These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Jessica Alspaugh, Program Manager, Enterprise Search Group, Microsoft
• Business problems: Hard to find the right person; People working on redundant work; Enterprise search doesn't adapt.
• Social search is about connecting people to people, as well as, adapting dynamically based on usage patterns and available metadata.
• People search supports phonetic and common nickname match.
• With OCS, SharePoint supports contact card mouse-over.
• View recent content option opens AJAX window containing links to the most recent documents created by the person.
• Knowledge Mining provides keyword suggestions from Exchange 2010. Uses phrases that the person uses often in email. Person has complete control over what items are added to their profile page.
• In SharePoint 2010 colleagues are indexed for ranking purposes.
• Encourage photos. It makes a big difference in enabling interaction. People are less likely to engage with someone who doesn't have a profile photo.
• Microsoft makes it easy to add custom properties to the profile.
• Use the Managed Metadata Service to ensure consistency of terms. Manages metadata fields support dynamic type-ahead suggestions.
• Check out the "Go behind the Search Box" slide for a list of social search features.
• Vanity Search helps users build a profile and create search terms that other people find them in a search.
• Default search order was changed from relevancy to social distance, though you can override.
• If you add a new column and index it, SharePoint Search will automatically create dynamic pivots on the left navigator of the results page.
• If search quality is good, people have more confidence, which leads to increased usage, which further increases search quality.
• Pre-Query Suggestions are built from high click-through queries, and appear dynamically before the search button is pressed.
• Post Query Suggestions appear on the right side of the result set page, under Related Searches.
• Social definitions - "what people are saying about..."
• Check out Social Tag slide - Social tagging will improve search quality.
  

These are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Sean Squires, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
• Lincoln DeMaris, Program Manager, Enterprise Content Management Group, Microsoft
• Microsoft Case Study: 1TB of knowledge data, ~100K documents. Used across Microsoft.
• "Microsoft isn't doing [their own] internal knowledge management very well."
• Need to balance two opposing forces: Discoverability and authority versus empowering users to contribute. (See KM on SharePoint 2010 Goals slide.)
• Microsoft's KM solution architecture: Publishing site + document center + shared services for content types, managed metadata, analytics, and social feedback. (See Key Elements of Our Solution slide.)
• An explicit page owner is critical. Microsoft assigns owners to specific topic areas.
• Use tagging/categories and the Content Query web part to automatically surface related pages.
• Anyone can edit a page. However, it is stamped "unapproved" until the owner approves.
• The owner receives a task when someone edits their page.
• Documents must be strictly managed, yet may come from anywhere.
• In SharePoint 2010 you can set policies (such as workflow, retention, and permissions) on a folder basis.
• Folders are available to meet business needs. They are no longer needed to get around scalability limitations.
• See the "Wrap Up" page for a good summary of features and takeaways.

Theses are my session notes from the SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenters: Gail Giacobbe, Principle Program Management Lead, Microsoft; Ted Pattison, SharePoint MVP, Critical Path Training
• People see wikis as yet another place to store information. They say, "Please don't give me another place!"
• Microsoft used a wiki to enable 400 people to create 15,000 pages of documentation in four months.
• The SharePoint Publishing powers the Enterprise Wiki.
• You can customize the enterprise wiki using SharePoint Designer.
• The relevant content within wikis comes to you through the social networking features of SharePoint's news feed.
• Enterprise wiki: Easy page editing, wiki-linking with auto-complete, cross-brower rich tect editor.
• Features: Page templates (content types & page layouts), Categories (managed metadata), Ratings (web analytics), Tagging and Comments
• Contrary to my earlier understanding, SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Wiki does not include an out of the box table of contents feature. It is something that Microsoft says can be easily customized. (Ugh!)
• The enterprise wiki is designed to be customized and scalable.
• Anything available within SharePoint is easily integrated into the enterprise wiki.
• Leverage SharePoint's compliance (policy, records management) and content management (workflow, approval) capabilities within the wiki.
• You can easily integrate web parts into a wiki page.
• Edit in place, live preview
• Support for "reusable content"
• Insert images and media files directly from your computer. You do not need to upload them to a SharePoint library first.
• When you start a link by typing "[[", a list of all the existing wiki links appear, so you can quickly select the one you want or create a new one.
• The My Site news feed is a critical part of the power of the enterprise wiki, since that is where you are notified of new relevant content and activity of the wikis you visit. (I wonder how you control being inundated with news feed items when you are associated with a very busy enterprise wiki.)
• Working with CSS is "much easier" than it was in SharePoint 2007.
  

