Easy set up

if you’re someone who’s new to SharePoint or need an environment to practice on, CloudShare is a great solution. In many organizations it can be difficult to get a virtual machine spun up so that you can practice various configuration options. The ability of CloudShare to spin up an environment quickly and easily is simply awesome because now everyone can have their own environment to play around in.

Practice, practice, practice

People ask how you get better with SharePoint and the answer is that you practice! For the SharePoint Analyst the need to have a good understanding of the out-of-the-box capabilities, maybe some SharePoint designer skills, some infrastructure knowledge and maybe some development skills you need to have an environment the can customize all for yourself.

CloudShare allows me to create an environment that I can essentially practice on and rip to shreds without affecting anything else. In addition I get the ability to snapshot in case I screw anything up, which is happened more than once Unfortunately you and get the ability to store one snapshot which kind of sucks but I’m hoping that the good people at CloudShare read this article

Less cost and better back

if I wanted to run SharePoint environment consisting of more than a single server on my laptop it’d be pretty expensive to purchase, in addition to being heavy. CloudShare but saves my back and cost because now I get to run around with an ultrathin laptop and then spin up an environment whenever I want.

I also love the ability the you can create a fully fledged environment within CloudShare adding multiple servers in just the same way as you would if you are running it on physical hardware. For someone who is getting into SharePoint infrastructure, or for the SharePoint analyst who wants to delve in this area, this is a great way to be able to practice.

Sharing with clients

You can also share your CloudShare environments with other people and I have done this frequently when I’m either doing a simple proof of concept or demonstrating platform capabilities of SharePoint. If I was to do this on a locally hosted virtual machine and when I walked out the door my clients would lose the opportunity to play around tinker (and who doesn’t like to tinker!). However with CloudShare I can send them a URL and when they try to access the CloudShare environment it would spin up and they can happily play around.

Now there are some limitations with this in terms of the time that external users can use a shared copy but this isn’t a bad thing since this frequently launches people into action.

Solution showcase

Part of my job is to be aware of the masses of third-party products that are out there for SharePoint. To provide my clients real value in it have an understanding of what third-party solutions may possibly solve the business issues and provide them value. However it’s time-consuming and cumbersome to download third-party products, install them and play around with them.

The CloudShare solution showcase allows me to download a number of pre-build virtual machines that contain a number of different third-party products or solutions already built. For me this is awesome as it allows me to play around with other elements in the Microsoft stack such as exchange, check out third-party products and also view some prebuilt solutions.

If you are just getting into SharePoint and need a place to practice, we need some more sophisticated capabilities and really like CloudShare. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Therein lies the problem. For the normal user the word ‘collaboration’ has as much meaning as the word ‘Team Site’. Collaboration, as pointed out by luminaries such as Paul Culmsee, is a means to an end. You don’t collaborate for the sake of collaboration, you collaborate to solve a business process, issue or provide some tangible outcome.

The same applies for Team Sites. I am sure that Microsoft didn’t think that customers would be having these types of conversations:

End User: So what site template should I use if I want to run my project, answer a RFP, communicate information to people, have a like minded group of users exchange ideas, process an invoice, create a new procedure or …

SharePoint Guy: Oh yeah that’s easy just use a Team Site.

End User: Team Site? But a team of what? Sports team? A teamsters union? And when I create one there is just generic stuff that doesn’t apply to me. It contains a tasks list but is this a tasks list that relates to tasks I assign to people in the RFP process or tasks that I assign to others in my department?

Why don’t team sites work that well?

The answer is context. Team Sites provide no working context to users in much the same way as you handing me a document and telling me ‘This is a document’. I *know* its a document, but what the hell should I do with it?

Let me give you another example. Let say that I work in a large organization and I use a file share:

Some senisbly named top level folders, are Team Sites also sensibly named?

This simple folder structure provides a very simple information architecture to our users that at least gives them a guideline to how they should start working. If I was looking for an Invoice chances are I would start browsing in the ‘Invoices’ folder. The same with goes for RFP Proposals. One thing that you don’t see in fileshares are folders called ‘Stuff’ or god forbid ‘Shared Documents’.

