Doug Cornelius .com

An intranet is one of the foundation tools for a knowledge management program. We are currently working on the redesign of our SharePoint intranet. This will be our third generation intranet using SharePoint. The redesign team has spent a great deal of time discussing navigation on the intranet.

I have come to the realization that most users want to be able to navigate and browse to their desired content on the intranet. This seems contrary to the internet where most people are comfortable searching for content. I think there are two reasons. First, intranet searches (ours included) have been notoriously bad, by not searching enough repositories and not presenting the search results in a coherent way. Second, users treat the intranet like any other application where they click action buttons to get the information they need.

Users should be using the intranet to help answer a question. So a well designed intranet should be setup to help the user answer their question. This means organizing content content solely around business units (for a law firm practice areas or administrative departments) is not the most useful way to organize the intranet.

We decided to have some organization on the intranet organized around typical tasks. We worked with focus groups and card-sorting exercises to layout a top level and secondary navigation. There was a lack of agreement on where some items should be in the navigational scheme. It seems everyone had different way of thinking about how content should be grouped.

Coincidentally, I just finished reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. He makes a compelling case that an item need not be in a single location when dealing with digital content. The book also shed a lot of light on why people have different ways of wanting to group the intranet content.

Along this same idea, Bob Mixon posted on MOSS 2007 Site Navigation – Topical Versus Organizational and Getting More from the Content Query Web Part (CQWP). He indicates that you can get the best of both worlds in SharePoint, organizing content by business group and by topic. This technique seems like it will be able to give the business groups the ability to manage and update their information, but repackage it and make it available to different user groups in different ways.

The Knowledge Thoughts Blog posted their collection of video resources about SharePoint: Learn more about Sharepoint.

They also shared their collection of Delicious links on SharePoint. This is my collection of Delicious links on Sharepoint.

In my feed from SharePointPedia, I came across a post from Bill Gates on how he uses Office 2007 and SharePoint. Yes, it is a pretty fluffy post about how wonderful Office 2007 is to use.

Mr. Gates points out the ability to use SharePoint as an expertise locater. He also talks about creating internal websites, collaboration and discussions in SharePoint, but never uses the terms “blog” or “wiki” or “RSS.” I find it interesting that he is playing up the social networking features of SharePoint.

In a related note, Mr. Gates talks about using email and outlook as his primary communications tool. Again, he leaves out blogs, wikis and RSS.

Law.com’s Legal Technology section has an article by Mark Gerow of Fenwick & West: Implementing Large-Scale Extranets.

Like Fenwick & West we also use Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as our extranet platform. The trouble with using it as extranet is finding an attorney and finding a client with a matter they want to share information by using an extranet. Although there is a lot of talk about clients wanting extranets, I find it to be more talk than need or desire.

I was surprised to find that we have more extranets for litigation matters than transactional matters. I think the problem is the database style of presenting and holding information in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . The great thing is that Sharepoint gives you the flexibility to organize and display documents. The bad thing is that Sharepoint gives you the flexibility to organize and display documents. I believe the chronological display of litigation filings breaks the barrier of having to figure out how you want to display the documents.

One way I found to leverage the Sharepoint structure was to host the contracts be transferred under an asset acquisition agreement. Representing the seller, we published each of the contracts to the extranet site and tagged each entry with the corresponding item reference on the disclosure schedule to the asset purchase agreement. When looking at the schedule you could see a lease referenced as item 12 on schedule 1 of the disclosure schedule. You could then turn to the extranet site, quickly browse to the schedule 1 section and look on the list for item number 12. Then you can pull up the contract. The extranet was a great tool for use to organize the documents for our client and allowed the purchaser easy access to the documents.

I was surprised to hear that Fenwick & West automatically creates an extranet for each matter opened. Granted, the information for a blank Sharepoint site takes up little memory and space. Unless their extranets are widely used (and I have found few firms that widely use extranets) you end up with lots of dead extranet sites.

Microsoft won the battle to invest in Facebook. According to the New York Times, They agreed to pay $240 million for a 1.6% stake in the company . That places the value of Facebook at $15 billion.

Microsoft’s SharePoint Products and Technologies Team has been working up their own take on SharePoint as a social network tool. According to the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, Eric Charran (Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services), Dino Dato-on (SharePoint Ranger), and Greg Lang (Program Manager for Microsoft Enterprise Services Communities Tools and Infrastructure) have written a soon to be published white paper that addresses the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement SharePoint’s MOSS 2007 as a social networking solution.

There is an except on the website: Enabling and managing social networks (for business use) with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

One of the reasons I have been using Facebook is to see what pieces of its functionalities would add value inside the enterprise. We have a great photobook application, but it gives an incomplete and relatively static snapshot of information about the person. It should be relatively easy to pull in additional information about the person, like what matters they have worked on.

I wonder if we should be developing our own custom application or leveraging the tools that come with SharePoint. The My Sites functionality in SharePoint looks like it could be a useful platform for pulling in more information about the people inside the firm.

