In this post, I want to share a couple of quick recommendations around Technology Strategy (like Office 365), Digital Workplace strategy (Intranets, Extranets, Collaboration, Meetings, etc.) and roadmaps, some resources for further reading and highlight the opportunity for us to connect at the SharePoint Conference in May this year.

Having An Actionable Roadmap Is Important!

After spending years helping customers envision, develop, and implement digital workplace strategies I have learned that the issue often isn’t motivation, interest, or even budget related, but having tactical knowledge of what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why to do it. In other words, organizations need to have more detailed and more comprehensive roadmaps that are actionable first and foremost.

What Is A Digital Workplace Or Digital Roadmap?

So first let’s clarify what I mean by a roadmap. Roadmaps have a few consistent elements. They have typically phases, tracks/focus areas, time frames, and activities. These activities are often represented as actionable steps/things to do, projects or even programs of projects depending on how high level the roadmap is. Below is a simple sample for reference:

One of the challenges here is that many organizations think it’s more complicated than it needs to be to develop and create a roadmap for a digital workplace, an Intranet, or for some specific area of digital excellence within an organization. Most roadmaps are quite simple – they essentially are a way of visually showing recommended actions (or sets of actions). By visualizing these actions we can at a glance communicate priority, urgency/order, dependencies, estimated effort/how long things take, and more.

Why Don’t More Organizations Have Actionable Roadmaps?

Coming up with the recommended actions to go from your organization’s current state to the organizations envisioned future state or aspiration state could be difficult. This is why many organizations employ experts who work with other customers (like myself or the company I work with 2toLead), or why they look at what other organizations are doing and how they are framing their strategy.

If you aren’t sure how to write a recommendation or what the right recommendations are – then start by documenting pain points, and user needs. A skilled expert can take those needs (especially if they are specific) and map them to potential solutions (your recommendations). Anyone can elicit pain points, and user needs related to digital tools and technology – but do keep in mind that more experienced analysts may be able to get a richer understanding of these based on their technology expertise and skill set.

Below is a simple diagram of how a typical customers needs/pain points might be represented.

Getting Started On Your Own Roadmap(s)

If you want to develop your own roadmap start with thinking about the categories or areas of focus where there could be clear recommendations.

You could probably come up with a number of technology recommendations as you look at your digital workplace portfolio. What’s more, you can come up with many recommendations quite easily if you explore how Governance, Adoption, or Technology Excellence could be improved. These categories are often missed in most roadmaps as far too many focus on the technology projects and just assume adoption or governance will be considered in each project. However, this misses looking at things holistically and benefiting from some investments in these areas directly rather than always being tied to a project, and it’s associated outcomes (and budget limitations).

Coming up with recommendations is only the start though. Once you have your recommendations, you need to define the urgency. Is it immediate? Is it near term? Is it for the future? More importantly are some ‘ongoing’ recommendations where you are recommending a new motion, activity or exercise that should be recurring?

If you can frame your recommendations by category and by urgency, you have the basis for a roadmap.

Making Roadmaps More Actionable & Better Prioritized

The next step is breaking things down further, adding more detail and further exploring how urgency and the recommendation should be evaluated. In most of these break downs your goal is to achieve some measure of estimated business value and estimated complexity. If it’s hard to think of how complex or how valuable something is? Odds are it isn’t specific or broken down enough.

When you break recommendations down like this not only can you develop an actionable roadmap, but you can more easily prioritize things. As an example, by mapping out the business value and complexity scoring you can put them into a matrix like the one below to help prioritize certain recommendations first, especially if some don’t have dependencies or other things that complicate the order/priority of the recommendation itself.

Keep in mind that you can have multiple roadmaps and roadmaps focused on a specific phase, category or shorter time window than say a more program oriented roadmap that shows how these specific, targeted recommended actions connect and how they might be budgeted/managed.

Want To Know More?

Connect with me for a 1:1, Download Hundreds Of Pages Of Guidance and/or Come Join Me At The North American SharePoint Conference.

If you haven’t already taken a look at it – we have published quite a few whitepapers full of free expert guidance and advice on SharePoint and Office 365. Here are a few of them:

• INTRANETS WITH OFFICE 365 – Explore the benefits of an Office 365 Intranet and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
• DRIVING ADOPTION – Explore the best approach and expert techniques for driving and improving Office 365 adoption and usage.
• MEASURING IMPACT – Find out how to identify and measure the ROI and business value Office 365 provides with examples and advice.
• SHAREPOINT MIGRATION – Learn how to successfully plan and execute a SharePoint migration.
• EXTERNAL SHARING – Learn how to plan for the risks and things to consider with external sharing. Learn what you need to know about external sharing in Office 365.
• WHEN TO USE WHAT – Maximize the value of your digital workplace. Learn how to help your users make better, more effective decisions on how they get work done.
• OFFICE 365 RESOURCES KIT – We have shared many templates, samples, and resources. To simplify the download we have combined our Office 365 resources into a kit.

In only 2 and a half months the SharePoint Conference will be back in Las Vegas on May 21^st through the 23^rd (with more time if you want to join us for workshops). This event is one of two major Microsoft events in 2019 where the Microsoft product team will be announcing their roadmap updates for SharePoint and the Office 365 collaboration and content services changes that are ahead of us. This is an amazing conference with deep dive technical sessions, great networking, incredible perspectives and a significant amount of Microsoft leadership/announcements.

