Doug Cornelius .com

I attended a breakfast meeting sponsored by Knowledge Management Associates, Inc. about all things SharePoint.

There were four presentations:

• Dispatches from the Front Lines – Themes and Trends in SharePoint Use
  Sadie Van Buren
• Training Approaches to Drive SharePoint Adoption
  Pam Conway
• SharePoint Best Practices Conference Recap
  Tim Farrell and Marcel Meth
• Microsoft’s SharePoint Investment Areas
  Tara Seppa

In the interest of full disclosure Knowledge Management Associates, Inc. is a client of The Firm and they did give me a copy of MS Office 2007 as a prize in the raffle.

Tara Seppa from Microsoft spent some time at the Real World SharePoint Experiences conference to give us some idea about what direction Microsoft is taking SharePoint.

. . . . Omitted at the request of Microsoft. Apparently the information was not ready for disclosure.

Lastly, Tara pitched the the SharePoint team blog as place for information on Sharepoint as it goes through the development process.

Tim Farrell and Marcel Meth of Knowledge Management Associates presented some of their notes from the recent SharePoint Best Practices Conference.

Tim and Marcel attended the SharePoint Best Practices conference in DC Sept 14-17.

Marcel is seeing a trend where extranets and intranets are collapsing. He is seeing companies deploy in a secure site outside the firewall. Internally, Microsoft’s SharePoint deployment has 14 Terabytes of data. They keep each database under 200GB.

Microsoft expects support of non-window browsers within 2 years.

There is also a new SharePoint online. You do not need to install SharePoint. Your information just lives in the cloud.

Intranet search and enterprise search are different. The intranet search of SharePoint is mature and works well, but it is not an enterprise search.

Workflow is not quite ready for prime time. There are lots of subtleties and you will need some expertise to use it.

Tim spoke about governance and taxonomy. You should have a governance team of about 10 people even for a big company. Chose a pilot program that can build grass roots support. See how it grows and emerges. Start with just the one pilot. (He seems to like the concept of emergent collaboration.)

Tim also focused on tiered levels of control.  At the top, with the highest degree of control and the lowest degree of innovation and change are the enterprise wide taxonomy. At the opposite extreme are MySites that have the lowest degree of control and highest degree of innovation and change.

Tim’s best practices for document management in SharePoint:

• Support a single source of the truth
• Consistent taxonomy
• Centralize management of taxonomy
• Updateable taxonomy as the organization changes
• User can enhance core tax and enhance with own particular needs
• Changes shared with rest of business to avoid duplication

Tim’s top ten pitfalls for a SharePoint implementation

1. MOSS as replacement for a network drive
2. We know that we need, just set up a default site
3. Failure of capacity planning
4. Just set up a site, Joe user will love it – you need some user testing
5. Oh, while we are at it – adding other upgrades at the same time
6. Upgrading SQL and line of business applications during portal implementation
7. Letting front office administration manage SharePoint – they need training and defined roles for Governance
8. Designing every site before rolling out SharePoint – think in terms of phases.  Do function first
9. Over-engineered security – use AD as much as you can.
10. Converting all of the ASP.net code to web parts – some stuff may just run better not being in

Pam Conway, Vice President at  CompuWorks gave this presentation at the Real World SharePoint Experiences seminar.

Pam talks about the purpose of training.  Sure, it is about acquiring skills.  But that is only one piece of the puzzle. Pam’s seven points for training:

• Acquire skills
• Improve skills
• Inform
• Communicate
• Sell
• Connect
• Reassure

You want to use training to inform users so they know how they should be using the tool.  Training can also be used to communicate and explain why they should be using the tool.  Communication is two way, trainers should be listing and bringing feedback from the users.  You should use training to sell the tool.  You need to sell the users on why they should be using the tool.  You need to show them what is in it for them.  Training can also be used to connect individuals within a group or across groups to discuss how they could use the tool.  It is also time to reassure the users.  You should be prepared to hold their hands to let them know that support is there for them.

