I have been approached by CMS Wire, who liked my writing on my humble little blog here, and so I will be writing at least one article a month for them, and the first one is now available here:
SharePoint Enterprise Search: Lessons Learned in the field
Briefly its about our experiences at work with SharePoint search. My manager and AVP have been working on this since well before I joined them. The Proof Of Concept which saw the enterprise search features of SharePoint deployed to a group of users within the IT division has been very successful. We are now moving into production with the facility to be provided to the whole of the IT division - around 500 people.
So its not 'enterprise' search across the whole of our enterprise, but it is 'federated search' in that many existing information silo's are being indexed.
If your interested in learning more, I will be joining my old friend Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd, and author of two excellent books on enterprise search, at Enterprise Search Summit East in New York.
We will be running a pre-conference workshop on Monday the 10th of May entitled: Getting the best from SharePoint Search Implementations. Hopefully we will see you there, come and say hi.
Showing posts with label Sharepoint2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sharepoint2007. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
SharePoint 2007 metadata management - fail !
I am writing this post mainly in the hope that I missed something fairly fundamental and that someone will contact me and make me look stupid by providing an easy fix........ but I am not holding my breath !
I have been designing a SharePoint (MOSS2007) Project Management Information System (PMIS) that fits our own particular Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Enterprise Project management Framework (EPF). Before anyone points me in the direction of the great "SharePoint for Projects" officiando Dux Sy, I have read all his stuff. I have also used some concepts from Michael Sampons books.
Anyway, our SDLC is document heavy, there are are over 50 SDLC and EPF MS Word and Excel document templates. My design makes a Content Type for each one of these, linking a set of Site Columns together with the MS Office template, and then building them out under the 'new' menu in 3 document libraries (SDLC, EPF and Operational Change Management).
No problems so far ! Working on some principles of user focused design, we wanted to pre-populate some of the metadata that would be the same for every document in a single project, such as Project ID Number, Project Name and 3 fields of 'categorization' metadata based on a taxonomy we call the Business Retail Model (BRM).
Still OK. If you build a site you can go in an enter a metadata value for the site column once via the Site Settings and then every time you start a new document, the DIP shows that this metadata is already filled in - et voila !
However we have up to 100 IT projects a year. So the PMIS has its own web app and path (URL) and the site of at the top level of the site collection will belong to the IT PMO, and then there is a 'master template site' managed as a sub-site. This 'template' has been constructed as a SDLC specific, collaborative PM site and then saved as a template (Site Settings, Save site as template). See screen shot below:
When a new project comes on line IT PMO staff go to the Create menu, and from the 'Custom' section of the create new site box, pick the PMIS template.
All of this works just fine - all Content Types work, open the right MS Office templates, display all the site column fields in the DIP etc etc BUT you can no longer access the site columns via the settings menu for a particular site, so you can no longer pre-populate some of the metadata.
Before you suggest it, building the Site Columns at the site collection level would not work, because of inheritance. In fact myself, plus an experienced SharePoint sys admin and our best SP developer have examined this in depth, and we cannot find a way to create sites from a site template and yet pre-populate some of the metadata.
By the way, in other ECMS' you would get round this by populating the metadata against the folder, and any object dropped into the folder would inherit the values - a behaviour which I beleive has been added to SharePoint 2010, BUT we are not going to get SP2010 until maybe 2012 - so that's not an answer either !
My challenge to you all is - can you show us the error of our ways ? Have we missed something fundamental ? Let us know if you have any ideas on this please.
I have been designing a SharePoint (MOSS2007) Project Management Information System (PMIS) that fits our own particular Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Enterprise Project management Framework (EPF). Before anyone points me in the direction of the great "SharePoint for Projects" officiando Dux Sy, I have read all his stuff. I have also used some concepts from Michael Sampons books.
Anyway, our SDLC is document heavy, there are are over 50 SDLC and EPF MS Word and Excel document templates. My design makes a Content Type for each one of these, linking a set of Site Columns together with the MS Office template, and then building them out under the 'new' menu in 3 document libraries (SDLC, EPF and Operational Change Management).
No problems so far ! Working on some principles of user focused design, we wanted to pre-populate some of the metadata that would be the same for every document in a single project, such as Project ID Number, Project Name and 3 fields of 'categorization' metadata based on a taxonomy we call the Business Retail Model (BRM).
Still OK. If you build a site you can go in an enter a metadata value for the site column once via the Site Settings and then every time you start a new document, the DIP shows that this metadata is already filled in - et voila !
However we have up to 100 IT projects a year. So the PMIS has its own web app and path (URL) and the site of at the top level of the site collection will belong to the IT PMO, and then there is a 'master template site' managed as a sub-site. This 'template' has been constructed as a SDLC specific, collaborative PM site and then saved as a template (Site Settings, Save site as template). See screen shot below:
When a new project comes on line IT PMO staff go to the Create menu, and from the 'Custom' section of the create new site box, pick the PMIS template.
All of this works just fine - all Content Types work, open the right MS Office templates, display all the site column fields in the DIP etc etc BUT you can no longer access the site columns via the settings menu for a particular site, so you can no longer pre-populate some of the metadata.
Before you suggest it, building the Site Columns at the site collection level would not work, because of inheritance. In fact myself, plus an experienced SharePoint sys admin and our best SP developer have examined this in depth, and we cannot find a way to create sites from a site template and yet pre-populate some of the metadata.
By the way, in other ECMS' you would get round this by populating the metadata against the folder, and any object dropped into the folder would inherit the values - a behaviour which I beleive has been added to SharePoint 2010, BUT we are not going to get SP2010 until maybe 2012 - so that's not an answer either !
My challenge to you all is - can you show us the error of our ways ? Have we missed something fundamental ? Let us know if you have any ideas on this please.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
EMC introduces My Documentum
Some former colleagues from the Open University attended the 'Momentum Europe' conference in Athens last week. I had already spotted this press release but have only now got round to examining the release of the new 'My Documentum' family:
"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"
The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.
So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc
Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.
This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)
To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.
Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.
Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.
"EMC My Documentum Family Delivers The Power of Enterprise Content Management to Every Business User"
The press release has embedded YouTube videos and links to product information pages.
So, my initial thought was, nothing new here, it's just repackaging existing products under a new marketing banner, but its Documentum Client for Outlook (DCO), File Sharing Services etc
Not so ! Discussing this with my old colleague Mark, who was at the conference and very much knee and elbow deep in the Open University Documentum implementation, he said there is considerable new code, and for example with DCO the integration is much slicker, giving a much more 'native' Outlook experience.
This is interesting in the historical context of a blog based discussion with Shiv Singh of RazorFish about "Outlook as the portal" - its your email client, your personal information manager, your contacts manager, calendar, RSS reader etc etc ...... but also your client for your Documentum ECM repository (and other enteprise systems too ?)
To take that topic down a slightly different path, at an AIIM sponsored seminar on SharePoint 2010 this morning, one screenshot showed Outlook 2010 displaying social information gathered from SharePoint MySite profiles.
Yet, unless I am missing something, or doing something really stupid, with Outlook 2007 and SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) you can not simply drag and drop an email from your inbox into a SharePoint document library. Sure you can connect to a document library, it appears in your left hand navigation pane, and will allow you sync the contents of that document library to take them "off line" and on the road with you - but can't just simply move an email into the library ! Nor can you create a 'shortcut' in the Outlook shortcuts view of the left hand nav bar, to a WebDav (Network Places) view of a document library either.
Hurrah (!) to EMC for continuing the client side development, and lets home SharePoint integration with Outlook and particularly email is better in the next version.
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