There will be over 150 speakers at the event and over 200 sessions. Whether your interest is in SharePoint, Office 365, Planner, Teams, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps, Yammer or more – this is a great event to block in your calendar and register to attend. You can save an additional 50$ with code HARBRIDGE. If you sign up for a workshop package, you can also bring some sweet gadgets home such as an Xbox One or a Cortana Smart Speaker! Register today at https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=HARBRIDGE

Want To Know What I Will Be Presenting On & Talking About?

I will be presenting one session at the conference, and I will be conducting one full day workshop.

Workshop Highlight: Strategy & Success With Office 365: Practical Tools & Techniques For The Strategist, Information Architect & Analyst

I am extremely excited to share that I will be running a FULL DAY workshop based on the half day ones I have run in the past on this subject. In this full-day workshop we will have more time to cover EVEN MORE content and practices.

People are complex. Office 365 is complex. Add the two together and you get some of the most challenging, difficult, and stressful situations, especially if you are responsible for facilitating shared understanding between them.

Join me to learn about actionable techniques to improve, simplify and amplify your leadership, business analysis and information architecture efforts with Office 365. Walk away with improved confidence when dealing with business and non-technical related challenges of Office 365, and be familiarized with effective tools and techniques that make Office 365 implementations more successful.

Our topics, where we will dig into best practices will include:

• Aligning with The Microsoft Roadmap
• Planning & Implementing for Scale
• Aligning with Industry Trends
• Pro-Active Planning
• Visualizing & Communicating Better
• & Much More!

Session Highlight: Intranets and Digital Hubs with Office 365: What you need to know

There is a growing trend of organizations moving to “the cloud” to meet their intranet needs. While many organizations are running their Intranets “on-premise”, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions or running them on platforms like Office 365.

The question for many companies is not ,“should our intranet be built with Office 365?” but, “how should we integrate or build our Intranets with Office 365?”. This is even more true today with the emergence of new modern Intranet capabilities and continued innovation from Microsoft that must be reconciled with enterprise Intranet/Digital Workplace needs.

In this session, I will explore what is listed below (and more):

• How to address sprawl issues via improved, dynamic, and personalized navigation build based on OOTB capabilities and best practice design patterns.
• How to improve governance and lifecycle with controlled provisioning, default metadata and good Information Architecture practices.
• How analytics are changing, and search is improving and how to best ready your organization and integrate your Intranet with the considerable innovation and new capabilities in this space.
• How to handle news, events, and page authoring and how and why to embrace modern SharePoint to support these needs.
• Why mobile needs to take advantage of the first party apps, and how that can be done best.
• How Yammer, Teams and modern social enterprise can and should be integrated with your Intranet.
• How to take advantage of Microsoft Stream, Forms, PowerApps, Flow and more to improve your Intranet.

Hope this helps,
Richard 

In this post, I want to share a couple of quick recommendations around Intranets in Office 365, some resources for further reading and highlight the opportunity for us to connect at the SharePoint Conference in May this year.

The Intranet/Digital Hub Is Still Important! 

There is a concern we hear from customers and colleagues at conferences. “Is the Intranet less important or no longer as important in the post Microsoft Teams, Slack and modern digital tool world? Yes! Organizations may be leveraging new meeting and chat tools like Microsoft Teams, they may have already established collaboration sites/spaces, enterprise social tools, and other infrastructure that makes modern employees more digitally ready to meet industry needs. The Intranet or Digital Hub still provides a better experience (if done correctly) in three key areas that amplify investments in the supporting areas of a digital workplace:

1. Navigation: While conducting meetings, connecting with colleagues and working is easier than ever when an organization embraces tools like Microsoft Teams those same tools don’t scale well in helping people navigate the, often, hundreds of spaces that they work. Roll-ups, aggregation, dynamic navigation and more are all easy to implement (including with OOTB capabilities) in Office 365. Want to get back to a recent space you were working? Regardless of what technology that space was using? Our Intranet is the answer. Want to navigate across hundreds of sites/spaces? The modern, filterable and easily navigable site directory experience in the Intranet is still the best place to go – especially if it’s blended and integrated with that global navigation, we all know and love.

3. Personalization: Most modern tools we use are becoming more and more personalized. They learn or listen to our preferences and try their best to provide personalized recommendations or insights. The challenge is that these tools are not incorporating key insight from your organization, they way you conduct your business, the way roles and staff work, and the way people should work to achieve the kinds of outcomes you are looking for. Modern personalization is powered by intelligent services, data, and input from your organization and one of the best places to surface that is within the Intranet itself. Whether that be via modern bots, and chat interfaces, recommendation engines, predictive search or navigation, or by predictive answers to questions based on comments/social submissions. All of these patterns and more are accessible to modern organizations and are often far easier to implement than most organizations realized once they fully understand what capability is available OOTB and how strong the Azure and ecosystem have become in supporting improved personalization.

3. Integration: While tools can and should be integrated to improve experiences and “make things easier” for employees at the end of the day most integration with the digital workplace is about creating a hub, dashboard or one place to go for employees. This is still a hugely important aspect of a successful Intranet design, and Office 365 Intranets are better set up for this than, arguably, any other Intranet in the marketplace. This is because they are already integrated into intelligent ways with the core Microsoft Digital Workplace, and easily extensible and integrated with hundreds of other systems and services via services like Flow, Azure Logic Apps, SharePoint, and the vast third-party ecosystem that has already been established.