The following are session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Presenter: Daniel Kogan – Sr Program Manager, Microsoft
• Metadata and management content types are really about governance, management consistency and standardization: Is it the same, what is it? Where is it? What happens to it?
• Content types are no longer trapped in a site collection. In SP210, they can apply to the entire enterprise.
• Example: If all blog posts use the same content type, and there is a retention policy applied to the blog post content type, that retention policy will automatically apply to all blog posts across the enterprise.
• Any errors associated with site collection being unable to consume a published content site will be aggregated at the content type hub.
• The Enterprise Metadata Service publishes enterprise content types and the managed enterprise taxonomy.
• You can tag content through the browser, rich Office client, or through custom/3rd party applications.
• The Managed Keyword field dynamically checks existing terms, makes suggestions, and may allow for adding new terms.
• Example: You set a managed metadata field for months of the year, to ensure that the month format is consistent throughout the enterprise. The managed metadata field is created, and associated with the enterprise month default label. You can also associate "other potential labels." Now, when a user is filling out the Month field, they could enter "3" or "Mar" or "March." However, the managed metadata field will ensure that the value is consistent set to "March" across the enterprise. You can also enforce the sort order of metadata so that March is always listed before August.
• Microsoft provides an Excel-based schema that so you can easily import your term set into SharePoint.
• You may distribute ownership of portions of the enterprise taxonomy – term stores.
• The taxonomy hierarchy is available in the column filtering dialog.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• What do end-users care about? Personalization, easy access, ease of use, clear objectives, and management buy-in.
• Think about adoption strategies from the beginning and throughout a social computing initiative.
• Identify and leverage champions.
• Engage HR, legal, compliance, and security.
• Don't force people to use social computing. That will usually backfire.
• Brand and market your social computing solution. Get people excited. Use posters, multi-media, etc.
• Used a phased approach. Don't overwhelm users with too much. Introduce new tools one at a time.
• Take feedback into consideration and implement improvements.
• Social computing is not a fad; it is the evolution of collaboration.
• SharePoint will mine Exchange email messages propose additions to your profile (Interests or Ask Me About fields).
• You can declare blog and wikis items as business records.
• Deloitte: A name that appears in the enterprise is no longer just a name. It is linked to a profile, IM, and email. This creates a much richer sense of connectedness.
• Accenture: If someone views a profile that doesn't have a picture, an e-mail will be sent to the owner and let them know that someone checked their photo-less profile.
• Deloitte: 45% profile creation. Focus on first year was on profile creation. Goal for year 2 is 75%.
• Deloitte: Measure the number of colleagues per end-user. The goal is a minimum of four colleagues, and membership in at least two communities. They also measure the number of profiles views.
• Both Deloitte and Accenture have social computing advisory boards.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Knowledge Management Issues within the enterprise are still looking for a solution, and social computing might be part of it: Rapid response to problems, capturing knowledge to ensure business continuity, and reducing transition costs. Although social computing may be part of the solution, it is not THE solution to knowledge management.
• If we manage by commitment, and employees meet their commitments, do we really care when, where, and how they do it?
• The evolution of Social Computing: Facilitated Knowledge Management, to collaborative workgroups, to social enterprise.
• We do social things regardless of whether we have social computing tools or not.
  If you're not measure ROI of social computing investments, you're not alone. No one else is either.
• See the "What's the ROI" slide for a great list of social computing benefits.
• Work life is very different than personal life. So, the way we use social media in work life is very different than in personal life. How work differs: Time constraints, negotiated priorities and commitments, processes, functional silos, physical and virtual spaces, regulatory and legal requirements, document centricity, legacy systems, performance evaluations, productivity, control, and knowledge retention.
• When all of your economics come from the industrial age, everything is measured like a factory.
• "Six Sigma almost killed 3M."
• Knowledge work is an iterative process.
• The reason you cannot calculate the ROI of social computing (or telephones, or e-mail), is that you have no idea how people are going to use them. You cannot know who will communicate with whom, what they will talk about, whether they will talk about business, or how much time they will spend communicating.
• Social computing increases the frequency of "knowledge accidents" within a company – which is a good thing.
• Take look at the "Future Vision" graphic slide.
• Plan for success: Create a organizational social media charter, understand how people are using or want to use social computing, determine how social computing can augment existing processes and systems, create awareness, document and share successes.
• Be strategic. Align the social computing goals with the business goals.
• Check out slide on measuring social computing effectiveness.
• Experiment – Monitor – Learn
• If you don't build it they will go somewhere else.
• Social computing is really just a shift in communication channels. It is not something to justify, but something to navigate through, embrace, and leverage as a new capability and manage as a new risk.
• "The anti-social organization is ultimately non-productive." – Chris Howard, Burton Group.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009

• "Enhanced presence" goes beyond just availability. It encompasses location, skills, capabilities, and other attributes that help people and applications find the right person at the right time.
• Microsoft is not sharing anything about Office Communicator Server 14 yet.
• The contact card feature is a summary of a person's info. It appears when you hover over a presence enabled name. It is available throughput Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. However, it is dependent on OCS.
• From Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC), you can launch an HD video chat. (Cool, but I wonder how much bandwidth that uses.)
• Virtually any UCC functionality available in MOC, is available through an API for developer to embed communication capabilities into business applications (Communication-Enabled Business Processes - CEBP).
• Exchange 2010 voice mail is auto-transcribed into email message. Not perfect, but you get the gist.
• OCS is nicely integrated into Outlook. One click to join a meeting from the invitation.

Session notes from SharePoint Conference 2009:

