chrisg

Michael Gannotti on SharePoint

chrisg — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:37:17 GMT

Someone else out there is doing some great video interviews on K2. Michael Gannotti. Check out these great videos on K2 and BlueThread too.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1147

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1148

If you have not followed Michael's videos and or blog I highly recommend it. It is on my list of favorites.

A great article for all you programmers out there

chrisg — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:27:13 GMT

http://lifedev.net/2008/07/programmer-creativity-boost/

Geier At Large in Dallas

chrisg — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:43:07 GMT

Hello again and welcome to another entry into my travels. This time we are in Dallas TX (one of my favorite cities) and talking with Jeremy Ragan from Blue Thread http://www.bluethreadinc.com/

Give it a listen/watch.

Nashville User Group

chrisg — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 18:55:14 GMT

I had the pleasure of visiting Nashville this week and was able to present at the Nashville SharePoint Users group. It is a very well run group and its new so that is a huge accomplishment. Checkout their web site http://www.nashvillesug.com/

I talked all about K2 blackpearl and how it can help in so many situations and how we integrate with SharePoint overall. Was a great session if I do say so myself and I was invited back to talk more about blackpearl as we release more and more functionality. Also talked about our MOF process and got lots of good feedback on that. Cant way to go next time it was a great group. If you are in that area check it out.

Geier at Large with Tim Byrne Pt 2

chrisg — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:42:00 GMT

The continuation of my interview with Tim Byrne. Enjoy! Coming soon...More Geier At Large interviews.

Geier At Large

chrisg — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:34:00 GMT

Welcome to my new adventure, we call Geier At Large. This new series of blog posts will chronicle my adventures traveling around talking to different K2 customers and partners. We are going to try this out and see how it does. So be watching this space as I hit the road, to talk to YOU the K2 community.

My first road trip keeps me close to home in Chicago talking to Tim Byrne of Clarity Consulting. Tim is one of the K2 Insiders and the guy who makes me eat Sushi. Take a look at this first part of the interview. I will post part 2 a bit later.

I hope you are going to like the series of interviews and get something out of them. If you want me to come interview you let me know! And I apologize in advance for the small video. Somehing is going on with the way community server handles the embedding of the video. We are working on it. In case you cant stand it, here is the url http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPi7WZxiVE4

Mastering SharePoint with Bob Mixon Day 5

chrisg — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:41:00 GMT

Today the last day we are going to go into Security and Search. Two of the topics that interest me the most….

Security:

Who is responsible for Security: Most people will say IT. However for information architecture perspectives, the reality is that each piece of data needs a data owner. The security should be up to them since they know and understand that data the best. IT may implement the security based on guidance from the data owner.

However in broader terms, EVERYONE IS RESPONSIBLE FOR SECURITY

Important Notes

1. MOSS has good fine grained permissions

2. Permission Inheritance

3. Views are security trimmed.

Some good links for security stuff

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73134&clcid=0x409

http://k2underground.com/blogs/articles/archive/2007/07/11/moss-and-workflow-security.aspx

I may be biased on that last one.

In a controlled environment NEVER EVER EVER give an individual user permissions to a site, list, or library. It is way too much over head to manage, and will get out of control too quickly.

SEARCH:

Search TIP. USE BEST BETS AND KEYWORDS. They are GREAT!

Thanks for reading! TGIF!

Mastering SharePoint with Bob Mixon Day 4

chrisg — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:10:14 GMT

We are starting with more labs today. (not sure I can do it as for some reason I ordered decaf coffee)

Creating Controlled Documents

Note-Never Change anything on a built-in content type. Microsoft may make modifications to these via service packs and or other updates. Plus its just a bad idea.

Note- Do not modify or remove metadata columns that are associated with built-in content types. Its BAAAAD.

Note to self. Investigate “Labels” with regards to Information polices and content types. Looks like some neat stuff in there.

TIP. First create your lists and libraries without spaces in them such as “Documentsofstuff” then go to the lists and library settings and upadate the name “Documents of stuff” this will allow you to create the libraries and lists without all that %20 stuff

When creating a new Site Collection one of the best to use is the Collaboration Portal.

Limitation: You can only have 1 pages library per site. (I wonder why this is?)

Ahh the survey. I have done a lot of these. And I must say that I am relatively impressed with it. Especially with the branching logic.

http://office.microsfot.com/en-us/sharepointserver/ha102090651033.aspx

Wepart Zones;

I did not realize that zones really did anything. But I guess I never thought about the whole not displaying content to some audiences. So something has to adjust the web parts to take up the slack. Good points.