Want To Know More?

Connect with me for a 1:1, Download 100+ Pages Of Guidance and/or Come Join Me At The SharePoint Conference.

If you haven’t already taken a look at it – we have published over 100 pages of free expert guidance and advice on SharePoint and Office 365 Intranets in this whitepaper: Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know – The Definitive Guide To Intranets With Office 365

In only 2 and a half months the SharePoint Conference will be back in Las Vegas on May 21^st through the 23^rd (with more time if you want to join us for workshops). This event is one of two major Microsoft events in 2019 where the Microsoft product team will be announcing their roadmap updates for SharePoint and the Office 365 collaboration and content services changes that are ahead of us. This is an amazing conference with deep dive technical sessions, great networking, incredible perspectives and a significant amount of Microsoft leadership/announcements.

There will be over 150 speakers at the event and over 200 sessions. Whether your interest is in SharePoint, Office 365, Planner, Teams, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps, Yammer or more – this is a great event to block in your calendar and register to attend. You can save an additional 50$ with code HARBRIDGE. If you sign up for a workshop package, you can also bring some sweet gadgets home such as a Xbox One or a Cortana Smart Speaker! Register today at: https://sharepointna.com/#!/register?utm_term=HARBRIDGE

Want To Know What I Will Be Presenting On & Talking About?

I will be presenting one session at the conference and I will be conducting one full day workshop.

Session Highlight: Intranets and Digital Hubs with Office 365: What you need to know

There is a growing trend of organizations moving to “the cloud” to meet their intranet needs. While many organizations are running their Intranets “on premise”, many are considering entirely cloud-based solutions or running them on platforms like Office 365.

The question for many companies is not ,“should our intranet be built with Office 365?” but, “how should we integrate or build our Intranets with Office 365?”. This is even more true today with the emergence of new modern Intranet capabilities and continued innovation from Microsoft that must be reconciled with enterprise Intranet/Digital Workplace needs.

In this session, I will explore what is listed below (and more):

• How to address sprawl issues via improved, dynamic, and personalized navigation build based on OOTB capabilities and best practice design patterns.
• How to improve governance and lifecycle with controlled provisioning, default metadata and good Information Architecture practices.
• How analytics are changing, and search is improving and how to best ready your organization and integrate your Intranet with the considerable innovation and new capabilities in this space.
• How to handle news, events, and page authoring and how and why to embrace modern SharePoint to support these needs.
• Why mobile needs to take advantage of the first party apps, and how that can be done best.
• How Yammer, Teams and modern social enterprise can and should be integrated with your Intranet.
• How to take advantage of Microsoft Stream, Forms, PowerApps, Flow and more to improve your Intranet.

Workshop Highlight: Strategy & Success With Office 365: Practical Tools & Techniques For The Strategist, Information Architect & Analyst

I am extremely excited to share that I will be running a FULL DAY workshop based on the half day ones I have run in the past on this subject. In this full day workshop we will have more time to cover EVEN MORE content and practices.

People are complex. Office 365 is complex. Add the two together and you get some of the most challenging, difficult, and stressful situations, especially if you are responsible for facilitating shared understanding between them.

Join me to learn about actionable techniques to improve, simplify and amplify your leadership, business analysis and information architecture efforts with Office 365. Walk away with improved confidence when dealing with business and non-technical related challenges of Office 365, and be familiarized with effective tools and techniques that make Office 365 implementations more successful.

Our topics, where we will dig into best practices will include:

• Aligning with The Microsoft Roadmap
• Planning & Implementing for Scale
• Aligning with Industry Trends
• Pro-Active Planning
• Visualizing & Communicating Better
• & Much More!

Hope this helps,
Richard 

Earlier this week Microsoft announced two new Datacenter locations in Canada. This will provide the world with new regions and datacenter locations and will provide resolution to Canadian data residency concerns.

As a Canadian who has worked passionately with Office 365 and Azure for many years now – I can honestly say I have never been more excited for what this means to Canadian customers. There really are no significant barriers or reasons *not* to begin moving to the Cloud or more actively leveraging it in Hybrid patterns. I shared a few of my thoughts on this on the most recent 2toLead blog here.

The announcement is wonderful but it also raises a few questions like how will Canadian companies who have already created Office 365 tenants in other regions move them to Canada? This is an ongoing challenge that effects customers often when there are significant acquisitions or regional changes. So it’s something that we have worked through and Microsoft is working on.

Additionally how ready is your organization to take advantage of Cloud benefits in Azure and Office 365? While the second question takes more time than this blog post can answer (and depends on situational and environmental factors) one thing is for certain – Microsoft continues to invest in Canada and more Canadian organizations are able to reap those investment rewards.

Hope this helps,
Richard

Based on tremendous demand and with the help of Microsoft and community leaders we wrote a public draft of a whitepaper that provides Office 365 guidance on when to use what in Office 365. We presented the key findings and research from the whitepaper as well as guidance at Microsoft Ignite 2015. This post is a summary of those resources.

