A Matter Of Degree

FREE Ontolica Actionable Search Result Webpart for SharePoint

2012-01-24T12:31:57-05:00

Today the folks at SurfRay (makers of Ontolica) released a free download of an actionable search results webpart for SharePoint (SP 2010, and FAST Search for SP). To quote their description:

"This free result action web part adds four of the most commonly used document action menus to SharePoint search results. The solution adds a drop down menu similar to that found in SharePoint document libraries.

View Properties
Send Link Via Email
Add to My Links
Open Document Location

This web part deploys as a replacement to the Core Search Results web part in SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint."

Here's what you'll need in order to deploy and test it in your own environment:

- SharePoint 2010 with a functioning Search Service Application and Search Center
OR
- SharePoint 2010 with FS4SP.
AND
- Access to the SharePoint server.

I have the download and can’t wait to try it in my SP 2010 dev environment. Definitely an easy step toward better Search experience and greater SharePoint Search Maturity!

Every 60 Seconds on the Internet - The Tradeoffs

2012-01-01T10:53:19-05:00

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012!

By now you may have seen the infographic "Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds on the Internet," or one of the many similar infographics which promote all the "mind-boggling" activities we do online and/or relative to technology.

This morning I took a moment to imagine what that infographic would look like if it told the truth about the tradeoffs we make with our enthusiastic embrace of social media and electronic devices.

Please note: I completely made up all the following numbers (though I feel they are not wildly off the mark).

On this first day of the year, when even the Google Doodle (see below) is promoting primarily offline ways to resolve, renew and celebrate, I'm hoping that we'll all spend more time unplugged in 2012 (and I don't mean thanks to a mobile device). I'm personally resolving that the time I do spend online will be more purposeful, with the goal to "subtract the obvious, and add the meaningful" (quote from John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity). Not exactly a S.M.A.R.T. goal, but it's a start.

Have a wonderful and productive 2012!

Resources:

Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012 - by Dorie Clark on the HBR Blog Network

John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity

SharePoint Maturity chapter in O'Reilly's upcoming "SharePoint 2010 At Work"

2011-12-14T08:00:00-05:00

Mark Miller has pulled together The Best of End User SharePoint in book form. O'Reilly Publications will publish EUSP's most popular articles for an upcoming book: SharePoint 2010 at Work - Tricks, Traps, and Bold Opinions.

The book will include the following chapters:

Taming the Elusive Calculated Column-Logic by Dessie Lunsford
Charting for SharePoint by Alexander Bautz
Data View Web Part, The Basics - Add a Hyperlink by Laura Rogers
JQuery to the Rescue by Jim Bob Howard
Quote of the Day Web Part by Waldek Mastykarz
A Global Navigation Solution Across Site Collections by Peter Allen
Empower the Power User by Kerri Abraham
The SharePoint Maturity Model by Sadie Van Buren
Unlocking the Mysteries of the Data View Web Part by Marc Anderson
SharePoint 2010 Tab Page by Peter Allen
Combine Documents and Website Links in One SharePoint Library by Eric Alexander

The book will be released in February 2012 in both hard copy and online versions. To receive a copy at a 40% discount, follow this link to the O'Reilly site to get more information, and use MILLERSP as the discount code.

Boston Area Events This Week: SharePoint, Azure, Mobile, Big Data!

2011-12-12T16:43:45-05:00

There's a lot going on this week in the Boston area tech scene, and I wanted to highlight a few of the upcoming events:

Monday, 12/12/11 - The Boston Area SharePoint User Group will meet at a rescheduled time. Richard Harbridge will present "Is Your SharePoint Really Healthy? What’s The Right Prescription?" at 6 pm.

Tuesday, 12/13/11 - Five of my colleagues at BlueMetal Architects will present on Using Windows Azure to extend your applications to Mobile devices. The evening starts at 5:30 pm at the NERD Center in Cambridge; the BlueMetal sessions start at 7 pm.

Thursday, 12/15/11 - the Boston SharePoint Salon will tackle the topic of Big Data - at Tico, on 222 Berkeley St. Boston, from 7 - 9:30 pm.

And if you're tired of Boston...