I also did not realize how you can set so many different zone setting you can change. You can setup different permissions for each zone. Allowing some people to not be able to change web parts in that zone.

CQWP

Content Query Web Part. Lots of people here kind of high on it. I guess I am one of the few who had issues with it and ended up not using it. Am I the only one?

Warning: With the CQWP if you have it doing all subsites for the Query. And you have a lot of those sites. It will delay the display of the entire page while it waits for the CQWP to finish its query. This can be a big problem.

LOTS of Labs today. I won’t walk you through the details. Needless to say I had to apply a great deal of what I was learning the last few days.

Then of course I got to get up and talk all about K2 and built a process from scratch, on the fly. I just wish I had a faster machine, because things were going SLOW!

That’s all for today.

Mastering SharePoint with Bob Mixon Day 3

chrisg — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:55:23 GMT

Looking forward to today as I want to get into seeing all this stuff work.

Since we are so far ahead in the schedule we are going to change gears and go off the beaten path. Bob is walking us through a presentation called “Information First” this is part of his standard consulting engagements that he does with different clients that need help in starting off an information architecture.

Define what you value.

What information is important?

This helps you use the old 80/20 rule. 80% of the value is derived from only 20% of the content. So focus on that 20% and you job overall will be easier.

Something to understand.

Understanding your data will facilitate meaningful use of information….

What does this mean? I think it means that you need to really understand your data, what it is, where it comes from, how it is used and why. If you do understand this you will get much more use out of it because you will better understand the relationships, and be able to better organize it. If you do organize it better and make it easier to use more people will find it and use it and then you will get more value from it. (You think?)

Bob walked through some information mapping using Mindjet Mindmapper. If you have not seen this I suggest you take a look.

Interesting concept was gone over as to the consumer side of data. How and why people view the data dramatically affects how you organize it and classify it. So who and why people need to and want to get to data affects how you plan to present it. You must think about this when planning out the taxonomy, not only that the data is there and that it needs to be there but who will need it and how do they want to view it and why…

So this means that when planning your taxonomy you need to talk to people that make up different classification. Data owners, data consumers and make sure you get a good representation from different areas. So don't just ask HR how they view HR policies, ask some generic Joe Schmoe how they view HR data.

Another thing to keep in mind when planning your information taxonomy is the evolution of data. Will the information change? If so how often? Do you need to view previous versions of the data that has changed? How long will you need to keep previous versions and how many of them? This could affect your architecture and settings pretty dramatically. This is especially true as you plan content types and associate policies with them. Ahh I love it when a plan comes together.

TIP:

Don't be too flat in your taxonomy; you really need a hierarchy in order to get a proper structure for data.

Tip.

No data should go into a formal system without an owner.

Why do you need to manage your content?

Content is beneficial to improving your productivity, the overall productivity of your organization or quality of life. Because of this it should be maintained and well managed. This is also why you need to build out the system that manages the right way.

Something you really need to look into is the whole concept of views on lists and libraries. Rather than creating a bunch of new folders or other lists and libraries. You can store it all in one and just use different views which you can direct link to for people to see. Changes the way people see the data and they won’t know it’s not different areas. All they see is the stuff that matches the criteria of the view. I must say that this is one thing I have done right several times before. Get rid of Folders….!!

Document libraries and versioning.

Good stuff..

TIP. Remember that the second you enable versioning, those who only have reader access will never see the documents that are minor versions. They will only see the published files. This is also true with all WCM content.

Did you know that if you checkout a document it will save a document to your local My Documents > SharePoint Drafts folder?

Some Misc Limits

· More than 2000 libraries and lists in a single site will degrade performance.

· Having more that 50 lists and libraries in the sites navigation makes it very difficult to navigate from a usability perspective

· The max recommended size of a library is 10,000,000 documents. I think I am safe.

Document Management

This controls the lifecycle of document. It controls how documents are created, how they may be reviewed and after review how they are published. Once published it dictates how they are consumed by those who need to and after not needed anymore how those documents are disposed of.

WCM

I did not realize how granular you could get with utilizing WCM. You can have your style team dictate very granularly what the “content” will look like where it will be etc. And the content people just add the content. I really like how this can work, and then people won’t be able to use all different fonts and styles etc. You can dictate that the only fonts to be used come from xyz CSS or the like. Take this a step further and add some cool K2 workflow to the mix. (Obligatory plug sorry)

Another cool item is for images where you by default can browse to where images are stored even on your desktop. You can now limit what they are allowed to browse. Such as the Site Collection images library. (Which I guess that is what it is there for)

Page Layouts

Nothing earth shattering here, we are going through lots of stuff on page layouts, and options. Bob seems to be high on Telerik I will have to check them out. Also going into different ways to edit these pages and how to use Web Part Zones, web parts etc. I have not done much with WCM so I actually am very interested in getting on my vpc and seeing what I can do.