The whitepaper can be found and downloaded for free from http://www.WhenToUseWhat.com. We performed a presentation at Microsoft Ignite in front of 2000+ attendees on the topic. If you would like to see a recording of the session be sure to check it out on Channel 9 – http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Ignite/2015/BRK2102 or watch it via the embed here.

Slides are also available in full on SlideShare.net here. along with my other talks (including 100+ other ones like the Top 10 Things IT Professionals Don’t Know About Office 365).

Since Ignite the response has been extremely positive at local user groups, SharePoint Saturdays and a few other events I have spoken at.

Hope this helps,
Richard

There are many conversations we all have around enterprise social. Some of the most challenging conversations aren’t on the value of enterprise social, but in how should we go about implementing and delivering social enterprise services in our own organizations. While this subject deserves many posts I thought I would start with a topic I am very frequently asked about: when should I use SharePoint and when should I use Yammer?  In this post I will highlight key considerations around SharePoint and Yammer for Microsoft led social enterprise scenarios and try and highlight meaningful and real reasons some organizations have been cautious around adopting social enterprise technologies like Yammer.

Let’s start with an observation that organizations today are still providing differing guidance on when and how to use social technologies. There has been great community and organizational sharing around this topic and, at the end of the day, many implementations of social technology involve multiple technologies that have some overlapping capabilities. There is no ‘perfect’ answer to how you should implement social enterprise services in your organization without understanding where and how you have invested in technology, and what the needs of your organization and users are. What I can say from experience is that it is better to have overlapping capabilities if that empowers your users and organization compared to not having those capabilities, or not having meaningful adoption of those capabilities.

When to use what…

That being said one of the first point of confusion that comes up is “when to use what”. There are many different thoughts and articles on this subject (and all of them are fantastic) but typically they focus on a few things – how urgent is the communication/need – and how private or public is the communication/need? Once you have identified those two things you can normally make a decision as an individual user as to what technologies may be applicable – and which one seems like the best one to use in that circumstance.

Let me be clear – sharing and communicating is a good thing – and what we want to ensure first and foremost is that it IS communicated – regardless of where it is communicated. So we need to ensure the culture of sharing and communicating is alive and healthy in the organization. Once your users value sharing/communicating – then what people need to learn is how the technology works (without understanding you won’t get commitment) and how they can share/communicate better. This is where SharePoint, Yammer and Office 365 Groups provide more value than 1:1 and 1:few methods of communication like traditional email and instant messages (or phone calls and Lync [web conference] meetings).

SharePoint & Yammer: What Should We Use?

For today’s discussion let’s assume that you currently have rolled out SharePoint within your organization in some capacity or you are interested in furthering those investments. If that’s true then the topic of when to use Yammer over SharePoint will be very relevant to you. Also note that I am discussing Enterprise Social Network elements like the newsfeed here and not outlining the extensive knowledge management features SharePoint possesses that compliment an enterprise social service.

Microsoft’s guidance has been clear and consistent: Use Yammer whenever possible over SharePoint (Pick your enterprise social network: Yammer or Newsfeed). Additionally use Office 365 where possible over traditional on premises variations of the technology.

While Microsoft will release another on-premises version of SharePoint Server (SharePoint 2015) and will maintain its social capabilities – Microsoft has stated that they will not be adding new investments in SharePoint’s social capabilities where they are met by Yammer. Microsoft recognizes that some organizations just don’t feel comfortable with multi-tenant cloud services or aren’t yet ready for the cloud in their own enterprise organizations. For these customers, our guidance is to use the SharePoint newsfeed until the cloud meets their needs, or they are ready to embrace the cloud service. Please be aware of Microsoft’s investments in SharePoint 2013 SP1 which will allow on-premises SharePoint users to easily integrate their Yammer network.

Author’s note: I wish I had more time to write out explanations for why you should treat social like a service in your organization – or how continual innovation and access across devices anywhere at anytime should significantly encourage customers to adopt SaaS based social enterprise tools like Yammer – but I would no doubt digress and dilute the focus of this post. So let’s just say that for now that I have a bias towards any XaaS (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) offerings you subscribe/consume over traditional assets (on prem) technologies you might purchase and upgrade every few years. So in my own words – embrace the cloud where possible. This applies to everyone. If you are a consultant and provider of services, or if you are a customer/organization looking to improve the business with technology. Social is a great case for adopting at a hybrid model for Yammer, SharePoint Online and One Drive for Business – and may be a good way to adopt a more services oriented approach versus historic asset management and implementation.

There are legitimate reasons an organization might hesitate to leverage Yammer instead of SharePoint newsfeeds. In my experience most reasons tend to be from lack of understanding – but there are a few that are legitimate and deserve to be discussed here.

If an organization has active usage and engagement on SharePoint newsfeeds and considers certain SharePoint features to be critical it may be necessary to provide workarounds or wait for an equivalent feature (or critical feature) to be available in Yammer before they move. To help keep you informed two of the reasons SharePoint newsfeed loving organizations are concerned with moving to Yammer are listed here:

• Site Based Security Inheritance – When using the SharePoint newsfeed from a site, posts to that newsfeed are automatically placed in that team site. No one can see the posts of a site where he/she does not have access to. Because the security is integrated with SharePoint, the people who can view posts of a site are the same as the people who can access the site.