• Key Tenants of Records Management in SharePoint 2010: Integrated governance across variety of SharePoint objects, familiar and easy to use, and flexible.
• Records Management feature Set: Recordization, eDiscovery and hold, auditing and recording, and retention and expiration. See feature set slide for detail of "what's new in 2010."
• Business problem #1: Preparing for Litigation and eDiscovery
• Recommendation: Use the same search technology for enterprise search and eDiscovery.
  The custodian approach to eDiscovery does not work well with collaborative content. You cannot assume that all relevant content will be created/edited by custodians.
• Create retention stage policies within SharePoint 2010 that govern end-to-end life cycle of documents within a library.
• New Hold and Discovery settings are available on any list/library.
• You can keep hold documents in their native store or move them to a special repository for documents with a hold.
• Audit reports provide clear and detailed history of who has accessed a document, and when.
• Microsoft doesn't claim to provide deep eDiscovery forensic analysis with SharePoint 2010.
• There are also retention and discovery features integrated within Exchange.
• Business Problem #2: Protecting the most important data in the enterprise.
• Visual queue signals documents within a library that have been marked as a record.
• Managed records provide a limited set of feature options to the user in the ribbon menu.
• Even pages in a wiki and posts in a blog can be marked as business records. They do not need to reside in Records Center.
• Create a workflow that automatically declares and classifies records. Requires SharePoint Designer.
• The home page of Records Center is a tool for records managers.
• The Content Organizer is a set of rules that the records manager sets up. It uses document metadata, including content types, to determine how to apply the file plan. Rule hand priorities to avoid conflicts.
• The Content Organizer rules can be used to mine SharePoint sites for documents that meet rule criteria, and mark and move the record, or a link to the record, to the Records Center.
• Site and document content types are a critical component to successful auto-classification.

The big news of the day was that the public beta of SharePoint 2010 would begin in November. There's a lot to look forward to. The new SharePoint is a significant move in the right direction.

In the spirit of sharing information quickly, I'm posting my unedited personal notes from each of today's sessions. I apoligize for the length.

Keynote - Steve Ballmer

• Open beta of Office and SharePoint 2010 to begin in November. No specific date offered.
• Microsoft market SharePoint to the consumer market someday.
• SharePoint vision is to eliminate the need for dedicated search, ECM, BI, and social computing solutions.
• Key strategy changes for SharePoint: From end-user application to composite applications and Rapid Application Development; from on premise solutions to cloud-based computing; and from internal intranet sites to public Internet sites.
• New developer dashboard makes it easier to troubleshoot SharePoint sites.
  Deploy "sandbox solutions" to isolate developer coding.
• Over a million users are signed up for SharePoint Online.
• Glaxo-Smith-Kline and Ingersoll Rand were mentioned as SharePoint Online references.
• SharePoint Online supports "almost" all of the end-user functionality as the on-premise version.
• Use cases that may justify the cloud: Not wanting to build new infrastructure; needing to collaborate with an external partner.
• Pfizer, Ferrari, Kroger, Kraft, Volvo all use SharePoint for their public Internet sites.
• The new SharePoint Server for Internet Sites is licensed to make it cost effective to deploy public Internet sites.
• Cut and paste formatting fidelity between SharePoint and Office.
• Skinable, Sliverlight media player web part.
• Built-in link and spell checking.
• Query-less search leverages FAST Search Server 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Drilldown - Jeff Teper

• What makes SharePoint unique? Tight office integration, web based site design.
• SharePoint balances the developer, end-user, and administrator experiences.
• Big focus on improving usability: Ribbon UI, edit in place, AJAX, fewer page refreshes.
• Integrate Office online components with SharePoint.
• Richer blogs and wikis.
• Social tagging, folksonomy support.
• "We think of ourselves as pioneering enterprise social computing."
• SharePoint 2007 showed up on Gartner Magic Quadrant for first time, and “did well.” Expect that SharePoint 2010 will do even better.
• Support for millions of items in lists and libraries.
• Controls for managing taxonomy, both top-down and bottom-up. Define and enforce consistent content types and taxonomy across all SharePoint sites.
• Built in media streaming.
• Search improvements: Federation, relevancy, wildcards, thumnailing, inferences from people profiles and mailboxes.
• Powerful new data visualization features.
• Support for [[wiki link]] syntax outside of wiki.
• Upload images directly into the SharePoint editor. No need to upload to image library first.
• Ability to multi-select items.
• Create and manage document sets, which are groups of documents consolidated into a single work product.
• Note board is like the Facebook wall.
• Microsoft did usability testing of SharePoint Central Administration UI for first time ever.
• Rich PowerShell support. Over 500 commands will be shipped with public beta of SP2010.
• Improved admin reporting and analytics.
• New, streamlined upgrade model should protect existing sites, while allow control to enable new functionality when it makes sense.
• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is now called SharePoint Foundation Server 2010.
  

SharePoint 2010 Overview

• All SharePoint pages are now like wiki pages. They live in their own page library and can be edited in place.
• Edit list and library settings from ribbon menu.
• Apply PowerPoint themes to SharePoint sites. (Looks like the admin might have to add the theme file to sever before it shows up on the list of available themes.)
• SharePoint Communities are what Microsoft is labeling their social and collaboration tools.
• The "enterprise" wiki is built to resemble Wikipedia, and is more feature rich than their "standard" wiki. Includes table of contents, rating, templates, sections, categories, tagging.
• Tag, rate, and add notes to any item in SharePoint, when enabled.
• Any list/library may contain a managed keywords column that integrates with managed taxonomy service.
• My sites include "status", like the Facebook status. Other colleagues’ status messages will appear in the news feed on the My Network tab, if enabled.
• Tabbed My Site user interface.
• Access everything you have tagged, noted, commented, or rated from your My Site. All of these items also show up on the news feed.
• My Network tab displays the activities of your colleagues.
• Every site supports document routing now, not just Records Center.
• Create rules to route content based on tags. Users simply save to "drop off library." Pop-up provides URL to final location.
• Insert web parts within content, in line.
• Media streaming supports look-ahead and bit throttling. You can create an internal YouTube with out of the box functionality.
• Enhanced people search can mine email (Exchange only). Supports phonetic and wildcard search.
• Insert a tag cloud anywhere, even outside the site collection where the content is stored.
• SharePoint Insights refers to the SharePoint Business Intelligence features.
• Publish Access data to SharePoint, in other words, webify Access.
• Business Data Services (BDS) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC). Supports read/write.
• The data in SharePoint "external lists" live in backend data sources.
• SharePoint 210 Scalability: Terabytes of data with multi-million item lists.
• Microsoft.com/SharePoint is running SharePoint 2010.
  