I did not know about this Smart-Client Authoring. That’s pretty neat, and it works well. It’s a great reason to upgrade to Office 2007. That’s great. Have you played with this? Neato! Your content creators can create their content in Word 2007. Obviously there are some drawbacks and may need some additional steps beyond a few clicks. (But I bet K2 can automate it) J

Audiences

I have never really messed with this feature, but Bob really likes it and positions it in such a way that it does sound appealing. I am just not sure I am ready to implement it with what appears to be a good deal of work to set it up. This is really all about filtering the view of information. What information should you be seeing. This is not security, this is just another way to sort and filtering to raise relevant content to the right people.

TIP: Every Site should have a Help and How to on it. This can be combined based on Role and Audiences to make it even more better. J

Planning for Document Management

Use this as a checklist of stuff to do when going through the planning process.

1. Identify document management roles

2. Analyze Document Usage

3. Plan the organization of documents

4. Plan how content flows and moves

5. Plan Content types

6. Plan Content Control

7. Plan WORKFLOW –See K2

8. Plan Information management Roles

AHHH The fun part now some LAB WORK. Let's create a TON of content types, and start building out some Information Architecture.

That's all for now talk to you tomorrow

Mastering SharePoint with Bob Mixon Day 2

chrisg — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:32:13 GMT

Mastering SharePoint Day 2

Welcome to Day two into my Classroom Journey into “Mastering SharePoint “ led by Bob Mixon. The notes from today may be a little more jumbled over yesterday. There were also lots of other things going on, including some labs.

Sites and Navigation Structures

What is a SharePoint Site? Make sure when you are thinking about it you separate content from visual representation. They are very different. Content is rendered on pages using HTML, controls and web parts.

Important: once a site is created the Site cannot be changed to use a different site Definition.

Site Template VS Site Definition

· Definition sitting on the file system…

· Template is what’s in the content db.

There was a ton more on this obviously. Bob walked through how all this works in moving from the file system, to the content db etc. But if you want a detailed explanation of that, I guess you will have to take the class J

This whole process is still a tad confusing. I need to learn more about the differences. I guess that will take some post class researching.

Be aware that Modifying Site Definitions = bad

You used to have to work a great deal with these in the 2003 days. However now you have features. Now you can deploy a new site “blank” and then activate the feature to it. Now you don't have to work with site stuff. This is a very Interesting idea to me. I like it. You can Staple features to a site…I hope we learn that. Google “Feature Stapling” for more info. Or once again “Take the class”

Take note: It also appears that Bob is going to be coming out with a new branding class that will be available online that will help you with this as well as doing the other stuff necessary. I am signing up…

I love features. You can activate a feature that creates a bunch of lists and libraries, then de-activate it and have it remove them again. That’s just awesome job MS. (Was that out loud?)

So what site template do you choose when creating a new site? Bob says start with a publishing site. He is the 3^rd MOSS “Expert” that has told me that or a variety of that. So it must be a good way to go. However be aware that if you start with a publishing site and later you want to save it as a template you will not be able to. You would be forced to do the Features Stapling. Keep that in mind.

Next we broke down every site template and went through their purpose and what was in them a valuable exercise. It does help you understand why you would use each one. Too much content to post here but if I can get the spreadsheet I will.

Important NOTE: Deploy an Enterprise Site Directory in Every Site Collection it will be valuable to you. You can only have 1 per site collection.

Site Navigation:

A very interesting topic, we talked a lot about how site structure affects content, and navigation and how the 3 can be very inter-related. Make sure that you think about this. If you customize navigation too much to make it fit within the content you can get into a situation where you are bypassing a great feature of MOSS called Security Trimming.

Personal Sites:

Not something I have used heavily and he stressed that these are very good at letting the human and or social aspects of SharePoint. People can create their own persona. They can talk about themselves, and have skills advertised and work with each other based on that. There are a lot of good options with Personal Sites, document sharing and even the possibility of having people share most of the documents on there. I think it is an Interesting idea. One thing to remember from an architecture perspective A personal Site collection is a Site Collection in itself, and should be thought of as such.

