tfpl blog

SharePoint 2010: what it means for information professionals and their organisations

I recently made a trip to Microsoft for a workshop on SharePoint 2010 at their campus in Reading.  The picture I took away is of a shift in focus away from development to configuration (and there's a hell of a lot more to configure), illustrated by the following:   

• Complex (or simple) records and document management policies (compliant with DoD 5015.02, amongst other things) can now be configured into the system at and across every level and site location, or simply determined ad hoc.  It looks like a complete EDRMS is on the cards with hierarchical (file-plan like) structuring, automatic document ID numbers and-all with a highly intuitive and attractive browser (any browser) based user interface. 
• Developers will no longer be needed to come in and hack into your SharePoint in order for it to communicate with other databases and systems.  All of this can be configured out of the box without any knowledge of or ostensible use of code.
• As a result of the above and because the development engine, Visual Studio 2010 (sold separately of course), is integrated into the Central Admin area I think that significant investment on bespoke coding is a thing of the past. For example, .NET coding can as easily be published to SharePoint 2010 as a document might be through a standard CMS. In addition to this, the .NET coding language is relatively easy to pick up for quick learners, which systems admins usually are.
• My opinion is that outlay in development will revolve around (app by app) bespoke applications development which has been readily facilitated through the provision of APIs meaning that apps can be built and rolled out through the Central Admin (or the ‘back office’) development tool-kit.

On cost, for organisations that have made a sizable resource commitment to MOSS 2007 already, the prospect of further investment in SharePoint 2010 might initially be a turn off[*].  If however they are persuaded by the additional functionality (particularly in what was formerly business intelligence, the records centre and mySite) then they still face the requirement to upgrade their hardware to x64 (currently it is x32). This x64 backroom hardware is needed to effectively accommodate technologies such as ajax which make for seamless and smooth user operability on the client side but demand significant resources from the servers to that end. This demand scales up with increases in user numbers and user activity, which will be a significant consideration if organisations start adopting SharePoint as a “full featured business platform”, as Microsoft is touting it.

Additionally, upgrade/migration from MOSS 2007 to SharePoint was not something that was readily covered and I suspect 2007 users may be in for a rougher ride, price-wise and technically, than they might otherwise have expected.  This may be a particular issue to those organisations that invested heavily in 3rd party bespoke development of the product.

So, how significant is the advent of SharePoint 2010 to the information professional? Well, we have always known that information architecture, information governance (inclusive of its pillars such as policies, rules etc) and sound information management in general are critical to the success of any electronic information system deployment.  And, with the removal of significant functionality barriers in SharePoint 2010, the continued importance of this cannot be stressed enough in giving systems administrators something to consider before bending to every whim of their users. 

It is therefore critical that the advice of the information professional is heeded at the highest levels of management and engendered into the IT psyche.  The blueprints of a successful implementation should be drawn up, highlighted, championed and followed from the very beginning, lest the onset of “SharePoint Sprawl”, a symptom of poor information architecture and a lack of information management forethought, generally; and one with which many, if not most, MOSS 2007 implementations contend.

If you have information management concerns around your deployment of SharePoint, or any other system, contact us for expert advice and solutions.

Authored by Shooresh Golzari, tfpl consultant.

[*] Recent conversations with clients and SharePoint integrators indicate that this is true.

TFPL SharePoint survey

For the past two years, TFPL has been monitoring the impact that SharePoint implementations have had on knowledge, records and information management activities.  During that time, we have held three successful one-day conferences looking at lessons learned through case studies and keynote papers.  

Our fourth conference is taking place on 15 October and will feature a number of new case studies, together with an update on the progress of an Eduserv research project investigating the use of SharePoint in Higher Education Institutions.

We now want to gather more information about the use and impact of SharePoint and have developed a short, web-based questionnaire which we are inviting you to complete.  The survey should take you no more than five minutes to complete and we will share the results with you via our blog and website.

Please click on the following link to participate in the survey; the survey will accept responses until 31st October.

[Please note that the survey is now closed and the link has been removed]

The Consultancy team.

SharePoint for Records Management - continued.....

Following on from comments raised from James Lappin's post back in February our Consultant Edward Taylor had the following comments:

Personally I do agree that SharePoint is capable of substituting a file plan to a certain extent, provided you are not hoping SharePoint will give you the functionality to carry out EDRM.  In many cases an organisations main aim of using SharePoint is to enhance collaboration; and the combination of using Content Types and Columns allows enough metadata to be gathered when uploading new information to meet the needs of most users.  For this to be a success those implementing SharePoint must understand the different types of content they are managing through SharePoint and assign a suitable strategy to gather the information and where to store it via document libraries etc.  It is also important to consider the needs of the user and not to expect them to enter a vast array of metadata to satisfy the needs of an information worker to upload a document – speak to the users, carry out piloting on sample groups and try to understand what is important metadata that must be entered and data that is nice to have but not required. 

