SharePoint Solutions Blog

Our New Free SharePoint Training Video Series

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:10:00 PST

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the first two videos of a new free SharePoint training video series: SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work. The free video series is the latest addition to our free SharePoint training video library, and introduces the viewer to key foundational SharePoint concepts and strategies, with a view towards helping organizations derive the most value from their SharePoint implementations. The videos may be accessed from the red “Free Training Videos” button at the top of our SharePoint Solutions home page at http://sharepointsolutions.com.

“As a SharePoint-based company, a big part of our mission is to help other companies get the most value out of SharePoint,” notes instructor Kevin Pine. “We do that through classes, consulting, software add-ons, and these free training videos. Our new ‘SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work’ series is another step in that mission. The series provides rich, practical content – helping those new to SharePoint understand some of its most important concepts. Through these videos, the viewer will also get the flavor of the SharePoint Solutions classroom experience, and a glimpse of the quality instruction that we provide.”

Here is what the viewer can expect in these first two free videos from the “What Makes SharePoint Work” series:

SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work
Using Metadata in Libraries

This one-hour training video is a great introduction for those new to SharePoint. Dump that inefficient and ineffective labyrinth of folders and learn how to tag, categorize, and identify documents with metadata. You will also learn how to filter, sort, group and present views of just the right documents to just the right people, where and when they need to see them. Understanding the concepts of lists, columns, and views is key to making SharePoint work in your organization.

Watch this video if you:

are planning the folder structure for organizing your documents
have already created folders for organizing your documents
know someone who is using folders to organize documents

Because, after all, friends don’t let friends make folders in SharePoint!

SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work
Using Site Columns and Content Types

This 40-minute training video is a great introduction to the concepts of site columns and content types. Site columns are fairly easy to understand and to conceive of ways to apply. The concept of Content Types is a bit tougher to understand, and this video shows you when and how to create and use both site columns and content types.

Watch this video if you:

are new to SharePoint (and have watched “SharePoint 101 – Using Metadata in Libraries”)
are not taking advantage of the power of site columns
need an introduction to using content types

These first two videos of our new series are the latest additions to a growing library of free video training resources. To view the new video series, or the other free videos in our free SharePoint Training Videos library, simply click the red “Free Training Videos” button at the top of our SharePoint Solutions home page at http://sharepointsolutions.com.

Announcing Our New Introductory SharePoint 2010 Course for Server Administrators

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:36:00 PST

In response to numerous requests over the last several months, SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce a new addition to our catalogue of SharePoint 2010 courses: Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators, a 3-day hands-on instructor-led course designed to give IT Professionals a jump-start and quickly bring them up to speed on installing and managing their SharePoint 2010 environment.

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 for Server Administrators is aimed at IT Professionals who are responsible for installing, configuring, designing, and administering a SharePoint 2010 environment. It is designed for a technical audience consisting of administrators, developers, web masters, and others who wish to gain basic technical knowledge about SharePoint 2010.

No prior knowledge of any version of SharePoint is assumed.The course is structured in a manner that assumes the student is an IT Professional, and comes to class with basic technical skills. Experience with SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2007 is neither required nor expected of the student. Obviously, some students who attend will already have experience with SharePoint. The instructors will make the appropriate connections for these students in the lecture, without confusing the students who are new to SharePoint.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Understand what features are available in each of the three SharePoint 2010 editions (SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Edition, and SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition), to help them determine which edition is most appropriate for their organization
Understand the concepts and terminologies that are unique to SharePoint 2010
Understand how end users work in SharePoint on a daily basis
Learn to administer sites, site collections, and server farms
Install and configure SharePoint 2010
Administer site security
Configure Kerberos security between SharePoint and external applications
Plan and implement backup and restore procedures
Configure and administer the Enterprise Search Service
Configure and administer the User Profile Service
Configure and administer the Managed Metadata Service

The course includes a simulated installation/configuration of the SharePoint 2010 Server software in a virtual Windows Server 2008 environment. Each student will have his or her own unique virtual server on which to work.

The discussion will include what versions of SQL Server can be used with SharePoint, the various topologies that can be used to scale up your environment, and planning considerations from a hardware perspective, all with an emphasis on recommended best practices.

The cost of the three-day course is $1895. Classes are enrolling now for Q1 of 2012.

InfoPath Training

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:54:00 PDT

Need InfoPath training? We've got just what you're looking for!

SharePoint Solutions offers quality hands-on classroom-based InfoPath training.

Learn the ins and outs of creating digital forms that your users won’t mind using.

Four days is all it takes to master digital form creation in InfoPath 2010, and to learn the basics of routing those forms through common business processes using SharePoint 2010 workflow, through our new course, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive (Intermediate).

In this instructor-led 4-day “deep dive” course, you’ll learn:

To understand forms as a primary driver of business processes
To design digital forms that work – asking the right questions the right way
To understand the varied audiences for your forms and the data they need
A framework for determining what questions your form needs
Form layout and design best practices
What controls are available for InfoPath forms and how they work
How to create data connections to receive data from external sources

and much, much more.

In addition, you’ll learn to use SharePoint Designer 2010 to create powerful SharePoint workflows to automate the routing of those InfoPath forms through common business processes. You’ll discover:

The different types of workflows you can create and when to use them
Item events which trigger workflow
Steps, actions and conditions: the building blocks of workflow design
Else-if conditional branching and (MS) Boolean logic
How to test and debug your workflows

and so much more.

Familiarity with the basics of SharePoint 2010 is required, but no previous experience with InfoPath 2010 or SharePoint Designer 2010 is necessary.

Packed with information and hands-on experience!
Classes are filling up fast, so prompt registration is highly recommended.

Check scheduled dates and locations of upcoming classes.

Method to grant account access to User Profile Service Application

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:46:00 PDT

In order to work with SharPoint's User Profile Service Application beyond a read-only capacity, a user account must be granted appropriate access. Otherwise, you'll encounter errors such as ActivityFeedPermissionDeniedException when attempting to perform operations such as ActivityEvent.CreateActivityEvent.

The following method will grant access to User Profile Service Application for a specified account name of the format DOMAIN\User.

private static void GrantPermissionsToUserProfileService(string accountName)
{
var upServiceproxy = SPFarm.Local.Services.Where(s => s.GetType().Name.Contains("UserProfileService")).FirstOrDefault();
if (upServiceproxy != null)
{
  var upServiceApp = upServiceproxy.Applications.OfType<SPIisWebServiceApplication>().FirstOrDefault();
  if (upServiceApp != null)
  {
      var mgr = SPClaimProviderManager.Local;

      var security = upServiceApp.GetAccessControl();
      var claim = mgr.ConvertIdentifierToClaim(accountName, SPIdentifierTypes.WindowsSamAccountName);
      security.AddAccessRule(new SPAclAccessRule<SPIisWebServiceApplicationRights>(claim, SPIisWebServiceApplicationRights.FullControl));
      upServiceApp.SetAccessControl(security);

      var adminSecurity = upServiceApp.GetAdministrationAccessControl();
      var adminClaim = mgr.ConvertIdentifierToClaim(accountName, SPIdentifierTypes.WindowsSamAccountName);
      adminSecurity.AddAccessRule(new SPAclAccessRule<SPCentralAdministrationRights>(adminClaim, SPCentralAdministrationRights.FullControl));
      upServiceApp.SetAdministrationAccessControl(adminSecurity);

      upServiceApp.Uncache();
      upServiceproxy.Uncache();
  }
}
}

In the scenario where your application's execution context is a SPJobDefinition, your code will be running under the account identity of the SharePoint 2010 Timer service. In this previous article, I showed you how to write a method to determine the account identity of the timer service. Combining the two methods should allow you to create a custom SharePoint PowerShell cmdlet which will grant access before running your custom timer job to perform such functions as updating SharePoint user profiles.

Method to determine account identity of 'SharePoint 2010 Timer' (SPTimerV4) Windows Service

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:07:00 PDT

As a developer of solutions for the SharePoint 2010 platform, you may on occasion find the need to determine the account identity of the SharePoint 2010 Timer Windows Service (SPTimerV4). The following method will return the service's account name for you.

private static string GetSPTimerJobAccountName()
{
   string retval = null;
   ServiceController[] controllers = ServiceController.GetServices();
   var cont = controllers.Where(c => c.ServiceName == "SPTimerV4");
   ServiceController svc = cont.FirstOrDefault();
   if (svc != null)
   {
       System.Management.SelectQuery query = new System.Management.SelectQuery(string.Format("select name, startname from Win32_Service where name = '{0}'", svc.ServiceName));
       using (System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new System.Management.ManagementObjectSearcher(query))
       {
           foreach (System.Management.ManagementObject service in searcher.Get())
           {
               retval = service["startname"] as string;
           }
       }
   }

   return retval;
}

Recorded Webinar: Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Tony Bierman) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:43:00 PDT

Yesterday's Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 webinar was very well attended. Based on the webinar's turnout and the multitude of questions we received from participants, there is certainly a lot of interest in the features SPGA 2010 has to offer for SharePoint site creation and governance. Who can blame you for wanting to stop wasting so much valuable time creating, managing and governing SharePoint sites? It just makes sense that so many people are looking for a solution like SPGA 2010 to automate these processes.