Friday, 12/16/11 - this is the last day to save $450 on registration for SPTechCon San Francisco in February, and if you use discount code VANBUREN, you'll receive an additional $200 off, for a total discount of $650. Conference information here. I'll be presenting in three sessions: one on SharePoint Maturity, one with Derek Weeks on Business Process Maturity, and one with Chris McNulty on Data Visualizations in SharePoint.

Bob German joins BlueMetal Architects Today

2011-12-12T08:00:00-05:00

I'm so excited about heading to work this morning, because Bob German is joining our team today. If you're not familiar with Bob's work either through Microsoft or the SharePoint community, I'll give you the 140-character version:

@Bob1German is #sharepoint developer & architect w/16 years exp at MSFT, frequent presenter, just published book on Silverlight & SP 2010.

I'm really looking forward to working with Bob, and the momentum that's building at work goes far beyond his joining us. I wanted to take this chance to say that for the first time in my life I'm experiencing a kind of workplace nirvana I haven't known before. People like Julie Turner, who just joined the team this fall, and Beatrice Baciu, one of the early hires at BlueMetal, are making my daily work life more collaborative and fun.

How to express this workplace nirvana succinctly for this blog? With Venn diagrams!

In the past few years I'd noticed that there was some, but not much, overlap in my network groups. I often envisioned a dream team where the really stellar people I'd worked with before, and the really stellar people from the community I'd only imagined working with, could come together with the really stellar people I was working with currently. Bonding and hilarity would ensue.

Well, it's happening.

That messy diagram is intentional, to show how much more overlap there is now. I get to work with friends and stellar co-workers from the past, and the group comprised of "never worked with them before but they're awesome to work with" is simply a much greater percentage of the "all co-workers" group. Kudos to the leadership of BlueMetal for putting together such a great team - they hit most of the workplace Twelve Attributes referenced below.

And those of you in the SharePoint community, note there's still a lot of room for that purple circle to move closer to the center. Please contact me if you think it would be as awesome to work with Bob, Julie, Beatrice, and all the other experts on the team, as I do!

More information:

The Twelve Attributes of a Truly Great Place to Work - Harvard Business Review blog

Counterpoint: Great People are Overrated

Bob German's blog on MSDN

Bob's SharePoint 2010 / Silverlight book on Amazon

Bob's Tweetstream

SharePoint Maturity and how it corresponds to the Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey

2011-12-09T09:49:45-05:00

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar, moderated by Derek Weeks of OpenText Global 360, to discuss the results of the latest survey "How Are Businesses Using Microsoft SharePoint In The Enterprise?" It was a great discussion, with Sue Hanley and Dave Coleman joining me as panelists. I wanted to follow up on the webinar with some data from the SharePoint Maturity Model that corresponds with the survey results.

A few items to note:

The demographics of the companies who've gone through the SharePoint Maturity assessment are quite similar to those who responded to the survey (see Slide 7 of the webinar presentation) - a wide range of company sizes, industries, and geographical locations.
The maturity levels mentioned below are defined here on sharepointmaturity.com.

Training

One of the first competencies in the survey that maps to the SP Maturity Model is Training (see Slide 22 of the webinar). According to the survey:

44% of companies responded they do not have a training program,
13% responded that they are dissatisfied with their training options,
37% responded they are satisfied/comfortable,
6% that they are Very Satisfied.

Looking at the SharePoint Maturity data, the overall average for Staffing and Training is 340 - or about the midpoint of the maturity scale (where content owners from some functional areas are trained on the system). This improves with time - 1-3 years of SharePoint use averages in the 200s (training is informal or ad-hoc, in other words no training program), and 5-9 years of use averages in the 400s (multiple training offerings exist).

Given the relationship of training to adoption, I think there's a lot of opportunity here for organizations to evaluate their SharePoint training offerings early in their implementation cycle, and to put a training plan together (so that they can answer that survey question differently next time!). This doesn't have to mean hiring resources to run a formal training program; it could be as simple as some embedded videos around the intranet, a custom Help file, some power users who can make themselves available for questions, etc.

Integration

The next competency in the model that aligns with the survey is Integration (see slide 42 of the webinar). The survey asked "Are you exposing legacy or other application data?"