I also agree with the opinion that SharePoint Sprawl has the potential to cause SharePoint to become ineffective and therefore it must be governed accordingly (this cannot be stressed enough), ensuring that there is consistency in how is it managed and used across all departments.  For example an organisation must ensure that when new Team Sites are created existing content types are used rather than creating new ones, this allows information to flow across the organisation effectively.  If SharePoint is ungoverned information silos can develop along with problems that are more often associated with shared drives.      

In terms of applying retention schedules and the ability to put records on hold; this is possible and requires the use of the SharePoint Records Centre, however its functionality has not be well received and fails to meet the needs of most users requiring an EDRMS.  We will be keeping a keen eye on the release of SharePoint 2010 later in the year to see what changes they have made to RM.   Further information on this topic has been written by a good friend James Lappin who has provided an excellent piece on Records Management in SharePoint which is well worth a read - http://thinkingrecords.co.uk/2009/04/19/how-records-management-works-in-sharepoint-2007/.  As for the other areas in SharePoint I would say keep trying new things with the users to see what is popular and what is not.  At TFPL we have been trying out the Wiki pages to allow our consultants to brainstorm and develop ideas and strategies for different sectors that we work in which is proving to be useful and a handy way for our consultants to collaborate. 

 

SharePoint 2007: The key questions for records management

In the recent past the records management profession did not have to concern itself too deeply with any one system from any one vendor.  The profession could establish specifications as to what it wanted records management software to do (TNA 2002, MoReq etc) and use those standards to incentivise a clutch of vendors to produce systems that operate according to that model.  Records managers simply had to understand the thinking behind the specifications.

SharePoint 2007 is different.  It hasn’t been designed around existing records management specifications, instead it has its own idiosyncratic records management model.  SharePoint team collaboration sites pose significant governance challenges and are sometimes introduced alongside, and in competition with, existing electronic records systems.  

The vendor behind SharePoint, Microsoft, already monopolises organisational servers and the basic desktop tools for document creation and e-mail. Their exceptional size brings with it exceptional ambitions.  They want to sell SharePoint into every organisation large medium or small.  They don't want to base their product around the types of records management controls (particularly the corporate fileplan) found in TNA 2002 and MoReq 2.  Only a minority of organisations have the appetite and capability to implement and sustain a corporate fileplan. 

Not every organisation will take on SharePoint 2007. Of those that do, not every implementation will be successful or sustained.  SharePoint will face competition, but on a global scale that competition is unlikely to come from the niche vendors who provide EDRM and ECM systems based around TNA 2002 and MoReq/MoReq2.  The organisation in the best position to take on Microsoft and SharePoint is Google:  another huge, cash-rich monopoly.  Google plans to skirt around Microsoft's monopoloy of organisational servers and destops by providing their Google Apps system across the web, from the cloud.

The records management profession is going to have to get used to managing records in records systems that are not of its professional making.

The strength of SharePoint 2007 in the marketplace gives us as a profession no choice but to engage with it.   We need to be in a position to ensure that organisations make decisions in relation to SharePoint with their eyes open.   When organisations do choose to implement SharePoint team collaboration sites we need to be able to help teams make the best of them.   On a broader front, as a profession, we need to assess how we move forward in a post-SharePoint 2007 world, where our records management standards and specifications will have a reduced influence on the marketplace.

Below are what I consider be the key questions that we need to address in each of these areas 

Helping organisations make informed decisions in relation to SharePoint

• Given that SharePoint 2007 has no place to hold a hierarchical corporate fileplan how do we ensure the overall coherence of the collection of collaboration sites?

• How do we guard against the danger of 'SharePoint sprawl'? 

• How do we apply retention schedules in SharePoint?  How do we protect records from amendment or deletion?  Is it worth using the SharePoint 2007 Records Centre for these purposes?

• To what extent should we encourage/require the use of version control and metadata in SharePoint? 

• Do we recommend that organisations turn on the facility to allow each member of staff to have a 'my site'?  Individuals can use their my site to share information about themselves; to blog; and to create, store and (if they wish) share documents

• Do we recommend that organisations plug in TNA 2002/MoReq 2 based EDRM/ECM systems behind SharePoint?  If so how do we recommend that they map from the elements of SharePoint (site collection, site, library, folder or content type, document) to the elements of EDRM (fileplan heading, folder, document) 

• SharePoint offers many alternatives to documents and e-mails for creating and communicating information (wikis, blogs, discussion forums etc.)  Do we need to manage them?  If so how?    

• There are usually other drivers beside records management behind a SharePoint implementation.  How can we best ensure that records management and governance needs are afforded sufficient priority?  

• What do we do when we find SharePoint team collaboration sites being rolled out in competition with an existing or planned electronic records management system?

 

Helping teams and end-users make the best of SharePoint

• What advice and support do we need to provide end users to help them set up and manage SharePoint team collaboration sites?  

• What should we be advising each team to do when they start a new project or piece of work? Should they create a new team collaboration sub-site? or a new document library within an existing site/sub-site?  or a new folder within an existing document library? 

