Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

MEC-ing Towards Ecstasy

This week, I had fun (don't tell my bosses, but I get paid for this) facilitating a series of hands-on workshops for clients and prospects.  They are jointly sponsored by Microsoft and partners like my firm, and are designed to give attendees a hands-on experience with the latest wave of Microsoft technologies. 

They were once called the Customer Immersion Experience (this Catholic-school boy can't help but to arch an eyebrow at THAT baptism metaphor), and are now called the MEC, or Microsoft Experience Center.  There are multiple editions and versions of the MEC, but this one features the newest version of Office, Office 365.

I have attended and delivered many of these sessions, and find them useful to our clients for a variety of reasons:

1.  They are business-oriented.  The content is directed toward business users,  not developers or IT professionals.  These are people who apply technology to solve business problems, not whose job it is to manage IT.  The content is more oriented toward business productivity than platform optimization.

2.  They are experiential.  Attendees get assigned a role in a "day in the life" script that shows how Microsoft technologies are used on a day-to-day basis by knowledge workers. There is also enough slack built into the sessions' schedule to allow attendees to play, experiment, and explore scenarios that are of particular relevance to them.  In so doing, attendees learn not only about how Microsoft technologies enable them to work differently, they can also learn about the limitations of these solutions as well.

3.  They are hands-on.  Microsoft ships ten laptops (pretty kickass Lenovo Yoga touch-enabled convertible tablets)  and ten headsets for integrated voice and video communications, and we build time into the day for experimentation, learning and play with new apps, capabilities, and devices.  This also includes showing how other devices like Surface tablets and other mobile devices like iPads use the  technologies we're using.

4.  They are turnkey.  The original edition of CIE/MEC required that customers come to a Microsoft Technology Center to attend a MEC session. In generation 2, the Mobile MEC, Microsoft had to ship computers and voice endpoints along with powerful servers capable of running virtual instances of all the required server technologies:  a domain controller, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, etc.  In the same way that computing pioneers look at ENIAC, then their smartphones, and shake their head, I do the same now that the server-side work can all be provisioned and run in Microsoft's cloud.  We can provision and manage full-featured environments (with data populated) in about 24 hours for the new Office 365 MEC, without shipping servers around.

All in all, if you're considering making an investment in Microsoft technologies or seeking better return on what you already own, the hands-on workshops and MEC scenarios are a great way to see how your knowledge workers can improve their productivity and save money via the latest Microsoft has to offer.

 

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!

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!

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:

Microsoft WPC 2013 -- Cloud Themes

[Note:  This is the second in a series of articles about Microsoft's recent Worldwide Partner Conference, written from the point of view of a long-time partner.]

The first major theme of WPC 2013 was the cloud, and how Microsoft has adapted the company to compete in the cloud. 

In Steve Ballmer's keynote, he discussed data points such as Microsoft's deployment of ONE MILLION servers in support of cloud applications. Per Ballmer, only Google and Amazon have deployed more, and Facebook and Yahoo are close, but no one else has deployed more than 100,000.  But it's not only about scale.  Microsoft also competes on the following themes:

• Microsoft acknowledges that not every enterprise application is well-suited to a multi-tenant public-cloud architecture, and continues to offer best-in-class hybrid options using tools like Windows Azure, Windows Server, System Center and StorSimple for deploying and managing systems across both internal and external data centers.  Microsoft has uniquely invested in public, private, and hybrid cloud computing, and remains differentiated from its competitors. It's hard to debate their contention that no other company can currently execute on this, but it's perhaps a more interesting question how long that point of differentiation will matter.
• Microsoft continues to provide a combination of public/private cloud infrastructure and tools with the world's leading business productivity applications (Office 365, the fastest-growing application at Microsoft and the fastest application to $1 Billion in Microsoft history*, and Microsoft Dynamics).

A great demo followed during Satya Nadella's keynote, showing off Microsoft's cloud story:  Information Rights Management using Exchange (on Office 365), using PII (Personally Identifiable Information) protection, Bing maps, and social connectors, providing secure access to business content across devices using cloud services like the above and SkyDrive Pro.

An interesting theme that was touched on in a few keynotes and demo scenarios was the toggling between personal and work content and devices with just-in-time provisioning and de-provisioning of applications and infrastructure.  Expect to see more about this, as it's a great challenge to serve up content, not only to the right person on the right device, but also to the right persona -- how will one's "work" self and "off-work" personae be maintained separately, or are they destined to bleed into one in a future where the lines between work and play are slowly erased?

* I think that Microsoft's claims about Office 365 being the fastest Microsoft product to exceed $1 Billion in revenues should be taken in context, given that Office 365 represents the combination of multiple server products in a hosted package:  Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint.  This feels more like a reallocation of revenue from one set of Microsoft products to another.  I would be more interested to see the NET growth in Microsoft server products (combined on-premises, private cloud, third-party hosted and Office 365) so that, not only as a partner but as an investor, I can see whether Office 365 is simply cannibalizing Microsoft's traditional business or is actually accretive (yes, I work at an accounting firm, and need to start using words like this again) to Microsoft's overall product revenue.

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 – A Partner’s Reflections

Last week Microsoft convened its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), educating, listening to, and entertaining about 16,000 of its top partners in Houston, Texas.  This was my sixth WPC, and my 14^th year as part of the Microsoft partner community, and I processed the week’s events and write this  series of blog posts from this point of view.

