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.

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.

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?

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.
  

There's been a lot of anti-SharePoint buzz in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere as of late. Most of the negativity is based on the fact that MOSS 2007 is seriously lacking with respect to social computing features. Not even Microsoft debates that point anymore. The following is an excerpt from a blog post by Oscar Berg of The Content Economy that summarizes this position very well:

"SharePoint / MOSS 2007 is designed for the (Windows) desktop and for collaborating on office documents inside the corporate firewalls. It is not designed for collaboration in broader terms - not even for simple file sharing if it goes across corporate firewalls. Furthermore, it is not designed for the web, it has only rudimentary Web 2.0 features and tools (such as blogs and wikis), it is not built with Web 2.0 technologies, and it lacks core Web 2.0 qualities such as ease-of-use. Despite all this, SharePoint is platform with a lot of capabilities which can be extended and leveraged through customization, third-party tools and complementary products and services. The key problem is just that many of the companies that have bought SharePoint 2007 believe they got more than just the basic capabilities out-of-the-box. They might not be ready for additional investments. This will most likely hold back the value they can get from their original investment in SharePoint."

Oscar's position should not come as a surprise any of us who are familiar with both Enterprise 2.0 and MOSS 2007. Here are my thoughts:

• MOSS 2007 is not a good choice for an Enterprise 2.0 platform. It is a good choice in meeting much broader collaboration and content management requirements. So if you're looking for the latter, either accept SharePoint as a weak Enterprise 2.0 platform or plan to augment SharePoint with best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 add-ins and tools.


• The Enterprise 2.0 features in MOSS 2007 (i.e. blogs, wikis, profiles, etc.) they are infinitely more than what a lot of enterprises have today. Therefore, MOSS 2007 may still represent an important step in the right direction toward Enterprise 2.0.


• Enterprise 2.0 is really more about a cultural shift in the way we do work than it is about implementing a specific set of technologies. This cultural shift is necessary regardless of the technologies we implement. Based on the maturity level of most companies, SharePoint may adequately support their Enterprise 2.0 cultural shift.


• While MOSS 2007 is a weak Enterprise 2.0 platform, I hold out hope that future versions of MOSS improve significantly. While I don't expect MOSS 14 to be perfect, I do expect that it will meet our Enterprise 2.0 requirements for the next few years.


• Although my preference is to use MOSS 2007 out-of-the-box, there are times when 3rd-party add-ins make sense. The MOSS wiki, for example, is particularly bad. The Kwizcom WikiPlus add-in is a good example of what Microsoft partners are doing to take advantage of MOSS's current shortcomings.

Are you concerned about MOSS 2007's social computing limitations? Or do you agree with me that it is good enough for where most of us are at right now?

Companies are addicted to PowerPoint. It's hard to imagine how anyone ever sold an idea or proposal prior to digital presentations. This has resulted in mountains of bloated slideware files clogging our email and file servers. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 now includes a slide library feature that goes a long way toward improving the way we work with PowerPoint presentations.

The out-out-of-the-box slide library leverages all of the standard content management features inherent in MOSS, including as check-in/check-out, versioning, alerts, and workflow. The difference between a slide library and a standard document library is that when you upload a presentation from PowerPoint or MOSS to a slide library each slide becomes a unique SharePoint item, which is managed independently.

The real magic begins when you create a new presentation from the slides stored in the library. First, you select the slides to include. You have the option of creating a brand new presentation or importing the managed slides into an existing PowerPoint presentation, providing it is already open. You also have a choice whether or not to keep the formatting. Finally, you can choose to be notified if the managed slide in the library ever changes.

Think about it. As you open a presentation, it automatically checks the authoritative source of record to see whether any managed slides have been updated. That's powerful! If there have been updates, you can decide whether to replace the old slide or simply append a copy of the updated slide. Obviously you can ignore the update all together, if you wish.

So here's an example: We maintain an overarching Unified Communication and Collaboration (UCC) Strategy presentation. In addition, we have several sub-strategies for specific services within UCC. There are some redundant slides and some unique slides across each of these presentations. By using the slide library we can manage a single copy of each unique slide. Then, when we open a presentation it checks to see whether each slide is current with the version in the slide library. Before, if we needed to update one of the redundant slides, we would need to remember to replace the old version in each of the presentations. That takes time and is prone to human error. The MOSS slide library results in a much more efficient means of managing PowerPoint slides.

