – start the workflow thing. Now you can make a really pretty page where this stuff all happens behind the scenes, but it’s year-end, and this is a simple contest. One way to simplify the workflow process is to add an HTML column that provides the shortcut to the workflow right in the item. I’ve used this method a number of times in other lists, but Varinder Singh wrote a nice blog entry on how to do it.

I’m going to opt for the workflow solution. People can look at the pictures, choose the one that they like and run the “Select as Winner” workflow. The workflow is pretty simple – it will add the name of the picture and their name to a list. A workflow in that list will throw out any previous entries that person made and a view will take care of the counting and sorting. Nothing fancy here, but it feels good to be able to say “yeah, we can do that in SharePoint” whenever somebody asks for a solution. Give us a few weeks, and I’ll post a picture of the winning door and the winner’s choice of charity.

Enjoy the Weekend

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clip_image002I realize that I have readers from around the world, and that Thanksgiving is far from a universal holiday. Other countries celebrate a holiday like this, but most at other points during the year. Still, in the United States this is a pretty big weekend – 4 days of eating too much food, watching too much football and for some, shopping at a frenzied pace. Oh yeah, most of us try to remember to pause for a few minutes and think about the things we are thankful for.

I am thankful for a lot of people in and around SharePoint, but I’m not going to write a testimonial. I have listed them before: my team, our trusted friends (consultants), 3rd-party vendors whose products we rely upon, AIIM, Microsoft and a bunch of others. Thanks! We are in the midst of a really good ride with a really good product and we should be grateful for the opportunities we have.

Right now, I have the opportunity to have another slice of pie and to get ready for the inter-family football rivalry, West Virginia University vs. Iowa State University. Neither team will be going to a bowl game this year, but depending on the outcome, either my brother or I will be wearing a shirt in public that clearly says: “Yeah, I lost a bet!”

Have a Happy!

ECM is an Activity not a Product

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imageLast week the AIM New England Chapter held an event with the goal of trying to figure out how people are using SharePoint. You can read about the event, the discussion and the wisdom the expert speakers shared in the Event Experience Report, but I want to talk about a note found on page 6:

“One person described a decision to move a customer facing solution out of SharePoint because the customers were not interested in the features SharePoint has to offer. The solution has evolved into a ‘content publishing’ solution and management feels that there are better platforms than SharePoint on which to build such a solution.”

I’ll confess to being that person. Are we giving up on SharePoint? No. Is our content management program changing? Yes.

When we first began using SharePoint in 2006, we liked what we saw. While we were struggling to figure out how to best use the product in-house, someone asked if we could use SharePoint to exchange documents, information and perhaps collaborate with some of our customers and business partners. As you might expect, good little techies that we were / are, we jumped at the chance to add a second farm and build an Internet-facing SharePoint server.

We developed solutions. We formed pilot groups. We tested, tweaked, added and perfected features and we held training events. We met with our customers and we spoke with our coworkers and what we heard was that our customers don’t need SharePoint. Our customers want to share files, and share is 90% retrieve and 10% submit. Do the math, there’s nothing left for “collaborate on” or “construct a process around” or any of the other things we have been trying to get people interested in. That’s OK! We understand serving customers, and we don’t want to make customer service harder than it needs to be.

But wait a minute. If we already have SharePoint, why abandon it? SharePoint can certainly be used to share files with people over the Internet.

That’s true, but we’re not in 2006 any longer. SharePoint can be made to be a simple repository of shared documents and SharePoint can certainly handle segregating and protecting private documents while also providing access to public documents, but so can lots of other products. It is one thing to put some effort into SharePoint to create a solution that looks, feels and acts like a more expensive product. It’s quite another thing to put some effort into SharePoint to make it look, feel and act like a less expensive product. Sometimes, SharePoint just isn’t the right answer.

One of the problems with technology and the notion of businesses adopting technology, is that technology changes. One of the most important responsibilities of an IT group is to make and to keep other people aware of what those changes are and what those changes mean to the already adopted solutions. A critical element of that understanding is the fact that installed solutions are not free. We cannot look at something that was developed in and deployed on SharePoint and say “that’s done, let’s move on to something else” – systems, including the things we build in SharePoint, are never done.

SharePoint was the right platform in 2006 because it was just about the only affordable solution we had for securely sharing content over the Internet. We tried to take advantage of the platform, to offer more features and to entice people into turning file sharing into collaboration, but the demand isn’t there. I understand that, the underlying task isn’t a collaborative effort. The underlying task is a mature business process that doesn’t need to be “improved” by SharePoint or anything else. Now that there are simpler, less expensive solutions for securely sharing files over the Internet, it’s time to consider them. Guess what, they work and they work better than SharePoint.