I waited a week to write these blogs because it gave me time to not only make up some of the work that I fell behind on by attending WPC, but also because it gave me time to process, consider, and connect what I learned at WPC (especially in light of the major Microsoft re-organization that occurred the day after the end of WPC).  Many short-form, real-time observations were available via the tweetstreams that I and many others kept up the whole time, but this is designed to be long(-er) form prose.

A few themes emerged at this year’s event.  First and foremost was Microsoft’s reinforcement of its reinvention as a “device and services” company.  As necessary as this appears to be in light of new business models, it’s a tumultuous transition, as evidenced by Microsoft’s recent stock performance.

The other themes were orchestrated by Microsoft, via their organization of conference content into the following tracks:

• Cloud
• Big Data
• Enterprise Social
• Mobility

The Vision Keynotes were grouped with device keynotes this year, making for a marathon 3.5-hour Monday morning Vision Keynote-a-palooza.  I’ll cover some high-level highlights here, then post individually on the themes above in the coming days.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer opened WPC with some highlights of the fiscal 2013 year just ended and some data points about how Microsoft is providing “High Value Experiences” for customers and partners, including:

• 90% of Microsoft’s revenue was represented by the assembled partners at WPC, and they collectively are projected to have grown 6% year-over-year on a $650 BILLION Microsoft business
• The release of Windows 8, the biggest single overhaul of Microsoft’s core desktop operating system since Windows 95, and the “Hey, we listened!” upcoming release of Windows 8.1
• Success of Windows Server 2012 for private cloud and virtualization (winning market share vs VMWare, a point underscored by COO Kevin Turner in his Wednesday morning competitive brief during the “Value Keynotes” section of WPC)
• Dynamics CRM in the Cloud – winning share from Salesforce (although I am looking for some statistics to support this – Ballmer underscored a recent defection of a key SFDC employee to Microsoft's CRM team, and Turner’s data points on this seemed to be more centered on growth than on share, with some jabs at SFDC’s lack of profitability)
• Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – providing growth and progress in public and private cloud (cross-referenced to Amazon Web Services competitive story in Turner’s keynote)

I will drill a bit into each of the four conference themes above, and provide a summary of other miscellaneous impressions of WPC.  Watch this space for more updates in coming days and weeks.

A New Chapter -- KMA and Sentri

"Even in the perfect world where everyone was equal
I still would own the portal and be working on the SQL."

-- Elvis Costello, "Every Day I Write the Book," with geek liberties taken

I'm excited to announce a new chapter in the direction of the team I've have the good fortune to work with for the last several (nearly six) years, and in my career:  KMA has sold its SharePoint practice to Sentri, Inc.

Starting today, Monday 13 February 2012, I'll be Sentri's General Manager of Strategic Services, with responsibility for Sentri's SharePoint and CRM practice areas. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to build upon what I've spent the past twelve years doing: helping business decision makers improve organizational performance using Microsoft business productivity technologies.

In addition to a strong existing SharePoint practice, Sentri has world-class capabilities around Microsoft core infrastructure and application platform technologies, so the combination of breadth and depth from Sentri and KMA is truly exciting.

When I take stock of where we are and how we've gotten here, I am thankful for the following:

• the time, capital, and wisdom invested in the SharePoint practice by KMA's founders Jorge Rodriguez and David Goldstein. I've learned an incredible amount from them over our time working together.
• the counsel, ideas and support of my business partner Jean Tufts and former colleagues such as Chris McNulty, Sadie Van Buren, Florin Muntean, James Henry, Sean Megley, Liz Hatch, and many others. Their ability to generate great ideas and execute on them with clients was the foundation for much of what we currently are, and they all pushed me to be better than I would have been otherwise.
• the clients and community members who provided constructive accountability as they learned alongside us over several generations of SharePoint product releases.
• the Managed Partner team at Microsoft, including world-class PAM Barrie Mirman, who now has one less partner to manage, and whose insight, energy, focus and commitment are unparalleled anywhere I've seen in Microsoft in my twelve years as a partner.
• the SharePoint community, who has embraced our thought leadership and given us a stage on which to tell our story.
• last but not least, I am thankful for the passion, commitment. and collegiality of KMA's SharePoint team, with whom I look forward to writing the next chapters in this story.

Expect to see more frequent updates via this medium now that the deal is done. It's early in this book, and there are many more chapters to be written. 

SharePoint Saturday Philly -- Recap and Presentation

I had an absolute blast presenting "A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Strategies" at SharePoint Saturday Philly this past weekend.  In addition to the usual friendly, motley band of itinerant SharePoint speakers from various ISVs and consultancies, there were several hundred attendees (about 450 overall). 

As one would expect from a group of people freely giving up their Saturday to learn about SharePoint, folks were engaged and enthusiastic about the subject matter, and my session was full of questions, cross-talk, and attendees sharing their ideas, successes, and challenges.  Their participation certainly made the 75 minutes fly by, and the conversations continued into the hallway and beyond.

I'd like to send a public shout-out to Mike Mukalian, David Mann, and the rest of the organizers, to Chris McNulty, who co-authored the presentation with me when we presented it at SharePoint Saturday - The Conference (DC) last summer, and to Sentri's Jason Himmelstein, with whom I drove down and who filled my brain with many great ideas about future presentation content.

The slides are here: 

A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Best Practices

View more PowerPoint from Mike Gilronan

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.