Talking about My Sites..We got into a discussion of global deployments, I found it very surprising the amount of disinformation out there on the bad parts of a global deployments. It was a heated discussion, the person who started the conversation is going to post a thread to www.masteringsharepoint.com so check it out and follow it there.

Planning for Sites and Navigation

Your SharePoint environment will GROW. Keep this in mind when planning. It will probably grow more than you think. If you don't wrap governance around it and control (hopefully with some K2) it will definitely grow probably grow out of control.

Some Q’s

· Are you going to use Single Site Collections or Multiple

· Who will administer each Site Collection

The good thing with one site collection is that a lot of out of the box tools and web parts is that they are usually scoped to a site collection so not a lot of custom dev work is required. But if you create multiple there are other good parts but there may be some custom dev work to be done since you need to do some things that go outside the site collection bounds.

I advise you to Do some research on these choices or (start broken record) take the class.

So how do you plan for site collections? Ask yourself some questions and have answers to the following

· What is the purpose

· Who is the owner

· Who can access it from a visitor or read perspective

· Who can participate or contribute. (Who needs write access)

· What type of template is needed

· How will it be surfaced in search?

What about sites and information architecture…

· How to structure

· How will data be presented

· How will people navigate

· How will you target the information in this site to people

· How will search be optimized?

Planning for Sites and its contributors

Remember If ITS NOT EASY THEY WONT USE IT..

I cannot emphasize this enough. IT IS HUGE. This is true for just about everything in IT, building an application, a process, a SharePoint site etc.

· Eliminate time consuming steps

· Make sure you keep things to the minimum. Do not expect people go through hurdles to get information in.

· People should easily know where to put something.

· They should have a small subset of sites they go to. Do not make them navigate a huge structure just to participate.

So what about the CONSUMERS?

If it is not EASY to locate it won’t be found and thus not be used.

Consider thinking about this from a user’s perspective. Imagine yourself as a new employee, and think where would I find x or y or z? Maybe a good idea here is to ask a friend or spouse to help you. I am sure they would be oh so willing.

Thinking about stuff like this is very difficult and we need to break out of our habits and try to eliminate the "curse of knowledge". If you don't know what that is I suggest you do some reading. It will help you in many areas for planning and communicating. Google that term and you will find some great resources.

Some good ones I just found by googling

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=F0612A

http://www.businesspundit.com/the-curse-of-knowledge-why-communication-at-work-is-sometimes-difficult/

It is also gone over in a GREAT book

http://www.madetostick.com/

Its good reading for lots of reasons

A good point was raised here. Kind of out of place but good none the less. If you are in a situation were politically you have to make someone an administrator of a site, here are 2 important rights to remove. (Rights to create sites, rights to set security perms) remove these 2 and it is much more palatable to give all others and call them administrators…Good political move.

Some other good planning tools

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73282&clcid=0409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73148&clcid=0x409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73138&clcid=0409

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=73146&clcid=0409

These are starters, just to give you an idea of what to do. However these docs may not work well for larger projects as they layout and space is not that conducive. Maybe take these and use a SharePoint site in DEV to manage it and use it for reference.

Then you can EAT YOUR OWN DOG FOOD. If you find it hard to use, your users will too.

AHHH Its LUNCH TIME. I am impressed with the food. Good job Bob…

And then it’s LAB TIME!!! We are going to start creating some sites and site structure

….

…

Content Classification and Categorization

· Content Types (A form of Classification)

· Sites (A form of categorization)

Content types you can think of as a way to define your objects. These can be such things as metadata, different behaviors, and policies

Sites are basically a container for grouping content, and they also provide you a means to provide a security context around that content.

I really think that overall Content types are going to be one of the most important aspects of your SharePoint design, how you create these and the relationships you use for your data, files etc. Content types are going to dramatically affect the results of the ending product. It will affect how you find, and create your data along the way. Make sure you understand them

Content Types directly relate to business data entities

An interesting point about content types and using them, the Content Type is typically scoped to a site collection but Bob says you can wrap a content type into a feature and deploy to a farm. I must find out more about that…..

I love the idea of content types and associating behaviors with it. Polices, expirations, workflows etc. Good that if you want to associate a workflow with content type you cannot do it in OOB workflow or SPD. However with K2, wammo no problem. J

How do you know when to create content types?

Determine the goals for why you would do it. Remember that 30% of your info is classified? If it is not going to be an item that will be needing to be easily surfaced, searched and sliced and diced up. If you do not need to do this then you do not need to classify it as such and thus not need it to be a content type. So for example if you are going to be storing lots of customer contracts either in a single place or multiple places, and you are going to want to quickly and easily get at this info, filter it, search it or other. Then you have to apply some taxonomy and the best way to do that is Content Types.