Training is essential for SharePoint.  If you build it, will they come?  NO.  You need to pull them in.  There are lots of change management issues associated with SharePoint.  Training can help and should be part of the change management process.  You should identify the hurdles in advance so you can address them as part of the training.  Training is just start of the process. You need plan for before, during and after deployment.

For before, you need to generate buy-in.  The trainers should have cases ready that show how current problems can be solved by the adoption of SharePoint.  The trainers should use a real use case in the training sessions.  You also want to show the top-down push for SharePoint.  You need to show what’s in it for me to the users. You need to show how it is going to make easier for the individual to be able to do their job.

Pam pitched focusing training on the persons role in SharePoint:  are they a user, contributor, editor, administrator, etc.

There is a learning kit from Microsoft.  It is an add-on from Microsoft download center. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Training

Pam pitches the use of documentation, single page quick reference cards.  (I was surprised that she did not pitch having them in SharePoint, but using paper handouts).

Sadie Van Buren of Knowledge Management Associates gave this presentation at the Real World SharePoint Experiences seminar.

Sadie also blogs at A Matter of Degree, a Microsoft SharePoint / Information Architecture / Web Usability blog.

Sadie showed some client reactions and surveys on their use and adoption of SharePoint.  The clients surveyed covered a broad spectrum of industries, size and revenue. It was a small sample set of only 19 companies.  Sadie compares SharePoint to a Swiss Army Knife.  It does lots of things but does not do them very well. There are lots of best of breed programs that do some of the things better.

Some downsides to SharePoint:  it is not Blackberry-friendly, it is not a cross-platform platform, it does not produce reports, it is not good for a relational database and it is not good for transaction uses.

Most people are using SharePoint for search and for their intranet.  Only one is using it for public facing web pages.  Sadie was surprised that about half of the clients were using blogs and wikis.  In part, because they did not ask for them.  They seemed to adopt blogs and wikis just because they were part of the platform.

These are the trends she sees in customization:

• Site collection creation process for extranets
• Employee phone list from AD
• Inserting staff photos into AD
• Theme changer
• Alerts refresh

Sadie moved on to some of SharePoint’s cultural challenges. Most of the challenges she presented for adoption of SharePoint are the same challenges we have in knowledge management.  People resist changing ways of doing things.  People are too busy to share or won’t invest time, management won’t assign ownership of content, governance and consistency are a low priority, and “my documents, not the company documents.”

Some things that Sadie found to be ingredients for success:

• Bulletin boards, cafeteria menu and a picture of the day drive traffic
• Buy-in from management
• Sponsorship from key users
• Right attitude: “We’re not implementing SharePoint; We’re implementing a new KM program.”
• Findability (People need to find things)
• Integrate with other systems to avoid duplicate data entry

We have continue to wiki-fy content at The Firm.  SharePoint treats wiki pages as documents and gives them high rankings in search results. They are quickly becoming the preferred way to capture information and knowledge in the firm.

The SharePoint wiki tool is simple, but that makes it easy to teach people how to use. Everyone who has actually used the wiki is stunned at how easy it is to edit.

Here is the latest count of wiki pages:

I am staggered at the amount of content flowing into the wikis.

I am using the number of wiki pages as an indicator of adoption. Ideally, I would like to be able to pull the total number of versions of wiki pages. That could be a better indicator of usage because it would show the total number of edits to pages, not just the number of pages. So far I have not been able to find a way to get a report on this from SharePoint.

Does anyone know a way to find that information in SharePoint?

I have expressed my displeasure with the Sharepoint Wikis: Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.  We have been looking at wiki platforms to replace or supplement the Sharepoint wikis. One platform is Atlassian’s Confluence. These are the answer we received for a few of our questions:

Thanks for your interest in our award-winning enterprise wiki, Confluence. Sorry for the delay in responding, but we released Confluence 2.9 today and I wanted to wait and reply after the release because some of the new features may be very appealing to you. Based on your requirements, I think that Confluence could be a very good fit for your law firm.