Many of our clients asked us to post a recorded copy of the webinar for download. Here is a link to the recorded webinar, along with supporting materials. I've also included a link to the SPGA 2010 product page for more information.

Recorded SPGA 2010 Webinar (WMV)

Accompanying slides to SPGA 2010 Webinar (PDF)

SPGA 2010 Case Study: Howell Petroleum (PDF)

SPGA 2010 Case Study: Burns, Hoolihan and Winchester, LLC. (PDF)

Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 Product Page

If you have any questions, contact me here.

Announcing InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 No-Code Workflow Training for SharePoint 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:07:00 PDT

The business process automation capabilities of SharePoint 2010 (all editions) are fast becoming some of its most popular features. Streamlined business processes reduce labor and supply costs dramatically and improve both efficiency and office morale. It is rare to find one element that can make such a huge impact on a workplace environment.

In response to the overwhelming demand for instruction on InfoPath 2010 and no-code SharePoint 2010 Workflow creation using SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce our two new courses:

InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 No-Code Workflow Basics (2 days) and
InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive (4 days).

Both of these intermediate-level courses require a good working knowledge of SharePoint 2010 and familiarity with the Microsoft Office Suite of programs, particularly the “ribbon” interface.

The 2-day “InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 No-Code Workflow Basics” can take any savvy SharePoint 2010 user and have you building user-friendly digital forms and powerful, sophisticated SharePoint 2010 workflows in just two days, using InfoPath 2010, the Workflow Designer in SharePoint Designer 2010, and any edition of SharePoint 2010 – even the free edition! Designed to have you up-and-running quickly, this instructor-led, hands-on jump-start cracks the secrets of designing InfoPath forms your users will really use, and SharePoint Designer workflows that accomplish a myriad of business tasks – automatically. Packed with information and hands-on experience!

The 4-day “InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 No-Code Workflow Deep Dive” takes SharePoint 2010 users through the basics of forms creation and workflow design and on to the next level of workflow capability. Starting with everything that is in the 2-day course, the Deep Dive takes you further – leveraging the powerful advanced workflow features only available in SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. You’ll learn about creating Site Workflows, Reusable Workflows, using Forms Services so your users can fill out forms in a browser, using web services to pre-fill form fields, working with digital signatures, visual workflow design using Visio 2010, and much, much more. You’ll even have an opportunity to examine YOUR real-life business process issues and craft workflow solutions.

Don’t know which class would be the best for you?
Check out this helpful side-by-side comparison.

Classes are now enrolling for fall and winter of 2011 in our Nashville and Chicago locations.

SharePoint is like a very complex swing set kit, but without the assembly instructions and picture

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:46:00 PDT

I just finished teaching our Exploring SharePoint 2010 and Upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 classes this week in Nashville. I’ve been teaching these classes around the U.S. on a monthly basis for the last year and a half. It’s Friday afternoon and my students have headed home and I am reflecting on how much information we covered and how much they learned. I think it was a great week for them.

It just occurred to me that SharePoint has some amazing similarities to “kits”. Have you ever purchased a “do it yourself” kit of any kind? There are kits for a lot of different household and hobby types of things that people have a hankering for and want to assemble themselves rather than purchasing a finished product.

A great example is a children’s swing set kit. For instance:

These parts in this kit:

Can be assembled into this swing set:

Of course, you have to go to a lumber yard to get the wood components required to complete the kit.

Perhaps most important of all, but not shown that prominently in the pictures, is the printed instructions that come with the kit. These are usually really important to have unless you happen to be one of those “handy” type of people that can just look at the parts and figure out how all of them fit together properly. Unfortunately, that is not me - at least when it comes to swing sets. I need the assembly instructions.

So, after being 100% devoted to SharePoint for the last eight years, it is very clear to me that there is a strong analogy that can be made here. SharePoint is like a very complex swing set kit, except that it doesn’t come with the assembly instructions or the picture of what it is supposed to look like when you are finished. Therein lies the rub that so many people in so many companies have learned the hard way over the past eight years.

Really, there just can’t be a picture of the finished product included with the out-of-the-box SharePoint or detailed assembly instructions even though SharePoint is a lot “kit-like”. Why?: because SharePoint is designed to be a general purpose set of tools that can be used to build an almost infinite variety of browser-based business applications. This characteristic is what a lot of people are referring to when they talk about “SharePoint as a platform”.

Unfortunately, the fact that SharePoint is really a platform and therefore can’t ship with a picture and assembly instructions, doesn’t eliminate the need for a picture and assembly instructions!

When an organization starts with SharePoint, it is really important to spend some time on the front-end envisioning what the finished product needs to look like (i.e. coming up with the “picture”). To do that, it is really important for the people who are responsible for developing the vision to first understand the capabilities of all of the various SharePoint tools that are available to them. The only way to get that understanding is through reading, research, trial and error, and formal training.

My opinion is that there is really no substitute for high-quality classroom training. Books, conferences and SharePoint Saturday’s can only take you so far. At a high-quality hands-on SharePoint training class, you can trial and error to your heart’s content using a pre-configured lab machine and you can ask an expert instructor as many questions as you want to. It really is the most efficient and high-value way to get a good start on a SharePoint project.

GUIDs in SharePoint Database Names and DPM 2010 - Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 13 May 2011 11:07:00 PDT

One complaint about SharePoint 2010 that I have heard consistently for the last year from students in my Upgrading SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 class is that the "Configure Your Farm" wizard automatically adds GUIDs to the name of a number of the new Service Application databases:

SharePoint 2010 database names with GUIDs appended

This problem has been written about and discussed on many other blogs, and so I am not going to go into a full explanation here of why it happens. Suffice it to say that it is a concern of varying degree for many SharePoint Server farm administrators and SQL Server DBAs.

My experience is that for organizations that used a shared SQL Server for their SharePoint databases, because of this issue, using the Configure Your Farm wizard can be a non-starter because of the inability to specify the database names in conformance with the organization's database naming standards. In many of these organizations, the SharePoint Server administrators feel "cheated" by Microsoft because they can't take advantage of the time savings of the Configure Your Farm wizard.

For other organizations that have a dedicated SQL Server for their SharePoint databases, the issue may just be an annoyance and they will decide to take advantage of the Configure Your Farm wizard anyway and just live with the weird looking database names.

So, to a certain extent, this issue can frequently boil down to personal preference, except when it starts to impact the ability to easily backup and restore the SharePoint databases.

Those GUIDs can really be a royal pain for a DBA when it comes to creating and maintaining backup and restore scripts. And, as I found out this week, it can really be a royal pain when using Microsoft's own System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 backup and restore product. (This is where the "Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" phrase comes from in the title of this post).

Apparently, the System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 product team did not communicate with the SharePoint Server 2010 product team all that well and vice versa, because here is the error message you get when you have DPM 2010 back up several of the wizard-created SharePoint Server 2010 databases:

Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010 error message when SharePoint database names are too long

Those darn GUIDs make the names of several of the Service Applications databases too long for DPM 2010 to handle! And, according to this post on Microsoft's SharePoint forums there is no solution besides renaming the databases and re-configuring SharePoint. The prospects of having to rename the databases IS A BIG DEAL in my mind. I have yet to see a really safe and sure fire procedure published anywhere that I would be all that comfortable following in a production environment.

Here is the thread from the Microsoft forums:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmsharepointbackup/thread/35ad43bd-3185-458d-aa15-c4654f968de6/

I will have to say that I love SharePoint Server 2010. I also love Data Protection Manager 2010. But, right now I am not loving them as a couple :(.

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:07:00 PDT

This post is Part 5c of my SharePoint 2010 Social Networking series. The other parts of Part 5 are all related to the Social Bookmarking and Tagging features of SharePoint 2010:

Part 5a - Intro and Central Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users

Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags < You are here

Part 5d - Searching Bookmarks and Tags

(Note: For the first post of the SharePoint 2010 Social Networking series and a table of contents, go here.)

Feature: Browsing Bookmarks and Tags

Of course, having a community of users bookmarking\tagging pages and storing that data in the database for the benefit of others (described in Part 5a and Part 5b) is only a good thing if there are well-designed tools for the users to retrieve and sift through the data when they need to find something. Of the most common approaches for finding information in a database, 1) browsing, and 2) searching are the most familiar for most users.

So, let’s first look at what Delicious and SharePoint Server 2010 have to offer in terms of browsing through bookmarks and tags and then I will cover searching in the next post.

(Note: I am using the grandfather of all social bookmarking applications, Delicious, to help me compare/contrast the social bookmarking and tagging features of SharePoint 2010. See Part5a of this series if you would like the complete explanation about this.)

For bookmark browsing functionality, a user needs well-designed features that address these fundamental questions/requirements:

How can I browse through all of my bookmarks and tags?

- By bookmarked page name chronologically

- By bookmarked page name alphabetically

- By tag name chronologically

- By tag name alphabetically

How can I browse through and discover other users’ bookmarks and tags that might help me?