• Should we advise end users to use folders to organise their document libraries or 'content types' (metadata)?   

• Do SharePoint team collaboration sites help with managing e-mails?  

  

Moving forward as a profession

• SharePoint 2007 blurs the distinction between the intranet and the team working space.  It blurs the distinction between data and documents. How will this affect the relationships and distinctions between records managers and other professionals?  

• Where next for the business classification/corporate fileplan?  The international records management standard is based around it.   So are TNA 2002 and MoReq2. But they are difficult and time consuming to build and have had a mixed reception with users in those organisations that have built them.  SharePoint doesn't cater for them without work-arounds and customisation.  

• Where next for electronic records management specifications? When there were lots of niche vendors in the field, and when electronic records management systems (EDRM) were distinct from other types of system such as web/intranet content management systems then specifications worked well as a way of influencing the market.  Now EDRM systems have been subsumed into broader Enterprise Content Management (ECM)  systems, organisations are basing their procurement choices on a broader range of criteria.  And Microsoft have been able to ignore the specifications but still dominate this market.

James Lappin
Senior Associate consultant

The cause of 'SharePoint sprawl'

by James Lappin

SharePoint is taking on some of the features of a monopoly.  It is becoming a byword for Enterprise Content Management, as 'iPod' is a byword for music players and 'Google' is a byword for search.  If an information need bubbles up in an organisation, someone, somewhere is going to say 'can we do that with SharePoint?'

 

SharePoint seems to be everywhere.   You know there is a ball of string somewhere in your dad's shed, in everyone's dad shed.  You know there are some SharePoint licences kicking around in your organisation, in everyone's organisation.

If you haven't chosen it for your document and records management system then your organisation will still end up considering SharePoint for your intranet, or your website, or for collaboration, or for an attempt at introducing some form of social networking. 

When you purchase SharePoint 2007 for your intranet you aren't just buying an intranet module of SharePoint. SharePoint  isn't a suite of modules, it is an integrated product. When you purchase SharePoint to roll-out as an intranet you are getting far more than just the SharePoint publishing sites, which are intended for the type of content traditionally posted to an intranet. Instead you are getting all of the different types of SharePoint site, including:

• team sites  (a place for  a team or work group to collaborate on documents and other outputs, store documents, share news, and display and manipulate key data) 
• my sites (providing each individual with a storage area, and a means of communicating information about themselves to the rest of the organisation) 
• all of the other specialist types of site you can set up in SharePoint, including  document workspaces (where people can collaborate around one particular document), wiki sites, and meeting workspaces (where people can plan and record one meeting)

If you choose SharePoint for your intranet and chose to turn on team collaboration sites, unexpected consequences may occur.  If the implementation team rolling out SharePoint are primarily accustomed to rolling out intranets, where a small percentage of the organisation contribute a small percentage of their team's information, then they may be unprepared for the chaos that can ensue from an uncontrolled roll-out of SharePoint team collaboration sites. 

Team collaboration sites are meant to accomodate the messy day-to-day work of teams and work groups.   You might hope that each team makes do with one team site,  in which they house as many document libraries as they need, for all the different projects that they undertake, accompanied by collaborative goodies such as a shared calendar, a shared contact list etc.    But in practice the team site will be sprouting sub-sites like there is no tomorrow.  

When a new project starts the desire will come for a new sub-site, like a fresh new exercise book at the start of school term, to accomodate the specific communications and information preferences of the group working on the project.  Each sub-site can, in turn, accomodate as many document libraries as its owners want, and sprout as many sub-sites, meeting workspaces, wiki sites, document workspaces etc. as its owners need. You can see where the phenomenon known as 'SharePoint sprawl' comes from!

Why cloud computing is the biggest challenge Microsoft has ever faced, and what cloud computing means for your organisation

Like any traditional software vendor a significant slice of Microsoft's revenue comes when customers upgrade to a new version of its products.  The downside of this model is that upgrades cause uncertainty, disruption and expense to customer organisations.  

Microsoft has started to face serious competition from cloud computing:  Software-as-a-Service vendors who do not require customers to install their software on their servers. Instead the vendor hosts the system and customers pay a monthly subscription to use it via the web.  Microsoft's key competitors from the cloud include Google apps and Zoho.

Software-as-a-Service vendors do not usually require customers to upgrade to new versions of their software, instead improvements are made incrementally and included in the subscription fee.  The reason for this is that Software-as-a-Service vendors bear the burden of hosting each of their customers' implementations of their product.  If different customers are on different versions it adds complexity to this hosting and erodes their economies of scale.

The prospect of impending upgrades casts a shadow over the three main products that Microsoft sells into enterprises: Windows, Office, and SharePoint.