So why do we provide our users with out of the box Team Sites that contain a bunch of senseless containers for information that offer no guidance as to what they should be doing with these things (Shared Documents, Discussions, Tasks, Announcements and so on)? A SharePoint Site is simply a medium with which to accomplish a business goal, outcome or process. You need to provide your users with clear guidance around what function the site will serve. Simply telling them to use a Team Site is not going to provide clear context to users working within.

Further exacerbating this is that now not only do users not have any idea where to store things, they now have little idea about how to store them. With the new capabilities that SharePoint offers beyond that of a simple fileshare users are further confused about what is the best medium for their content. So should be they putting a team meeting in the shared calendar, or should it go in the announcements list or maybe they should email out to everyone and store it in a document library?

The Fix?

The fix is to inject the context that users need into the sites that you create. To accomplish that you need liberal doses of Information Architecture, an understanding of user requirements, an appreciation of the processes they are using all combined with the SharePoint configuration options that leverage this (metadata, content types, document and list naming, navigation and so on).

Now let me ask you to imagine a world without the Team Site template! Before I get hate mails and you spit out your coffee on your keyboard stay with me on this. If you deleted the Team Site template in SharePoint what would you replace it with? Well it would be a set of templates that are specific to a set of outcomes. In our example above we would have the following:

1. RFP Proposal Site
2. Project Site
3. Invoice Payment Site
4. Community of Practice
5. Engineering Proposals

What I have done is kept the same elements that a Team Site has ( Calendar, Tasks, Documents and Discussions) but now have provide some context to users to they know exactly that this document library isn’t for random documents, its for RFP working documents, the calendar isn’t a random calendar it’s a calendar to store events and milestones specific to the RFP process. I also removed that horrible photo (I think that they should get the models at the next SharePoint conference) and changed the title of the homepage. Simple steps but all of a sudden you can easily tell where information should be stored and how it should be stored.

How about we go one step further, another 15 minutes and add some other pertinent information that already comes with this base template:

Now all of this with 20 minutes of out of the box configuration. However I assure you that if you navigated to this site, or worked within it, you would instantly be aware of the purpose of the site, where content should be located and what business process, goal or objective this site is meant to facilitate.

Although this seems like a trivial example it provides tremendous value to users on a number of levels:

1. You provide context to the site. No longer is this just a site, its a site for specific purpose, goal or objective. 
2. It allows you to use the nomenclature of your organization ensuring greater adoption and easier training
3. It gives the site added purpose. There is a clear definition of what the site is supposed to do, users do not have to hunt around and determine what they are looking at or what they are supposed to do.
4. As the site templates are specific to the business end users are under the impression that a custom solution has been built to their needs. It has, but is so simple to do!

While that’s only half true, below are some more thoughts on this topic from recent observations and in addition to the characteristics that Michal introduced in his article 2 years ago (leveraging the platform; act as an advisor; the importance of technical and personal skills; demonstrating passion, compassion, restraint, sense of humor, and humbleness). Some of these are not necessarily unique to being a SharePoint analyst but characteristics important for many professionals in IT.

SharePoint is the domain, you are the Analyst  

SharePoint or not, an analyst must define and plan the requirements gathering and management approach; identify who the stakeholders are and use requirements elicitation and analysis techniques appropriate to the project and the audience.

A SharePoint Analyst isn’t as much about finding ways an organization can use the tools and features available in SharePoint, but rather how SharePoint can support an organization and its processes, people, information, policies, and procedures. In other words, it’s about the business first and what role SharePoint plays in facilitating the things that people need to do at work every day.  Whether it’s a contract approval process or a records retention policy or using metadata to identify and organize documents, you need to find the best way for SharePoint to accomodate the requirements.

Your expertise in the SharePoint domain is a combination of your experience, expert judgement, knowledge of the technology and knowledge of the industry it is operating in (E.g. energy, healthcare, education etc.).

Be a problem solver

To solve a problem you must first define and understand the problem.  It is then your role to identify the solution alternatives, communicate the trade-offs with each alternative, ask lots of questions, challenge assumptions and help stakeholders make the necessary decisions.