  When using Yammer things are different. Because Yammer is not completely tied to SharePoint an organization would have to make a group in Yammer private if we want to prevent everyone in the network (whole company) see posts to certain groups. Private groups in Yammer will not by default have the members of those groups be the same as the members of the site (in SharePoint). To keep them in sync organizations will have to update the private group in Yammer after a member change is made to the site (or vis-a-versa).

  So this can be a major reason to hesitate using Yammer instead of SharePoint newsfeeds – but as we roll out things like unified groups (http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/25/delivering-first-chapter-groups-office-365/) or other updates this will improve the integration between SharePoint sites and Yammer groups (not to mention Outlook, Exchange, Lync and Office 365). Additionally we should think of making most groups available to everyone (public groups) where possible if we want to have an open sharing culture. If people don’t want the whole company see their conversation they can use a private group, a discussion board in SharePoint or use the private message capability in Yammer, email or Lync for this.

• Provisioning Of Yammer Groups & SharePoint Sites – While this is a minor inconvenience when performing automated site provisioning or using a request based site provisioning process by default creating a site in SharePoint will not create a group in Yammer for that site. For SharePoint Online or On Premises an extra step is needed when provisioning a site if a Yammer group feed experience is desired for that site. Keep in mind that SharePoint Community sites do not have Yammer group feeds included by default. Note that improvements to site provisioning, scripting, and unified groups (referenced above) could mitigate this over time.

So I highlighted some legitimate points where organizations are cautious… but let me be clear – even for these organizations the benefits yammer provides out weigh the additional overhead that comes with it.

Benefits to leveraging Yammer

There are many significant benefits an organization leveraging Yammer for their newsfeed has over those who are using the SharePoint newsfeed. If an organization is just starting with SharePoint newsfeeds it should be an obvious choice to move, transition or leverage Yammer over SharePoint newsfeeds going forward.

• Posting Announcements
• Polls
• Praise
• Events
• Private Messages
• Keyword Monitoring
• Embeddable Feed (In Other Places Beyond SharePoint)
• Hide Conversations
• Bookmarks
• Richer File Preview
• Richer Email Integration
• Post To Yammer (Create Newsfeed Conversation from Document Preview Pane)
• “Document Conversations” or Inline Social (http://blogs.office.com/2014/06/03/yammer-brings-conversations-to-your-onedrive-and-sharepoint-online-files/)
• “Unified Groups” (http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/25/delivering-first-chapter-groups-office-365/)
• Card View (Coming soon)
• iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 Apps! (There is no SharePoint Newsfeed Android app & functionality differences exist)
• More updates/investments coming regularly to both Yammer and Office 365! (Keep an eye on the O365 roadmap and Yammer release schedule!)

Awesome! Hopefully we are all a bit more onboard with Yammer than when we started – or at least more informed.

What are the other issues that aren’t as significant?

Now comes the next question that I expect in the comments section or from fellow colleagues out there… if those two were the legitimate reasons (in my opinion) then what are the other reasons people give and why aren’t they as concerning?