Windows 

Windows is suffering from a widespread reluctance of organisations to upgrade from Windows XP to Vista.   Organisations perceive that they can do most of what they need to do with XP, and that Vista does not offer significant advantages. Adoption was also hit by economic conditions.  Many buyers take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to new releases of Microsoft products.  By the time Vista had settled down the credit crunch was upon us and buyers saw sticking with XP for another year as a way of saving cash.   Many organisations will now be tempted to skip Vista entirely and wait until Windows 7 comes out. Gartner and Microsoft have both warned against this strategy:

• Gartner said that failing to upgrade to Vista is risky:  organisations skipping Vista may later find themselves with no option but to upgrade to Windows 7 shortly after its release because support for Windows XP is withdrawn. 
• Microsoft says that Windows 7 will be based upon Vista, and upgrading to it from XP will be significantly more complicated than upgrade from Vista.  

Organisations might call Microsoft's bluff on this one: E-week's Microsoft-watch blog reported in this post that  only 10% of enterprises have upgraded to Vista. Microsoft has already bowed to pressure to extend the life of XP, and it is not in the company's interests to make life  too difficult its customers. 

The Office Suite 

The productivity tools contained in the Office Suite no longer offers  Microsoft a competitive advantage. The establishment of standards for word processing tools has meant that it is too easy for competitors to provide software that imitates and interoperates with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

MS Word documents can be viewed and edited in rival packages such as Google Docs, Open Office and Pages (Apple's equivalent for the Mac). I have bought an Asus ee netbook  and a Macbook over the past year and a half, neither had Office on it.  I have only missed it when colleagues provide me documents that contain macros written in Word.  

Of these alternative packages Google Docs is the strongest competitor.  It is free to individuals (which gets lots of people accustomed to using it).  It also forms the basis of Google Apps:  the system that Google offers to organisations from the cloud in competition with Office and SharePoint.

The main hope for Office lies in making it linking it ever more closely with the one great success of Microsoft's year, SharePoint.   The next version of Office (Microsoft Office 14) will be very tightly wrapped in with the next version of SharePoint.

The dilemma for Microsoft is that to differentiate the Office Suite from their free/cheap competitors they have to make it more sophisticated, but the increased sophistication increases the disruption and cost of upgrade to organisations because it introduces a need to provide training.  The upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 was the first Office upgrade in my memory that was radical enough for organisations to need to roll out training to accompany it.

SharePoint

The latest version of SharePoint, MOSS 2007 has been a roaring commercial success.  It has seen massive take up for by organisations using it for their web sites, intranet, collaboration and document management.  It has also been adopted by organisations wanting to introduce web 2 features such as blogs and wikis into the enterprises, despite the fact that these features are not particularly powerful in MOSS 2007.  

  
One of CMS watch's 12 technology predictions for 2009 is that the release of Office 14 will cast a shadow over SharePoint during 2009.  The next version of SharePoint is due to be released at the end of 2009/start of 2010,  coinciding with Office 14.  It will be significantly different to the current version of SharePoint, to enable its tight integration with Office 14.  CMS watch predicts that organisations will be wary of doing extensive customisation of their SharePoint implementation for fear of the work involved in upgrading it to the next version.  

Those organisations that adopted SharePoint 2003 are finding it far from straightforward to upgrade and migrate content to MOSS 2007, because MOSS 2007 was such a radical change. If the same pattern of a radical rather than an incremental upgrade occurs at the end of 2009 then Microsoft again runs a risk of alienating customers.

The implications of cloud computing for Microsoft 

Microsoft is unbeatable at providing traditional host-it-yourself software for organisations, because of:

• their large salesforce 
• their long-standing relations with IT departments 
• the investment that organisations have already made in the Windows platform and the software that Microsoft provide for it

The move of organisations to cloud computing is not in Microsoft interests.

• It erodes the competitive advantage they have from their provision of Windows 
• it levels the playing field for competitors wanting to sell into the enterprise. 
• it plays to the strengths of rivals such as Google whose products were developed from the start to be provided from the cloud. 

This post from Paul Miller describes the commercial and technological difficulties that SAP had in translating their hugely successful Enterprise Resource Planning software into an offering from the cloud.  The business model for providing systems from the cloud is fundamentally different from the model for providing systems for organisations to install on their servers.  The move to the cloud will be the hardest challenge Microsoft has ever faced.

The strongest indicator I have seen that the move to cloud computing is inevitable is the fact that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect is now basing his entire long term strategy on moving Microsoft's offerings to the cloud (see this full length article from Wired.com) 

The implications of cloud computing for organisations

The initial driver for organisations to migrate to cloud computing will be economic. Traditional software requires a substantial up front investment in licences, servers, integration, configuration, training and roll-out. These spikes of investment of time and resorces are repeated (albeit to a lesser extent) for every upgrade.

One of the first categories of organisation to adopt Software-as-a-Service were start-ups, partly because they had not already sunk investment into server rooms and IT staff, but also because they find it hard to acquire credit, and therefore the steady monthly subscription to a Software-as-a-Service vendor was more feasible to finance than the big up-front investment for traditional host-it-yourself software.