Although the advantages of using the MOSS slide library are clear, there are some things to keep in mind:

• The MOSS site type must be a 'team site' or 'document workspace.' Other site types may not support slide libraries. Slide libraries cannot easily be added later unless you create a new sub-site based on the 'team site' or 'document workspace' site type.
• All slides should be uploaded to the root of the slide library. It too difficult to create a new slide show from slides scattered across different folders in the library, since you lose your selections when navigating between folders.
• Whenever you create a new, unique slide it should be uploaded to the slide library so that it will be managed.
• All slide edits should be done on the managed copy stored in the library. Do not edit slides directly in the presentation. This will ensure that every presentation using that slide will be kept up to date.

The MOSS slide library is valuable to any team that manages a large number of dynamic presentations. I hope that Microsoft will continue to develop and enhance the slide library. Here are some most wanted improvements:

• Larger thumbnail graphics - The tiny thumbnails in the main slide library view are so small it is impossible to read the content. Unless you are very familiar with the content, you will need to click on the slide to see a larger image or perhaps even open the slide in PowerPoint.
• More safeguards - There are not any built-in safeguards to ensure that a presentation made from slides in the library will stay in synch. Someone could easily break the link with a slide in the library and not know it, resulting in the Presentation becoming stale.
• Support for templates - A document template based upon slides in the library does not maintain the connection between the slides in the template and the slide library.
• Deletion support - If you delete a slide in the library, you should be prompted to have it removed when you open presentations containing that slide. This would make it much easier to retire an obsolete slide across all presentations that contain it.

Have any of you used the new MOSS slide library? How does it work for you? What improvements would you like to see?

A little more than a year ago we learned that people in our company were standing up wiki solutions on their own because IT did not have a wiki standard. At that point we identified three wikis, all built on a different open source platforms, including OpenWiki, MediaWiki, and Flexwiki. Clearly we missed the opportunity to anticipate demand. However, it wasn't too late to limit our risk.

In less than two months we identified stakeholders, gathered requirements, evaluated wiki solutions, and selected a standard. The goal of the standard was to prevent (at least going forward) the proliferation of disparate wiki platforms. We selected Screwturn Wiki because it was open source, built on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server, and met our functional requirements. However, due to our need to establish the standard quickly we did not have time to operationalize it. This meant that there was no centralized infrastructure, no internal support team, and no guidance on how to implement a Screwturn wiki to work well within our company. Development teams were basically on their own to build and support their Screwturn wiki instance.

While the Screwturn wiki standard met our goal of building new wikis on the same platform, the way we implemented the standard did not meeting the needs of our end-users. They wanted a standard that was fully supported by IT and on a centralized infrastructure. Self-provisioning of wiki sites was also an important requirement. They didn't want to engage IT people to create a wiki. They wanted to simply push the "new wiki" button.

As all of this was going on, we were in the process of implementing Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007. We had heard that MOSS included its own wiki out-of-the-box. This was intriguing to us since it would mean that we could leverage our MOSS infrastructure and support structure. It also would meet the self-provisioning requirement. However, we immediately learned that the MOSS wiki is a really a WINO: Wiki In Name Only

The out-of-the-box MOSS wiki lacked many features that had become standard in today's open source wikis, including table of contents, sections, sectional editing, and intra-page linking. This perplexed us. It was as if Microsoft had thrown their "wiki" into MOSS at the last minute so that they could check the wiki box on the feature comparison chart. While the MOSS wiki may have some value for people who had never used a wiki before, those who had find it utterly lacking.

So, we had a problem. Do we try to use the MOSS wiki for the masses and allow people that need a real wiki to continue to use Screwturn? This would require us to address the operational shortcomings of our Screwturn standard, which would take time and money. It would mean that we would need to operate and maintain two separate wiki solutions, which is complex and redundant. We needed a better solution

Our research revealed very few full-feature wikis built on MOSS. In fact, we only found three possibilities: Kwizcom WikiPlus, Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) from Codeplex, and WikiPoint by Neoworks. We ended up dropping the CKS from consideration because it lacked sectional editing and intra-page links. We also eliminated WikiPoint because it appeared to only be supported on WSS 2.0. That left WikiPlus. If that didn't work, we were prepared to do what was necessary to operationalize Screwturn wiki.

Our initial evaluation of WikiPlus was not great. While they did add a few interesting features, such as reporting, lifecycle management, and an enhanced editor, they were missing critical features, such as a table of contents. We contacted them and learned of a new release that would not only include a table of contents, but sectional editing and intra-page links. Over the next several weeks we worked closely with Kwizcom to address our unmet requirements. They were very responsive to our needs. The result was a feature-rich wiki solution built on MOSS. Our people who evaluated WikiPlus liked it better than Screwturn, primarily due to the WYSIWYG editor.

Someday Microsoft's wiki may grow up and eliminate the need for a 3rd party solution like Kwizcom WikiPlus. Until then, its nice to know there's a viable alternative.