• Duplicate functionality:
  This is always a concern, but most of the duplication deals with newsfeeds in SharePoint which have clear directions/guidance for how to disable and replace with Yammer. At the beginning of this post I highlighted that it is better to have some duplication if it means greater adoption or more targeted capabilities so I am hard pressed in my experiences with customers, partners and Microsoft to think of a scenario where this is really a show stopper or that hasn’t been addressed in roadmaps and the duplication isn’t based on some legacy. (Let me know if you think otherwise.)
• Cost:
  The only reason this could be a concern is if the costs of setting up a hybrid model to consume Office 365 services like Yammer were considered cost prohibitive for the business. A transition to the cloud has cost benefits (due to how the cloud is priced) so it’s only when doing a mixed environment that I see this brought up as a concern. At the same time I think there are few things that are a better investment than finding a path to the cloud and better cloud integration with your on premises technology investments. As a result I don’t see this as being an issue – especially with the funding programs Microsoft has, the competitive pricing of services that support this (as it’s very common nowadays with great guidance published), investments in onboarding that Microsoft has been making, and the fact that organizations realize value almost immediately upon completing the hybrid work (once you start using – you immediately start to receive value in SaaS solutions).
• Search:
  One of my favorite subjects and something that is brought up often. There are hybrid search investments for SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-premises that make it possible to create search experiences that enable users to search across each or both collections. In addition to this it is very easy to perform a search in Yammer and you can always add link to search yammer directly from any SharePoint search page. Delve (http://blogs.office.com/2014/09/08/milestone-office-delve/) also will search across Office 365 (including Lync and Exchange as well as Yammer and SharePoint). Directionally I feel that this is less of an issue – but is something that should be planned for and considered when you plan your enterprise search strategy. Certainly understanding what the experience will be like – and how long you will be in a hybrid mode between on prem and online would be important to note. The two search experiences (Yammer and SharePoint Online) being different is mitigated with Delve and other investments but is something that organizations live with. It technically provides some benefit in that each experience is ‘more targeted’ in each platform. Since Yammer searches based on ‘date’ relevancy – Yammer content tends to be more relevant for a certain time period versus the way SharePoint searches more extensively with greater filtering options more in line with an enterprise search service for knowledge management scenarios. Though I will be the first to say I wish we had a more comprehensive search and discovery experience across both technologies (and Delve is a great step in that direction).
• Security:
  Highlighted the only real concern above. This can be managed manually and is managed that way at many organizations today without issue. I personally haven’t seen this be an issue as organizations only have this come up often when doing significant integration with SharePoint and are bringing Yammer groups up into SharePoint sites or to support processes/workflows that live in SharePoint. In these circumstances solutions and workarounds are developed (sometimes just manual ones) that are worth the benefits Yammer provides over SharePoint newsfeeds and they don’t occur with significant frequency. Still worth considering (as highlighted above).
• Following:
  So there is a notion of ‘following’ in Yammer where people you connect and follow with have specific Yammer posts that you might be interested in keeping up to date on. In SharePoint you can also follow documents (for bookmarking purposes) and Sites (for bookmarking purposes). These are all still valid. Microsoft made improvements to following sites with Site Folders in Office 365 (http://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive-for-business-updates-web-user-experience/). So the issue here is normally that following A) doesn’t really work across SharePoint environments in a Hybrid configuration (SharePoint Online and SharePoint On Prem) to which you should have the social and primary place be SharePoint Online and SharePoint on prem should really be for heavily customized environments or very specialized needs – or the issue is B) that following content provided additional notifications in the newsfeed service in SharePoint. B) is mitigated by the fact that we have features like Alerting in SharePoint, or other methods for ‘staying on top of’ key events. Additionally Yammer is pretty easy to leverage from an API/Open Graph perspective and you can add in not just notification/posts from specific SharePoint workflows or processes, but you can also extend that to any other system/service you are leveraging.
• On Prem Only:
  In these circumstances if you can’t adopt the cloud’s capabilities then using SharePoint’s capabilities or some of the third party providers is the way for you to go (though caution should be suggested for heavily customizing or heavily customized add on products). Even if you go this route you should have a plan for when and how you will eventually consume cloud based services (or know exactly what is stopping you to monitor in case that reason changes or becomes a non issue). My thoughts on this have been pretty clear here. Cloud first and XaaS investments are better in majority of circumstances than asset/on prem investments (when equivalent functionality and offerings are available).
• Profile Complexity:
  The ability to add user profile properties and fields in SharePoint online exists today and this can be useful for a variety of situations. People search in SharePoint also can be useful as can searching for people in Yammer to see what conversations and other things they have been up to. Additionally Yammer has a profile for each user and today those are not the same profile as the one used in SharePoint. Users are still using a consistent password, username and authenticating – earlier this year Microsoft made this easier (http://blogs.office.com/2014/02/18/simplified-login-to-yammer-from-office-365/) and there is a publically disclosed item on the roadmap around simplifying the logon experience with Yammer further. So the issue is really users may need to fill out more than one profile and that for different reasons you may want to visit their profile in SharePoint or in Yammer. This is fairly common in the public space (linkedin, facebook, Skype etc) so users are actually familiar with this. If someone is interested in using Yammer and is a Yammer contributor expect that you will run into no issues getting them to fill out their profile – and since the biggest benefit it provides is improving discovery of that individuals contributions (meaning they are participating actively on Yammer) – this doesn’t result in an issue. Keeping in mind that directionally we should see consolidation based on Azure AD/Office 365 on things like this over time.
• What about OneNote, Wikis, Blogs, and more?
  Most of the other issues I hear revolve around blogs, wikis, team OneNote documents versus notes or conversations in Yammer. These each serve different purposes and are complimentary. I struggle to find real issues here beyond just having many options – perhaps too many – for users. That’s where governance, guidance, coaching, and leadership can drive better direction and support for when to use what… and I struggle to find something really significant as an issue that an organization has run into here – especially as the Office 365 services continue to mature.

Did I miss anything? Let me know and I would love to share a response or thoughts around it.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge

Recently at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference I presented a session on when to build, buy, or customize SharePoint (and when not to). This post summarizes the session and where you can watch it for free or leverage the slides for your own purposes.

Determining when to use SharePoint, build customizations that extend SharePoint, buy third party products, or to ignore SharePoint all together can be very challenging. It requires an understanding of SharePoint’s strengths, weaknesses, and gaps as well as an understanding of how they apply to the business problems you are trying to solve. In this session, we explored decisions other organizations have made, criteria they used to evaluate their options, lessons they learned, and how they approached these difficult decisions.

When Should We Use SharePoint OOTB, Add Third Party Products, Or Build Custom Solutions? SPC14 from Richard Harbridge

The full session recording can be watched and downloaded here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC270.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge

I recently discovered that the two presentations I delivered at the previous Microsoft SharePoint Conference are available on Channel9!

Out of my 135,000+ slideshare views I know the majority relate the variations of my Seven Success Factors For SharePoint deck – so in case anyone is ever looking for a recorded copy – here is one! Plus a really fun one around Sustainable SharePoint Strategies!

By the time I presented these two decks I had done variations of each presentation at a great many SharePoint User Groups, SharePoint Saturdays and other SharePoint events! So thank you to every audience member I have ever had who gave me feedback and helped me clean, refine, and deliver my message.