Overview of Office 2010

• Striving for a consistent experience across PC, phone, and browser.
• Outlook: Mail thread mgmt (cleanup and ignore), Reply with meeting, "Backstage"
• Excel: Show little trend charts for each row of data. High fidelity between app and web published spreadsheet. Real-time co-authoring within web app embedded in SharePoint.
• The Note Board is like a wiki or discussion. Any document or list item can have an associated Note Board.
• "Backstage" is a feature available within each of the Office suite applications. It is accessible from the file menu. It contains all the information about the document, and is programmatically extensible to meet specific business needs.
• Open Word documents within SharePoint using the embedded Online Word applicatino. It is a rich editor, not just a reader.
• The rich Word application indicates who else is co-editing with you. Paragraph-level locking prevents save conflicts. Changes are queued up in the Upload Center. An indicator show when changes are pending and can be applied. Co-authoring eliminates the need to check-in/out.
• In-line image editing within Word, such as background removal.
• Word and PowerPoint support client-based co-authoring. Excel is browser-based co-authoring.
• OneNote supports both web and browser co-authoring. All co-authoring is enabled through SP2010.
• Awesome new PowerPoint transitions.
• Video editing within PowerPoint, for example color correction, trim, bookmark, special effects (reflection, frames).
• Embed internet video into PowerPoint.
• Ability to compress embedded media files in PowerPoint.
• Office is available in both 32- and 64-bit clients.
• Unless you're creating very large Excel files, there is probably no need for 64-bit version of Office, yet.

Overview of Social Computing in SharePoint

• Social computing lowers the cost of sharing and collaborating. It surfaces knowledge and networks, and increases employee engagement.
• SharePoint let you control the speed and breadth of your social computing deployment.
• Company demographics, hierarchy, policies, and culture skews the normal social computing patterns we observe on the Internet.
• The My Home tab is replaced by the My Content tab.
• New My Network tab shows you the blended news feed of your colleagues’ activities. This replaces the Colleague Tracker web part. It tracks for a lot more activities than SharePoint 2007. Appears to be more granular.
• Subscribe to a tag so that you get an update to your network news feed every time someone else in the company uses that tag.
• New "Ask me about" field on profile, which has higher relevance than tags in other profile fields.
• New organizational structure browser graphically illustrates employee, team members, manager, and direct reports. Requires Silverlight. There is an HTML version too.
• Store content on My Sites that doesn't fit in any team site. It is intuitive for people to look for documents in My Site. They seem to easily associate work products with their respective author.
• There is no evidence that memberships work differently or better than SP2007.
• Eliminated most ActiveX within SharePoint, and replaced it with AJAX, making the UI operations much smoother.
• It is really easy to add graphics to a blog.
• A SharePoint web page is a basic wiki; they just don't call it a wiki. They just want people to think of it as simply an easy way to edit a web page.
• The enterprise wiki is based on the publishing portal template. Embed web parts, such as libraries or video player within an enterprise wiki page.
• Apply records management and legal hold policies within social computing tools to content.
  Showed a custom developed "Join" button for a community site that adds a user to the list of site members.
• Showed custom thumbs up, thumbs down voting web part.
• Let me know if you need me to elaborate on any of these items.

This is my final Top 10 learnings list from this year's Burton Catalyst conference. This list relates to desktop virtualization, productivity suites, and enterprise content management:

• It will be 2012-2014 before companies do wholesale desktop replacement using virtual end-points.


• Licensing can be an issue with virtual desktops, especially with Microsoft and Oracle.


• Productivity suite options: 1) Stay with MS Office, 2) Give an alternative to disenfranchised users only, 3) Use an MS Office alternative - mostly, 4) Wait to dump MS Office until XML support improves, 5) Replace current productivity tools with collaboration tools.


• If you ever see Microsoft Office dethroned, it will be because there has been a fundamental shift in the content creation market.


• When you don’t treat content review like a project, you get all the same problems as a poorly run project.


• Content is the currency used by businesses to make decisions.


• Why isn’t there more use of digital rights management? Not perceived as having enough value, yet. However, it will grow in importance.


• One big gap for the non-Microsoft productivity suite vendors is their lack of integration with SharePoint.


• Think of structured and unstructured content as different views of corporate information.


• Don’t assume that all corporate information is inside the firewall.

So that concludes my coverage of Catalyst. Overall, it was an interesting four days filled with timely insight. I would definitely consider attending again.

Here is the next Top 10 list of things I heard at Catalyst 09. This list focuses on Unified Communications(UC):

1. Mobility is a critical enabler to the business and increasingly a critical part to selling UC to the business.


2. Be patient. Allow the UC market to continue to mature before making major UC investments.


3. “UC is not even close to mainstream adoption.”


4. Cloud-based services will likely play an incremental role in UC strategies.


5. Video conferencing is becoming much more integrated with web conferencing and telephony.


6. Integrating video conferencing between businesses is still problematic, due to lacking standards. However, some federation services are emerging. However, they require that the parties use some of the same platforms.