Email notifications of the changes

Yes, highlighting or only showing the changes to the page itself;
Yes, Confluence allows users to ‘watch’ pages (or entire spaces) and then sends you an e-mail every time they are updated. The e-mails themselves contain the page and a link to the page where you can easily view the most recent changes. The changes are presented in a nice format highlighting both what has been deleted and what has been added.

Here is a quick overview: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/oCAC

Confluence also allows the creation of custom RSS feeds that allow users to subscribe to certain pages, spaces and blogs and lets them check the updates at their discretion without filling up their inboxes. 

Checkout on editing

Confluence has very strong capabilities in this area. If a user clicks to edit a page that is concurrently being edited by another user, they will be notified. Confluence can automatically merge their changes if the two users edit different parts of the page. If there are any conflicts, Confluence will display them for you and give you the option to either ‘Overwrite’ the other user’s changes, ‘Merge your changes’ manually, or ‘Discard’ them.

Our page describing this functionality is here:http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/TzUC

Confluence also has very fine grained permissioning, meaning that you can easily restrict which individuals and groups can view or edit a page. 

Integration with Sharepoint / MOSS 2007.

Microsoft is embracing partners who are leaders in Web 2.0 technologies and so we had SharePoint Connector designed. This plugin allows for integration between Confluence and SharePoint on multiple levels. You can embed SharePoint content on a Confluence page, create links between the different programs, run searches among content on both programs and more.

You can see the homepage for the connector here:http://www.atlassian.com/sharepoint/default.jsp The documentation for the SharePoint Connector offers more comprehensive information on the product: http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/9AHrBQ

Today, we also release a free plugin called the Office Connector. This makes it easy to convert MS Word documents into Confluence pages and also to embed Excel and PowerPoint content. I’d highly recommend watching the video on its homepage: http://www.atlassian.com/office/

Has your law firm tried an evaluation of Confluence yet? You can download a free 30-day evaluation and see how it works from: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ConfluenceDownloadCenter.jspa

It sounds like they are addressing the holes we have found in SharePoint wikis.

I watched a presentation by XMLaw of their OneView suite of information management tools for SharePoint and in particular, their OneView Connect product. OneView Conncet is a framework for connecting systems and building portal sites.

OneView ties into other data systems in the firm and allows you display the content from those other systems in a SharePoint webpart. Among the standard connectors are those for SQL databases. They also have connectors to InterAction, Interwoven’s Worksite, and Open Text eDocs as part of what they ship in the box.

One a single page, you can show the contacts at a client (from InterAction), their billing status (from the time/billing system) and documents (from Worksite). One View also makes it easy to build tabs into a SharePoint webpage to flip between content pages.

The paradigm they use is rendering the content from the other system into a SharePoint list. Then you can format views of the information in a way similar to other SharePoint lists.

Their product is a really powerful tool that allows SharePoint to be more of portal into all of the firm’s information, instead of SharePoint merely acting as a separate repository

In the interest of disclosure, Rob Saccone, the President of XMLaw, used to lead the development team at The Firm.

In early April we rolled out Sharepoint 2007, upgrading our intranet platform from SharePoint 2003. I have been keeping track of the number of wiki pages and wiki libraries.

As of today we have:

wiki libraries: 9
wiki pages: 313, which is a 50% increase over the past month’s 205

Progress has been a bit slow as we deal with some issues. The notification system still has some problems and we want to get those fixed before we start pushing too hard.

We are still suffering from the wiki’s failure to show the changes to the wiki page as part of the notification. [See Sharepoint Wiki Disaster.]

Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint.com has been running with my idea of using separate pages in a Sharepoint area to host a collection of user support documentation: Pages and Sites in SharePoint 2007 (Case Study).

He has turned that into a screen cast using an alternative method of organizing the documents using content types: A Beginner’s Guide to Content Types. The screencast is a great way to show the methods used.

I find the use of content types to be very valuable when use multiple document libraries.

For a single document library like I set up for “Using Your Computer” I find the column and view sorting to work just fine without the content type. If I had the documentation spread across other sites or other libraries, then I would use content types. I find the power of content types to be their ability to reunite information spread across the site collection into one place. For a single document library, it seems to be excessive and adds unneeded complexity.