We are now in a credit crunch.   Most organisations are finding it hard to find cash for investment.   The smooth monthly subscription model of Software-as-a-Service is becoming more attractive.

Software provided from the cloud os different in character to the software that vendors have provided you on disks to install on your servers. It is simpler and leaner. The vendor bears the cost of hosting it so it is in their interests to cut out extraneous bloatage. Google apps is a far less complex product than SharePoint.  Whether this lack of complexity is a good thing or a bad thing depends partly on whether you see training colleagues on how to use their information systems as a benefit or a cost to your organisation. 

Cloud computing will erode the boundaries between the information systems of different organisations

Most teams in any organisation have as much need to collaborate with people outside the organisation as they do with people inside the organisation.   Any collaboration system that is confined to your organisation will by definition meet no more than half of a team's information needs and communication needs.   As soon as you stick a piece of software on your servers, customise it to your needs and wrap a firewall around it you are cutting that system off from the rest of the world.

At one time organisations aspired to have one corporate repository, organised with a corporate classification.  This dream is dying.  In the document and records management sphere corporate fileplans have failed. Organisations have not been able to get these corporate classifications accepted and used by staff.  Where organisations are using them staff do not find them useful.  A software package (SharePoint), that has no place for a corporate fileplan, has swept the board.

Cloud computing will  diminish the technical barriers to information collaboration between different organisations. Different organisations subscribing to the same Software-as-a-Service will be on the same version of the software and differences between the systems will be minimal.   

Myself and my colleagues in the TFPL consulting team all have Windows, Office and SharePoint on our desktops.  Maybe you do too, but what versions do you have? We have XP, Office 2003 and MOSS 2007.  Contrast this is with an  example of Software-as-a-Service. I use Google docs, the basis of Google Apps. Maybe you do too.  I don't need to ask you which version, there is only one version, and if I want to collaborate with you all I have to do is to send an invite to your username (in this case your googlemail address).

Imagine,  in the very near future,  several different organisations are signed up for a similar Software-as-a-Service for their generic collaborative software.  It might be Google Apps, it might be Zoho, it might even be SharePoint if  Microsoft managed to get it working well from the cloud, it might be AN Other system.   It will be trivially easy for a team inside one of those organisation to add in external partners to their collaboration sites. Not just technically possible for system administrators- trivially easy for end users. Once this happens there will be no going back to the days of server- installed, firewall encircled collaboration software, because going back would mean the organisation is cutting itself off from its customers and partners.

SharePoint and the management of data

There are some functions of enterprise information systems that Web 2.0 and cloud computing services can easily replicate. They are perfectly capable of giving knowledge workers the applications they need to:

• store and share documents
• communicate with each other through e-mail and messages
• collaborate with news, calendars, tasks, photos,blogs and wikis

The fact that these applications are offered either free of charge or cheaply by web 2.0 providers is a threat to vendors of collaborative systems and of document/records management systems. Organisations may find themselves powerless to stop staff migrating away to web provided applications either as teams or as individuals.

However there are other types of enterprise information systems that it will be difficult for Web 2.0 services to replicate, namely:

• systems that exist to hold, crunch and analyse data
• systems used to re-engineer a business process or processes with workflow

These systems tend to require too much customisation and too much integration into other organisational systems for web 2.0 services to replicate.

In its early manifestations SharePoint was primarily a collaborative system. If it had stayed that way it would now find itself very vulnerable to competition from web-based rivals such as Zoho and Google Apps. The game-changer with MOSS 2007 is the Business Data Catalogue (BDC).

Microsoft want your organisation to use the Business Data Catalogue:

• to bring data in from your various databases (your finance database, project management database, customer database etc.) for consultation and use within SharePoint
• to provide your users with an enterprise search facility: allowing them to search across the various databases of your organisation
• to use data imported from other systems to control and populate metadata fields in SharePoint. In effect using your existing databases as controlled vocabularies in SharePoint.

Microsoft's sales pitch for the Business Data Catalogue is that it enables you to surface data from business databases in SharePoint without any coding. Simply describe the information architecture of each of your databases in XML and then let the BDC search over, and use data from them. The best descriptions of how the BDC functions that I have read on the web are by DotNet Dreamer and by Martin Kearn. Martin Kearn describes the BDC as the most powerful feature of MOSS 2007.

The business data catalogue is a masterstroke in Microsoft's tenacious battle to remain top dog in in providing the information management platform to organisations. Microsoft are inviting organisation's to use the BDC to bind their SharePoint implementation in with their core databases and line of business systems, a role which at this point in time none of its web based rivals in the collaborative space could replicate.

The Business Data Catalogue threatens to burst apart the long standing distinction between systems dealing with structured data (databases) and sytems dealing with unstructured data (document management systems and collaborative systems). It will have implications for us information professionals - how many of us have skills and experience that span the two spheres of structured and unstructured data?

The best implementations of SharePoint that I have seen have been the ones that used organisational data creatively within SharePoint.