When SharePoint out-of-the-box features are not enough to satisfy the requirements, there are a few options.  Look for workarounds and/or facilitate a buy (use 3rd party tools) vs. build (custom development) decision and communicate the benefits and trade-offs for each alternative. This all comes down to knowing how important the requirement is and how much the business is willing to invest.

Ask questions and communicate

At a high level, you should be able to answer the following questions and communicate them effectively.  By no means is this a complete list and as always you have to ask even more questions in order to answer these questions!  You may not (or should not) be the only person coming up with the answers, but in order to communicate requirements, assumptions and measures of success, these are some of the things that need to be understood by everyone involved on the project. The method of communication could be formal, informal, documented or verbal (or a combination) – whatever works for your stakeholders.

• Who are the stakeholders and what is their involvement and influence level?
• What is the problem we are trying to solve or the opportunity we are trying to promote?
• What is the gap between the current capabilities and the solution objectives?
• What are the high priority requirements (the key things this solution must deliver)?
• What are the main benefits this solution will provide?
• How can we measure the success of our SharePoint implementation?
• What should we measure? What are the assumptions? (Assumptions are present at every level. These are the things you believe to be true but has not yet been confirmed)
• Which requirements cannot be delivered and what are the constraints preventing it? (technical or business)
• What are the impacts to the business? (these are financial impacts, impacts to process, technology and people/roles etc.)

Be a teacher

Whether you are the Business Analyst, SharePoint Analyst or SharePoint Business Analyst; chances are you’ll also be required to provide training, demonstrations, prototypes or proof of concepts to gain buy-in and solicit early feedback.  This includes showing stakeholders how to use a completed (or semi-completed) solution to solicit input or even providing training on basic SharePoint capabilities (tailored around key end-user tasks) to gain comfort with the technology.  The more your stakeholders understand and are comfortable with the solution, the better the feedback, which leads to better requirements and a better solution.

Just like any good teacher, it is important to know how your students (in this case, stakeholders) learn new information and tailor your training and communications accordingly (visual learners? learn by doing? learn by reading and hearing?).  Don’t teach them everything there is to know about SharePoint (it’s your job to know the technology), but teach them how to perform their key tasks and find the information they need to do their jobs.  SharePoint just happens to be the platform they are using.

Be a student

While the organization and end users are learning about SharePoint, you are learning about the organization.  No implementation will provide value if you don’t learn what value means to them.  This is often different for every organization so don’t assume you know this better than they do.  This is dependent on the problems and opportunities the business is facing and the ones that provides the most benefits and has the highest impact.

Learn the current capabilities of the organization to understand what additional capabilities are required in order to meet the objectives.  Be aware of the organization’s industry, culture, offerings (products & services), infrastructure, organizational structures and operational processes and policies (regulatory and compliance requirements). Under every rock there will be information that adds to your requirements.  I’m not suggesting you turn over every single rock, so know which ones you’ll need to explore as part of your project scope.  Find the people around you that can provide this information (you’ll meet a lot of people along the way!).

At a more granular level, learn what motivates your end users and key stakeholders and how the organization gets things done.  As much as possible, learn and use the terminology and jargon that the organization understands.

Knowledge of these elements help you understand the constraints, assumptions and boundaries of the solution.

Build trust

All of the points above lead to building trust.  A SharePoint implementation involves change (big or small) that impacts how people work.  For this reason, the SharePoint analyst is an agent of change.  You are in a role to influence behavior, overcome resistance and address concerns.

Love SharePoint!  Love it for what it is and what it isn’t. 

Knowing what SharePoint is and what it isn’t frees you from the idea that this needs to be exactly perfect for everybody or solve every problem.  Look for the high impact items as well as the “quick wins” that will leverage SharePoint in the right way.  It also allows you to perform all of the points above effectively.  Afterall, what makes you an expert in the SharePoint domain is how well you know the product and its capabilities and how well you can marry the strengths and constraints of the system with the strengths, weaknesses and boundaries of the organization.