Good TIPS

· Never have the same name of the content type in different places with a different meaning. Has nothing to do with SharePoint but rather the ease of use and ability for rollup and taxonomy. Good Tip.

· 99% of all content types should be created at the highest level. If you walk through rollups, and cascading of content types where they keep building on each other through inheritance if makes a ton of sense.

Lists and List content types.

This is pretty interesting stuff. When you create a new Announcement list it automatically creates a list and associates a announcements content type with it. Is each list just a raw list with a content type applied? That is kind of neat. Good architecture.

Go to any list and change it to be allowing management of content types, when you do that you will see the content types associated with it. This really helps you understand the whole list thing. Even a blank list will have a content type of Item.

I recommend you go through the site content types and look through how they are arranged and what ones are there. Some interesting things you can learn and this will help you plan yours

Site Content Types and List Content types:

Site content types are the actual definition. The schema, the core. Yet it has not been used.

The second you associate a site content type with a List or library it is copied and become a List content type. There is a loose coupling there, so if you make changes to the site content type it will propagate to the list. You can break this by modifying the list content type. But this will break that link.

MAJOR POINT. DO NOT MODIFY THE DEFAULT CONTENT TYPES!!!

ALSO NEVER CHANGE A DEFAULT SITE COLUMN

There is soooo much with regards to all the little differences behind the scenes with Content Types, Fields, Columns etc. The great thing is how inter-related they actually all are. And its all done for some very good architecture purposes and how SharePoint is built. When you really dig in and learn its actually quite well done. It’s also a good idea on a very structured site, to never just go into a list or library to create an ad-hoc column. It then will be broken from the Site Content type template. You should go to that content type at the site level and add the column. I wish I had done this a few time in my environment

Information Management Policies.

Did you know that with any content type you can also setup information management policies to be associated with that content type? Makes it much easier to manage don't you think?

Some additional info on Management policies

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms499244.aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms549876.aspx

Planning content types

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287765.aspx

A cool codeplex tool on content types

http://www.codeplex.com/moss2k7ctypesviewer

Have I said much lately how much I love CodePlex?

Obviously Check out Bobs Blog and the Mastering SharePoint site

www.masteringsharepoint.com

www.bobmixon.com/blog

Well let’s call it a day. More to come tomorrow I am sure.

Mastering SharePoint Day 1

chrisg — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:09:52 GMT

Day 1

I am doing a blog of my experiences here at the Bob Mixon Mastering SharePoint class. There should be a new blog entry each day talking about what I learned and some thoughts I took away.

http://www.masteringsharepoint.com/

http://www.bobmixon.com/speaking/Pages/default.aspx

I knew going into this class it was going to be awesome. I knew I needed to take away from it things that I could use internally at K2. We have a KM, Portal based on SharePoint and it is used extensively. I know now that when I implemented in over 1 year ago I did a lot of things wrong. I know I would do it very differently. Now after this week I hope to plan changes along with some others internally that will correct those changes.

The day starts off with the overview.

SharePoint Overview Section

Some key points of the morning

Knowledge management solutions are never done. BPM is never done. You are constantly changing them, adding to them, refining them. AS business changes and we know it does, you need to have your software change with you. How quickly can you change it? How much insight into your processes do you have that shows you where it needs to change and why..?

Today’s business is fast paced, Streamline operational business processes to eliminate data errors. You need to take the knowledge gathered from internal operations, internal production systems and external relationships and be able to use it for proactive decision support.

Too often we are asking our employees to make decisions in their everyday life, and are hoping they are well informed. However are we doing our part by making sure they are well informed and have proper access to the best information easily and quickly. Not doing so makes them much less productive. This also puts the business at risk by making faulty decisions and not putting enough information and insight into the hands of those that need it.

Improving overall organizational productivity is a MUST. How can you accomplish this? This does not just happing by using technology and hoping that will do it. If you think so you are not looking at the whole picture. The important part is more of a mindset, an attitude and a discipline. Having the tools in place is one thing. But putting them into place is not enough. You need to architect them correctly and ensure they are done well enough so that people use them, and use them well.

What is a portal? The real definition of a portal is:

Persona based delivery of content based on who you are. You want it to present info to you based on what you do, who you are and what you should be and need to be seeing.

Collaboration

Collaboration provides a means for employees, vendors and customers to work without time or location boundaries. It must be **Simple and easy to use, this is often an overlooked aspect of design. If you don't make it easy to use, they won’t.

