Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Webinar-apalooza: SharePoint Thought Leadership

The dog days of summer are busy days for KMA.  We've got a lot of content queued up for our KMA Insights Webinar Series, as well as other events with our business partners, bunched up over the next few weeks, with these three the next wave of thought leadership:

On August 26, I'll be presenting a lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint and Enterprise Social Computing," with always-insightful industry analyst Gil Yehuda and Laura Farrelly, VP of Marketing for NewsGator. The invitation to this webinar can be found here.

That same afternoon, my colleague Sadie Van Buren will be presenting the results of our firm's annual survey into SharePoint adoption trends in a webinar for the Special Librarians Association (SLA) entitled "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint-based Collaboration."  I'm told that this session is sold out already, but Sadie will be delivering the KMA Insights Webinar Series September lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint - The Sophomore Year" with similar content. More information about Sadie's SLA presentation is here.

Shortly thereafter, our colleague and resident "compliantist," Sean Megley, will be presenting a webinar along with our business partner Blue Moon Industries about the new MA Privacy statute and KMA's SharePoint-based compliance management solutions.  The slide deck to his recent presentation (KMA Insights July webinar) on this topic can be found here, and I'll post invitation and more details about this Life Sciences-focused event as they become available.

Syndicating Myself (BDC Column Limitation in SharePoint)

My colleague ran into an issue today on our SharePoint intranet, KMANet.  He saved a proposal to our collateral library, but the "Account Name" column, a Business Data column populated via a link to our Microsoft CRM system, showed the wrong account.

My colleague had tried to populate the correct account name, but it did not save properly.  When I tried to replicate the issue and save the proper account name, SharePoint threw an error indicating an invalid character in a text field.  This looked squirrelly and vaguely familiar to me, so I did a little research and, ironically, found my own blog article from February, 2007 that got to the bottom of the issue:  the Account Name business data column is limited to 60 characters, and when we try to populate an account name that is too long, we get the error.  We shortened the account name in MSCRM and re-saved without event.

I've yet to find documentation that reflects this limitation, and I'm not technically experienced enough with the BDC to know a non-programmatic way to overcome this.  The "shorten the account name in CRM" workaround works fine, but I welcome any suggestions for resolving this in SharePoint, and hope this post helps others who encounter this limitation.

The New MA Privacy Statute -- What You Can Do to Prepare

Yes, after two postponements, it appears that the deadline for complying with the new MA Privacy statute will be January 1, 2010.  If you have employees or customers in Massachusetts, and you store personally identifiable information about them on computers, you will be subject to this statute.  Given that the fine for each INSTANCE of non-compliance is up to $50,000 and that there were several hundred thousand security breaches around this type of data last year alone, it's no surprise that people are taking notice of this statute and preparing in earnest.

As my firm combines its expertise in SharePoint technologies with some specific capabilities around compliance, we're bringing to market a SharePoint-based tool to manage compliance programs, including the new MA Privacy statute.  Accordingly, we're hosting a "lunch and learn" webinar next Wednesday, July 29, featuring:

-- Doug Cornelius, a Chief Compliance officer at a real estate and private equity firm, and noted writer and speaker on compliance issues.  If you care about compliance, you need to be reading his blog, "Compliance Building."  Doug will speak to the genesis of and requirements under, the statute, and how we can expect it to change as the first wave of adoption gets underway.

-- Bob Boonstra, a Chief Information Officer at a publicly-held pharmaceutical company who has instituted compliance management programs for SEC and FDA requirements.  Bob will speak to how he has seen firms institute programs to manage compliance requirements such as this one.

-- Sean Megley, a SharePoint architect and resident "compliantist" at KMA with a long history of working in government contracting, life sciences, and banking enterprises with rigorous compliance requirements.  Sean has been building compliance management solutions for years, and will show a solution developed specifically for the new MA privacy statute.

We're looking forward to an enlightening session.  You can find details and register here. 

Office 2010 -- First Impressions

At last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I learned a bunch of things, to wit:

• Microsoft has a HUGE wave of technologies poised to hit the market over the next 12 months (Windows 7, Office 2010, and many others)

• Microsoft LOVES to compete with the likes of Google, VMWare, Cisco, Apple, etc.

Notwithstanding these big, obvious themes, I was pleased to get my first look at Microsoft Office 2010.  Here are a couple of first impressions, formed via Chris Caposella's value keynote, some executive roundtable meetings, and a hands-on lab session with Office 2010 at WPC:

Outlook:

  The ribbon finally shows up in Outlook 2010, eating up some valuable screen real estate but also providing access to some interesting new features.  One is a "conversation view" that allows the user to group messages by conversation, and expand or compress conversations, very easily. 