This year is particularly cool because if you haven’t heard there might be a new version of SharePoint in the works, but who knows. Either way thanks to all those people that have had to sit through me talking about SharePoint, all those that read this blog and keep those great stories of how SharePoint is changing the way you work and your organization coming!

I look forward to doing some more conferences and to start blogging a little more regularly again now that I am back.

Fortunately the gracious people at the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences were nice enough to allow us to present our ramblings with the session below:

“Yes but…” is a common answer given by experienced SharePoint consultants when asked if a particular solution design “will work”. One of the key reasons for this is that SharePoint’s greatest strength is one of its weaknesses. The sheer number of components or features jam packed into the product, means that there are many complex interactions between them – often with small gotchas or large caveats that were not immediately apparent while the sales guy was dutifully taking you through the SharePoint pie diagram.

Unfortunately, some organizations trip up on such untested assumptions at times, and in turn it can renders the logical edifice of their solution design invalid. This is costly in terms of lost time to change approaches, but increased complexity since sometimes workarounds are worse than the caveats. In this fun, lively and interactive session, Michal Pisarek will put his MVP (not really) on the line, and with a little help from Paul Culmsee, examine some of SharePoint’s common caveats. Make no mistake, understanding these caveats and the approaches for mitigating them will save you considerable time, money and heartache.

Don’t miss this informative and eye opening session!

Now this is not meant to be a session where by we complain about some of the various limitations that SharePoint may contain or curse the name of Microsoft. Let’s be honest, considering the sheer breadth  and depth of the product , the many features that it offers, it is a superbly engineered piece of software that we have all experienced.

But there are those occasions where love turns to frustration which turns to pulling your hair out and you feel like my little friend below.

In that light lets take a warts and all look at some of the most common caveats, the things that you should be aware of that could trip you up when implementing SharePoint.

However that is only half the story because for every caveat there is usually a workaround! We will attempt to both provide you with a selection of the best caveats that we can find along with the best way to mitigate these issues and get you back on track.

But we need your help! To make a truly great session we want to hear the caveats that have stopped you in your tracks and left you scratching your head. So please let us know your caveats by leaving a comment below or submit them to michalpisarek@sharepointanlysthq.com

Its going to be a super interactive session with us sharing our experiences and asking the audience for theirs. So if you are up for something a little bit different than the standard talk and want to learn and have some fun we would love to see you there.

Whilst maybe not the best solution there is a number of ways that you can edit Managed Metadata fields that may make the process of updating these fields easier.

So lets assume that we have the following Document Library below. The column ‘Category’ is a Managed Metadata column that we associated a specific category to a document that exists in this library:

Document library with a Managed Metadata column called category

Standard Browser Editing

As with other columns you can always edit Managed Metadata columns through the Web Interface quickly and easily. There are a number of ways to get to editing the item but either way you will end up with being able to type-ahead or select a value from a list of options. Remember though that this will only let you edit one item at a time:

Editing one item at a time

Office Client Editing

The other way to edit Managed Metadata is through the Office client interface. You can go into the backstage view and perform the same operation as through the standard browser option above. However you need to have Office 2010, Managed Metadata columns are NOT supported to be editing in Office 2007:

Office client editing

Inline Editing

This is a great feature that hardly gets any mention but it works great for Managed Metadata fields. If you have inline editing enabled you can edit Managed Metadata (and other fields) in place without having to go into another screen. I think of it as the poor mans datasheet since you cannot make changes to more than one item at a time, but it does save considerable time editing metadata:

Using Inline Editing

Document Set Shared Columns

Out of the box there is only one way to bulk edit Managed Metadata fields and that is by using a Document Set, creating a managed metadata column, and then setting it as shared. So lets assume that I have a Document Set that I use to store Project Documents:

Project Document Set

Once I have created the Document Set and added my Managed Metadata columns to the set, I select the column that I want to share across all content in the set as Shared:

Making the Customer column shared

Now if I edit the properties of the Document Set all the values of my shared column called ‘Customer’ will change and be propagated to the contents contained within:

Changing the Shared Column

Updated documents within the Document Set

So as you can see there are a number of ways to edit Managed Metadata fields in SharePoint 2010. Although there isn’t an ideal solution to get around the Datasheet issue its good to know that there are plenty of options available.