Let’s look at how well Delicious and SharePoint 2010 support these requirements:

Delicious:

Browsing for bookmarks and tags on Delicious is very intuitive and powerful.

By default, on the home page Delicious shows the most recent bookmarks saved to its database by the entire community of users:

Here are some important points about this page that I have called out in the screen shot above:

The home page defaults to the most recent bookmarks collected by the service (Fresh Bookmarks tab), but also shows tabs for the most popular bookmarks (Hotlist tab) and a way to explore the most popular tags being used (Explore Tags tab).
A count of the bookmarks saved in the last minute is shown and it is hyperlinked to a page that will show all of those bookmarks in reverse chronological order.
Each bookmark shows as a line item with the page’s title as a hyperlink and the site that the page is from noted below beginning with the word “via”.
A count of the number of users who have bookmarked the page is shown. The count is hyperlinked to a page that will show all of the users who have bookmarked the page and any tags that they have used.
The most popular tags that have been used with the bookmark are shown and hyperlinked. Clicking on one of the tags will take the user to a page that shows all bookmarks that have used that tag.

What if the user just wants to see his\her bookmarks\tags? By clicking on the Bookmarks button in the top navigation of the page header, the user will go to their My Delicious home page and see only his\her bookmarks, by default, in reverse chronological order:

One thing I particularly like about this page is that I can see how many other users have bookmarked the same page that I have bookmarked (example circled in the screen shot). If I click on that number, I am taken to a page that gives me the list of all of the other users and the tags that they used when creating the bookmark:

The Delicious approach to prominently displaying counts of users who have bookmarked a given page is powerful. It lets the user easily see what bookmarks others are finding to be most useful and does so in a quantitative way.

Also, from the page above I might find other tags that other users have used that might lead me to other useful pages related to a given subject. This type of functionality demonstrates the essence of how social bookmarking and tagging can facilitate knowledge sharing and discovery.

Now, let’s shift the discussion from “Bookmarks” to “Tags” in Delicious.

Delicious uses a fairly standard tag cloud for browsing tags:

If the user clicks on a tag in the cloud, he will see all of his bookmarks where he used that tag:

What if the user wants to see all bookmarks for all users for a given tag? Delicious doesn’t make this quite as easy as I think it should be, but it is still fairly easy. The user just navigates to the Explore Tags page (using the drop down in the top navigation) and types in the name of the tag they are interested in. The result is a page that shows the most recent bookmarks for that tag:

By adjusting the number of bookmarks to show per page, the user can see up to 100 bookmarks per page that have been associated with the tag and scroll through them in reverse chronological order.

In summary, Delicious gives the user numerous easy-to-use and powerful ways to browse through and filter its database of bookmarks and tags and discover bookmarks and tags that other users have stored.

SharePoint Server 2010:

Browsing for “My” Bookmarks and Tags

If a user wants to see all of their bookmarks\tags, the feature that is provided for this is the Activities web part that is on the Tags and Notes view of the user’s My Profile page of their My Site:

(Note that Tad Orman is signed in as the user. Because of that, he sees all information on his My Site - even information he has marked as private. Other users can see a public version of this page on his My Site that would only show information that he has not marked as private.)

To snap this screenshot, I logged in as Tad Orman, navigated to his My Profile page (1) on his My Site, selected the Tags and Notes tab (2), and refined what is shown in the Activities web part (5) by clicking on the Tags hyperlink (3) in the Refine By Type (4) control. The result is that the Activities web part (5) is showing all of Tad’s tagging activities for the month selected. (Note that the Activities web part has a scroll type of control (6) at the top that allows the user to scroll forward and backward through his/her activities by month.)

Within the list of activities, the user can see the page name (or URL, in some cases) he bookmarked\tagged (e.g. “Gears Marketing Project - ….” in the highlighted line), the tag that he used (“Gears” in the highlighted line), and the date that he bookmarked\tagged the page.

The page name (or URL) is hyperlinked. So, the user can go directly to the tagged page by clicking on the link.

The tag is also hyperlinked. If the user clicks it, he is taken to the Tag Profile page for that tag. I will explain more about the Tag Profile page a little later.

Finally, there is a line below the bookmark/tag that gives the user the additional options to View Related Activities, Make Private, or Delete the bookmark:

I think the options to mark a bookmark as private and delete a bookmark are self-explanatory. The option to view related activities is not and requires more explanation. I’ll cover it a little later.

***One very important point to note here is that SharePoint 2010 never uses the terminology “bookmark” or “link” anywhere. Even though the product certainly stores bookmarks\links in its database, it never uses that terminology in the user interface. It only uses the term “Tags”, which it also stores in its database along with each bookmark\link.

Even though this can be explained to end users (as I do below), I believe it will end up being confusing to many of them. Users will ask questions like “How can I store bookmarks in SharePoint and share them with other users?” and “How can I find all of the bookmarks I have saved to the database?” and “What happened to the “My Links” feature from MOSS 2007 - what replaces it?”. The answer to all of these questions is “Tags”, but the jump from the term bookmarks (or links) to tags will not be that intuitive for many everyday users, IMHO.***

Filtering and Sorting the List of Bookmarks\Tags to Make Finding Easier

The tag cloud underneath the Refine by tag control, needs some more explanation because it is the key to browsing and filtering tagging activities alphabetically, as opposed to browsing tags in reverse chronological order by month (which is the default).

Users can filter the list of tagging activities by using the tag cloud and the contents of the tag cloud can be sorted alphabetically by tag name to help the user find the tag she is interested in. But, the steps for doing this may not be very obvious to new users.

In the sequence of screenshots below, this is accomplished by setting the Refine by Type control to “Tags” (1) and then setting the Refine by Tag control to “Alphabetically” (2), and finally selecting the specific tag in the tag cloud that you are interested in (Gears Project in the screen shot) (3):

What this causes to happen is: the Activities web part (4) will only show bookmarks\tags activities for the tag selected in the Tag Cloud web part (Gears Project in the example). This allows the user to browse through her tagging activities alphabetically by clicking on each tag in the Tag Cloud web part until she finds what she is looking for.

So, the three web parts, Refine by type (1), Refine by tag (2), and Activities For (4), are designed to work together to facilitate filtering and browsing of bookmarks and tags.

(Note: It is not possible in SharePoint 2010 to view the Activities web part (4) filtered or unfiltered sorted alphabetically by bookmarked page name. The list of activities in the web part are always sorted in reverse chronological order. Because of this, users cannot browse through the complete list of all of their bookmarked pages alphabetically. They can only browse tags alphabetically and then filter the activities list down to those for a specific tag.)

Browsing to Discover Bookmarks and Tags Used by Other Users

This is really the functionality of social bookmarking and tagging that makes it “social”. More importantly, as I stated above about Delicious, this is where these software features can really help enterprises with knowledge sharing and discovery. I believe the bigger the enterprise the more value this can provide because of the sheer volume of internal content that is stored in SharePoint. The search engine is also critical, just like it is on the Internet. But, there are times when humans can discover important information that search crawlers can’t. The ability for humans to easily share what they have discovered is another important way to make sure quality content gets out to those who can benefit from it.

It seems to me that the SharePoint product team went to great extents to try to provide multiple ways and multiple places for a user to discover the bookmarks and tags that other users have created. I think this approach to surfacing the bookmarking and tagging activity is great!

The best way to understand this is to walk through a scenario. The scenario I will run through below is as follows:

Scenario: Jeff Williams is a member of the Contoso CRM Consulting team. Tad Orman is also a Contoso CRM consultant and on Jeff’s team (they both report to Syed Abbas, the team leader). Because Jeff and Tad report to the same manager, out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 automatically connects them as Colleagues. Jeff has heard through the “grapevine” that a group in a division in another geographical region is working on a new project to develop a product line that is vastly different than the existing product lines at Contoso. Jeff would like to learn a little bit more about this initiative in case it might impact his work at some point. Unfortunately, Jeff is out of the office most of the time and he doesn’t get a chance to “gather at the water cooler” with his co-workers that much, so he doesn’t think he will overhear what might be going on with the new product line anytime soon. But, he does have some new social computing tools in SharePoint 2010 that are supposed to facilitate knowledge networking. Maybe they could help him find more information…………

Here is Jeff Williams’ My Profile page in SharePoint 2010 (Note: the My Profile page is no longer the home page of a user’s My Site as it was in MOSS 2007):

To begin, Jeff starts paying attention to his My Newsfeed page which is now the home page of the My Site in SharePoint 2010:

All of a sudden he starts noticing that his colleague, Tad Orman, has been tagging pages and documents in a site and using the tag “Gears Project”. Could this have something to do with the new product line that Jeff has heard about? Jeff has been stuck on an internal project in a remote office in Peru for the last six months and he is not as informed as he normally would be if he was working back at headquarters.

In the newsfeed, Jeff clicks on the hyperlink that reads “What is the projected Go-live date”. This apparently is the name of a SharePoint page that Tad has bookmarked and tagged with “Gears Project”. This is what Jeff sees when he clicks on the link:

Ooops, it doesn’t look like Jeff has access to this page. (As an aside, it also doesn’t look like bookmarks and tags in the newsfeed in SharePoint 2010 follow the security trimming rules that SharePoint Search follows.)