7. Communications-Enabled Business Process (CEBP) is nirvana. Standards, integrations, and ecosystems don’t yet exist to support rich CEBP. Recommendation: Make CEBP the goal and push your vendors to enable.


8. UC moved us from device centric, disjointed communications to person-centric, presence-aware, device-agnostic communications.


9. User access to UC functionality should exist within the applications where users live (email, business applications, UC platform interfaces).


10. The desktop is increasingly extended to mobile devices – Don’t forget mobility in your UC client strategy.

Look for one more post to wrap up my Catalyst learnings.

This my the second top 10 list from the Burton Catalyst ’09 conference. Here are my Top 10 take-aways from the various Social Computing sessions at Catalyst:

1. Encourage networking relating to both professional expertise and personal interests to create stronger accountability and engagement.


2. Networks happen. Social networking technology makes it easier to build and sustain larger, more diverse networks within a hierarchical structure.


3. Benefits of Internal Social Networking: Accelerates communication and problem solving, creating peer-to-peer communication capability. Captures individual worker know-how for reuse by many, creating collective intelligence. Creates peer-to-peer communication in context, deepening understanding for decision making.


4. People are used to just asking someone if they don’t know the answer. However, you need to know who to ask. With social networking you can throw a question out to the community. In most cases the answer will come from someone you don’t know.


5. Teach people when to use the tools or they will latch on to one tool and use it for everything.


6. Email is the #1 competitor to enterprise social computing.


7. Everyone thinks they are behind with social networking. The fact is that everyone is still trying to figure it out.


8. Employee rating can surface disconnects between what the boss/peers think and what the “public” thinks. This is a good thing.


9. Relationship on-boarding is a continuous process. Social networking can help improve the efficiency of this process.


10. The best practice is to get the seed money for the first social networking initiative on faith, and use that experience to justify additional investment.

Are you involved in an enterprise social computing initiative? Let me know if you agree/disagree with any of these findings.

I’m finally getting around to publishing my notes from Burton Group’s Catalyst '09 conference. I had intended to live blog each session. However, for various reasons, some technical and some logistical, that just didn’t work out. Now as I comb through pages of notes I struggle with how to best publish them. I’ve decided to publish a series of brief Top 10 lists that boil down my learnings on specific topics. This is the first list and it focuses on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

1. Enterprise IT and the vendors are both too immature to leverage SaaS today.


2. Be strategic when planning an SaaS pilot. Focus on the “underserved” users, since SaaS functionality will be perceived as limited compared to current enterprise solutions. Email for call center employees is perceived by many companies as low risk and a good opportunity for early SaaS.


3. To prepare for SaaS, companies should be working toward making their internal services more modular, so that pieces can be easily moved to the cloud in the future. We need to really understand application interdependencies. A mature Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) will improve the likelihood of succeeding with SaaS.


4. Don’t think that issues that have challenged enterprises for decades (such as performance, availability, maintenance, capacity, etc.) just magically go away for the SaaS vendor. They have these same challenges. However, they’re success depends upon their ability to hide challenges from you, the customer. Just because the vendor isn’t talking about them doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing them. If you’re not careful you’ll just end up with the same mess you have today, just in someone else’s data center.


5. Instead of SLAs, some cloud vendors are instead opting for full discloser of availability and performance. Customers can then decide whether they can accept the risk. They can always fire the provider if requirements are not met.


6. Records management functions are not very good in current SaaS solutions.


7. SaaS has shown enterprises that there are much easier licensing models. However, venders still need to figure out how to make it easy for companies to buy on premise and hosted services with a single pricing model, and with flexibility to move users between on premise and hosted without breaking the pricing model and requiring new contract negotiations.


8. We are conditioned to do large releases that require user training. However, with SaaS expect to see releases of one or two features at a time, but on a much more frequent basis. At this rate of change, training is not necessary.


9. Businesses are still concerned about what is out of their control with SaaS. For example, there is really no case law on SaaS, making it impossible to access risk. No one wants to be the test case. Let someone else be the first.


10. Google is building a connector to Outlook, so companies can continue to use Outlook on the desktop, with Google in the cloud.

What do you think? Do you disagree with any of these assertions? How is your company approaching Software-as-a-Service?

The technical preview for SharePoint 2010 starts today. A technical preview is when a small group of Microsoft customers and business partners get early access to the new bits. The public beta will follow later this year. Along with the technical preview, Microsoft has launched a new SharePoint 2010 web site that is open to everyone. It contains three short videos and an FAQ. I watched the overview video. Although they only scratch the surface on what is coming, there are some interesting new features:

• New form factors allow connecting from any device


• Many social computing enhancements (though none of them are shown in the demo)


• Ease in connecting across boundaries


• New emphasis on SharePoint as an application development platform


• Robust content life-cycle management


• FAST search technology is built into SharePoint
  Enhanced people search help people make connections with each other


• Contextual ribbon menu interface (like Office 2007)


• Multi-select makes it possible to simultaneously apply actions to multiple list items


• New message dialog boxes appears to display over the top of a grayed-out site, instead of as a separate page


• User interactions are much smoother since server post-backs have been eliminated - Example: Checking out a document happens immediately and does not cause the screen to refresh


• Edit content in place, including text, images, and rich media (The ribbon menu dynamically presents the relevant options.)


