SharePoint pro's and Con's

My boss Toby Ward (see http://intranetblog.com) has taken an internal company briefing I did on SharePoint technologies and added some content to make it 'SharePoint Pro's and Con's' which he is presenting at the IntraTeam conference this week in Copenhagen.

This is the 'sneek preview' version which is up on SlideShare.net"

Sharepoint Moss 2007 Pros & Cons by Toby Ward, Prescient Digital Media

View more presentations from Toby Ward. (tags: copenhagen intrateam)

If you have read my opinions on SharePoint / MOSS before, you will know there is nothing new here, and we can encapsulate easily thus:

• Don't believe all the marketing hype
• Make sure you do good requirements analysis and understand what you want to use it for, and if it truly meets your requirements then go for it
  
• Ensure you plan accordingly - remember the 5P's (Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance)
• Integrate it with, or supplement it with other technologies as required, it really is not the "one ring to rule them all" !
  

There you go, MOSS implementation in four bullet points.......... :-)

Enterprise RSS, wherefor art thou...?

Toby Ward over at Intranetblog has a post "Enterprise RSS is not dead, its still being born" in which he references ReadWriteWeb and some other sources.

I will not regurgitate the post here. but I am a big fan of RSS and ATOM content syndication technologies, however as Toby points out lack of enterprise take up is more to do with cultural, human factors issues.

However within the Information Management / ECM sphere, RSS / ATOM can be hidden away from those poor 'deer caught in the headlights' end users.

For example Alfresco uses the ATOM publishing schema internally for its RESTful interface for publishing content. It would appear to this (admittedly non-developer) writer that you might be able to address the CMIS web services 'meta-standard' using RSS or ATOM interfaces.

However on a less complex level, RSS can allow you to syndicate or pull content into your portal or intranet page from your CMS or other source, with out explicitly stating your using RSS and without having to educate your users on the new technology. In this more limited use case scenario you can set up the RSS reader portlet or web part and decide on what information 'feeds' you want it to present to the users. As they are not getting to choose the feeds to subscribe to, there is no training issue, it may just appear as the 'news box' on your portal page.

So for example the communications department at one of our clients sees this as an excellent mechanism for bringing in news from its sites and divisions all round the globe. So only the techies need to know what mechanism / technology is in use, the 'normal people' just see different categories of news presented to them on the page.

However the same client has users who want to 'personalise their corporate news experience' - this seems to me to be a heaven sent opportunity to gently introduce RSS, but as Toby noted, without actually using the term 'RSS' - lets stick to calling it 'syndication' or even just 'subscription' as in 'subscribe to this news channel'. So maybe RSS could find a sweet spot in a personalisation scenario.

The other thing that I take away from the lack of runaway success for enterprise RSS is that of user education and training. Recently listening to one of Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcasts, there was a a bit of a discussion about users having to be 'licensed' to use technology. In Europe there is indeed an end user certification called the European Computer Driving License (ECDL). This leads me to postulate that an organization that takes the education and technology training of its workforce very seriously, to the point that RSS is not considered as voodoo, witchcraft or just plain ' too difficult', will possibly gain considerable competitive advantage over those that don't.

By the way, I don't subscribe to age based arguments on skill sets in this domain either. My father was 66 before he got his first computer. He secured the post as secretary of the local social club because he could word process letters and do the accounts in a spreadsheet. Now he is in his mid 70's he Skype's me every weekend....... :-)

Is the shine coming off Sharepoint ?

My thanks to my colleague Cathy who pointed my in the direction of this interesting article at InformationWeek; Can Microsoft keep Sharepoint rolling ?

Its a good and interesting read, and seems to agree with everything I ever say on these pages about Sharepoint / MOSS:

• It might be the product for you, but how do you know unless you analyse your requirements
• A phased implementation appears to be more successful, add bells and whistles later
• Sharepoint in itself is not a 'strategy' - it can be part of ECM, Intranet or collaboration elements of your overall Information Management strategy
• Contrary to MS marketing hype, Sharepoint does not actually do everything brilliantly
• A Sharepoint deployment, like any other technology implementation will ultimately fail if not aligned with strategy, and if not properly planned with comensurate governance in place

By the waym, my employer, Prescient Digital Media, can help with all of these things :-)

Speaking of which Toby Ward just posted this on Intranetblog.com from the JBoye08 conference in Aarhus, Denmark, where he appears to have been chatting to Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMSWatch: Sharepoint Overview (pro's and con's of MOSS)

Lean Intranets ?

Patrick Walsh on his manIA blog has referenced Toby Wards Intranetblog specifically the posting 'Intranet 2.0 sits on the back burner' and then goes onto write some really interesting stuff on the concept of 'lean' intranets.

If your not aware of what we mean by using the word 'lean' in this context its actually refering to the concept of 'lean manufacturing'; I wont go into detail here, but here is the wikipedia article and Patrick covers it nicely in his article.

So please go and read Patricks article 'Intranet 2.0;the need for lean intranets', because I feel the need to digest his thoughts thoroughly before responding here with some commentary.

Enteprise Search - its not just the technology

I had a great chat with Martin White of Intranet Focus today, he rang me from the UK. We worked together on various elements of the intranet and search projects that were under my pervue at the Open University.

He debriefed me on the Enterprise Search Summit 2008 in New York, for which Martin gave the keynote. He later sent me his slides so I could have a read myself. Now Martin's knowledge on search is encylopedic, and we have had many chats on various elements of the subject and it turned out that we had similar opinions about search and ECM, i.e. that sorting out search problems or enteprise content management problems are as much about planning, governance and building teams of people to 'manage' the technology - bottom line, as per usual its all about people and not the shiny new software.

Martin puts emphasis in his presentation slides about building a team to manage your search, when I was presenting on the OU ECM programme I would always be sure to emphasise the size and breadth of the multi-disciplinary team brought together to implement the strategy. Martin has posted a summary of the conference and some of his thoughts here.

Now this also fits with Prescient Digital Media's advice on implementing or improving intranets, that there should be an emphasis on planning, governance and 'managing'. Indeed to push the theme even further Toby recently posted on the Intranetblog on the Pro's and Con's of Sharepoint, qouting Shawn Shell, the author of the new CMS Watch Sharepoint report. Shawn's advise on how to ensure success in deploying Sharepoint also focuses on what might be called 'soft' aspects of information systems project management.

OK, so non of this is 'rocket science' to me, Martin, Toby or Shawn, but if your a newly promoted IT guy (hey, I've been there !) who's been told to implement Sharepoint, or buy a new search engine, the change management, people management and information management (metadata, taxonomies, classification schema's, 'findability' etc) aspects might be a long way from the top of your task list ! When it comes down to it they may not be at the forefront of the CIO's thoughts either.......

Having been involved around the periphery of a big CRM programme, and having watched colleagues do data warehousing and BI etc, non of this is specific to 'unstructured data' - but, time for the blatant plug (!) if your doing ECM, Intranet, CMS or search projects, Prescient can help to ensure you have the right executive backing, the right governance structures and the right team in place to implement your projects.