Prescient Planning for SharePoint Success webinar - Monday 13th April

Join Toby Ward, President and CEO of Prescient Digital Media online next monday to hear about how to plan for a succesful SharePoint implementation:

• Date: April 13, 2009
• Location: Webinar

• Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT

• Is SharePoint right for your organization?
• Are you considering the pros & cons of SharePoint vs other platforms?
• Do you understand SharePoint's design and information architecture limitations?
• Have you put in place the necessary governance and planning to make it work?

http://www.prescientdigital.com/events/upcoming-events/planning-for-sharepoint-success-free-online-webinar-presentation/

If you have read any of my pages before, you will know that I always mention an old British forces saying, the 5P's - Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance - and this is as true for a SharePoint implemenation as it is for any other enteprise software.

Come and join the Intranet Best Practices workshop at J.Boye 09

I have the pleasure to announce that I will be running a pre-conference workshop at Janus Boye's innaugral North American conference: Philadelphia 09

The workshop is Intranet Best Practices and its a double act with my very good friend and colleague Martin White (of Intranet Focus Ltd).

Martin is also doing a session entitled: Making the most of SharePoint 2007 and I think current plans may see me doing an as yet to be determined session on the Intranet track.

Toby Ward of Prescient Digital Media will also be there doing sessions on the e-Health and Intranet tracks, along with many other excellent speakers. The full programme is available here:

http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia09/schedule

I have paticipated in Janus' conferences before in Denmark, they are excellent and informative, so I hope you can come and join us !

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....... :-)

The reality of SharePoint deployments

Over at Intranetblog.com Toby has commented on a recent AIIM webinar in a post titled "SharePoint: Truth or fiction"

I am not going to repeat the post here, you can read it yourselves. However Toby notes that the AIIM research suggests the majority of real world SharePoint (MOSS 2007) deployments are at the departmental level for file sharing / collaboration scenarios.

The AIIM research backs up previous CMS Watch comment (and their comprehensive reports) on where SharePoint can find its 'sweet spot'. Most of my previous posts on SharePoint have suggested that its really a portal server / portal development platform with additional features added for collaboration and content management (much like you can buy similar add on's for IBM WebSphere, Oracle Webcentre (ex-BEA Aqualogic) or even the LifeRay OSS portal). I have also suggested that Microsoft are wrong to market SharePoint as an 'Enterprise Content Managment" platform.

However AIIM (or was it Gartner?) did coin the term 'Basic Content Services' to describe SharePoints Microsoft Office centric lightweight document management and library services features, and it appears that this is where many department level deployments are focused - on replacing disorganised and unmanaged 'file share hell' with hopefully better managed and better organised SharePoint document libraries - maybe they are even using metadata ! (sorry lets stick to MS terminology - 'site columns'........)

No doubt AIIM is right that an easy and simple introduction to enterprise information management and ECM via SharePoint based document management is better than nothing, and is a good start to helping organisations build up their information management environment. But Toby points out that the evidence seems to suggest the more 'sophisticated' web content management, records management and even forms management functionality is not seeing much use.

I will just end this post the same way I end all SharePoint posts by stating I am not knocking the product, SharePoint maybe the perfect fit for your organisation in meeting specific requirements. The caveat is that unless you follow the same process you would normally follow for a major enterprise software procurement, and develop a good set of requirements how will you know if SharePoint will meet those requirements, or if you would be better of spending thousands on WordPress or millions on Documentum ? Remember the '5P's' - Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance !

So don't assume that because your IT shared services organisation says you can have it for 'free' that there is not going to be some impact on your bottom line. Indulge in a little prior planning to ensure your solution will at least be 'good enough' even if its not 'the best ever', and as ever Prescient Digital Media stands ready to assist you :-)

More Sharepoint stuff from the JBoye08 conference

Toby has posted another Sharepoint related article on IntranetBlog based on his interaction with various industry experts, and more to the point `seasonded users` who are discussing their experiences at the JBoye08 conference in Aarhus, Denmark:

What the experts say about Sharepoint (MOSS)

I like these frank qoutes from anonymous users, so I am going to replicate them here:

• “The perception is that the search engine is terrible. I’m not 100% in agreement… the engine is pretty good, but the search interface can be weak (e.g. the engine does support wild card and Boolean searches, but usually the implemented interface does not).”

• “Personal sites (My Site functionalilty) is both interesting and scary at the same time.”

• “The complexity across farms is ridiculous. Make sure your consultant (MS partner or implementer) give you a list of those things that stop working across farms.”

Toby is also tweeting live from the conference so if your on Twitter search for Toby Ward and follow in `near real time` :-)

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.

A new life for Liferay ...

a new life a corporate suite that is, well perhaps. Janus from CMS Watch writes about the new partnership between Sun and Liferay here: Sun Portal Server rides into the sunset in favour of Liferay.

My boss Toby chips in with some analysis on the Intranetblog with: Another Portal bites the dust.

However I would like to comment on a different angle. I have met the Liferay guys at a conference. They are one of those great open source stories, they started development of their product to meet their own needs (a new portal type website for their church if I remember correctly). The software has gone from strength to strength based on the original developers and the community they have built up around the product. However they also have some commercial nous, just look how well they have done so far ! So, to get any bigger, or to push into more markets the serious cash backing that Sun can provide will do no harm at all ! Of course Liferay is seriously platform agnostic, but it does run on Suns Java app server and of course it runs with MySQL, lets hope if the relationship is cemented and Sun fully acquires Liferay (which has been hinted at as noted by Toby) that Sun remembers to play nicely with respect to running Liferay on other platforms.

By the way, although I have no experience of running Liferay, it appears that the new collaboration features in version 5 make it a Java based competitor to MS MOSS 2007 - and competition is always good ;-)

First day at Prescient Digital Media !

So, been Canadian for just over a couple of weeks now, had my first 'public holiday' - Victoria Day - yesterday, but today I started in the new job. Not a lot I can tell you about that yet, I mean I have only been in the office half the day .......

However as well as getting on with creating a full consulting offering around improving your intranet search experience, I have been asked do some research on MOSS 07 / Sharepoint, as so many of our clients are considering for one use or another.

My new boss, Toby, has obviously been discussing MOSS with people at the Enterprise 3 conference down in San Diego, as he made this posting on the Intranet Blog yesterday: Sharepoint requires proper architecture and governance (well 'duh' but obviously many people are neglecting this !)

So, more Sharepoint posts to come......