• Live preview formatting changes prior to publishing


• Out-of-the-box Silverlight web part for rich media support


• Ability to theme SharePoint using Office themes. For example, apply a PowerPoint theme to a SharePoint site


• Support for several non-Microsoft browsers, including Firefox and Safari


• Publish Visio diagrams directly to SharePoint. Using SharePoint 2010 and Video 2010, dynamically maintain diagrams by connecting to back-end data sources


• Business Connectivity Services (BSC) replaces the Business Data Catalog (BDC), and is greatly enhanced, including the ability to write changes to back-end data sources


• BCS data can also be exposed through the Office 2010 clients


• SharePoint Workspace (formerly known as Groove), provides off-line reading and editing features

One of the most common criticisms I hear from end-users regarding SharePoint 2007 is that simple operations take too many clicks. I'm encouraged by the demo of SharePoint 2010, which appears to streamline end-user operations and make SharePoint look and work a lot more like a real Web 2.0/Ajax application.

The demo videos don't contain a preview of SharePoint 2010's social computing tools. Expectations are running high that Microsoft learned a lot since MOSS, and that SharePoint 2010 will have real blogs, wikis, bookmarking, and profiles.

I suspect Microsoft will keep quiet on most of 2010's new capabilities until the SharePoint conference in October, which should be quite a show.

We began our pilot of SharePoint My Sites almost two months ago. Of the more than 400 people we invited, 320 created a My Site. For many of them, however, this was the last time they used their My Site. To put it bluntly, they don't need a My Site to do their job. So, many perceive that time spent working on their My Site is frivolous, or worse, wasteful. At the same time, there are a few pilot participants who, for whatever reason, have the vision that their My Site will improve the way they do their job, and will make them more valuable employees. It's not easy being a pioneer. They have to figure out how to do things on their own, often on their own time. In this post I will share some of the interesting business-related use cases for internal employee blogs that have surfaced in our pilot.

Of the 320 people who have created a My Site, 20% created a blog site. However, when you take a look at how many people are actually posting to their blog on a regular basis that number drops to only about a dozen. Here are some of the creative ways they are using their blogs:

• A knowledge worker shares job-related information with colleagues, such as summarizing articles from the Internet.


• A software developer shares code snippets with other developers.

• A software developer uses his blog like a personal notebook to keep track of how to do routine tasks, such as calculating time-zones and zip codes from address data.


• A knowledge worker writes entertaining stream-of-consciousness posts about a project that he is working on.


• A summer intern keeps a daily journal of what he has learned, observed, and accomplished.

So, even though only 4% of the pilot users are blogging regularly, we are seeing tremendous creativity and resourcefulness among the My Site bloggers. As we deploy My Sites to the enterprise, we don't expect the percentage of active internal bloggers to grow beyond 4% for a long time, and we are comfortable with that.

Have you seen any other interesting use cases for internal employee blogs?

Social Computing Enables Knowledge Capture and Sharing
One of the primary benefits of Social Computing is that it enables knowledge capture and sharing. Unlike e-mail, social computing platforms, such as blogs and wikis, places content in an environment where other people can find, access, and use it. Consequently, it’s often better for people to post to their blog than send an email. Granted there are still times when an email is the right medium. Before sending an email, we should all ask ourselves whether the content has potential value to people beyond the original distribution. If it does, put we should put it in our blog. Likewise, we should use a wiki instead of creating a word processing file whenever possible. It is easier to collaborate with a wiki and then be assured that other people see the most current version. Again, there may be times when a word processing file is necessary, such as when special formatting is necessary. However, in most instances it is just as easy to capture content using a social computing tool so that they can be leveraged as knowledge assets later.

Protecting Knowledge Assets
Social computing is new to the enterprise space and it demands a new approach to protecting shared knowledge assets. Traditional approaches of deleting terminated employee content do not apply well to shared social computing content. Take this example: Bill accepts a position with another company. Shortly after leaving, a termination process reacquires his computer, and deletes his mail file and personal network drive data. Within days or weeks of leaving, Bill’s personal content is purged from the enterprise systems. With data on computers, personal network drives and in e-mail, this probably makes sense. After all, no one else in the company had access to this content when Bill was around. Social computing knowledge assets, on the other hand, should be treated differently. They are shared. Bill’s blog, for example, does not necessarily become less valuable when he leaves. It may contain pertinent information about his role and responsibilities that could be invaluable to the people who remain after Bill’s departure. In fact, Bill’s blog may be more valuable to the company now that they no longer have access to Bill the person. Therefore, companies need to put some thought into how they manage the knowledge assets of terminated employees.

Recommendations
What is the best way to protect the knowledge assets of terminated employees? Here are some ideas:

• Don’t automatically delete content of terminated employees – The content produced by a terminated employee is an asset that belongs to the company. Separate the termination process from the retention policies relating to shared knowledge assets.
  
• Don’t expect managers to review the content of terminated employees – Not only are managers usually too busy to review the knowledge assets of terminated employees, they also cannot necessarily judge the potential value of the assets on their own. Expecting managers to take the time to isolate and protect knowledge assets of terminated employees is unreasonable.
  
• Do approach the challenge like a project – Identify stakeholder (including legal, compliance, and human resources), gather requirements, and design an approach that will best meet the requirements.
  
• Do gather metadata when knowledge assets are created – This metadata will help you determine the value of the knowledge asset. There will probably be a point in time when each knowledge asset loses its value and needs to be purged. Knowledge assets located in social computing platforms should adhere to a company’s electronic data retention policies, just like information in any other repository.
  