At the 3rd TFPL SharePoint Conference Stephen Wilder described how The Leprosy Mission International (TLMI) had used the BDC to synchronise SharePoint with their project management database.

• Whenever anyone in TLMI saves a project document to a SharePoint team site they identify which project the document relates to from the list that the BDC draws from the TLMI project management database.

• Other SharePoint metadata fields for the document are populated from information about that project held on the project management database

• Within SharePoint TLMI have built a portal site containing a project directory. The directory lists each project, and links to all the documents saved against that project, in whatever SharePoint team site they were saved in. This in effect creates a virtual project file. Individuals get to work in their local team space, but a corporate view is provided of the work on each project through the project directory.

James Lappin

Twittering and the SharePoint Summit

This October's TFPL SharePoint Summit certainly left delegates with much to ponder following an event focused on the nitty gritty of Sharepoint implementations, designed to give us an insight beyond popular hype surrounding the product. But how will they reflect on their experience at the Summit?

Before this October I had a somewhat negative opinion of such things as Twitter and "smart phones" which I had discounted as gimmicky distractions conducive to naught but pointless chit-chat.  Julian Birkinshaw, during his inspirational reinventing management presentation at this October's ebic (Connect with the Future), asserted that the most committed and effective employees are also those who tend to be most active on social media at work.  My experience over the last two weeks has certainly acted to cement this view.

I watched somewhat outraged as my colleague, James Lappin, and my new buddy, KPMG's Thöre Donner, were furiously hammering away at their respective notebook and Blackberry  keyboards; I thought they were answering emails during the proceedings!  However, after a little investigation I realised they were actually twittering their thoughts on each presentation!

Their method certainly, hands down, topped my antiquated and tedious pen and paper note taking. In fact, after subscribing to twitter and becoming a "follower" of one "JamesLappin" and a "ThoreDonner", their "tweets" served to join the dots on the puzzle which were my notes.  Whether this was simply down to the fact that I am not a very good note taker or not, I decided at that moment that I will not be a spectator in this, the mobile version of the "personal media" revolution introduced by Paul Saffo at ebic.

Aside from being a useful point of personal reference, like a kind of public day to day diary, Twitter can serve to extend your network and broadcast information to thousands of peers.  For example, Ewan McIntosh's live blogging and twittering of Paul Saffo's keynote piece at ebic attracted an audience of 6000 people in addition to the 70 delegates who were present, increasing its reach almost 100 times and on a global scale.  Ewan wrote this blog live at ebic. Interestingly, James Lappin mentioned to me that, this may also raise the possibility of future conference speakers being selected on the basis of their popularity on social computing media...

Anyway, here's how Twitter works: I literally just clicked the search function on twitter, typed "Sharepoint" into the search field and hit enter.   I am now viewing, in chronological order, what thousands of people are pondering about SharePoint.  If I think that person is interesting, I will choose to follow him or her and will subsequently receive their tweets on my homepage feed.  The concept is known as microblogging, so the premise behind it is that you should keep your thoughts concise with a maximum of 140 characters per blog.  But there is no limit to the number of blogs you can post.  So if you're at a SharePoint Summit, for example, I can search sharepoint and tune into your sentence by sentence report.  Here are some examples of what I picked up from James and Thöre's tweets during the proceedings:

JamesLappin Sharon Richardson is up next, here is a link to her SharePoint blog http://sharepointsharon.com... 4:19 PM Oct 14th

JamesLappin Sharon says that SharePoint is not best of breed in any of its areas. A specialist cms, search, collaboration system will do it better. 4:30 PM Oct 14th

JamesLappin Microsoft is investing lots of money into Facebook. Sharon speculating how facebook might influence future sharepoint development 4:40 PM Oct 14th

JamesLappin Sharon predicts the next generation of SharePoint will include Access, more social computing, and folksonomy/tagging capability 5:08 PM Oct 14th         

                                                    

thoredonner Jones Lang lasalle say MySIte is a massive quick win! 3:29 PM Oct 14th         from TwitterBerry

thoredonner mysite can improve links and navigation into your intranet by up to 500 per cent. 3:33 PM Oct 14th from TwitterBerry

thoredonner Business language is English and so the global site will be English.  Legal documents will in the correct language 3:34 PM Oct 14th from TwitterBerry

thoredonner Multi language takes planning and time 3:34 PM Oct 14th from TwitterBerry                                                                 

                           

 

Key themes from TFPL's 2nd SharePoint conference

Yesterday I attended TFPL's 2nd SharePoint conference.  Such is the burgeoning interest in Microsoft's flagship product that once again the 100 seat Wellcome Collection theatre was packed to capacity just three months after the 1st TFPL SharePoint Conference.