Providing leading collaboration and social tools in order to synergize your existing informational assets.

I have to admit that I used to sprout this kind of crap as well, because I though that it made me sound smart. But honestly when speaking to CEO’s, CIO’s and End Users they don’t want to hear this non-sensical garbage. What they want to hear as stories and examples of where SharePoint made a measurable and tangible difference in an organization.

So I have changed my tune! SharePoint Business Value comes in many forms but here are the ones that seem to resonate with clients that I talk to. They are simple one liners that I can quickly relate to users to help them understand the various capabilities that the platform offers:

Co-Authoring RFP Documents before a deadline

Its 6 people editing a single document a one time. Its the time savings meaning that people get to go home on time. Its that the Executive Assistant can format the document at the same time that others are making changes. It’s the difference between getting the RFP in on time, or missing a big business opportunity:

Recognizing a Face

Its about coming in on the first day of a new job and having people greet me because they saw my profile featured on the Intranet. Its about become part of a new organization quicker since I know information about my workmates. Its knowing that even though I have never met a person that I work with everyday I know what they look like.

Finding Experts

Its finding experts in the organization so that I don’t have to research information that others are intricately familiar with. It’s knowing who to talk to in an organization. Its find out that who you know is sometimes more important than what you know!

Find what I was looking for

It’s being able to find a document that I was working with only a couple of hours ago without tearing my hair out. Its about being able to use views in order to see content in a completely different way just by using metadata. Its really about just finding the content when I need, quickly.

Driving Change

Its being able to communicate a message to all staff in one location. About providing them the ability to engage with executives by providing comments to announcements or blog articles. About knowing what is happening in the organization by following particular keywords.

Automating A Process

Its about helping people do what they are good at, and automating stuff that takes time. Its about being automatically notified when to review a document. Its knowing where a document is in a review cycle without needing to email 10 people.

So what are your examples? Let me know what they are maybe we can make this a great resource to demonstrate simple, tangible examples of the business value that SharePoint can bring.

In this case study the client was  a large engineering firm that did extremely complex work. Many of the senior engineers had a wealth of knowledge around certain areas but most tended to work in long term project teams. In some cases long term project work meant that teams formed and rarely did other outside of the project know of the incredible wealth of knowledge that was been uncovered.

The issue this organization faced was that the junior engineers frequently had to perform research on various items – dam tailings for example. Whilst they could find content that referred to a specific topic area how did they know that they could trust the content? What if they had questions about the topic area? A considerable amount of time was spent researching topics that could simply be circumvented by the wisdom that a senior engineer could impart, but who were these people?

The solution implemented was to leverage the SharePoint 2010 User Profile capabilities and allow users to fill in their areas of expertise. It also allowed them to insert other pertinent information such as their qualifications, past projects and experience. The User Profile fields that were created relied on an open taxonomy whereby users had the option of reusing an existing term or adding their own. Considerable cost savings were realized because users were essentially creating their own taxonomy.

Various expertise shown in each Users Profile

All the fields were then exposed in search allowing all employees to search for users by expertise. Now junior engineers could quickly and easily not only find relevant content, but also relevant experts for a topic area.

Profile information available in search results

The Outcome

An interesting part of this is that the User Profile were leveraged for tangible business use. Too many organization fails to see the possibilities that these social tools can provide from a pure business context.

Two significant outcomes occurred as part of this social endeavor. Firstly there was a huge saving in time and increase in quality of the work that junior engineers did. Now not only could they find static content but they could tap into the vast wealth of experience that existed in the organization. Previously only long serving staff knew who the person in the know was, the social features of SharePoint democratized the process so that all staff could tap into that fountain of experience.

Secondly it quickly became apparent where areas of improvement needed to happen. In fact some Senior Engineers were receiving so many requests that they wanted to be removed from the system. However a better approach was established. The senior engineers started a blog on their MySite that contained answers to many of the frequently asked questions they were receiving. All of a sudden the gold mine of tacit knowledge trapped in workers became a tangible commodity that the organization could use.

