Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Lync Pro Tip: "An Error Occurred During the Lync Meeting" with External Users

If you have ever encountered this error, you may find this post helpful. It frequently occurs when one tries to join an external meeting, and one's Lync (server) does not permit access by the external party who sent you the meeting request, or vice-versa. 

By default, if you have Lync installed locally, clicking on the "Join Online Meeting" hyperlink will try to initiate the meeting using your Lync client.  If your Lync administrator has enabled external access via federation or other means, this error will occur.

Fortunately, a simple workaround exists:

1.  Right-click the link in the original invitation, and "Copy Hyperlink"

2.  Paste the URL into a new browser tab

3.  Append the suffix "?SL=1" to the URL

4.  Join your meeting via the Lync Web Client

The "?SL=1" switch in the URL forces the meeting/session to use the web client, rather than the local client.

There are, or course, some limitations to using the Web Client vs the local client, but if your local client cannot access the meeting, this is a simple, quick workaround you can try so that you can participate in Lync meetings with external parties.  You can also use this tip to help external parties to connect to Lync meetings that you set up, and it's remarkable how much more productive we can be when the first ten minutes of a meeting aren't occupied by "Can you see my screen? etc.)

SharePoint Saturday Rhode Island Recap

I was honored to be selected to present at this weekend's (inaugural) SharePoint Saturday Rhode Island.  Organizers Jason Himmelstein, Chris McNulty, and Josh Cliff did yeoman's work in making it happen, the sponsors stepped up to fund it, and the speakers turned out and delivered a phenomenal day's worth of the best free SharePoint training.  Best of all, over 100 attendees came out, learned, and were active participants in the discussions.

Special thanks go out to the host venue, New Horizons Rhode Island, for graciously "lending" us their facility for this event, and to all of the new speakers (including my colleague John Mongell) who shared their stories, experiences, triumphs, and tribulations with us.

In the morning, I presented a session on SharePoint as a component of a more broadly integrated collaboration strategy (including voice, video, e-mail, etc.).  It was based on some ideas I hatched after reading Nancy Settle-Murphy's excellent book:  "Managing Effective Virtual Teams."  As promised, the slide deck is here:

I also promised to drop some basic templates for integrated communication/collaboration plans into my SkyDrive, and they can be found here, although they are much better when in the overall context of the book.

In the afternoon, I presented a closing session about how to go back to your boss, your project sponsor, your CFO, etc. and get funding for all the cool SharePoint projects you learned about at SharePoint Saturday.  The organizers told me to make it quick and fun, TED-talk style, and the energy was great in the room, so I hope it worked out. The deck is here:

SPSRI - how do i get this funded closing final from Mike Gilronan

and I think that this video captures the premise (not premises, more on that in a future post) of the discussion, even if it was a competitor to Microsoft who originally created it:

All in all, this was a great event with great flow of ideas from a great community.  Thanks to all who made it happen!

Five Stages of Microsoft Partnership

I spent some time with a colleague this week discussing how partners work with Microsoft, and it's a conversation I've had in many shapes and forms for almost 15 years with many Microsoft partners in partner briefings, conferences, advisory  boards, executive round tables, and other less formal venues (ie/eg, over beers).  Having built much of my career around partnering with Microsoft, I have strong opinions about this "dance" that we do, and if you know me at all, you know that I am generous about sharing such opinions. :-)

So, please find here a reasonably informed but informal, slightly tongue-in-cheek but generally based in reality, take on partnering with Microsoft:  an ersatz "maturity model," if you will.  In this case, I need to be crystal clear:  I speak for myself and myself
only on this one:  this by no means reflects the opinions (or even the experience) of any of my employers over the last 15 years.

With apologies to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, here are the Five Stages of Microsoft Partnership:

Stage One:  Denial 
Why on God's green earth would we want to partner with Microsoft?  They need to bring us some leads, then we can talk.  It just feels like a tax, with no immediate evident return.   We can't make any headway without being asked to fill out some form containing information about my company that Microsoft should already know.  What are they bringing to us, besides a long list of acronyms?  We don't know or care about the difference between an SSP and a TSP.