I assume that Microsoft is already working on an enterprise Facebook. It just seems like an obvious tool for them to develop. My guess is that SharePoint will give them the platform to do it.

I have generally frowned on the weather display on intranet pages. But I saw this and found it interesting. This SharePoint webpart from Bamboo Solutions could display the weather for all or our offices in one place, side by side.

Comparing the weather is much more interesting, than just seeing your weather information. In LA it is always going to be sunny and 80 degrees. But that becomes much more interesting when it is displayed next to the weather in Boston (especially on a murky day)

Thanks to the SharePoint Product Group for publicizing this on the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog.

I have been a fan of Google Maps and Google Earth for a while. In my real estate practice it is generally very useful to see the building and surrounding land to help identify problems.

One thing I have been thinking about, and working with off and on, is how to represent information from our firms systems and my personal systems on a map.

On the personal side, I set up a Google Map that shows a few of my real estate transactions. I set that up several months ago and it needs some updating. I found it powerful to show a breadth of practice. Personally, I think the map is a more powerful display of information than a list of real estate transactions.

In the firms we set up a few tests of displaying our transaction data on our SharePoint intranet. Many of the problems came from our underlying data source. (We were not good about capturing a property address).

Now, according to the Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog, you can incorporate Virtual Earth Maps on SharePoint. I will have to revisit this after we upgrade our SharePoint platform in the next few months.

• Tom Jones, Director – Product Marketing of Aderant
• Tim Kenney, VP Business Development of Handshake Software
• Michael Green, IT Director of Nixon Peabody LLP

Expert Portal is designed to be the “home page” for professionals and their clients. Handshake’s Relationship Toolkit combines the information from CRM, Aderant Expert, DMS, HR System and SharePoint content.

The session moved on to a case study from Nixon Peabody LLP. They spend a lot of money on technology because they think it increases productivity and gives them a competitive advantage. They really want to create an environment the conducive to sharing, using and reusing knowledge. They also want to improve communication and collaboration.

Their short term goal was to create a more user friendly environment that addresses the requirement for information sharing and collaboration. The longer term goal was to focus on improving internal processes, decision making and aggregation of data.

He prioritized the projects based on a matrix, charting business impact against ease of implementation.

Mike moved on to a demo of his MySite, which contains:

• Attorney’s matters
• Attorney’s clients
• Attorney’s hours
• Office weather
• Matter Billing Attorney’s AR and WIP
• Recent documents
• My links
• My extranets
• Link to the Wall Street Journal . com
• Partner news
• Firms news

The my site has a collection of webparts to add. The collection looks a lot like the iGoogle collection of widgets. This collection was custom built by Nixon Peabody. Not allow of them are strictly business oriented. They included things like sports scores. This strategy was done to attract users and get their attention. He allows the users to move the webparts around on the page. Some webparts are locked in place and the user cannot move them or remove them. So every attorney’s MySite will have business content.

They partnered with Recommind for the search, replacing the native SharePoint search.

They have knowledge liaisons that vet documents. Attorneys send them good precedents. The liaisons review the documents and rate them and summarize to affect their search results and document display. They have a user rating system, that allows multiple ratings available for each document.

Each matter has a matter system. Within the list of people who have worked on the matter, there is presence awareness.

Nixon Peabody uses extranets extensively. They give them a particular look and feel and brand specific to the client.

The portal demonstration was based on SharePoinit 2003. They have no current plan to move to Sharepoint 2007. [Like my firm, it likes like they have lot invested in 2003. That makes it hard to "migrate" to 2007.]

Their rollout strategy was office by office and floor by floor. They sent trainers to each attorney’s office to show them the portal and how to add and use the webparts.

Strategies for Success:

• Executive Support
• Vision – Be able to articulate where you want to go.
• Planning – Develop a roadmap on that you plan to do and outline what you are not going to do.
• Governance – Develop a cross-functional team with ownership across the organization.
• Marketing – Make proactive efforts.
• Simplicity – Make it easy to train and easy to support.
• Incentives -KM is supported by financial incentives.

As part of the attorneys business plan, they require the attorneys to set a benchmark for how many documents they are going (a) to add to the portal/precedent collection and (b) review and rate. Management tracks this information.

The value: “Information in the context of other information, naturally linked and highly relevant.”

Forrester Research and NewsGator are putting on a webinar: Increasing SharePoint Value with RSS: “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is getting lots of buzz because it’s a one-stop portal, collaboration, content management, search and business process environment. To get the most of SharePoint team sites, you need to make the experience as rich as possible for employees and ensure that content is accessible when they are away from the portal. “

Using the RSS feeds and an enterprise based RSS reader can turn SharePoint from a repository of information into a much more powerful communications tool. SharePoint produces RSS feeds for its blogs and wikis (no surprise). It also has RSS feeds for searches, changes to lists and many other objects in the SharePoint platform.