• Do flag the knowledge assets of terminated employees – If I were to find the knowledge asset of a terminated employee, it would be helpful to know that it was created by someone who no longer works for the company.
  
• If nothing else, delay deletion…as long as possible – For most companies, accurately assessing the value of social computing knowledge assets is difficult. This makes it impossible to apply a retention period independent of the termination process. So, if saving everything forever is not an option, consider preserving knowledge assets for a predetermined period after termination, preferably 12 months or longer.

In conclusion, take care when deleting social computing knowledge assets of terminated employees. Implement a retention process that protects content based on its value the company, and don’t just delete it because the creator of the content has left.

Like a lot of people in the collaboration and communication space, I'm extremely interested in the Software as a Service (SaaS). Here are my notes from a recent Gartner webinar on SaaS and cloud computing. It was originally broadcast on May 27, 2009, from 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. EST. The presenter was Daryl C. Plummer, Managing VP & Gartner Fellow.

Cloud Computing

• Cloud computing definition: "A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet Technologies"
• When you say "cloud", always include another word, like "computing", "storage", "services." "Cloud" by itself really doesn't mean anything.
• The customer doesn't have to understand how a service works. They are "abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces."
• For the most part IT thinks they need to know how a service works, mostly because we've trained them to do that. Instead, focus on outcomes, measurements, and contracts that mitigate risk.
• Focus on the outcomes you need, not on whether or not the service included the "cloud" label or not.
• Cloud computing is a provider-consumer relationship, instead of a vendor-user relationship.

Cloud Computing models

• Acquisition model: Service – "All that matters is results. I don't care how it's done."
• Business model: Pay for use – "I don't want to own assets; I want to pay for elastic use, like a utility."
• Access Model: Internet – "I want accessibility from anywhere from any device."
• Technical Model: Scalable, elastic, sharable – "It's about economies of scale with effective and dynamic sharing."

Risks of Cloud Computing

• Availability, capacity, and performance
• Security, privacy, disaster recovery policies and procedures
• Service metrics, reporting and analysis
• E-discovery and investigations
• Data ownership, recovery, and migration
• Integration with on-premise systems
• Commitment requirements (terms, minimum use)
• Setup, training, and integration fees
• Difficult to customize
• Switching costs
• Governance of sourcing process
• Data/process location and isolation
• Regulatory requirements
• Transparency to provider operations
• Hidden supply chain impact

Common cloud computing use cases

• Prototyping/Proofs-of-Concept
• Web application serving
• Email / Collaboration
• Application appliances
• Application testing resources

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

• A "form" of cloud computing in almost all cases.
• SaaS is misnamed - It should be called "Application"-as-a-service, as opposed to "Software"-as-a service.
• Delivers an application based on a single set of common code in a one-to-many model.
  Uses a pay-for-use or subscription licensing model.
• Beyond simply "bleeding edge" and "good enough", it is now viable and ready for consideration.
• Almost all software vendors will have an SaaS offering

Upsides to SaaS

• Use operating budget instead of capital budget
• Only pay for what you use
• Platform homogeneity
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) in mid-term; Long-term TCO is yet to be determined
  
• Faster implementation
• Increased innovation

Downsides to SaaS

• Governance issues
• Release management dictated by provider
• Limited 3rd party tools
• Vendor management
• Security
• Long-term TCO
• Integration between on premise and SaaS

Four things you can do today

• Savings: Compare your cost of capital expenses versus cloud services
• Portfolio: Find three workloads which you can experiment (Move workloads, not applications)
• Migrate: Move existing apps into cloud (Served from the cloud, versus cloud services)
• Use: Consider cloud email and collaboration (Get immediate feedback)

Gartner Bottom-Line Recommendation
Now is the time to consider cloud computing model for delivering services to employees, as well as customers and business partners.

A SharePoint My Site is a central location for you to view and manage documents, links, colleagues, and other information. It is also a way for coworkers to learn about you and your expertise, projects, and work relationships.

A My site consists of two tabs: My Home and My Profile. Additionally, it is possible to create various sub-sites:

My Home is a personal, private web site. You have control over which components (web parts) you include on your My Home page. Some web parts provided initially. However, you can move them around, remove them, and add new ones. Configure it to meet you personal needs. No one else can see your My Home page. However, depending upon how you setup access control, some content within your My Site may be accessible by other people through your Profile page. Examples include shared documents, shared pictures, blog, and wiki.

My Profile is a "public" profile page. All Progressive people have a profile page by default. The entire company shares a single layout for the profile page. You do not have access to change the way your My Profile page looks or works. Using the people search capability in SharePoint, you can locate the profiles of other people. The profile is prefilled with information such as name, location, phone number, etc. Additionally, you may decide to add other optional details, such as your picture, text that describes you, projects, and areas of expertise and interest.

Below your My Site, you can create sub-sites, providing you are within your 100MB storage limit. Common sub-sites include a blog or wiki. However, you may also create sites using one of several site templates. Templates give you a starting layout and web parts that you can configure to meet your specific needs. With sub-sites, you have a high degree of control over the way they look and function, and who has access to them.

I created the following diagram to help illustrate the relationship between My Home and My Profile:

Two weeks ago we started piloting SharePoint My Sites. Although I’ve been using My Sites in a sandbox environment for several months, it was really nothing like using My Sites in the production environment with real security limitations and real people. Here are my first impressions:

People do not understand the differences between the My Home and My Profile tabs

For starters, people don’t understand that no one else can see their My Home tab. The My Home tab of the My Site is a personal workspace. You have the ability to add, remove, and configure web parts. However, any web part on the My Home page is inaccessible to other people. You can think of the My Home page like you would My Yahoo or iGoogle. You decide what the page looks like. It’s for you. We have implemented a 100MB quota on the size of a My Site. List, libraries, and sites must fit within that limit.