They work better, and they are cheaper, because they are less capable and because they have been perfected toward a narrower goal. The solutions that we are looking at were born in the cloud; they don’t have to be migrated into the cloud. The solutions were born into a mobile world so they come with desktop apps and apps for every mobile operating system – good looking native apps! The people who built these solutions know what they are doing and they know what we need to do, so integration with Outlook is baked in, drag & drop integration with Windows is baked in, permissions, controls, auditing and reporting are all baked in. Yes, these are file-sharing only solutions, but when that’s all you need, that’s all you need.

We are still a SharePoint shop and this is still a SharePoint blog, but my focus has always been Enterprise Content Management. The title of this post is from a comment I made recently on a friend’s blog: ECM is not dead, but ECM is an activity, not a product. The ‘M’ in ECM is also a responsibility and it’s one that I take seriously.

Jack Be Nimble

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clip_image002A few months ago I wrote about our entry into a Brave New World of Capture where I was talking about the new Multi-Function Printers (MFPs) that were being installed. One of the things we were excited about was these machines’ ability to scan to SharePoint. ‘Scanning to SharePoint’ was a feature listed as being ‘required’ in the RFP. In fact ‘scanning to SharePoint’ was highlighted as being the most important feature we were looking for. We selected these MFPs based on the way in which they could scan to SharePoint. Every proposal had a solution; we liked this one based on technology by Ricoh and NSI (Autostore) the best. I have been keeping this post in a holding pattern because…well because the scan-to-SharePoint option didn’t work.

OK, that’s not fair, it did work. It does work. The MFPs print, copy and scan, and they can scan to SharePoint by hooking up with the NSI software on one of our servers. Unless (yeah, you knew there was an ‘unless’ or a ‘but’ coming), unless the software needs to set a managed metadata column after the scan. In that case, the scanning process ignores the metadata – not just the managed metadata, all the metadata.

Important note: The reason I waited to post this, is because Ricoh and NSI have been working on a solution to this problem, a solution we are now testing.

The point of this post was going to be that a tiny 35-person company shouldn’t be pointing out problems to vendors. We should be benefiting from Fortune 100 companies having already pointed those problems out and vendors having already solved those problems! I wanted to write about this, because this isn’t the first time this has happened. We discovered problems with both Harmon.ie and HarePoint when trying to move documents between our two SharePoint Farms. Again, both of those companies jumped on those problems and both solved those problems, but I am still amazed that we discovered those problems. I can’t believe that we were the only ones trying to use those features?

Marc D. Anderson (far right in picture) pointed out at a recent AIIM New England event that we might benefit from the fact that we are small, perhaps “nimble” and that we can address problems quicker. I guess I never thought of our company as being nimble but that’s probably because I’ve been here so long. Prior to working here, I worked in several large organizations, and they were far, very far from nimble. Maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe we are benefitting from the fact that my manager (who discovered the scanning problem) has the authority to contact the vendor, make any necessary changes to the configuration and install the temporary fix on our server. That last bit alone would be a show-stopper in most organizations. Our guy was concerned about installing that fix, but it’s his decision. He’s also capable of taking a snapshot of the VM and restoring that VM if it becomes necessary. For all I know, we are the first people to discover this problem because the SharePoint folks at the big companies are still waiting for the server guys to evaluate and install the product for testing!

How does a company become nimble? Is that possible? I don’t know, and I don’t have any advice for large companies, but I am actually raising the question in a therapeutic kind of way. As we prepare for the next generation to take over my department, we are becoming less nimble. That’s not a complaint; it’s just a fact of life. When you spread work that one person used to do, across 2 or 3 people, nimble suffers. The question to me is “how do I preserve that nimble nature?” I need to answer that because Marc is right; being nimble is a huge benefit. I don’t have the complete answer, but I know that communication, trust and autonomy are big parts of the answer. I also know that trust and autonomy require even more communication.

Marc recently completed a small consulting project for us. Ironically, he solved a different problem we were having with managed metadata, a problem I wrote about in Stuff Happens. I like to think we made Marc’s job a little easier by extending a nimble environment to him. We trust Marc, so we gave him the autonomy that he needed and of course we communicated with Marc. A few years ago, Marc may have had even more autonomy. A few years ago, Marc would have only been working with me. This time, he needed to get permissions from the manager and he needed to communicate with a systems analyst on my staff. We were able to move through the project pretty quickly and the project was a success despite both Microsoft and our own bad habits creating obstacles for Marc. Nimble works – let’s be nimble.

In case you missed it, I want to point out that NSI, Harmon.ie and HarePoint have been very responsive to the problems we have encountered. These are precisely the kind of vendors you want to work with. No vendor ever talks about problems, but they all have them – no product is perfect. The best vendors are the ones who solve problems.