Bob and his content provide a great deal of good definitions of terms then relating that to MOSS. Breaks it down to a base level and what it will really mean to you, and your business. Including a great diagram that breaks out the different versions of SharePoint, I know this is such a common question. Microsoft has a spreadsheet here….

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101978031033.aspx

But I really like the diagram; I am trying to get it.

Now we get into the BDC. The infamous BDC- There was surprisingly some people in the class that had used it, I had gotten the impression that the BDC was not well utilized across the implementations of MOSS. Many of those in the room which had used the BDC used the the BDC MetaMan to get it going. I can’t see how people would do this without a tool like that. There is just too much to think about.

Now comes some very interesting parts as I really wanted to see how he positioned workflow and how people reacted. Most of what he presented I had seen and heard before. The OOB stuff is basic; the SPD stuff is better but can still be grown out of quickly. Most of the real work will be done in Visual Studio using WF. This is where he hit us with a great point. WF is not AGILE. BPM requires Agility. You can build it yourself, but needing ANY changes will take a great deal of time given the complexity and learning curve. Then you are left not being able to respond to changing business requirements and have a limited growth curve since it takes so long to make changes.

He also raised a real good point that I am not sure how I feel about at this point. He says There is NO reason to build any ASP.net website or application without using WSS or MOSS. It is a rich full featured, enterprise class development platform. And you can customize every aspect. There is so much there. If you were going to build a new windows application that stores data, would you develop your own storage engine or would you use SQL or Oracle. Bob related that you can build a web application or site 10x faster relying on WSS as a platform over just using ASP.net etc. This is often a similar argument to one I have made about K2 and is another view of the old build or buy decision. One that I believe will become more and more clear moving forward as people shy away from in depth development projects and will drive towards application integration and application assembly. Putting pieces and parts together and focusing on the business value and not the plumbing.

What is federated? The real meaning to submit queries to multiple search engines have them return the results and compile and list that info out. MS federate; means just return results from external services such as file shares, internal sites, and external sites.

Teams Roles and Responsibilities

Who is involved with the SharePoint design and the Implementation. More importantly who owns overall responsibility for it?

Bob says:

Why shouldn’t IT own the SharePoint solution? It is a business management solution, not a technology management solution. Solutions like CRM, or other LOB etc, IT should not own. The business needs to own them since they are for the business and they need to be managed by and requirements driven by the business. It’s quite the amazing thought really. Now this does not mean that IT will not administer, but they should not OWN the decisions. The business needs to, it is managing their business, it is helping their business, IT is the tool to help them know what the limits are what the caveats there around Availability, scale, performance, back up, restore etc. But the core of it, the process of it, Business must drive it.

Important Point: Chances for success will be increased by proper interfacing with the RIGHT members of the organization. If IT just goes off and builds what they think, it will FAIL

The council IDEA

There is a good deal of time spent in Day 1 talking about the ideas of establishing a “council” or multiple ones depending on granularity those involved and need. He recommends that you establish a council that drives the direction, and makes decisions. Business and IT should jointly sit on this. This is a GREAT idea, and has so many aspects that can be of benefit. This can be a management thing where evangelism is pushed from the top down, and a grass roots effort from the bottom up. Ideally this could even be both to have an even more rapid happy adoption. The more people adopt and the more people that use, the more ROI you can achieve.

Get some “Why” people, your cheerleaders, your advocates. You can have the Why people running around. (Why aren’t you using SharePoint for that, Why isn’t that on SharePoint) (Would be nice to have (why aren’t you using K2 for that?) J Don't forget on this team you need users, user education and evangelism will be a key to a successful roll out. Having the right members on this team that can help plan and lead that will be a great benefit.

There really seems to be a lot of additional stuff you need with the idea of a governance council. You can break this out and add in steering committees, working groups etc. I think that setting these things up at some level is the biggest step. Much like change management the important factor is that you are starting and you are doing, you can expand, grow and evolve from there, this can expand as your use of and knowledge of SharePoint does as well. There is too much stuff in the class around this kind of topic; you really need to take the class to get a good understanding of it, or course I recommend it highly.

The Librarian

Get a Knowledge manager, SharePoint librarian, Information Architect. Once architected and implemented you need to have a dedicated person who is responsible for managing the Information, the knowledge, the data. You need someone who is constantly on top of that. Granted with K2 and a solid process and solid architecture this can be alleviated some, but he is right. You definitely (in order to get full advantage out of a KM or IM, WCM in SharePoint) need someone overseeing this not in just Admin terms but in Knowledge and information terms.)