My favorite new Outlook feature is a "Clean Up/Ignore" function that allows the user to quickly and systematically re-direct or delete messages in a thread -- it's also known as the message "mute button."  For example, once a thread gets unwieldy (5 reply-all's, 5 "please remove me from this thread" messages, 3 "me too" messages, etc.), a user can systematically trim out the chaff, keeping only the messages where a decision was made or action required. I remain curious, however, how this feature will handle branching of messages outward from a thread, and look forward to testing this feature in more depth.  

Another useful feature is the addition of a small, relevant snippet of a calendar view added to meeting requests so that the user can see his/her calendar from within the meeting request.

Excel: 

I'll likely write more about this in the future, but the addition of sparklines and a feature called "slicers" add more BI and data visualization capability to Excel, and the keynote demonstrations included a user easily working with a data set containing 1.5 million rows of data in a workbook via the SQL Server 2010/Excel 2010 integration previously code-named "Project Gemini."  

Word: 

One exceptional thing I saw demonstrated in Word actually applies to several of the Office products:  the ability for multiple authors to concurrently author the same document.  This is a frequently requested capability, and I look forward to demonstrating this when the SharePoint beta is set up in our lab environment.  For now, you can see this process via the demo in this video (note: fast-forward to the 54-minute mark).

 
[BP0VK] The Business Productivity Opportunity: The Next Wave, Your Customers, and You

PowerPoint:  

Other than the co-editing capabilities which I saw only in the context of Word but which I expect to be most valuable in PowerPoint, the most interesting new features I saw related to new tools for editing of pictures and videos from within PowerPoint.

In all of the Office products, the "Backstage" view replaces the combination of the Office button and the Document Information Panel as the place to see and manage metadata and other document properties.

There were several new features in Office applications like Access, One Note, etc., that I saw in demos but have yet to take for a test-drive.  KMA has the bits installed in our lab, so watch this space for more updates as we continue our testing and learning.  Meanwhile, check out this excellent image gallery that shows off the new user interface and other key features in Office 2010, and this overview [Download OfficeOverviewFS].

Crowd-Sourced SharePoint Governance via DebateGraph Visual Wikis

I read with interest a recent post by one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Culmsee that I want to share.  I especially like Paul's blog because:

1. He and I care about some of the same things:  Project Management, Governance, SharePoint, and pop culture (although I prefer Eric B & Rakim to Opeth, and I haven't yet had cause to integrate Tom Cruise into my blog's content, thematically)
2. We're unlikely to compete with each other for business, given the distance from Perth to Boston, MA (11,635 miles).
3. He's generous with his knowledge and his opinions, and has welcomed correspondence and feedback on these topics.
4. He writes in a breezy style, accessible yet insightful.

OK, now that the honorifics are dispensed with, I'll get to the point:  Paul blogged this week on an innovative approach to SharePoint governance:  a product called DebateGraph, which serves as sort of a visual wiki that shows graphically how ideas relate to one another.  An example follows (sorry for the static image -- can't fit the interactive version into this format):

Seven Sigma has created downloadable DebateGraph SharePoint web parts to allow users to visually show the debate of any issue within a SharePoint wrapper, but to me the most interesting application is the one where "n" is the biggest:  Seven Sigma's public, Internet-facing debate about SharePoint governance, shown in the example shown above.

So, if you have strong opinions about SharePoint governance (I know you're out there -- you haven't been shy about expressing your opinions with me), please take a look, vote, and make your voice heard about what works and what doesn't in SharePoint governance.  Join the debate today!

SharePoint Workflow via K2 blackpoint

As a firm with deep investments in .NET development at more of a "foundation" level (e.g., Windows Workflow Foundation), KMA has been somewhat hesitant to invest aggressively in third-party workflow solutions for SharePoint such as Nintex, AgilePoint, and K2.  In the meantime, we've invested in developing a thorough understanding of three key approaches to SharePoint workflow:

1. effectively using SharePoint's native workflows
2. creating SharePoint workflows with SharePoint Designer (now a free download from MSFT) 
3. creating custom workflows in .NET with Workflow Foundation.

In fact, a few years ago, we created a white paper about these different approaches, detailing the strengths and weaknesses of each.  At the time, we consciously chose not to include ISV (Independent Software Vendor, or third-party developer) solutions because it would expand the scope of the white paper too broadly.

Meanwhile, we've monitored the marketplace for ISV workflow solutions.  This week, I attended the monthly New England SharePoint User Group meeting, including a featured speaker from K2, a leading workflow ISV.  K2 has had a presence in the workflow market for many years with their K2.NET and blackpearl workflow engines for the enterprise.  blackpearl is K2's current enterprise offering, and it contains some capabilities for SharePoint-specific workflow development.