Jeff navigates back to his My Newsfeed page and decides to click on the tag “Gears Project” in one of the line items to see if that would give him any more information. He is taken to the Tag Profile page for the Gears Project tag:

In SharePoint 2010, every tag that is created has its own Tag Profile page, like this one. The Tag Profile page is designed to show a list of all of the content where the tag has been used and the number of users who have used the tag on each content item. Content items can be SharePoint pages, document libraries, lists, documents or list items.

It looks like another person has been using the Gears Project tag and tagging some of those same pages that Tad tagged and that showed up in Jeff’s newsfeed. Since it is a hyperlink, Jeff decides to click on the number (2) in the first item to see who else has tagged one of these pages:

Looks like someone named Jeff Hay has also tagged those pages. That name, Jeff Hay, sounds familiar. Sounds like he might be one of the big shots at Contoso. Jeff Williams decides to click through to Jeff Hay’s public profile on his My Site:

Yep, Jeff Hay is a big shot. He is the Corporate Vice President of Operations at Contoso. And on this Tags and Notes tab, Jeff Williams can see that Jeff Hay has used the Gears Project tag several times.

Still, Jeff Williams is stuck. If he clicks on any of the bookmarked pages for the Gears Project (whether on Jeff Hay’s profile page, or on Jeff Williams My Newsfeed page, or the Gears Project Tag Profile page), he is just going to get an Access Denied message like the one he got above.

Wait. It looks like there is another public tag in Jeff Hay’s tag cloud that might relate to this. Next to the Gears Project tag there is a “New Product” tag. Can’t hurt to click on it and see where it leads:

Hmmm… Looks like Jeff Hay has also been tagging some of the Gears Project related pages with the “New Product” tag as well. That’s very interesting. If Jeff Williams could only access one of these pages he might get another clue………

The second one in the list “Gears Project - Blog” didn’t appear in the list of bookmarked pages for the “Gears Project” tag. So, Jeff Hay has bookmarked that page with the tag “New Product”, but not the “Gears Project” tag. Wonder why? Maybe it is worth a click to see if that page is accessible:

Whoa! Jeff Williams just hit pay dirt. Read the content of the blog post in this screen shot:

Frank Martinez is the Chief Operating Officer of the company and Jeff Hay reports to him. Frank Martinez reports directly to the CEO, Dan Jump:

Frank Martinez has decided to write a blog post on his internal My Site blog. By default, My Site blogs are viewable by anyone that can authenticate to SharePoint. Frank is divulging some breaking news and choosing to do it using his SharePoint blog because he is interested in fostering knowledge networking in the company and believes that the new tools in SharePoint 2010 can help do that.

On top of finding this information, Jeff Williams also sees that Frank Martinez has indicated that he is willing to be asked about the Gears Project tag:

Why not? Seize the day! Jeff Williams clicks on the hyperlink in Frank’s “Ask Me About” section and asks the COO a question:

How cool is that? Jeff Williams finds an open door to ask a question of the Chief Operating Officer of the company!

So, to recap, Jeff Williams was able to fairly quickly discover some new important knowledge that he didn’t have when he walked in the door to the office that morning. Moreover, he discovered it while working at a remote office far away from headquarters and not working side by side with his other team members. SharePoint 2010’s social bookmarking and tagging approach really enabled Jeff to jump from bookmark to bookmark and “find the needle in the haystack” pretty quickly. Finally, two other social computing features of SharePoint 2010, Note Boards and Ask Me About, gave Jeff an easy opportunity to engage with the company’s COO by asking a question related to the subject.

In this scenario, I showed the following tools in SharePoint 2010 that help the user browse and discover other people’s bookmarks and tags:

My Newsfeed
The Tag Profile page for a tag
The public view of another user’s My Site and their public tagging activity

In addition to these three tools, users can discover what tags other users have used by looking on the Tags tab of the Tags and Notes dialog of any SharePoint page. There is a Suggested Tags section with hyperlinks to the Tag Profile page for each tag, and there is a Recent Activities section that shows some of the most recent users who have tagged the page and what tags they have used. The user name and the tag used are both hyperlinked:

By the way, this dialog box can also be brought up when you click on the “View Related Activities” hyperlink when browsing through bookmarks on a My Site:

Finally, with respect to browsing and discovering bookmarks and tags, SharePoint 2010 also provides a Tag Cloud web part that can be placed on any page in a SharePoint site. The Tag Cloud web part has a few web part properties that can be adjusted to affect the content and display of the web part:

“Show Tags” filter
“Maximum Items” to display
“Show Count” check box

The “Show Tags” filter, offers three options:

By Current User
By All Users
Under the current URL by all users

“By Current User” is going to show all of the tags that the currently logged-in user has created in all sites, in all site collections and all web applications, up to a maximum of the top 50 most used tags. Essentially, using this filter will result in showing exactly the same tags as is shown on the tag cloud on a user’s My Site.

“By All Users” is going to show an aggregation of all users tags from all sites, in all site collections and all web applications, up to a maximum of the top 50 most used tags.

“Under the current URL by all users” is going to show only tags that have been assigned to content from the current site and all sites underneath it. It will show all users tags up to a maximum of the top 50 most used tags.

Here is a sample of the Tag Cloud web part with the “Show Tags” filter set to “By All Users”:

One other point worth noting about the Tag Cloud web part is that I have seen it appear in at least two different Categories in the Web Part Gallery. I have seen it appear in the “Navigation” group in some site collections and the “Social Collaboration” group in other site collections. I assume that this is due to different templates being used to create the site collections and inconsistency between those templates. Here are a couple of screen shots that demonstrate this:

Comparison: Browsing Bookmarks and Tags

At first, I did not feel like SharePoint 2010’s tools to browse and discover bookmarks and tags were very robust or well-designed. At first blush it seemed to me that the average user could pretty easily figure out how take advantage of the social bookmarking features of Delicious and find relevant bookmarks and tags, but I wasn’t so sure about that being the case with SharePoint 2010. The approach the two products take is very different.

The all-together, all-in-one-site approach in Delicious makes it easy to “get your arms around” the capabilities and how to use them. The spread out, “follow the string” approach in SharePoint 2010 is not nearly as easy to logically understand, but may turn out to be much more effective at helping the user discover the knowledge and actually do something with it. I think the example scenario I walked through in the latter half of this post does a good job of demonstrating that fact.

I am about finished with covering social bookmarking and tagging in SharePoint 2010. All that is left is to look at how the Search engine supports finding bookmarks and tags. That will be the subject of my next post and then I will move on to other aspects of SharePoint 2010’s deep set of social computing features. Thanks for reading!

Your Entrance Ramp to Understanding and Using SharePoint Server 2010

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 09:52:00 PST

Your task: Understand SharePoint Server 2010 and learn to use it effectively in your work.

But how do you get there? Where is the entrance ramp?

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce our brand new introductory course in the basics of SharePoint Server 2010. Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Server 2010 is a 4-day hands-on course on the basic concepts and basic features of SharePoint Server 2010. The course covers the features common to all editions of SharePoint 2010 (both free and paid-for), and then reveals the powerful additional functionality that only the paid-for editions (SharePoint Server 2010) provide.

This course assumes that the student has no familiarity with this or any previous version of SharePoint, which makes it the perfect starting place for anyone new to SharePoint who will be using SharePoint Server 2010 in their work. In just four days you’ll go from knowing little or nothing about SharePoint Server 2010, to having the skill and confidence to use it effectively every day.

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Server 2010 is open now for registration on our website, with the first class running in Nashville on March 22-25, 2011. The cost of the 4-day course is $2395, which includes class tuition and course materials.

If you’ve been looking for the “on-ramp” to understanding SharePoint Server 2010, this is the course you’ve been looking for.

If you need to learn to use the free version of SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Foundation 2010, check out our 2-day course on the basics here.

How to Scale Out a SharePoint 2010 Farm From Two-Tier to Three-Tier by Adding a Dedicated Application Server

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:59:00 PST

Three-Tier SharePoint Farm

Microsoft provides some good documentation on different SharePoint 2010 Farm deployment scenarios in the TechNet Library. One of those is about how to deploy a three-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm, which is the second most common topology for a SharePoint farm.

But, I couldn't find anything on TechNet that walked through how to "scale out" to a three-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm from an existing two-tier SharePoint 2010 Farm (the most common SharePoint Farm topology).

A lot of SharePoint Server Farm Administrators eventually get to the point where they need to scale out and the most commonly desired way to do it is to add a dedicated Application Server and move the SharePoint 2010 Service Applications to it (shown in the diagram to the right).