Succeeding With SharePoint In Seven Steps

The Keys To A Sustainable SharePoint Strategy

Hope this helps,
Richard

We all know that we should always aim to automate and improve our business processes more. Many organizations reap enormous benefits from improving the way they work alone or with other people through enabling technologies like SharePoint. The big question is how do we start? Or perhaps which processes or workflows should we automate and improve first? This article dives into this issue and offers advice and recommendations based on successful experiences with many customers.

The Question (And Why It’s So Hard)

There is a challenge for many organizations starting to adopt SharePoint (or any similar systems) workflow automation models. Fortunately it doesn’t always come up, but when it does it can be difficult. The question that often comes up goes something like this…

Scenario 1:

• Customer: We have SharePoint and would like to do workflows, which workflows should we do?

• SharePoint Expert: Well what business processes are you struggling with and finding painful?

• Customer:  Which ones are other organizations, or business units building workflows for? How are they using it?

• SharePoint Expert: A number of ways, but they aren’t you and their needs might be quite a bit different…

• Customer: Well why don’t we start there (because I don’t really know, or want to invest significant effort yet into understanding our needs).

 Scenario 2:

• Customer: Tell me where SharePoint workflow might be useful for our business group.

• SharePoint Expert: Before I can do that let’s talk about your processes and look for those that are most amenable to automation.

• Customer: That’s going to take time, why don’t you start by telling me what has worked elsewhere, or what other people are doing with workflow?

We know that this is a challenge and often we begin explaining a business process that isn’t like their own, or give a list of potential processes but without a clear idea of what that customers processes are.

Another Challenge: The Types Of “Workflows” We Can Build

There are multiple options for building a SharePoint workflow varying in complexity.

1. The simplest workflow is one where a single piece of metadata changes to indicate the workflow’s state; e.g. draft, in progress, pending, approved, etc.
2. The more complex workflows use SharePoint’s out of the box (OOTB) workflow capabilities; three state workflows, approval workflows, document feedback workflows, etc.
3. Then there are those that require custom notification messages, or specialized conditions/steps which might be able to be done with SharePoint Designer, or an appropriate 3rd party product (Nintex, K2, etc).
4. Finally we have complex workflows that will need to be developed in Visual Studio due to their nature or a sufficiently powerful business process automation tool.

So it’s critical you either iterate and slowly improve the workflow by making your way up this triangle of complexity, or that you use the appropriate solution set and approach for each ‘type’ of workflow you are automating and improving.

Authors Note: Ruven Gotz (a phenomenal Information Architecture and SharePoint leader) suggested that the simplest workflows can actually be accomplished/managed with no ‘workflow’ at all, but actually just metadata changes.

Rules For Automating Or Improving A Business Process

So if this is such a challenge what are the ‘rules’ for engaging a customer around workflow?

These are the most important rules for automating and improving business processes:

You need to understand the process and should have it mapped out fully.

• I can’t tell you how many SOP’s or structured documents I have ‘mapped’ and discovered numerous exceptions, missing conditional paths, and lack of critical detail that would have come out later (with greater impact/cost) in the workflow process had I not mapped it originally.
• If you have done this before you will find it easy to do quickly (depending on how many gaps in documentation/knowledge there are) and often will also help greatly accelerate the speed of developing the workflow itself (whether in SharePoint Designer, 3rd party tools, or Visual Studio).
• This is the single biggest reason why many workflow automation projects fail. If you find it’s challenging to map the process then only map a part of it that you feel able to successfully map and automate or improve that part.
• I recommend using Visio with swim lanes. Typically I don’t do this in front of a customer, but as an exercise on my own machine, or as a follow up/preparation for a customer process discussion.

In order to measure improvement (which is critical) you must first have a baseline or original understanding of key elements in the process.

• Sarah Haase (a phenomenal ROI & SharePoint leader) has done some great stuff in this space.
• Example of Baseline: [Time to Complete 1 Iteration] x [Number of Iterations] x [Hourly rate] = [Process Cost]
  • Example of ROI: The difference between the related cost before, and the related cost now, or the related revenue before and the related revenue now.
• Example of Baseline: 30 Minutes x 52 times/year x $50/hour = $1,300.00. We then scale this by the number of people impacts (this is done by…) 50 people for a total potential cost of $65,000.00.
  • If we reduce this to 10 minutes for each iteration (keeping the rest the same) that means it now only costs approximately $21,666.67 and the changes resulted in a potential savings of approximately $43,333.33 per year.
• Make certain to measure the impact over time (not immediately – but often a few months after to ensure adoption is there).

Always collect serious anecdotes from people impacted by the changes to the process (over time).

• Susan Hanley (a phenomenal ROI & SharePoint leader) has done some great stuff in this space.
• It is important when an incident is resolved or an enhancement is provided a follow up is done to identify what value it provides. In the persons own words – how does it make their job easier/better?

Understand The Process: What Questions Should We Ask?

So what should we know about a workflow at a minimum in order to be able to automate or improve it with SharePoint?