When trying to get funding or justify a MOSS project or really any project for that matter it is important to show the mapping. Map what it results in to a strategic priority. Customer support, increased efficiency, decreased hold time for customers etc. This is a huge key to a project and picking the right ones. This is also a key reason to why IT cannot own these types of initiatives, they simply (typically) do not have the appropriate insight and experiences to know these, and understand them enough to be able to raise them with enough credibility.

We discussed a Very interesting idea several times throughout the day from different aspects. Of all the problems that are going on out there with SharePoint. People everyday are seemingly starting a SharePoint project and not properly setting it up with a good amount of planning. I have talked with a lot of different consulting companies whose primary business is not going in at the beginning of a project but going in after someone tried to implement SharePoint and having to re-do a project that was supposed to be over but people were so unhappy with it that they had to bring in a new firm to help fix it. It’s amazing to me how often this happens. It ends up costing them 3x as much to re-plan, un-do, re-do. When will people learn?

Don't call it an Intranet

An interesting idea was brought up about marketing your SharePoint project internally. Don't call it an Intranet. Call it KM. Intranet term has too much preconceived notions and baggage. This does make sense at leads to another point. Bob says that if he could pick one group to run SharePoint he would pick Marketing and Communications, because they are the best ones to help communicate and evangelism internally. They are experts at it and know how to avoid those terms.

Part of the overall implementation team and the implementation plan needs to be end user training. Not enough people take this into account but think about this. What happens if you roll out a GREAT KM, Portal and no one knows how to use it other than just read the basic info on it. Very few people know how to really take advantage of the key features that really helped sell the value of the system to MGT, no one can truly collaborate and be effective? Too often this is the case. If you were rolling out a new CRM or HR application you would definitely roll out training in all flavors for this. You would have cheat sheets, self help guides etc. Why not when you roll out SharePoint? One key resource that was brought up and I have mentioned this before is do something easy like get the Sheppard’s guide. Look here http://www.sharepointshepherd.com/default.aspx It can add a ton of value with minimal effort.

Big theme of the day…

It’s not a technology issues, problem, and its not necessarily a technology solution. You use technology as a tool to help solve it. However the key to the solution is about the rigor, the process, the plan.

Functional Business Requirements and Planning

The afternoon session, it was a good big lunch so if I fall asleep while writing some nudge me..

The all important Why, What, How, know these points they are HUGE

· Why the solution is important to the organization

· What the goals of the solution are

· How will the solution be implemented?

Have a continuous review of these questions.. You may have a specific focus in the beginning, but regularly expanding that and growing based on the answers to these questions will drive additional success.

One good point is that “How” is the last entry on the list. How is last, don't worry about it till you have the other info.

Seeing Value and showing it.

Do you see value in your information and or your processes? If you do then you have to go through the processes and planning do it right. Architect it properly and run in properly on the right hardware, with the right backup and recovery plans. What happens if someone deletes a site collection or in K2 land deletes one of the databases…If you truly value this, you will spend the time to do it right. You know the saying if something is worth doing….It is worth doing right.

One piece that makes sense here is controlling requests. You could build a great KM solution that people start to use and use and use. However if you don't treat each new area, or library properly and manage the requests for them you could be a year out when people are once again saying. “I don't know where to put this document there are 5 libraries and or sites that it could go in” People at that point become frustrated because now they in the same situation again where they once were before you did all this SharePoint work. But it’s worse since you spent a lot of money to fix it.

Short tip: Take small agile steps, short sprints. Get small wins, grow evolve, let it catch on organically. Throughout the cycle, remember what worked, learn from each step, and its mistakes. I think this can be true of both MOSS and K2. Personally I would not start with the largest most complex process you have that will take 6months of work to get it going. I guess he agrees with me..:)

Some good links for information on Governance such as Checklist documents for SharePoint

http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102306291033

http://masteringsharepoint.com/media/p/46.aspx

These are some good resources for more information on SharePoint governance.

Leading the horse to water and hoping it will drink, or If you build it and they will come mentality does not work for SharePoint. I would argue that it would not work for a lot of things like this, including K2. You have to build these systems with them in mind, asking them for feedback, knowing what they need. If you build this awesome system with tons of powerful features and the interface is extremely different from what they are used to and they are required to do things very differently than before. Trust me, they won’t use it. They will find ways to get around it.