We Need Some Pickles

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imageThe word of the day is ‘Find” as in the word is not ‘search’ – people don’t (really) want to search, they want to find. That was the message offered up by Steve Weissman in our recent training sessions, and that was the message offered up by Bob Larrivee when I attended his AIIM ECM Master class several years ago. In fact, Bob was the first person I ever heard use the word “findability” in a sentence. Bob and Steve are correct, people want to find stuff. I might like to replace “Search” in SharePoint with “Find” just for that reason. I’m sure there are people who would tell me how to do that, “it’s just CSS” or “it’s just a bit of script” or “it’s just tweaking the master page” but I won’t really do it.

I won’t do it because we are conditioned to search. I’m not sure if that is Google’s fault, or Yahoo’s fault, perhaps it’s AOL’s fault, but ‘search’ rules and ‘find’ lags pretty far behind, even when we search. Despite that fact, finding is the goal. The problem with search is, well there are too many problems with search to talk about in one blog post, so let’s talk about find instead. How do we find what we are looking for in SharePoint?

We know where stuff is – The easiest way to find anything is to look where that thing is supposed to be. Well, unless you’re looking for something of mine. If I know that a particular type of report is in a document library in the Engineering site on SharePoint, it’s going to be pretty easy to find. That’s why it’s so important to design SharePoint in such a way that it supports your organization’s content. Of course, designing SharePoint isn’t just creating the site structure, we have to consider:

  • Who should be able to find this stuff? – Permissions
  • What do they need to see? – Views
  • When do they need to see it? – Alerts
  • How do we make views and alerts, not to mention search work better? – Metadata

Those attributes all help to make it easy to find what we are looking for.

We know what stuff is – We have lots of content in our company, but we have a relatively small number of types of content. Some of those types are generic: presentations, correspondence, contact lists, etc. and some of those things are unique to our business (or at least to insurance) like inspection reports. SharePoint supports both types of content, but it takes more effort to support the unique content. However, the results often make the effort worthwhile. In reality, a loss-control inspection report is just a Word document but if I am looking for one, my results are much better if restrict my view (or my search) to a specific Content Type than if I include all Word, or worse all Office documents.

We know what people do with stuff – This is where we have the opportunity to make content management shine. When you go to the grocery store, you will likely find rolls, jars of pickles, bags of chips and slices of cheese near where you can buy stuff that can be grilled. That’s because the people who lay out the store know that if you’re buying hamburger patties, you need, or can be tempted into thinking you need those other items. We’re not selling content on SharePoint, but we can make someone’s experience better if we bring together the content that they might want to see with the content they have selected. For example, we are working on a site where people can look at the recommendations that have resulted from those loss-control inspections. If I am looking at a recommendation, I am very likely to ask:

How many recommendations have we made at this place?

Was this recommendation accepted, rejected, explained away or ignored?

How many times have we made recommendations similar to this one at other plants?

Of course, with the right metadata and enough clicking, people could probably configure a list to answer some of those questions while they are looking at it. With a little more time, they could build a View to preserve those settings, but very often, that isn’t enough. In my example, we let them click on certain attributes in one list and then we present them with a page of web parts showing a composite picture from several lists – lists that are linked by metadata – so they can find the rolls and the pickles easily.

Search is a native element of SharePoint. With metadata and text indexing, we can make search return more and perhaps better results. By thinking about where we put our content, what our content is and how people will want to use it, we can use other features within SharePoint to help people find what they are looking for.

SharePointLess Training

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By the way, that’s not DSC03506‘pointless’ just SharePoint-less and not totally without SharePoint. Before continuing, I should advise you that I left my laptop at work, I’m not going back for it so my trusty editor will not be able to proofread this post. All bad grammar is my fault. Oh, and there won’t be a picture until sometime later because all the pictures are on my laptop.

Earlier this year, one of my coworkers told me:

“I think part of the problem with SharePoint is that people don’t understand why we need metadata and stuff like that.”

She was right. Not because we hadn’t tried to teach those subjects. I think I had a course titled “Metadata and stuff like that” but I always tried to shape training from within. In other words, I talked about metadata from the perspective of our company. I think that might have been confusing. Metadata is somewhat abstract, but when you define it using precise, well-known examples, it becomes less abstract (see, my editor would cross out ‘less abstract’ and pencil in something different), sorry, my bad, your loss.

We made arrangements with The Holly Group to have Steve Weissman work with a woman on my team to develop and deliver a different kind of training course – SharePointLess, as in “without SharePoint.” What is taxonomy? What is metadata? Why are they important? What can we do with them once we have them? How do we find stuff? I love the last one. Steve was very deliberate (my editor might suggest that very deliberate would be like very unique or very pregnant) in that he did not say “how do we search for stuff?” Steve is all about “value” and search doesn’t add value, finding something adds value. If I had been teaching this course, I would have shown a SharePoint search example. Steve had better things to talk about, and the students appreciated avoiding the SharePoint example.