• Process Details:
  • What is the name of the process?
  • Who are the actors of the process?
  • What are the systems involved in the process?
  • What are the pre-conditions for this process taking place?
  • What are the post conditions after this process has taken place?
  • How long does the process take right now?
    • If there are outliers or exceptions to the typical duration what are the causes for this?
  • How frequently does this process take place?
• Process Deep Dive:
  • What are the existing pain points in the process?
    • Examples:
      • Tracking and Reporting
      • Exception Handling
      • Filling Out Forms
      • Notifying Participants
      • Etc
  • What are the ‘exceptions’ in the process?
  • Where in the process are there escalation paths?
    • What are these paths?
  • What are the existing documents or artifacts used/leveraged within the process?
  • What are the related processes?
    • Related tasks?
  • What is the process? (Process mapping activities.)
  • What are the permissions and privacy considerations throughout the process?
• Potential Outcomes:
  • Process Map
    • All Steps
    • All Forms/Documents
    • All Exceptions
    • All Actors/Roles
    • All Reports
  • Form Wireframes
    • Key Forms/Documents Will Have Wireframes
  • Use Cases/Usage Scenarios/User Stories
    • Depending On Complexity

Good Workflow Candidates

What makes a good process candidate for workflow automation or improvement?

• Approvals and reviews of any content or internal items make for good candidates.
• Confirmation of completed steps (untracked processes that with visibility and tracking would be improved). Think of a process like tracking financial review by investment analysts and data analysts for key accounts where notification and visibility are critical when so many people are working together.
• Automatic assignment of tasks/work (upon conditions being met) – think about document generation or things like proposal generation.
• A process that is missing due date reminders or escalation, but where there are significant risks/challenges if things aren’t escalated. Think of longer running help desk or requisition processes, or even onboarding.
• Look for anything that is a structured excel document people fill out/work on. Most of these are low hanging fruit not just for lists, but also for supportive workflow automation.
• When there is provisioning (like SharePoint sites, but also for things like provisioning new equipment, software, etc) often there is a need for a better process – especially when this is paper based right now, or using extremely inflexible forms.
• Lastly look for scenarios where an existing electronic form simply doesn’t auto populate things, and is a pain to fill out – often these are easy to rebuild in SharePoint and can simply be easier to process/fill out and maintain over time (the most IT driven scenario).

Named Workflow Examples

Still not sure and unable to identify a workflow process that might be ready for SharePoint workflow to help? Remember that whatever workflows you start with the ones that have the most meaningful impact are those that are key to the work people do every day. As an example while automating and improving absence reporting and vacation scheduling may be easy and a good way to learn how SharePoint workflows work – it won’t result in a sizable ROI or improvement in most people’s work.

Try taking a look at this list of generic ideas and see if one sparks some interest for you:

• Absence Reporting and Vacation Scheduling
• Expense Reimbursement
• Equipment and Room Reservation and Management
• Meeting Planning and Management
• Policy Review and Approval
• Booking Travel
• Interview Management and Hiring Processes
• Training Sign Up and Management
• Event Planning
• Change Request Management
• Timecard/Time Tracking
• Product Planning
• Help Desk Ticket Management
• Compliance Support
• Investment/Account Management/Review
• Contacts Management
• Inventory Tracking
• Lending Tracking
• Sales Lead Pipeline Review
• Sales Forecasting

Hope this helps and best of luck in automating your processes. If you have more questions please share them in the comments.
Richard

On a regular basis I have had people ask me for examples of SharePoint branded intranets. The challenges are that A) most customers don’t want to share their intranets, B) many designers and partners have this in their own managed portfolios, and C) great contests/orgs have collections of them for paid subscription/purchase. The purpose of this post is to highlight a resource I am making public that I hope will help mitigate some of these challenges.

I have whipped up an Intranet example page here (w/ 30+ Intranet Homepage Designs/Examples). This page contains some SharePoint based design examples or screens of intranets from online web searches. This collection is ONLY meant to give ideas, show similarities, and give some organizations a bit of understanding that Intranet design can be quite different from website design.

My recommendation to anyone reading this:

• Make certain you connect with a great partner near you who has done this kind of work to see their portfolio.
• Check out great contests like the Worldwide Intranet Challenge or the Intranet Design Annual by Nielsen.
• If you are a customer and want to see other customer Intranets sometimes intranet groups share these sorts of things internally (based on membership) through organizers like my friends at JBoye.
• If you are a customer please scrub and share an example of your Intranet online so that others can benefit from your great work/investment and so you can show off how incredible the internal resources are at XYZ.

If you have any concerns with how I approached this, or what I have done so far please let me know. If you enjoy this resource and find it helpful please also let me know and I will continue to add more to it based on your feedback/suggestions.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge

Based on many migration engagements Portal Solutions and I wrote a short and easy to read free SharePoint migration guidance document that is now available for download. If you struggle with understanding what you need to think about, consider, and plan for when preparing for a SharePoint migration hopefully this document will help you and save you time.

SharePoint content migration can be a potentially risky, time consuming, and costly endeavor if you don’t understand the pitfalls and best practices.Whether they are triggered by a desire to move away from file shares and legacy systems, or triggered by a desire to upgrade from previous versions of SharePoint – they are a common activity most SharePoint practitioners have to tackle sooner or later.

This whitepaper breaks down some of the key decisions you must face and provides practical tips to effectively plan for your migration. It includes 200+ questions you should ask your SharePoint migration vendor and contains input from many migration vendors in the SharePoint ecosystem.

Short Whitepaper: Tough Migration Decisions – Making The Right Choices

There should be more great guidance coming so stay tuned and be sure to check out SharePointReviews.com if you haven’t taken a look at many of the great SharePoint migration vendors that are out there.

Hope this helps,
Richard Harbridge