I have written a detailed blog post with screenshots on our SharePoint Help site that walks through how to add a dedicated application server to an existing SharePoint 2010 two-tier farm:

http://sharepointsolutions.com/sharepoint-help/blog/2011/02/how-to-scale-out-a-sharepoint-2010-farm-from-two-tier-to-three-tier-by-adding-a-dedicated-application-server/

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 5a - Bookmarking and Tagging Database

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:58:00 PST

In this post, I will dive into the details of the social bookmarking and tagging features of SharePoint 2010. As I said in a previous post, my aim with this series on SharePoint 2010 Social Computing is to bring a new level of enlightenment to how the features have been designed to work, their intended use, and benefits.

I am actually going to break this discussion up into four separate posts because of the depth of the subject area and the investment Microsoft has made in the features. The work that Microsoft has done to enable social bookmarking and tagging within SharePoint 2010 is both broad and deep, and a single blog post on the subject would be too long.

Here is how I am going to break up Part 5 of my series into four blog posts:

Part 5a - Intro and Central Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users < You are here

Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags

Part 5d - Searching Bookmarks and Tags

(Note: This post begins the fifth part in this series on SharePoint 2010 Social Networking. For the first post and a table of contents, go here.)

To get started on explaining social bookmarking and tagging in SharePoint 2010, I am going to take an approach that some people may not consider very fair to SharePoint, but I believe that you will see by the end of the article that it is a very good way to analyze and understand the features available. My approach: compare social bookmarking and tagging in SharePoint 2010 to the features of Delicious.

Delicious could be considered the grandfather of all social computing applications. If not the grandfather, then certainly one of the top two or three from the early days of social computing on the Internet - definitely long before Facebook and Twitter.

At its core, Delicious is a database. It is a database of URL bookmarks with users and tags associated with them. It allows users to bookmark interesting content using their favorite web browser(s), assign free form subject-related tags to the bookmark(s), and then save the information to the Delicious database. The fact that the information is stored in the Delicious centralized database opens up the door for surfacing and sharing of bookmarks and tags among the community of users of the service (hence, the label of “social bookmarking” to describe the service).

Practically speaking, many users have found over the years that a social bookmarking application can help them uncover excellent content on the web that for some reason doesn’t surface easily in the search engines. I know a lot of people who consider a Google search and a Delicious search as their one-two punch when they are looking for a particular type of hard-to-find content. They frequently say that if they can’t find any relevant information about what they are looking for by using Google, that often they will find something through Delicious.

Microsoft has communicated over the last year that providing social bookmarking and tagging features was one of the primary goals of SharePoint 2010 Social Computing. The thought is that if all of an organization’s users contribute to the centralized database of bookmarks and tags, individuals and the organization as a whole will reap significant benefits from this type of sharing of organizational knowledge. (Remember that I said in my first post that social computing in SharePoint 2010 is really more about “knowledge networking” than it is about “social networking”).

So, let’s see how SharePoint 2010 stacks up to the feature-set provided by social bookmarking gold-standard, Delicious. Through the process of doing this, I believe I can do a good job of explaining the details of the SharePoint 2010 approach.

Feature: Centralized Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users

(Note: this first bookmarking and tagging feature discussion is a little on the technical side, but is very important to the end-user features that I tackle after this one.)

Delicious:

No question about it, Delicious has this. Without it, the service wouldn’t work, and we know it has worked quite well and has been quite popular for many years. I can’t describe the specifics of any of the Delicious database architecture, though, since it is proprietary and not shared by Delicious with the public. We will just trust that it is solid since it has stood the test of time.

SharePoint Server 2010:

Using SQL Server Management Studio, it is relatively easy to look under the hood of SharePoint Server 2010 and get some architectural details about the databases and tables that underpin bookmarking and tagging,

The dbo.SocialTags table:

Looks like this table is storing a record for each instance of a user tagging/bookmarking a page in SharePoint 2010. It has a date and time stamp (LastModifiedTime) a tag label text field (InputTermLabel) and a page title field (should be the title of the page bookmarked, but appears as NULL for some reason in the few sample records shown above).

As expected, it also has a foreign key (UrlID) that could be used in joins to a master URL table (dbo.Urls). This one-to-many data structure should make it easy to retrieve all of the bookmark/tag records for a given URL.

(Important note: By explaining what I see in the SharePoint databases, I am not advocating that anyone directly read or write to the SharePoint tables. The only supported way of accessing SharePoint data is through the object model and web services published by Microsoft.)

Also as expected, it has a foreign key (User_RecordID) that could be used in joins to a master User table (dbo.UserProfile_Full). This one-to-many data structure should make it easy to retrieve all of the bookmark/tag records for a given User.

Finally, it has a foreign key (TermID) that could be used in joins to a master Tag Label table (the dbo.ECMTermLabel table in the Managed Metadata Service database). This one-to-many data structure should make it easy to retrieve all of the bookmark/tag records for a given Tag Label.

So, a quick and dirty* Entity Relationship diagram might look something like this:

* I say “quick and dirty” because this is just my interpretation of the relationships based on what I can surmise from looking at the tables and columns in SQL Server. To my knowledge, Microsoft does not publish official documentation that describes the relationships or where and how they are used.

Comparison: Bookmarks and Tags Database Design

It looks like SharePoint has well-designed, capable data structures for accomplishing the primary goals of social bookmarking and tagging - storing and easily retrieving shared bookmarks and tags. We don’t know exactly what the Delicious structures look like, but it is probably a safe bet that it is similar - the data design of this type of application is not exactly “rocket science”.

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:38:00 PST

This post is Part 5b of my SharePoint 2010 Social Networking series. The other parts of Part 5 are all related to the Social Bookmarking and Tagging features of SharePoint 2010:

Part 5a - Intro and Central Database of Bookmarks and Tags For All Users

Part 5b - Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience < You are here

Part 5c - Browsing Bookmarks and Tags

Part 5d - Searching Bookmarks and Tags

(Note: For the first post of the SharePoint 2010 Social Networking series and a table of contents, go here.)

Feature: Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

How does the end user go about adding bookmark and tag records to the database?

Delicious:

Delicious provides multiple ways of adding bookmarks/tags to its database, but the most commonly used way is through a “bookmarklet” (a small amount of javascript) that is added by the user to his/her browser(s) as a Favorite:

With this bookmarklet added to the browser, the user can click on it on any web page and a Delicious bookmarking dialog will pop over the web page:

The Delicious bookmark dialog has some intelligence built in. It automatically populates the Title and URL fields, and queries its’ master tag database to recommend existing tags (sort of like Intellisense) to use that others have used to tag the page or similar pages.

SharePoint Server 2010:

SharePoint has a very similar bookmarking/tagging dialog box. It looks like this:

It is similar to the Delicious bookmarking/tagging dialog in a couple of ways: 1) it suggests tags to use by querying the master tag database, and 2) allows the user to mark a bookmark/tag as private (not to be shared with others, but saved to the database).

It is different than Delicious in a few ways as well. On the plus side, it shows a short history of the most recent tagging and notes activity for the page under the Recent Activities section at the bottom. On the negative side, it does not allow the user to change the page Title or URL that gets saved in the database. SharePoint 2010 saves whatever text is in the Title tag of the page and the exact URL of the page.

Something both SharePoint and Delicious do well, but is not apparent from the screenshots above, is suggest tags as the user types characters.

Here is how it looks in SharePoint 2010:

It does this by querying the Managed Metadata Term Store in real time for existing Keywords. If the user doesn’t like any of the suggestions, he/she can simply create a new keyword (or tag) and it will be automatically saved to the master list of keywords in the Term Store. The automatic saving of new keywords to the Term Store helps the next user that comes along as the keyword can then be suggested to them by the system.

SharePoint 2010 provides two ways to call up the Tagging dialog box:

1. The user can click on the Tags & Notes icon that appears on every SharePoint Server 2010 page in every site that uses the out-of-the-box master pages:

Or,

2. The user can add a SharePoint 2010 bookmarklet to their browser Favorites and use it to call up the dialog box (exactly like is done with Delicious):

Either way the user chooses, the end result will be that the Tag and Notes dialog will open up.

It may not be apparent, but the second approach opens up the door to tag “non-SharePoint” pages. These non-SharePoint pages could be other web pages from other internal applications OR pages from anywhere on the web.

This means that a user could research the competitions’ product pages, for example, and tag those pages with a label such as “competitor products”. The bookmark\tag for each page would be stored in the SharePoint database and shared out for others in the company to use. This is a very powerful feature.

To add the SharePoint 2010 bookmarklet to the browser’s Favorites, all the user has to do is visit their Tags and Notes tab on their My Site profile page and right click in the text that gives the instructions for how to do it:

Comparison: Bookmarking and Tagging User Experience

I think SharePoint 2010 is very similar to and does every bit as good a job as Delicious in giving the user easy-to-use tools to bookmark\tag pages. Microsoft has done an excellent job making the process simple, intuitive and providing integration with a master list of Keywords in the Managed Metadata Term Store. When the user bookmarks\tags a page, the page URL, User ID, Term ID and a date and time stamp are saved as a record to the dbo.SocialTags table. Couldn’t be simpler or more effective.

Just Released: Our Cool New Site Provisioning and Governance Tool

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:48:00 PST

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of our newest SharePoint 2010 software add-on, Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 (SPGA 2010). The “cool factor” on this one is off the charts and you’re going to want to check it out.