Stage Two:  Despair
Wow, this program is dauntingly comprehensive, and our organization really doesn’t have our act together.  If I were Microsoft, I wouldn't be bringing opportunities to us.  We have a long way to go to meet the requirements and guidelines, and to avail ourselves of all the benefits of the partner program.  We understand the segments of Microsoft, however, and know which one(s) our business should be aimed at, and we've identified some key people in those segments with whom we need to connect.  It just feels like a long way up from here.

Stage Three:  Hopeful Performance 
We have seen the value of the program, are executing against it, if unevenly, and we have a plan to monitor and improve our execution,  The Microsoft team has started to take notice, and our organization is either managed or on a path to becoming a managed partner.  We're using software entitlements to get/stay current on our own productivity
technologies.  We have started to speak in sentences with two or three Microsoft acronyms in them without batting an eye, and understand the different licensing mechanisms (e.g., OEM vs Open vs Select vs Enterprise Agreement) that Microsoft uses in my segment, and why that matters.

Stage Four:  Soaring Execution
We and our Microsoft partner team have executed against our plan, we are considered a "go-to" partner in at least one Microsoft competency or segment.  One or more people on our team has a "purple badge" as  a Virtual Microsoft employee, and we're jointly crafting sales and marketing programs with Microsoft team members.  We're making sure we bring a nice outfit to WPC, because we expect to be on stage receiving a Partner of the Year Award, and/or sitting for a photo shoot so that Microsoft can use our image in their
stock photography.  We also know enough to prioritize our Microsoft investment in the most "partner-friendly" individuals/teams, (ATUs/STUs, individual sellers, and segments) and avoid wasting time with the others.*  We know very precisely, by late summer, when annual plans are finalized, what the incentive structures and goals are for our key points of contact at Microsoft. 

We have, un-ironically, used sentences like "Is the new TSP for SMS&P aligned with APIO and goaled on SQL Azure POCs?"

*Like everywhere else, there is a bell-curve of partner-friendliness among Microsoft team members, and we're attuned to it.  A Partner Account Manager who can help you focus on where to invest, and perhaps as importantly, where not to waste your time, is an incredibly valuable resource, all along this lifecycle, and at this stage in particular.

Stage Five:  Devolution/Plateau
We have been a Microsoft partner long enough to train new Microsoft team members in Microsoft's own structure, organizational dynamics, and programs. We continue to perform at a high level, but have rested on our laurels a bit.  We lack the vision to ascertain which changes are critical, or the agility to embrace seismic changes in
Microsoft's partner model, margin model, deployment models, etc.  We fail to adapt to where Microsoft is headed next, so we double down on what got us to Stage Four.  We get the sense that Microsoft has begun to favor more "up and comer" partners, and too many of the "best practices" we espoused with Microsoft have been adopted broadly, killing
any competitive advantage we had against other partners.

Note:  The best partners, of course, maximize their time in Stage Four, and/or create what some investment banker-types call "a liquidity event" prior to ever reaching Stage Five.

I've learned two key lessons in my time as a Microsoft partner:

1. There's money to be made as a Microsoft partner.  It's not always easy -- Microsoft is a large, complex organization even in the midst of its own reorganization, and even the friendly dragon can obliterate a whole village with one swipe of its tail.  As with most partnerships, there are two key types of assets that make it work:

a. Programmatic/systematic:  forecasts, Partner Sales Exchange, events in a box, training opportunities, conferences and other events,etc.

b. Personal:  the people who interact with Redmond, developing product and go-to-market strategy, and the people who interact with Microsoft's customers in the field, at the regional sales organization level.

The programmatic things often need to happen (check that box!), but it's the personal relationships with the right people in the organization, as with most partnerships of value, that will make or break you as a Microsoft partner.  Don't ever miss an opportunity to wisely invest in these relationships. 

2. You've got to stay attuned to, not just how Microsoft makes money now, but also what their sellers are "goaled" on each fiscal year.   In so doing, you'll learn a lot about their priorities.  While it can be costly to be too early in the market with Microsoft's products and services (see:  PerformancePoint v1, Windows Mobile until about 2009 or so, Dynamics AX in about 2005-2006, etc.), it can put you out of business to be too late.

Overall, the magnitude of the Microsoft opportunity for partners, even in challenging times, has been enormous for a long time, and Microsoft is distinguished in its attention to a robust partner "ecosystem."  I have many times likened Microsoft to a battleship:  it takes a long time to turn the ship, but once it trains its guns on a target, it tends to obliterate that target. 