The My Profile tab, on the other hand, is what everyone else sees. Think of it as detailed listing within the corporate directory. All of the profile pages take their look and feel from a single site definition. So, our end-users don’t have the ability to change the look and feel of their profile page. However, people do have the ability to control access to some of the information and resources that are exposed through their profile page. Given our current state of a My Site immaturity, maintaining the profile is more important than maintaining other parts of a person’s My Site. The profile is the key to expertise location. In our pilot we have seen broad participation in adding photos and updating the profile fields, such as interests, skills, responsibilities and about me. Far fewer people have been uploading documents, creating lists, and creating sub-sites. I don’t see this as a problem.

The out-of-the-box site definition for My Sites is inadequate for most people

For the pilot, we intentionally left the My Site site definition as it is out of the box. Consequently, people get a My Site with an Outlook calendar web part that doesn’t work in our Lotus Notes environment, and an RSS reader web part that is not pointing to a feed. The initial My Home page is more or less blank. Although this blank My Site has potential for being configured to meet the individual needs of the user, most people do not have the skills, time, or desire necessary to do that. We now believe that a custom site definition for My Sites is critical to adoption. The initial My Home page should contain functioning web parts that deliver immediate value, without configuration by the end-user. Then, if someone wants to further personalize their My Home page, they can always do that. We are looking at providing the following web parts as part of the initial My Home page: email inbox, today’s calendar, company news, stock price, personalized weather, and an external RSS news feed.

It is not helpful to market MySites as internal Facebook

People like Facebook. They understand Facebook. So, it is very tempting to compare My Sites to Facebook. It’s not a good idea to do that. First, it builds an unrealistic expectation. Facebook is a Web 2.0 application designed from the ground up as a social networking platform. My Sites are built on MOSS and WSS. Facebook is relatively intuitive. Probably very few people feel the need for Facebook training. On the other hand, My Sites are about as easy (or hard) to use as any other Microsoft application. Frequently functions are hidden deep within complex menus. Seemingly simple functions, such as deleting a list or library throw people off. They invariably come away thinking a My Site is nothing like Facebook.

The second reason that comparisons to Facebook are problematic is that the feature sets don’t align. Sure there are some slight similarities. However, there is nothing in My Sites equivalent to status updates, the comment wall, or friend activity tracking. (No, the colleague tracker web part doesn’t even come close.) That’s fine. My Sites do a lot of cool business-related stuff that Facebook cannot do, like document management, approval workflows, and lists. So, the point isn’t that one is better than the other; it is that while there may be some loose similarities, they are two completely different tools, designed for different uses. It is better to market My Sites for what it is, a document-based, personal workspace with some basic social networking capabilities.

People do not understand the idea of My Site sub-sites

It’s clear that people are confused by the idea of sub-sites. When they create a blog, they expect it to be part of their My Site, instead of a completely separate sub-site. They don’t expect it to have its own settings that work independently of their My Site settings. It is probably a good idea to not communicate a lot about sub-sites to the masses.

It’s okay if most people never leverage My Sites

For some reason, there are a lot of people worried about what will happen if people don’t create a My Site. “How do we get people to create a My Site?” “How do we show them how to get value from their My Site?” I’m not sure it makes sense to put a lot of effort into forcing My Sites down the throats of our end-users’. My Sites are a cool capability that some people will understand and be able to leverage very quickly. However, most people may not need a My Site any time soon. That’s fine. Most people don’t need all of the capabilities within the Microsoft Office suite either, and that doesn’t keep anyone up at night. Instead of focusing on My Sites, focus adoption efforts on updating and maintaining personal profiles. The usage and value of profiles is more intuitive than that of My Sites. Make the My Sites capability available. However, let it grow organically, at least at first.

Most people are not going to leverage training and support resources

Before we kicked off our pilot we made sure that we had web-based training, and a support site with FAQs and other resources. We found that most pilot participants don’t utilize these training and support resources. Instead, they expect to learn My Sites as they play with them. Truthfully, this is how people in our company learn most applications.

In summary, we should focus on getting people familiar with using the profile page well. We can allow people to create a My Site, if they want. However, we should provide them with a My Home page that is instantly useful and that doesn’t require training. Microsoft tells us that only 8% of their employees use My Sites extensively. Most of their employees utilize Team Sites far more than My Sites. Now that we’ve started our own pilot, the reasons for this are clear.

Well, it's official, Microsoft has announced SharePoint 2010, which was formerly known as "MOSS 14." Here are some highlights:

• The "MOSS" accronym is dead. MS has decided to remove "Office" since the term means Office client to most people. A this point, it will be known simply as "SharePoint."


• Even though "Office" has been removed from the name, there will continue to be tight integration between Office and SharePoint.


• SharePoint 2010 will be 64-bit only and require 64-bit Windows Server 2008 and 64-bit SQL Server 2005 or 2008.


• SharePoint 2010 will require MS Internet Explorer 7 or 8. (MS IE 6 support expires in July 2010.)

Sources: Microsoft SharePoint Team blog

• Click here for the information about the SharePoint 2010 annoucement.


• Click here for the preliminary system requirements.