In this week's session, we were shown key differences between K2's new blackpoint offering and the richer blackpearl as follows:

• blackpoint has business-user-oriented user interfaces for workflow design that blackpearl does not have in its current version: 
  1. blackpoint Studio, a standalone Integrated Development Environment for creating workflows
  2. blackpoint Web designer, a SilverLight-based tool for visually designing workflows from within SharePoint
• blackpoint has reduced complexity (read: reduced functionality) to make it easier for business analysts and business users to develop SharePoint workflows without writing .NET code.
• blackpoint is priced much more aggressively than blackpearl, its enterprise-class cousin.  blackpoint pricing spans from $5,000 to $15,000 per server; blackpearl is orders of magnitude higher.

Given the aggressive pricing for blackpoint and K2's reputation in the Microsoft community, I look forward to our firm's being able to see more and test blackpoint, as many of our clients are approaching business process automation as a key initiative in their "sophomore year" with SharePoint 2007.

SharePoint Search and Information Architecture Webinar Series

KMA's Sadie Van Buren is speaking at an upcoming webinar session from Earley & Associates entitled "Optimizing Your SharePoint Investment Through Search & Information Architecture."  She's presenting in session 2, June 11, from 12:30-2pm EDT.

If you have any burning questions about the webinar content or how to take advantage of SharePoint's built-in search, please feel free to contact me, or contact Sadie directly.

SharePoint Real-World Lessons (in-person event)

One of the local organizations that KMA enthusiastically supports is the Boston KM Forum.  At next Thursday's (7/17, from 4-6 pm EST) meeting, my colleague Sadie Van Buren will be the featured speaker.  Her subject will be "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint-based Collaboration," and her presentation will feature lessons learned on the part of our firm and our customers based on many SharePoint projects.

The KM Forum has consistently strong events and presenters, and this should be no exception!

Ramp Up Your SharePoint Training

 

A common question from customers interested in SharePoint is:  "How do we get our people 'SharePoint ready'?"

In addition to the content rolled out in conjunction with this year's SharePoint Conference, our team at KMA has developed some of our own materials containing specifics such as, for example, local training partners, and it's been well-received.

A newly released resource (scroll down from top of post -- it's there!), from the Microsoft SharePoint Team, is a summary document definitely worth a look if you're focused on ramping up your organization's SharePoint skills.  It provides a fine starting point.  Enjoy!

[Note:  Also of note in the article -- the SharePoint Team will have a booth at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  I hope to attend if schedule permits!]

Packaged SharePoint Deployment Planning Services

I was thrilled today to see the long-awaited announcement of some packaged service offerings for SharePoint rolled out by Microsoft.  The program is called SDPS, or SharePoint Deployment Planning Services, and it is being offered only by Microsoft Consulting Services and select partners who meet strict eligibility requirements (e.g., certifications in SharePoint and competencies in portals, collaboration, content management, search, etc.).

What does it mean to you as a Microsoft customer?  If you license your products under Microsoft's Software Assurance program (SA), you are eligible to use services dollars you receive as a benefit under SA to fund structured SharePoint planning engagements of 1, 3, 5, 10, or 15 days in length to do things like build proofs of concept, conduct architectural design sessions, etc.  It also means you get to select among a small group of highly qualified services organizations, armed with best practices and well-vetted tools available only to SDPS partners, to deliver these engagements.

If you're considering going down the SharePoint path and you license your Microsoft products under SA, you may find the SDPS program highly worthwhile.  It is designed to take risk and friction out of the process of deploying SharePoint.  However, this is only part of the equation and no substitute for actually knowing what you intend to do with all these wonderful SharePoint technologies.  :-) 

A few starting points I'd recommend to help clarify and prioritize your objectives if commencing a SharePoint project:

1. Clever Workarounds' excellent recent series on "Why SharePoint Projects Fail." Paul touches on, among a million other good points, the importance of having a well-defined set of business goals before launching a SharePoint project. (He also mixes in some snark and makes it fun)
2. Microsoft's Infrastructure Optimization tools, which you and your partner can use to ascertain your level of optimization around functional areas such as Unified Communications, Business Intelligence, or Search.  To the classicists among you, think "Capability Maturity Model" as applied to business productivity tools.  While not a "cure-all," it provides a structured way of assessing and prioritizing many of the options you have as an IT professional or knowledge worker regarding where to spend your time and resources.

Our firm aggressively pursued this program and became (I was told at the time, in November 2007) the second partner in the world signed up to provide these services, but the program itself was just officially rolled out this week.  We've invested heavily in these areas and have been champing at the bit to execute against this!