If you know where you are on this continuum, and what opportunities and threats to look out for, you can create a lot of value to your clients, your community, and your investors. 

Happy Partnering!

Baseball As Collaboration Metaphor

[Note:  This post was made possible by an idea hatched by my friend and colleague Nancy Settle-Murphy when we worked together on a recent post about the 2013 Red Sox "Road to Redemption."  NSM provided editorial insight on this post as well, and provides a ton of insight about how people and organizations work together at guidedinsights.com.]

By day, I've been (as usual) thinking about SharePoint and other collaboration technologies, and how businesses solve problems and create value by effectively using them. 

However, by night, the Boston Red Sox have been on an entertaining run through the Major League Baseball playoffs, so I've been spending time wrapping up the baseball season by watching the Sox create some magic moments in October, frequently late into the night.

With that in mind, let's explore the junction between SharePoint and baseball via metaphor:

Baseball	SharePoint	Commonality
Infielders	Lines of Business   (LOB*)	Closest to action  (home plate = where revenue is generated)
Outfielders	Information   Technology (IT)	Last line of defense but still critical, constrained (fences = budgets)
Catcher	Human Resources	Calls signals, captain of defense (positioning fielders = organizational development and training)

* -- for purposes of this blog post, LOB means "Line of Business," not "[Runners] Left on Base" as in baseball. 

The key risks for a business trying to collaborate with too many infielders (LOB), not enough outfielders (IT):   chaos/Babel, security risk (e.g., of sensitive data being shared ad hoc via unsafe collab, like personal DropBox or SkyDrive, or just e-mailed), operational risk (no service-level agreements, or SLAs, for collaboration technologies, so they may not be available when we need them).

The key risk for a business trying to collaborate with too many outfielders (IT), and no infielders (LOB):  a well-governed wasteland that is so secure and well-ordered that no one goes there.

In baseball, the fun part comes when balls that are into the gaps between the infielders and outfielders (with apologies to Crash Davis):

• the bloop,
• the gork,
• the Texas leaguer,
• the bleeder,
• the dying quail,
• the ball hit into "no man's land" that falls between the infield and the outfield. 

Depending on how it's played, it can turn into a great play:

  

an error, or just a hit that falls between the fielders ("I thought you had it") 

 

 

In SharePoint, there is a rough equivalent:  gaps between the business users of the real-world technology and the IT organization responsible for its infrastructure/technical governance.  We fill these gaps with operational governance, a set of conventions and norms that answer questions like:  Who is allowed to create new sites?  Who
decides whether we can federate or share content with external parties?   Who decides on the interface/navigation? Who decides who has access to which content? Who creates expiration dates for content? Who can set alerts?

There's no magical formula or golden ratio in business collaboration technologies akin to the "shift" that teams use against David Ortiz, but there are some prescriptions/strategies I can offer:

1. Norms/rules: a convention in baseball is that a ball hit in the air between an infielder and an outfielder belongs to the infielder until an outfielder "calls him off".  Make sure that your organization has a default, agreed-upon, norm (similar) -- e.g., site administration rights can be delegated to a manager in LOB if (a) trained (document this) and (b) pproved by LOB leadership.  IT administrates/ratifies based on (a) and (b), but LOB approves.
2. [I'll steal a concept from softball here:]  a tenth "short" fielder or "extra player" typically positioned between the infielders and outfielders, who catches those in-between hits that would otherwise land between infield and outfield. Some examples of these "short fielders" to catch the "in-betweens" are:

 

• A Business Analyst who reports to IT, works as concierge to LOB
• A separate Organizational Development lead who reports to HR or an executive/officer, to bridge gaps and perform "shuttle diplomacy" between IT & LOB.  I recently met a client with the title:  Executive Director or Organizational
  & Systems Development -- it really shows a high level of commitment to cross-functional collaboration on his employer's part.
• Corporate Facilities.  Especially in large, distributed organizations, the Facilities organizations can be highly attuned to not just *where* people work, but also *how* they work.  Organizations such as New Ways of Working http://www.newwow.net/about-us have great resources to help organizations bridge these gaps.