Sit down and ask Questions Seek first to Understand

A good deal of information and knowledge can be had simply by going and talking to users about what a day in their life looks like. What do they do every day. What processes are they involved with, how do they do it? What steps do they take and why? What kinds of things do they have problems with? Now if you can really seek to understand these people and know what they are doing then you are way ahead of the curve. Imagine sitting down with several of these people and being able to help them by automating their processes. How long would it take before the news spread like wild fire? How long would it take for people to realize the value? How long would it take for that person to become an evangelist for you and tell everyone how awesome this project is? Think that would help? Now take a step further... (Probably down the road some) imagine empowering that person to help themselves. Imagine them being able to build out their own process and collaboratively publish that process with IT quickly and easily. That’s power.

Key Characteristics for SharePoint or any KM solution

· Make it simple and easy for people to get info into the system, while making it easy to know where to put it.

· Make it easy to find and navigate the system.

· Make the system capable of getting relevant search results. People need to make decisions quickly so making it easy to search and get back what they need that is ACCURATE NOW.

Taxonomies

I liked the way Bob presented out building out a solid taxonomy and how much it helps not only in Navigation but also in Search. It was good to know that I without knowing it followed some of the best practices and followed some of the hierarchies.

The taxonomies he went over were

· Document Type

· Organizational Type

· Functional Type

· Topical

· Faceted – The best for search. Which I actually used the Faceted Search I got off of www.codeplex.com it is AWESOME.

An interesting point with regards to getting relevant search results is not about crawling the content in a file through the use of “Ifilters.” The key is in Taxonomy, and Metadata, and doing this properly. He gave a great example. If I had a series of contracts and I wanted to search by customer number. If I did not have a metadata field for those contracts that was customer number the search engine would be forced to process each file and dig through it, thus indexing everything in it. So if I am forced to search for 123 (the customer number) it will return what I am looking for probably. But it will also return every other character string that is 123. Thus creating a huge list of results, and make it harder to find the good one.

How much of your content will actually be really classified and have a good taxonomy around it. Bob relieved my fears when saying its only about 30%. This can go up some with more technical environments. I am very thankful in our case since because we have a ton that needs to be done. He says 3-5 metadata fields per item. 5 is the max. That sounds good to me, I think that is good because people don't have to spend a lot of time filling in fields or in most cases not filling in fields.

Well that’s it for the day. My brain is full. I can’t wait for tomorrow though. What a class.

Look i am famous

chrisg — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 23:34:03 GMT

http://blumenthalit.net/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=50

he is talking about me! I guess I did a good enough job since he said it was and I quote "impressive"

Community efforts

chrisg — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:24:50 GMT

Further proof that community based activities are spreading.

http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1357

I must say that I love to see this. Putting the power back in the hands of the consumer is GREAT! I hope this trend continues more and more. I love the ideas of getting your customers involved at higher levels and making sure you HEAR and LISTEN to them. and then take it a step further, make sure they feel listened to. Companies can get tremendous value out of these efforts if they just take the time to open up.

There are so many great ways to open the channel and have the conversation. Take a look at what comcast is doing. From reading through the twitters it looks like its working. I cant wait to see what others do

http://twitter.com/comcastcares

Kerberos anyone?

chrisg — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:24:30 GMT

I sent out a collection of links that I have book marked on Kerberos and thought I would share them with everyone else as well. One them caught my eye.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2007/09/27/kerberos-and-moss-case-sensitive.aspx

I am curious if anyone has run into this. I had asked around a bit before and apparently some people had. But this was very ad-hoc and was mainly anecdotal.

So I ask you...Is it Case sensitive?

Now onto the links.

Some links on articles I have in my list

http://blogs.msdn.com/james_world/archive/2007/08/20/essential-guide-to-kerberos-in-sharepoint.aspx

http://www.pluralsight.com/wiki/default.aspx/Keith.GuideBook.HomePage

http://blogs.msdn.com/martinkearn/archive/2007/04/23/configuring-kerberos-for-sharepoint-2007-part-1-base-configuration-for-sharepoint.aspx

http://www.digwin.com/view/moss-and-kerberos-configuration

http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0899/kerberos/kerberos.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/tkerberr.mspx

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/97376/use-kerberos-to-secure-moss-2007.html

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/spfromscratch/archive/2008/02/11/configuring-kerberos-autentication-on-moss-2007.aspx

A Great book

http://www.amazon.com/Windows-Server-2003-Security-Infrastructures/dp/1555582834/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213632286&sr=8-14

Do you have any suggested reading for Kerberos?

Some good workflow reading

chrisg — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:42:00 GMT

http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2008/06/06/you%92ve-got-questions-about-workflow-here-are-the-answers.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc514224.aspx