The conference heard how the world's second largest real estate company, the world's second largest law firm, and a sixth form college in Surrey were each using SharePoint as an all encompassing information platform for their business.  Christian Aid and DEFRA, who had spoken at the first conference, came back to update us on their progress.  Jeremy Bentley give a history of the evolution of SharePoint, from its first appearance as SharePoint 2001, through SharePoint 2003 to its current manifestation as MOSS 2007.  Marc Stephenson looked under the bonnet to give a detailed description of the information architecture challenges posed by MOSS 2007.

It was a fascinating day, which painted a rich picture of the complexity of SharePoint:  its massive potential, the imaginative uses that it is being put to, and its idiosyncracies and glitches.

These are the key things I learned from the day:

SharePoint ' My Sites' are genuinely useful!

I had always assumed that My Sites were one of the dangers of SharePoint:  providing colleagues with a place of their own where they can stockpile their documents out of sight of the rest of the organisation.  This belief stemmed from my experience of e-mail in-boxes, and personal network drives: silos that even your closest colleagues can't access.

Speaker after speaker described positive and imaginitive uses of SharePoint My Sites:

• Defra, Jones Lang LaSalle, Esher College, Christian Aid and Linklaters were all using My Sites as their organisation's people directory. My Sites are places where colleagues can maintain their own contact details, role, expertise and interests; and places to go to find out about colleagues.

• Jones Lang LaSalle, Esher College, Christian Aid and Linklaters were all allowing colleagues to use their My Site to customise what they saw on their organisation's intranet home page, and what alerts they received, by signing up to belong to different audiences.

• DEFRA have found a records management usage for My Sites:  they take information about the individual who created a document from that person's My Site, and save it as part of the metadata about the document.

Esher College had made particularly powerful use of My Sites:

• The college has a central timetable for students and staff.  Each student and staff member sees their own personalised timetable on their My Site.  If the date, location or time of one of their classes is altered this change will immediately show up on their timetable on their My Site.

• The college pushes relevant news and key messages to an individual's My Site, with the news appearing as a banner at the top of their My Site.

• The college developed a web part to enable students to work with their tutors to monitor their progress.  The student's development targets are displayed on their My Site. The student can input their self-assesment of their progress and this information is fed through to their tutor.

• The document libraries that individuals can keep on their my sites are not necessarily silos: individuals can share access permissions with colleagues to collaborate on particular documents.

The vast scope of MOSS 2007

Adrian Dale identified five key areas of functionality that MOSS 2007 possesses:

• Content repository:  a place to store corporate documents and records, with metadata and access rules, and (in the Records Centre site) retention and disposal rules. And with a vastly improved search facility compared with SharePoint 2003.

• Communications tool:  a tool to manage your organisation's web site and intranet site, to channel news and messages to different audiences, and to enable users to customise their views of their intranet.

• Application development platform:  an environment in which to develop new applications including workflows, and database applications to manage structured data.

• Collaboration tool: spaces in which people can work together on documents, and where they can house wikis and blogs.

• Directory tool:  managing the organisation's directory of its people and their roles and expertise.

Both Jones Lang LaSalle and Linklaters identified reduction in dependence on other proprietary software as a key benefit and cost saving they have derived from their SharePoint implementations.   Christian Aid's Steven Buckley described how the charity changed its knowledge management strategy from one of buying best of breed products for each required functionality (web content management, collaboration, records management etc.) to one whereby new applications are developed in SharePoint unless there is a really good reason why they can't be. 

Giles Gregg from Linklaters said that for every application you purchase from a different vendor or in a different programming language you have the cost of maintaining the IT staff or contractors who understand that application/ programming language.  These staff are needed in order to ensure that you can integrate the application with other systems, that you can upgrade it, that you can restore it if it falls down.   

For Giles Gregg the most exciting thing about SharePoint was the fact that it does not constrain you.  It doesn't do everything. But if it can't do something Microsoft have given you the development tools you need in order to customise it.  And there is a whole economy growing up of contractors, vendors and developers which can be drawn upon to fill the gaps.

The importance of SharePoint to Microsoft

Jeremy Bentley said that Microsoft claimed to have sold 100 million SharePoint licences.  Not all of these will be used, but even so it is a huge number.  Marc Stephenson had been told by a Microsoft insider that there were 25 million deployments of SharePoint on PCs around the globe.  Marc said that in the 1990s Office was Microsoft's main product, but now SharePoint is their flagship.  One of the selling points of MOSS 2007 was that it was bound in very tightly with Office 2007.  The next version of SharePoint is likely to come out in 2009/10, around the same time as the next version of Office (Office 14).  Marc speculated that this conjunction would allow Microsoft to fuse Office and SharePoint together as one product.  The company is hinting at such a fusion with the name of this latest version of SharePoint:  MOSS 2007 (which expands to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007).

The quirks of SharePoint's information architecture

Marc Stephenson gave an overview of SharePoint's information architecture.  Marc said that you can't assume that your fileplans, taxonomies and metadata structures will automatically translate to the SharePoint environment:  SharePoint provides a very distinct environment for information architecture and you have to map your architecure into that.