In summary:  To paraphrase John Cougar Mellencamp, "It's a sad, sad, sad, sad [# of sads?] feeling when you're living on those in-betweens."  Have a plan for the "in-betweens" that involves both norms (to make the easy stuff as automatic as possible) and humans (to intervene and work across the field of business) to accelerate and optimize your collaboration technologies.

Happy collaborating, and GO SOX!

Fenway Magic and Turning Around a Team

The Red Sox are inspiring people all over New England and beyond.  Consistently high performance, a team ethos we haven't seen at Fenway in years, gut-wrenching late-inning drama, and a genuine personality (see also: #fearthebeard) have made them compelling to watch, especially when one considers the well-documented depths to which they fell in 2012, and that only six months ago, a bruised city turned to them for inspiration in the wake of the tragedy on Patriot's Day.

So, how did they turn things around so quickly?  I was fortunate to be able to work with my colleague Nancy Settle-Murphy, an expert in teamwork and organizational development (truth be told, I did little more than fact-check baseball information and flesh out a few metaphors) on an article that examines this "worst to first" phenomenon in more depth.  Enjoy!

Microsoft WPC 2013 -- Big Data Themes

The second of the four official themes around which Microsoft organized content at this year's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) was Big Data.  In a world containing "an internet of things" where 90% of all of the world's on-line data has been created in the last two years (per Ballmer's keynote, evoking Al Gore-ish hockey stick graphs), Microsoft seeks to stake out high ground in the world of big data.

Microsoft's strategy for Big Data is oriented around two key themes, as related in the keynotes:

1. "Unite the world's data" via Bing, Azure Data Marketplace, and Hadoop, which Microsoft has embraced with surprising alacrity.

2. Provide the best, most familiar tools for business insight (Excel and SQL Server).

The best Big Data content of WPC 2013 was not typical keynote bloviation, however:  Amir Netz's breathless demo of PowerBI, a new suite of BI tools for Office 365, was perhaps the highlight of the entire conference.  He showed, in about 12 frenetic minutes:

• natural-language search for data sources inside (private) and outside (public/commercial data sources such as the Azure data marketplace) the firewall for queries
• use of PowerView to visualize and animate BI reports
• using mobile devices to consume BI
• visualization of data sets, using popular music, a topic a global audience can relate to, using animation of a time series of data ("king of the hill" view to explain changes over time)

Unfortunately, the data supported Jason Mraz (>?!) and Mariah Carey in best song/artist queries, so it's hard for me to get behind the empirical results, but the demo was exciting and exhausting due to Amir's relentless and infectious energy.  I have to admit that at first I was put off by his somewhat "out of breath" delivery, but he grew on me, and the combination of his enthusiasm and humor with the visually beautiful data visualization of PowerBI ultimately won me over.  This is "must see TV," WPC-style:

Ambient Awareness Redux

At this weekend's U.S. Open in Merion, two things were quite noteworthy:

 

1.  As it did in 2011, except more so, it felt at once liberating and scary to have to leave our smartphones outside the gates to the facility.  (The USGA does not permit them to be brought into the event, although I saw several people using smuggled devices to catch somer amazing pictures.) 

This, of course, heightened my awareness of just how much we have come to depend on our mobile devices for everything to knowing what time it is to planning meetups via a quick text to researching anything and everything about the tournament (toughest hole?  18.  Sorry, Phil.).  The ubiquity of these devices and the verging-on-OCD degree to which we count them is well-documented at this point.

2. I also ran into quite a few old friends from the Philadelphia area, some who I hadn't seen in 5-10 years.  Pretty much all of them knew that I had recently taken nine weeks off between the end of my old job and the beginning of the new one, and expressed a mix of congratulations, wonder, and concern that I had taken the time off.  (I highly recommend it, and make a point of doing it once every 20 years or so).

This phenomenon really underscored the "ambient awareness" concept that I first encountered in the New York Times in 2008.  I was struck by the degree to which most of my conversations with many Facebook friends started halfway through, due to their our each being "read up" on the other via Facebook and other social media.   As we start to see more adoption of enterprise social platforms in our workplace, I hope that more of my conversations in the workplace will work the same way.