18% access their data through a separate interface
9% respond that SP data is integrated into a different system and pulled by users from that system
34% access some legacy data through SharePoint
7% access all legacy and new data via a single interface in SP
28% say data to SharePoint is not currently available
3% responded "other"

To me, these results indicate that at least 46% of the respondents' data and/or systems have no integration point with SharePoint, other than perhaps a link to external systems. In terms of maturity assessments, organizations' average rating is 216 overall (where a single system is integrated with SharePoint, aside from Active Directory). Organizations fall in the high 100s to low 200s for 1-5 years of SharePoint use, and from 200 to the low 300s for 6-9 years of use.

Although integration is a more complex undertaking than some of the other SharePoint competencies, it also has a bearing on adoption and user satisfaction, and directly affects an organization's ability to get to the next level in terms of business intelligence and insight. In the next survey I'd love to see that 28% number go down.

Survey respondents rated the most beneficial SP capability to be "Improved content search and navigation across site collection boundaries" (see slide 46 of the webinar) - which I am classifying in the Search competency. While it's great that organizations are enjoying improved findability, there is still a lot of potential here - overall the maturity rating for Search is 191. Maturity levels remain low over many years of use with no discernible trend toward greater maturity. As Sue Hanley pointed out during the webinar, one of the keys to search issues is that SEARCH LITERACY IS NOT PERVASIVE among users. This should be one of the facets of any SharePoint training program.

Business Process

The final competency addressed by the survey is Business Process - and here the survey maps the question directly to the five maturity levels (thanks Derek!). Here's how the survey responses compare to the maturity assessments I've received:

		Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey	Maturity Assessments
Initial	100	42%	34%
Managed	200	37%	25%
Defined	300	12%	29%
Predictable	400	5%	5%
Optimizing	500	5%	6%
		101%	100%

The consistency of the 400 and 500 level responses make it clear how few organizations are really optimizing business processes in SharePoint. When these results are layered with data for years of use, a steady progression is evident, however even the longest users and largest organizations are not hitting the 400 mark on average.

It's great to have this growing body of data both from the SharePoint Survey and from the maturity assessments that continue to come in. I'm confident that we'll see improvement over the years. Thanks again to Derek, Sue and Dave for a great conversation!

Resources:

Recording of the 11/30/11 webinar with Derek Weeks, Dave Coleman, Sue Hanley, and me

Slides from the 11/30/11 webinar

2011 and 2011 survey results - whitepaper versions

The SharePoint Maturity Model and data

The SharePoint Maturity Model is One Year Old!

2011-11-08T17:14:17-05:00

A year ago at this time, I had just finished developing a maturity model for SharePoint. I was frustrated with the mostly tactical, technology-oriented conversations I kept hearing about SharePoint, and I believed this was a different take on SP that would be a useful community tool - but I had learned long ago, you never know for sure what will hit and what won't.

With the support of Mark Miller and the folks at EUSP, I published the first version of the Model on 11/5/10. Positive community response was immediate and so encouraging that I kept developing.

Now, one year later, I've gotten feedback on the Model from hundreds of SP community members, from end users to MVPs to Microsoft partners to Microsoft itself. The list of the people I have to thank for their contributions, support, and encouragement has become too long to manage. The Model has a dedicated website thanks to FPWeb, and I have a provisional patent and licensing agreement in place. It has reached a global audience via articles, webcasts, podcasts, and in-person presentations not only by me but by other folks who see the value in this tool, and the data I had hoped for a year ago is building up, one assessment at a time. In a few weeks I'll be releasing a Silverlight application on the site that will guide SP owners through a self-assessment, and generate a report on their maturity levels compared to the global average.

But with all this forward motion, I must acknowledge I'm not as far along as I'd wanted. The list of improvements is still long - both for the model itself and the supporting materials. Rather than being in love with my model, I see the need for continuous improvement and update. I know it's at risk because it is complex, and it aims to be comprehensive, in a world of 140-character reduction and user-interface simplification. But I still believe it's the best way right now to get a comprehensive view of a SharePoint implementation, and to create your organization's path forward.

I'm committed to keep going. So in the spirit of "if you tell someone, you'll have someone to hold you accountable," I want to share my vision for improvements to the SP Maturity Model in the coming year. Some of them are carried over, some are new.

launch that assessment application
make the experience of learning about SharePoint Maturity more interactive (by taking that overview PowerPoint presentation to the next level)
incorporate Office365 and hosted solutions
create the mapping for staffing / resources
create the mapping to vendors
prepare the Model for Office 15 / SP 2012
continue the article series for SharePoint Magazine
Last but not least, write a book on the subject.