As an IT professional, you know how hard it can be to maintain the kind of control you want on SharePoint 2010 sites. New sites propagate like bunnies and can quickly get out of hand, often leaving you with a backlog of work to get them approved, created and provisioned the way you want – keeping your organization’s taxonomy, governance, and look-and-feel intact.

Not any more.

SPGA 2010 allows you to create site request profiles, from which your users can select the kind of site they need. You set all the boundaries on the front end, including workflow for approvals if you like. Then, when a user fills out the site request form, they set into motion an automated set of processes that quickly and automatically approve, create, and provision the site. There’s no way they can mess up your site uniformity or company standards, because you’ve baked everything into the profile in advance.

Is that cool or what?

Users are empowered; your workload is reduced; everybody’s happy.

Take a moment and look over the SPGA 2010 product page, the SPGA 2010 key features and benefits page, and the SPGA 2010 screen shots. Then download SPGA 2010 and take it for a test drive. You’ll be amazed at the difference that this powerful tool can make in your life.

Expand Your Workflow Creation Options and “Power Up” Your Workflows

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:29:00 PST

SharePoint Solutions announces the release of our newest software product: Workflow Essentials 2010 (WE2010).

Once installed to your SharePoint server, Workflow Essentials snaps right into SharePoint Designer 2010’s Workflow Designer “Activities” and “Conditions” to give you nearly double the workflow creation possibilities.

You are no longer limited to what Microsoft gives you out-of-the-box! Your
workflow action/condition options jump from 37 to more than 60 – all from within the SharePoint Designer 2010 workflow designer interface! No proprietary program interface to learn. Simple and familiar – all gain and no pain!

If you have found yourself dreaming about all the things your workflows could do “if only” you weren’t limited to what Microsoft gives you, then this is the product you’ve been waiting for. Your “if onlys” have become reality. Need your workflow to:

Loop through list items?
Create a SharePoint site?
Send an email with an attachment?
Grant permission on an item?

WE2010 makes this all possible – and a whole lot more! All without coding. You can see for yourself how much more powerful, more capable, more sophisticated your SharePoint workflows can be – effortlessly. Download the trial of Workflow Essentials 2010, and take it for a spin. You’ll be amazed at how much more you can accomplish with these expanded options.

Learn more about Workflow Essentials 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Training? Here's the Place to Start.

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:37:00 PST

Your organization is implementing SharePoint 2010, and you need to learn to use it.

Where do you start?

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce our brand new introductory course in the basics of SharePoint 2010. Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a 2-day hands-on course on the basic concepts and basic features of SharePoint 2010. The basic features covered in this course apply not only to SharePoint Foundation 2010, the free version of SharePoint, but to all editions of SharePoint 2010, since the other editions are built on the foundation of the free version.

Since the course assumes that the student has no familiarity with this or any previous version of SharePoint, this is the perfect course for anyone new to SharePoint who will be using SharePoint 2010.

Students will come away from the course with a very complete understanding of basic SharePoint concepts, navigating the SharePoint interface, the business problems that SharePoint can be used to address, and gain hands-on experience using SharePoint to share information and to collaborate with co-workers on projects and team work.

Additionally, each student will come away from the training with a comprehensive course manual which includes a distillation of the lecture content, the PowerPoint slides, and the scripted hands-on lab exercises, which can be easily repeated back in their work environment.

Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 is open now for registration on our website, with classes now enrolling for January 25-26, 2011 in Nashville, and for February 23-24, 2011, in Dallas.

The cost of the course is just $1195, which includes class tuition, course materials, and lunches both days of class.

If you’ve been looking for a place to get started with SharePoint 2010, this is the course you’ve been looking for.

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 4 - Diagram

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 09:57:00 PST

I have created a diagram that attempts to give the "big picture" of how the social computing features and processes in SharePoint Server 2010 fit together:

(Note: This is the fourth post in this series. For the first post and a table of contents, go here.)

Social Computing Processes in SharePoint Server 2010

As you can see the diagram is a mix of functional and technical. In general that is my goal for this series of blog posts as well.

I am planning to refer back to this diagram as I walk through the social computing features in the upcoming posts. I think it is easier to explain the purpose and functioning of individual features if the bigger picture is kept in mind.

I created this diagram using the following resources:

What I learned from presentations Microsoft made on the subject at the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas
What I could find on other blog posts on the subject (a little bit, but not a lot of depth)
What official documentation is available on TechNet and MSDN (a little bit, but not very thorough)
My own analysis and testing of the software (this is where I've spent the most time)

I am positive the diagram is not 100% accurate. I think the only way to get it 100% accurate will be for someone on the SharePoint product team to comment on it and point out where I am wrong. I don't know if that will happen or not, but would welcome the critique if Microsoft cares to provide it.

Finally, here is a link for you to download a PDF version of the diagram if you would like to have it.

My next post will drill into "tags", which is in the upper left corner of the diagram.

Add SharePoint Reminders Functionality to Your SharePoint 2010 Implementation

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:42:00 PST

Some features are just so obvious that it might never occur to you that they’re not included in SharePoint 2010. Doesn’t it make sense that since SharePoint has a collaborative calendar feature, and alerting capabilities, that it would also have SharePoint Reminders functionality right out-of-the-box? Well, it doesn’t. And that lack has bothered people for quite some time. There just hasn’t been a really slick, elegant way to get that functionality into SharePoint. Until now.

SharePoint Solutions has added SharePoint Reminders functionality in the new version of our Alert Manager product, SharePoint Alert Manager for SharePoint 2010. It bolts transparently onto SharePoint 2010 and the SharePoint Reminders functionality shows up in the interface itself.

You can set a SharePoint Reminder on any SharePoint list item that has a date and time field – calendar items, task items, and more.

SharePoint Reminders can be sent up to 30 days before or after a date/time field's value.
Conditions can also be defined to apply simple send/don't send logic.
Any number of recipients can be sent the reminder, including SharePoint groups.

You can see a quick overview of this functionality on our SharePoint Reminders page.

You’ll find lots of ways to use your new SharePoint Reminders functionality. Here are some common business uses:

Your company has a policy that all employees get annual formal performance reviews. But you would like to give your direct reports abbreviated one-on-one performance reviews each quarter and would like to be reminded to prepare for those in advance.
You are responsible for maintaining assorted electronic equipment for your company that relies on batteries (for instance, cordless phones, mice, computer CMOS batteries, etc.). You know that the batteries will need to be replaced before the equipment wears out. So, each time you get a new item, you want to log it into a SharePoint list with an acquired date. You want to set a reminder on the acquired date to go replace the batteries after a certain period of time.
You maintain document libraries that have official policy and procedure documents in them. Your job requires you to periodically review each of the documents to make sure they are up to date. You want to set a reminder on each document to review it every six months.
You sell maintenance agreements on products that customers buy from you, but the maintenance agreements only last for a certain period of time. Before the maintenance agreement expires, you want to be reminded to send the customer an offer to renew their maintenance agreement.

Once you get used to using SharePoint Reminders, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them. And of course all of this is in addition to the killer SharePoint Alert Management functionality that our Alert Manager 2010 product provides. Just one more way that our engineers at SharePoint Solutions are working to make your SharePoint ideas come to life.

Randy Moody

Ever Get Push-Back on Implementing SharePoint My Sites?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 21:40:00 PST

This is not technically a post that is part of my SharePoint 2010 Social Computing series of blog posts. But, it is relevant to that series.

I've noticed over the past seven years as a full-time SharePoint educator and consultant that I get more push-back on SharePoint My Sites than I ever would have expected. This phenomena happened in 2004 with SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and it continues to happen in 2010 with the latest version.

I'd say that I have been in front of at least 2000 IT and non-IT professionals in the SharePoint classes I have taught over the years. Rarely do I ever have a class where more than 60% of the students have implemented or plan to implement SharePoint My Sites. Almost always at least 4 out of 10 students are either lukewarm, or even sometimes adamantly opposed, to implementing My Sites at their organization.

The main reasons I hear from those who are opposed to My Sites are:

Some professionals (or their managers) don't trust that the rank and file users in the organizations will use the My Site properly
Some professionals (or their colleagues) view the My Site as "just another web page to have to keep up-to-date". It seems like more work to them than benefit.
Some professionals immediately associate the concept of My Sites as too much like Facebook, which they deem is not appropriate to use at work.
Some professionals see it as "redundant" to Facebook. Their organizations have long ago approved usage of Facebook in the organization for business purposes. (Obviously, these folks are the exact opposite of those who give reason #3).

The good news is that most of the time at least 50% of the students in my classes "get it" and are very interested in gaining the many benefits that SharePoint My Sites offer. But, that still leaves a significant number who continue to push back.

Have any of you experienced this kind of push-back? Are the reasons similar to the ones I hear? What do you think it will take before My Sites are universally embraced in all SharePoint Server implementations?

Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. I just read this news article about Hilton Hotels implementing SharePoint 2010 worldwide to 130,000 employees. At the very end of the article, the author of the article quotes the Hilton CIO as saying:

"We want employees to use SharePoint MySites and TeamSites [which create a Facebook-like environment] to share information or jointly edit documents with people in their departments"

I am going to stick this quote in my bag of tricks to use in the classroom the next time I hear this kind of push back.