 

SharePoint Conference 2011 Recap -- Live Event

KMA was fortunate to have been able to send six people to SPC 2011 in Anaheim, CA last month, and although we've done our share of blogging and presenting about it, we're most pleased to present this week's in-person event for our clients and prospects:  a half-day recap of the conference highlights, presented by colleagues as follows:

• Amy Talhouk summarizing the best of Project Server and SharePoint
• Deanne Damato discussing what's new in InfoPath and workflows
• Karina Vatynskaya joining special guest, Microsoft's Chris Bortlik to discuss patterns and practices in SharePoint adoption
• Derek Cash-Peterson reviewing what we learned about SharePoint for external-facing (extranet and WWW) sites
• Distinguished KMA alumnus and special guest, Quest Software's Chris McNulty demonstrating new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and PowerView (nee Denali and Crescent, respectively)

I'll be anchoring this shindig and reviewing how organizations are driving productivity via SharePoint's social capabilities. 

We look forward to delivering a crisp rendition of SPC, somehow distilling highlights from 5 days worth of content into 3.5 hours.  Buckle up -- we're gonna move fast!

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 6 (Expert Best Practices)

The second “Best Practices” type of session I attended was SPC245, “Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability” presented by Jornata’s Scott Jamison.  Although he is a principal at a competitor, he is also a top-notch presenter, and I always enjoy and get value from Scott’s presentations.

Clearly vying for the title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” Scott, in his third presentation of the day, blitzed through many specific, practical tips on how to make SharePoint more usable and information more findable, including the following highlights:

• Folders (great for contributors, especially incumbents who have a general sense of where things belong via “tribal knowledge”) vs metadata (great for consumers who understand metadata, but can be tedious for contributors if they have to tag content manually).   One key “Go Do” item Scott frequently advises is to create separate user experiences (via default views) for contributors vs consumers.
• Improving search results by paying attention to how things are named (especially the critical “Title” field) and where stored (e.g., the fewer slashes in the path, the higher-ranked in search)
• Improving search results by measuring their effectiveness with out-of-the-box reports from SharePoint:  search queries that returned no results or no best bets.
• Changing default navigation in simple but effective ways like getting rid of the default left-hand navigation where it works counter to how users will find their way through a portal.

All of the techniques that Scott related were in response to common user challenges that each of us has seen “in the wild,” and they were crisply and artfully presented. 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 4 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

A second Microsoft roadmap session I attended at last weeks’ SPC was session SPC271, David Pae’s “SharePoint 2010:  Improving Productivity with Social.”  It was actually somewhere between a roadmap session and a case study session, with examples of social computing inside Microsoft (and of course, Contoso) that illustrate where SharePoint 2010 and complementary products can foster social computing initiatives.

David Pae and colleague Paul Javid (Social Product Manager) walked us through the history of social computing, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Strategy, some specific examples and demonstrations of social capabilities of SharePoint and other complementary Microsoft technologies.

The most noteworthy things from this session:

1. A REALLY cool demo of Lync doing real-time English-Spanish translation of an instant messaging thread – I’m dying to see more of this, and think that the Lync/SharePoint combination provides an unparalleled communications and collaboration platform.
2. A good audience question about a limitation of the “noteboard” capability in SharePoint 2010.  Out of the box, it is not possible to comment on a comment, or to “like” or rate a comment.  [This question underscored how hard the presenters’ job is in a conference where Microsoft has committed to not discuss product futures, and it’s not fair to certain ISVs to discuss/promote others. (cough:  NewsGator!)]
3. The Microsoft products NOT mentioned.  Although Microsoft does a nice job of presenting a story that incorporates SharePoint, Exchange and Lync (on-premise or in-cloud or hybrid), the following technologies with social or collaboration indications were prominently NOT mentioned: 
   1. Skype, a social and collaboration tool with a huge user base, but what feels like a lack of an enterprise integration story ready to be told by Microsoft (whether for statutory or strategic reasons)? 
   2. SharePoint Workspace – how does the offline client, a necessity to many mobile information workers, impact the social computing experience?
   3. OneNote – shared note-taking is at least as social as IM, and the syncing capabilities with SharePoint create interesting opportunities.

Overall, this session provided a solid overview of out-of-the-box social computing capabilities of SharePoint, although not too much of it would be new to our clients running SharePoint 2010.  There will be, however, some more details gleaned from customer case study sessions (still to come)...