On the face of it there is a straightforward hierarchy within SharePoint:

• Site Collections contain sites (which can contain sub-sites and sub-sub sites down to the required levels).  Any site can contain objects such as lists and Document Libraries .   Document Libraries can contain folders. Folders can contain documents, images and other resources.

Complexity is added to the information architecture picture by elements which cut across the hierarchy, namely

• Columns:  Columns are SharePoint's way of defining metadata for any object in the repository.  You can define what columns of metadata you want for any particular site, document library, or documents within a document library.


• Content types:  you can define a content type for any type of documentation that you want to treat in a similar way across different sites: for example that you want to apply a similar access rule to, or use a similar template or workflow.

If you want to introduce a records management fileplan / business classification scheme into SharePoint you need to decide for each heading of your fileplan whether to set the heading up as a site, or as a document library within a site, or a folder within a document library.

Here are the quirks that Marc identified:

• Folders within document libraries don't have as much power as any of the other entities in the hierarchy:  they were put in as an afterthought by Microsoft who had thought they wouldn't need them.

• There is no support for hierarchical pick lists/taxonomy: you can only present the user with flat lists.

• The metadata columns you define for documents do not link in with the advanced search facility.  You can define a 'subject' field for documents, and you can provide a pick list to act as a controlled vocabulary for that field.  But (out of the box) you can't present that same pick list to a searcher, even though there is an advanced search facility which shows the 'subject' field.   

• Site-Collections work in a counter-intuitive way.  Every site must be nested within a site-collection.  But site-collections are invisible to users, who can only spot their existence through the url adress of the particular site or resource that they are looking at.

• Site-Collections function like boundaries within the system.  When you set up a content type, or a web part, or define metadata columns, these types, parts and columns only work within the boundaries of a site collection.  If you want them to apply across the whole system you have to set them up afresh for each site collection.  This would naturally push you towards having as few site collections as possible, but the catch is that there is a limit on the capacity of each site collection.  Site Collections should not exceed 100Gb (the reasons why are explained here).

• Document libraries normally inherit access permissions/restrictions from the next level up in the hierarchy (the site).  But access permissions can also be set by content types which cut across different areas of the hierarchy.  This leaves open the possibility of access permissions inherited from a site conflicting with access permission assigned from a content type.  Out of the box MOSS 2007 does not have any way of managing this conflict, and where the conflict occurs access permisisons are broken for that area of the hierarchy.

James Lappin

Debates on SharePoint at the 2008 RMS conference

I was one of the facilitators at a collaborative session at the 2008 Records Management Society looking at the future of electronic records management.

I asked the group the following question:

which will be more influential by the year 2012:  SharePoint or EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management Systems)?

A minority thought that EDRMS would be more influential because SharePoint does not have full records management functionality.  The majority thought that SharePoint would be more influential.  They thought organisations would implement it regardless of the relative weakness of its records management functionality, because of:

• Microsoft's entrenched relationships with IT departments in most organisations
• Microsoft's willingness to incentivise organisations to take it up by bundling SharePoint up with other products and upgrades
• The fact that SharePoint can do many more things than just manage records and hence will appeal to different interests within the organisation:  even if a records manager rejects SharePoint it may be advocated and procured by their Head of Communications, or a Knowledge Manager or an intranet manager.

Records managers would face two challenges with SharePoint:

• the first challenge would be as a profession, to influence Microsoft to add records management functionality. 
• The second would be to get their own organisations to take seriously the issues of governance and records management within SharePoint implementations.  The group thought this was the stiffer of the two challenges because many SharePoint implementations will be driven from a non-records management agenda. In contrast Steve Bailey thought that the interest other information professionals showed in SharePoint was an advantage to records managers when compared with EDRM which sometimes failed to engage the interest of non-records managers.

There was a debate about the future of EDRM suppliers.  Some felt that their market would be squeezed because many organisations would think that SharePoint, despite its records management weaknesses, did enough for them to get buy without EDRMS.  Others thought that there was a role for EDRMS either plugged into SharePoint, or instead of SharePoint, for orgniasations who wanted stricter RM disciplines than SharePoint supports.  Tony Hendley of Cimtech said that he thought that EDRM suppliers had always had to adapt themselves to the general desktop environments and would evolve products that fitted the SharePoint environment.

On the following day Roger Smethurst presented on DEFRA's implementation of, and customisation of, SharePoint (I've blogged on a similar presentation by Roger here). Roger said Microsoft had shown great interest in the customisations that DEFRA had made to SharePoint for records management purposes.  He had gone over to Seattle at Microsoft's invitation and they had discussed the possibility of incorporating some of them into future releases.

Roger Smethurst said that he was broadly happy with his SharePoint implementation.  The biggest frustration he had was the lack of integration between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint.  There is no simple direct way for a colleague to save an e-mail into SharePoint.  Roger ascribes this to the way Microsoft is set up as an organisation. The division of Microsoft responsible for developing Outlook has its own strategy and roadmap, that sits completely seperately from the development of the rest of the Microsoft product range.