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 3 - Prerequisites

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:18:00 PST

In this post on the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing feature-set, I am going to walk you through a number of prerequisites that have to be in place in your SharePoint environment before the social computing features will work at all.

(Note: This is the third post in this series. For the first post and a table of contents, go here.)

Before jumping into the details of the prerequisites, let me give you my master list of SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features that I plan to drill down into one by one during the next several posts:

Tags
Note Board
Tag Profile pages
Tags and Notes on My Site
Tag search
Tag and Notes bookmarklet
Tag cloud web part
Ratings
Status Updates
Activity Feed / Newsfeed
Activity Feed preferences
Recent Activities web part on My Site public profile
Extensibility of Activity Feed
Add Colleagues feature
Keyword and Colleagues Suggestions feature
“Interests” field on User Profile record
“Ask Me About” field on User Profile record
Integration with Outlook 2010
People search

All of these features are part of the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing feature-set, and, as I pointed out in my first post in this series, are intended to help organizations do a better job at knowledge networking.

After months of searching the Internet, I have found a lot of articles on many of these features, but I haven’t found a comprehensive series of articles that really aims to go both broad and deep into the subject area. That’s my goal with this series of articles, and you can look forward to many more after this one that will step you through the details of all of the features in the list above.

SharePoint Server 2010 Prerequisites for Social Computing

As you might expect from the long list of features I show above, there is a lot going on “under the hood” in SharePoint Server 2010 to enable the social computing features. My experience is that it can be a challenge to get all of the prerequisites properly set up. It can also be a challenge to figure out what component is configured improperly when troubleshooting problems once the features have already been deployed to the users.

The infrastructure prerequisites generally fall into two categories: 1) Service Applications and 2) Timer Jobs. Therefore, I’ll break up my discussion into those two categories.

Service Applications Required

It is not so obvious at first glance what service applications are required to be configured and running to enable the social computing features in SharePoint 2010. There are two: 1) the Managed Metadata service application, and 2) the User Profile service application. Neither of them has the term “social” in their names, but nevertheless, you have to have both of them properly configured and running.

A couple of visual clues that there may be something wrong with one or both of these services is to take a look at any SharePoint page in your environment where you expect the social computing features to be available. You should see the icons for “I Like it” and “Tags and Notes”:

You should also see the “My Site” and “My Profile” menu items on the drop down menu for the user control on the page:

If you don’t see all or some of these visual clues, then you need to proceed to Central Administration and determine if you have instances of the Managed Metadata service and the User Profile service running in your farm. (Note: SharePoint 2010 does not give the user an error message if these services are not running. It just doesn’t display the features that these services enable.)

It’s easy to see if you have instances of these services running in your SharePoint 2010 farm. Just go to Central Administration and navigate to the Manage Service Applications page to see if they have been provisioned and are running:

If you don’t have these service applications running in your SharePoint 2010 farm, then you will need to provision them by clicking on the New icon:

Explaining the configuration pages for these two services is beyond the scope of this article, but you should be able to easily find a number of articles that will walk you through the configuration steps.

Why does the Managed Metadata Service have to be running?

You might be wondering why it is necessary to have the Managed Metadata service application provisioned in order to use the social computing features? The reason is that the “tags” that users create when tagging pages, documents, list items, etc., get stored in the Keywords portion of the Term Store (which is the name of the central metadata repository that is maintained by the Managed Metadata service).

The Keywords portion of the Term Store is only half of the Managed Metadata repository. The other half is frequently referred to as the Taxonomy portion of the Term Store. The Taxonomy portion of the Term Store is hierarchical, while the Keywords portion is random. The master list of user tags gets stored randomly as they are created in the Keywords portion of the Term Store:

If the Managed Metadata service is not provisioned and running, users can’t use the social tagging features, because SharePoint 2010 has nowhere to maintain a master list of tags. One way to recognize that the Managed Metadata service is not provisioned/running properly is when your SharePoint site looks like this:

If you see this behavior in your SharePoint 2010 site, the first place to look is in Central Administration to verify that the Managed Metadata service is running.

One more point before moving on to the User Profile service application. I have been referring to the Keywords portion of the Managed Metadata Term Store as the place that SharePoint 2010 stores the “master list” of user tags. This is an important concept to understand, and here is a little more detail.

Each time a user starts to tag an item in SharePoint 2010, the Keywords portion of the Term Store is queried in real time to see if suggestions can be made to the user about previous keywords that other users have used. If a keyword appears in the list of suggestions and the user deems it suitable, the user can use it to tag the item. If not, the user can add their own unique keyword to the Keywords store and then it will be available for SharePoint 2010 to use as a suggestion in the future for other users.

So, the Keywords portion of the Term Store only stores one instance of a given keyword. That instance may be used by many users and many times as they tag items throughout SharePoint. Therefore, the Keywords list in the Term Store is truly a master list of unique keywords.

What does the User Profile Service Application Have to Do with SharePoint 2010 Social Computing?

The short answer is, “just about everything”. All of the plumbing to make the social computing features work in SharePoint 2010 is built into the User Profile service application.

When you provision the User Profile service application, the SQL Server database gets created that is needed to store all of the social data. And, that database contains a long list of tables that are required to make social computing work:

You can see from this screen shot that there are a number of tables that have names that that are fairly easy to figure out what feature of social computing they relate to. The “socialtag” tables relate to Tagging, the “socialcomments” tables relate to the Note Board, and the “socialratings” tables relate to the Ratings feature. So, this database needs to get created and that is one big part of what happens when you provision the User Profile service application in Central Administration.

The basic concepts of the User Profile service have been around since SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It was enhanced significantly in MOSS 2007. But, in both prior versions, the User Profile service’s primary scope and focus was to manage SharePoint’s User Profile database, synchronize it with a directory service (such as AD), and configure My Sites. In SharePoint 2010, the User Profile service continues to perform these roles in addition to providing the social computing infrastructure.

If you want to take advantage of the social computing features in SharePoint 2010, you will also need to properly configure the User Profile database and properly configure My Sites. The social computing features will not work without User Profiles and My Sites working.

If your User Profiles and My Sites are not set up and/or working properly, you will easily be able to tell by a user control that looks like this:

As I mentioned earlier in the article, the user control looks like this when User Profiles and My Sites are set up and working:

Timer Jobs Required

A fairly long list of timer jobs get provisioned and scheduled when you provision the User Profile service application in SharePoint 2010. Timer jobs have long been utilized in SharePoint Products and Technologies and it seems like with every new version of SharePoint, the list of timer jobs at least doubles. Timer jobs are processes that need to run on a schedule in the background to aggregate information, clean up data, and perform other process-oriented tasks.

In the case of SharePoint 2010, the User Profile service provisions 13 timer jobs:

(You can find the timer job list and definitions under Timer Job Definitions in the Monitoring section in SharePoint 2010 Central Administration).

Microsoft does not provide a lot of documentation on what each of the timer jobs do in SharePoint 2010. So, it is a little difficult to say which of these timer jobs is responsible for doing a particular task that is important to the proper functioning of a specific social computing feature. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the following User Profile Timer Jobs need to be running on an appropriate schedule in order for social computing to work properly:

Social Data Maintenance Job
Social Rating Synchronization Job
My Site Suggestions Email Job
Activity Feed Job
Activity Feed Cleanup Job

In the previous paragraph, I mentioned the idea of “appropriate schedule”. It has been my experience that the out-of-the-box schedule for some of these timer jobs may not be appropriate in all situations. Certainly, in a demonstration/test scenario, the out-of-the-box schedules don’t work very well. Too much time is allowed between runs of some of the timer jobs to process the data and present the results back in the user interface on a timely basis. Even in some production environments, the out-of-the-box schedule may not produce fast enough results to suit the users.

Here are the default schedules for the five social-oriented timer jobs I listed above:

You are free to change the schedule for any or all of these timer jobs that relate to social computing. In my demo/testing environments I routinely set them all to run every three minutes. Obviously, I would want to be very thoughtful in making changes to schedules in a production environment and consider the needs of my users and the server resource availability as well.

That’s it for the prerequisites for the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features. By now, you should see that making all of these features work together and accomplish their purposes requires quite a lot of technical infrastructure “under-the-hood”. Hopefully, this article will help you make sure you have all of the right components provisioned from the start and/or help you troubleshoot problems that your users may surface as they are using the social computing features.

In my next post, I will drill into the the details of what Tags are intended to be used for in SharePoint 2010 and exactly how they work.

Schedule Update: January Classes Now Open

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 13:37:00 PST

The updated schedule of SharePoint training classes is now posted through January of 2011.

We have classes for people with all different levels of SharePoint experience – or no experience at all! And classes for both the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint.

For SharePoint 2010, our “SharePoint 2010 Upgrade and Planning” course continues to prepare IT pros to plan and execute your company’s upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. Classes are open for registration in Nashville, Dallas, and Chicago.