Two days later, the woman on my team started bringing Steve’s message home. She talked about our taxonomy, our metadata and the specific things we need to find. She pointed out the various ways some of our ordinary attempts at organization have failed. She showed a screen shot of my Outlook folders. She showed documents named with terms like ‘final’, ‘final2′, ‘finalFINAL’ and ‘finalfinal2′. Finally, she showed certain parent folders on our K: drive with counts of duplicate files, 4,000, 7,000 and upwards of 14,000 duplicates. We talked about why we did what we did. In the absence of a better system, naming conventions work – to a point. In the absence of a repository that can hold email and a tool like Harmon.ie, Outlook folders work – to a point. In the absence of collaboration software, sharing files with email works – to a point, but that point is when every recipient thinks it’s a file worth keeping and stores it on their segment of the K: drive.

Then, 5 hours into 6 hours worth of training, only then did SharePoint show up. She showed us organized libraries. She us showed Views. She showed examples of workflows at work and she showed examples of versioning. In fact, the example of versioning that she showed was a more recent collection of files that were previously named something like ‘final.docx’

The difference with this training was that by the time we got to showing SharePoint versioning, we all knew what business problem it was solving. By the time we saw the results of a workflow, we knew what business process was being improved. By the time we saw examples of views, we could recognize the value that the metadata was adding.

I wish we had done this training earlier, but I’m not one to focus on what’s behind me, I’m a “mirrors forward” kind of driver. I look forward to building our next solution in SharePoint because I know it will be easier to build and that the result will be even closer to the bulls-eye. Our focus going forward is to extract value from the stuff we are saving. SharePoint isn’t just a repository, it’s a working platform.

How Do You SharePoint?

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clip_image002Maybe I’m missing a verb in the title, or maybe “to SharePoint” has meaning, suggests action of a sort or at least makes a few of us shake our heads. I left out the verb, because I’m not sure what the right one is. How do you “use” SharePoint, “get rid of” SharePoint, “stop bad SharePoint sites from spreading like kudzu?” “get the most out of” SharePoint, “teach people how to use” SharePoint, and so on. Do you have answers for any of those questions? Do you live in New England? Can you spare some time on Wednesday, November 13th? There’s a lot of questions, but if you can answer a few of them, join some of your New England neighbors in Cambridge, MA on the 13th – share a snack, share some coffee and share your answers, or at least your reactions.

On November 13th, the New England Chapter of AIIM (AIIMNE) will hold our second educational event of the program year and, no surprise, it’s focused on SharePoint. In case you aren’t aware, AIIMNE is doing events differently this year – well sort of differently. AIIMNE events have always been fairly lively, with a healthy amount of audience participation. This year, we decided to tap that energy and add some value for our members in the process. Each event is organized to encourage that audience participation and we are then publishing a white paper from the event. To get an idea of how this works, check out the white paper from our first event, where we focused on handling secure and confidential information amid an always connected always sharing workforce. Go ahead, download that report, it’s free and we aren’t even asking for your email address.

For this next event, we arranged for Marc D. Anderson, Co-founder and president of Sympraxis Consulting, Derek Cash-Peterson from Blue Metal Architects and Russ Edleman, president of Corridor Company to join us to get things started. Between them, these guys have seen just about every kind of SharePoint or SharePointery there is (hey, if we’re making up words). Steve Weissman, President of the Holly Group will be on hand to facilitate the discussion, should that be necessary; our audiences have a tendency to fire at will. Not to worry, our speakers are adept at crowd control.

What’s the goal? Well, besides gathering fodder for our next Event Experience report (as we call them), I hope to learn something. I hope to hear about ways of using SharePoint that I haven’t considered. I hope to return to work on Wednesday afternoon with a head full of ideas that will keep me busy until the next SharePoint event. I’ve heard some of these guys speak before, so if I’m going to get a head full of new ideas, I need you to be in the room. I want to hear your SharePoint Story (ooh, there’s a catchy name).

If you’re planning to join us, we will be at the Microsoft building at 1 Cambridge Center. It’s the one in the picture up in the corner. It’s not the building at 1 Memorial Drive. It’s a great facility and the Chapter truly appreciates being able to use it. We will also be using Microsoft’s Internet connection so if you can’t be in Cambridge, consider joining us on-line as we stream the event live. We stream a mix of presentations and video and we do our best to submit the comments and questions from our remote audience into the discussion in the room. You can read or share this event with others at the Chapter website, and if you are ready to sign-up, you can do that over at Eventbrite. But wait, there’s more. If you register by November 1st, enter the discount code “sharepointstories” and save $5. Thanks for reading!