The Process

The implementation of this particular initiative was relatively simple from a business standpoint and consisted of the following elements:

1. Determine the type of information that the organization wanted to capture
2. Determine the taxonomy of the information (Closed set of options, completely open or a hybrid approach)
3. Communicate the need for all staff to fill in their profile
4. Provide training on how to fill in the profile and how to search for experts

The most important part was the communication that this tool could be leveraged by anyone in the organization and that it should be kept up to date.

Conclusion

This case study is a great example of how out of the box SharePoint features can provide tangible business value. The cost savings of being able to access experts when needed can be immense, although it can be difficult to measure quantitatively.

Here are some tips from my experience that can help overcome this.

Encouraging Executive Adoption

One of the most fundamental mistakes that organizations make when rolling out profiles is not leading by example. Users will not follow if the executive team is not leading by example and the most powerful statement that a CEO or CIO can make in adoption of User Profiles is to ensure that they are up to date and to actively use it.

Bear in mind the the CEO’s profile will probably be the profile that will be visited the most, so it has to be filled in according to the policies the organization has established. If the CEO is not inline with the policies then it is highly unlikely that the organization will follow. Remember that actions speak louder than words and a profile that is completed from the CEO has immense sway over the perceptions of others.

Another tip is that if the executive team has assistants that could fill in their profile, SharePoint 2010 allows you to define an assistant on the profile that then can fill in the details without other users knowing. Sneaky, but in the battle for adoption, very valuable. Check out the post here.

Effective Communication

You need to communicate what the purpose of the User Profile in the organization. A bad example of communication is this:

As part of our SharePoint roll out each user has a profile. Please be sure to fill out the fields necessary in your profile by March 23rd 2010

Thanks,
Mr Horrible CEO

A much better example is to state why users should fill in their profile and what is in it for them:

As part of our ongoing attempts to tap into the amazing information in our organization each employee now has their very own user profile! Your user profile contains a wealth of information such as past projects, your skills, expertise and social interests.

We encourage you to fill in the profile so that you can find like minded individuals easier, find experts in topics your are interested in, see who worked in previous projects and help us all learn more about each other to strengthen the ties in this wonderful organization.

Thanks,
Mr Awesome CEO

Highlighting Functionality

Another approach is to highlight additional functionality that a complete User Profile provides such as activity feeds, people search, colleagues in common,organizational chart and others.

Expertise finding is particularly valuable for many organizations and having a complete profile is obviously a pre-requisite to this. By highlighting the business value that expertise finding provides, then tying this back to SharePoint functionality with people search, users can make the link that unless they fill in their profile they will not be found.

Social Programs

A interesting example I saw at one organization was the social clubs would only be approved and funded if a corresponding number of employees had their User Profiles filled in with their interest specified in this area.

Conversely in one organization Human Resources would poll users profiles and create events based on the interested contained. In this example they found that many people had a love of scotch in the organization so they bought someone in for the day to talk about the process of making scotch whisky ( unfortunately no one could drink )

Featured Employee

Another frequent approach is to use a User Profile to create a ‘Featured Employee’ that can be shown in an area of high visibility- usually the home page of an Intranet.

Serveral organization I have worked with have used this to great effect within their organization in the following ways:

• One organization had a ‘Friends Leaving Us‘ list that drew information from a User Profile called ‘Retire Date’. When any employee was within a month of retiring they would get free meals at the cafeteria. However they could only get on the ‘Friends Leaving Us’ list by having their entire profile populated
• Another organization used these Web Parts on the home page of various projects sites that would cycle through employees that met a specific criteria. In this case a field called ‘Current Projects‘ was listed and once a web part was configured with the project name, all employees that matched the criteria would be shown at random. It was a great way to introduce project members to each other.

I hope that you enjoyed some of these tips and tricks with getting employees to fill in their profile. In the end you have to ensure that this information is providing business value to your users. If the value is apparent then employees will populate and continue to keep their profiles up to date.

The Challenge

Where to start?

Class it up!