Our 2-day non-technical guided tour of SharePoint 2010’s new features and interface, “Exploring SharePoint 2010 – New Features” has been a huge hit, and classes are now open for all three cities.

For those just getting started with SharePoint 2007, “Applying SharePoint 2007 – MOSS Core Features” is your “on ramp” to SharePoint competency. In 4 days, SharePoint 2007 goes from being a mystifying maze to being a “Swiss army knife” you are fully prepared to use.

Fall/Winter is a great time to get that training you’ve been thinking about at one of our three locations (Nashville, Chicago, or Dallas).

The right knowledge and skill can make all the difference.

Find the right course.

Find the right class.

Download the latest class schedule.

Need a printable course outline or comments from recent students of a particular course? Let me know.

Have a question? Call or email.

Best Regards,

Randy Moody
SharePoint Solutions
Registration Desk
randy_moody@sharepointsolutions.com
615-515-0210 Ext. 2

The Key to More Capable Workflows

noreply@blogger.com (SharePoint Solutions) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:31:00 PDT

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the beta release of our new Workflow Essentials 2010.

Once installed to your SharePoint server, Workflow Essentials snaps right into SharePoint Designer 2010’s Workflow Designer “Activities” and “Conditions” to give you nearly double the workflow creation possibilities.

Need your workflow to:

- Loop through list items?
- Create a site?
- Send an email with an attachment?
- Grant permission on an item?

WE2010 makes all of that possible and a whole lot more. Your workflow action/condition options go from 37 to more than 60!

And your new options join the out-of-the-box activities and conditions right there in the Workflow Designer interface. No proprietary interface or new program to learn. It’s all right there in SharePoint Designer 2010.

You can begin designing more powerful, more capable, more sophisticated workflows right away!

Download the beta of Workflow Essentials 2010, and take it for a free test drive. You’ll be amazed at how much more you can accomplish with these expanded options.

Learn more about Workflow Essentials 2010.

Download the Workflow Essentials 2010 beta now.

We are happy to answer your questions about the product, both before and as you test it. Drop us an email or give us a call.

Best Regards,

Peter Roth
Director of Sales
SharePoint Solutions
(408) 678-0802
peter_roth@sharepointsolutions.com

SharePoint 2010 Access Services Demo

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:06:00 PDT

We are starting to publish recordings of some of the demos of the labs our students go through in our Exploring SharePoint 2010 two-day class and our Upgrading to SharePoint 2010 four-day class. Here is one from the module on Access Services:

SharePoint 2010 Social Networking: Part 2 - Where does it fit in?

noreply@blogger.com (Jeff Cate) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:19:00 PDT

Are the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features what we have been missing all along to really do "knowledge networking" right in the corporate world?

(Note: This is the second post in this series. For the first post in this series and table of contents, go here).

I certainly wouldn't go that far. But, the features can play an important role in fostering better knowledge networking, due to some of their unique characteristics, as compared to the other vehicles (or approaches) we currently use for knowledge networking.

The purpose of this blog post is to highlight these unique knowledge networking characteristics so that I can make the benefits of each feature crystal clear in upcoming posts.

Below is a table I created that presents my view of some of the most commonly used "vehicles" for knowledge networking (first column) and their characteristics (columns 2 – 7). Before you dig into the table and see if you agree or disagree, take a minute to read the description for each column:

Availability of knowledge networking opportunity (column 2) – are opportunities to knowledge network using the vehicle available to everyone or is an invitation to the opportunity required?
Requirements to discover new knowledge (column 3) – does the individual have to seek and/or participate actively to discover new knowledge, or is the appropriate knowledge pushed automatically to the individual?
Velocity at which knowledge can be shared (column 4) – how rapidly or slowly does the vehicle allow participants to share knowledge? In general, any vehicle that utilizes the spoken word is going to allow for more rapid sharing than vehicles that utilize the written word. Why? Because people can talk and listen faster than they can type and read.
Relative volume of knowledge that can be shared (column 5) – there can be big differences in the volume of knowledge that can be shared due to the unique characteristics of one vehicle as compared to another.
Level of overhead required (column 6) – how much overhead (non-knowledge networking effort and time) is required to use the vehicle for knowledge networking purposes?
Level of disruption to other work tasks (column 7) – what level of disruption to other work tasks is required of an individual to participate in knowledge networking using the vehicle?

Commonly used vehicles for internal knowledge networking/sharing	Availability of knowledge networking opportunity	Requirements to discover new knowledge	Velocity at which knowledge can be shared	Relative volume of knowledge that can be shared	Level of overhead required	Level of disruption to other work tasks
Formal Face-to-Face Meetings	Available by invitation only	You must seek/participate	Fast	Medium⁸	High¹⁰	High¹²
Phone/web conferencing	Available by invitation only	You must seek/participate	Fast	Medium⁸	Medium¹⁰	High¹²
Informal Face-to-Face Meetings (e.g. in the hall, at the water cooler)	In many cases available to anyone who is around, but sometimes informally closed	You must seek/participate	Fast	Low⁸	Low	Medium¹²
Email	Available by invitation only¹	You must seek/participate, with exception to "Reply All" conversations³	Slow⁵	Low	Low	Low¹³
Instant Messaging	Available by invitation only¹	You must seek/participate	Medium	Low	Low	Low to Medium¹³
Search (Enterprise and/or web)	Available to anyone²	You must seek/participate	Slow⁶	High⁹	Low	Medium¹⁴
Social Computing Features in SharePoint 2010	Available to anyone²	Knowledge gets pushed to you based on your stated interests and organizational characteristics⁴	Medium⁷	High⁹	Low¹¹	Low to Medium¹⁴

Notes:
¹ I consider Email and IM "available by invitation only", because most email conversations within organizations are initiated by one person with a closed group of one or more other people in mind. If someone sends an email to the entire organization requesting knowledge to be shared, in most cases the results are not very good (or appreciated J).

² I consider Search and SP 2010 Social Computing to be knowledge networking vehicles that are generally available to anyone in the organization. Of course, both Search and Social Computing are security trimmed in SharePoint 2010, but for the things you have access to, no invitation is needed to discover them.

³ In the case where the "CC" and "Reply to All" features of email are used with the intent of sharing knowledge with people who need that knowledge, some knowledge is actually "pushed" to some recipients of the email who otherwise may not have known about the conversation. Unfortunately, the recipient does not get to choose when this occurs or doesn't occur.

⁴ One of the most unique characteristics of the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features is that new knowledge gets discovered and pushed automatically to you based on your stated interests and characteristics as a member of the organization. None of the other vehicles have this characteristic. I will go into the mechanics of how this is achieved in a future blog post in this series.

⁵ In my opinion, Email is definitely the slowest and most inefficient vehicle we use for sharing knowledge. Unfortunately, it is still the most prevalent vehicle in most organizations.

⁶ I rate Search as a relatively slow vehicle for sharing knowledge, because it can require a tremendous about of "search refinements" to find useful information. Also, because new knowledge must be obtained by reading, it is relatively slower than meetings and phone calls.

⁷ Social Computing in SP 2010 offers a nice sweet spot between the slower vehicles of Email and Search and the more rapid person-to-person vehicles of meetings and phone calls. In a future post, I will clearly explain why I believe this is true.

⁸ While the most rapid form of knowledge networking takes place in person-to-person meetings using the spoken word, the volume of knowledge networking that can take place is limited by the number of people who can effectively participate in the meeting.

⁹ Search and Social Computing in SP 2010 offer the possibility of high volume knowledge networking if they are implemented in a way that allows as many people in the organization to participate as possible.

¹⁰ Formal face-to-face meetings require the most overhead to set up and conduct. People have to be contacted and schedules checked before a final date/time can be set. Meeting rooms and other resources have to be reserved. Conference calls and web meetings can eliminate the need to reserve meeting rooms and allow attendees to avoid short or long travel to the meeting, but setting the date/time and scheduling it with all attendees is still time consuming overhead.

¹¹ As you will learn in a later post, Microsoft has done an excellent job in designing the SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features to minimize the amount of overhead that individuals have to incur to participate and get the benefits.

¹² There is no question about it, meetings and phone calls are the most disruptive vehicle when it comes to taking time out of a person's day and other work tasks. As long as the benefits of the meeting/phone call outweigh the costs, it can be worth it, but too often they don't.

¹³ Some people might say that Email and Instant Messaging are very disruptive vehicles for knowledge networking. I disagree, but am assuming the individual knows when to "say no" to email and IM. If you can never close out your email client or set your IM status to "do not disturb", then I agree that either of these vehicles can be extremely disruptive.

¹⁴ I rate Search as a medium-level disruptor because it is so easy to get lost in the search refining and reviewing process and realize minutes or hours later that more time has passed by than was originally intended. To a certain degree, the same can be true when using the Social Computing features of SP 2010, because a certain amount of "guided surfing" is required to absorb the knowledge networking opportunities it provides.

That's it for this post. If you read this far, thanks for sticking with it and I hope you found it valuable! From here on, the posts will be oriented towards explaining specific SharePoint 2010 Social Computing features in detail.