Now - hold me accountable. And if there's anything that you'd like to see from the Model, or on the subject of SharePoint Maturity, that's not listed here, please let me know! Thanks to everyone who contributed during Year One, and I look forward to another great year!

Why Intranet Adoption Is Like The Color White (or, Adoption Doesn't Exist)

2011-10-24T08:30:00-04:00

Last week a client asked me, “How do we get better adoption? It’s such a challenge.” At this point I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked how to improve adoption of SharePoint intranets or applications. I have plenty of recommendations. And I know that the number of presentations, training courses, articles and opinions out there on the subject are also beyond counting. Clearly there’s a problem and the community is doing the best it can to address it.

When I was asked this last week for the nth time it came to me very clearly:

"Adoption" doesn’t exist.

At least, not the way most people think about it. It’s not an entity or a competency on its own. It’s not a feature or an endpoint with a well-defined set of characteristics. It’s not an improvement or an upgrade that you can run like a project and dedicate attention and resources to as its own workstream.

Think of the way the color white is made, which many of us learned in grade school or at a science museum: the result of many colors of light added together.

This is adoption. The “white” at the center that can’t exist without all the other colors.

Original photo source: Jared

These are the critical colors that need to be in place:

Executive support – Has using the new system or tool been made a priority at the highest levels?
Business alignment – Does the new system reflect how people actually get their work done every day, and does it improve that for them?
Marketing / Communication / WIIFM – do the users know about changes in advance, and has it been sold to them why the change is good for them?
Staffing, training, and support – Do the users know how to do what they need to do, and whom to contact when they hit a snag?
Trusted infrastructure – What would make the users leave their desktops, email, file shares, etc. for something unknown? Has it been proven to them that the new system is even more trustworthy than the old one?
Dynamic, fresh content – Who is in charge of making sure that content is up to date, and do they have enough time to perform this function?
Users have a voice – Increasingly, users want intranets to work the way the internet does. This could mean anything from voting and commenting on content, to uploading their own content, to sending feedback about a problem and/or making a suggestion. Does your solution span the range?
Usability – Is the system usable, more efficient than the way users worked before, and even appealing and beautiful?
Accessibility / mobility – this isn’t only about mobile devices; it’s about whether people can connect quickly from home, and/or do their work on a plane or commuter train. It’s about whether the folks in the warehouse or out in the field have a way to access the system.

And there are likely many more than this (for example, Carrots and sticks – has the organization considered what to turn off (e.g. file shares) and what to light up (e.g. performance incentives) in order to drive behavior?).

Put them all together, and you’ll have user adoption. I grant you, this is much harder work than shining a collection of colored lights in the same spot. But everyone, from the CIO to the content owner, needs to stop thinking about adoption as if it's something that can be affected in a vacuum. It is the result of all the other efforts you make.

And your efforts within your organization will be different from others - the mix of colors will almost never be the same from one to another (but that's an article for another time - Why Intranets Are Like Snowflakes):

Photo: Geoffrey Drake-Brockman, Optobot, Detail

So if you're struggling with the adoption of your intranet sites or applications, remember that it can only exist as the result of a mix.

And for those of you who prefer a more retro look and feel, I reversed the time-honored prism poster and envisioned the mix as follows (click to see full size).

Quick strategy briefing for project managers - tell the CIO that you're the prism. ;)

Original photo source: Brittanica.com

The SharePoint Salon

2011-10-21T10:25:16-04:00

Graphic courtesy of SoftArtisans

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

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

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

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

I hope to see you there!

Poll: Intranet Content Type Usefulness

2011-10-15T10:07:38-04:00

Andrew over at the Worldwide Intranet Challenge has posted a quick poll on the usefulness of nine different intranet content types. As of this writing there are over 200 responses, and so far the numbers indicate that users find KPIs and Archives/Records least useful, while Tools/Forms/Templates and Structured Content (i.e. staff directory, price list) are most useful. (I disagree on the usefulness of KPI's; my opinion is that companies have not done enough work here to put this kind of content on their intranets, or to post it in a meaningful / easily accessible way, and therefore users are not seeing value.)

I encourage you to take this very quick poll and give Andrew the high-level feedback he's looking for.