Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

I am working on a separate post about attrition and knowledge management, and was reminded of a favorite story from CompuWorks, a partner of KMA’s who specializes in training.  They were discussing with a client the value of having employees well-trained in the latest version of Microsoft Office, and the attendant increase in productivity it would bring.

The client asked, “What if we invest in training these people, and they leave?”

My quick-witted colleague from CompuWorks countered, “What if you don’t invest in training them, and they stay?”

Records Management and the Hotel California

"You can check documents out any time you like, but they can never leave."
[With apologies to Don Henley and Glenn Frey]

OK, it's technically a bit imprecise, but it was the metaphor that popped into my head when I learned a third new term/concept in January at my colleague Chris McNulty's SharePoint Saturday Hartford presentation about Enterprise Content Management:  "Content is King."

Chris used the term "Asymmetrical Records Declaration" to refer to the fact that, with records management capabilities in SharePoint 2010, many users may have the capability to declare a file a record (and thereby impose strict rules about how it is managed), but only a select, highly trusted few can *undeclare* records. 

OK, so I guess perhaps the better metaphor is a ratchet, but if I were a corporate records manager, librarian, counsel, or compliance specialist, this concept (and the key takeaway from Chris's presentation) is clear:  we can exercise a great deal of control over who can manage content using native capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010.

See also:  Technet overview of SharePoint 2010 records management.

My SharePoint Administrator Just Quit. What Now?

So, your SharePoint Administrator just accepted his or her dream job, elsewhere.  Or you had to reduce headcount and let him go…or she got hit by the green bus, won the lottery, "took two beers and jumped," etc.  You get the point. Your SharePoint administrator is leaving in either a sudden or an involuntary manner, and you need to ensure that:

• You have continuity in your SharePoint operations, with minimal negative impact to SharePoint users.
• You maintain security of your SharePoint environment, even potentially against the person who until JUST NOW had designed, built, and managed that security.

Although we won’t assume malicious intentions on someone’s part without good reason, this post is my attempt to summarize some of the basic things you should do ensure the security and continuity of your SharePoint environment after losing your Administrator.

1. First and foremost, disable your Administrator’s Active Directory credentials.  Do it now.
2. If your Administrator had access to other Network Administrator accounts, disable the accounts (if you have other administrators/accounts with appropriate access) or change the passwords.
3. Review and consider changing your SharePoint service account passwords.  Microsoft Support documentation details some additional information about changing these accounts (for SharePoint 2007).  If you don’t have these passwords, there is a Codeplex solution called SPCracker for gaining and documenting access to them.  If using SharePoint 2010, consider configuring automated password changes for managed accounts in Central Administration as per this TechNet article.  A couple of benefits of using managed accounts in SharePoint 2010 are the ability to manage account passwords in one place and the ability to use SharePoint’s built-in capabilities (e.g., alerts) to notify users of impending password expiration.
4. This is a tough one:  If you use forms-based authentication (e.g., for extranet accounts), review any accounts that your Administrator may have had access to the passwords to.  It’s not viable to ask dozens, hundreds, or thousands of external users to change their passwords all at once, but it’s worth double-checking to ensure that these users only have read or contribute rights and that there’s not another site administrator account floating around out there.

Some other tools that can help you support your users and quickly get (and stay) on top of what’s happening in your SharePoint environment are:

• ControlPoint by Axceler – an excellent set of tools for managing SharePoint permissions and auditing who can see what, as well as automating many other SharePoint administrative duties. 
• Password Change, Reset, and Expiration web parts from Bamboo Solutions, which allow SharePoint users to maintain their own passwords without intervention from an administrator (IT departments, especially those with lots of external users, love this!).   

If you have gaps in your internal service capabilities, administrator resources, etc., you should consider ways to get them on an interim or permanent basis.  More on this in a follow-up post.

Editor’s Note:  Many of our best blog posts come from questions raised by our clients, including this one, the direct result of a few client inquiries within a week or so of each other.  Please keep them coming, and we’ll keep thinking and writing…

Flickr photo credit "I Quit: 1" by rocketace

November 2010 -- Upcoming Events

 
[Flickr photo "road work ahead" courtesy of pumpkincat210]

This is always a very busy time of year, and 2010 is no exception.  KMA is hiring and assimilating several talented professionals while continuing to create and deliver great content in our areas of expertise. Be on the lookout for us at a variety of upcoming events including:

• On Monday, 8 November, KMA's Chris McNulty joins KMA alumna Sadie Van Buren in an encore presentation of their excellent SharePoint Saturday session:  "See Behind the Numbers:  Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010."  It provides a great overview of all of the business intelligence capabilities in SharePoint 2010 and is well worth attending.
• On Wednesday, 10 November, KMA will sponsor the November monthly meeting of the Boston Area SharePoint User Group.  We're looking forward to seeing Richard Harbridge's presentation on "SharePoint 2010 Integration and Interoperability: What You Need to Know".
• The next week, on Wednesday 17 November, KMA Project Manager Amy Talhouk joins Microsoft's Chris Bortlik in our monthly KMA Insights webinar, presenting ways to use SharePoint 2010's capabilities to create "The Social Enterprise."

We'll have lots more coming up between now and the end of the year, including additional webinar content, SIM and AIIM events, presentations at SharePoint Saturdays, KM Forum presentations, and lots of others.  Watch this space for details -- more to come.

Knowledge Management of the Personal-Flavored Variety, Part 1

[photo credit:  "Knowledge Management," originally uploaded by F. Montino]

Today's Boston KM Forum Meeting at Bentley University focused on "Personal Knowledge Management," and I was fortunate to attend three interesting and divergent sessions.

The first was a panel discussion focused on personal information management.  The speaker from I took away the most actionable content was Stever Robbins, aka "The Get-it-Done Guy."  Although the panel mostly focused on e-mail management (and I don't subscribe to much of what I heard, being of the "store it in a pile and use search and metadata to find everything" school), the following ideas were of note:

• Reduce any KM tool to Return on Investment (ROI).  What is the cost of getting the information in & out of the system?
• Test ANY tool you want to use to see if it makes you more productive.  Just because you use something a lot DOES NOT mean you like it, or that it makes you more productive (e.g., iPhone, heroin, etc.).
• Take a "deathbed" perspective once in a while.  How important is this e-mail, or document, or presentation, REALLY, in the big picture?
• Use the same structure to manage your data on every platform (consistent folder taxonomy, tags, etc.), and keep it simple:  no more than 4 or 5 top-level folders.
• For all you "Inbox Zero" devotees, try this:  move EVERYTHING to your deleted items folder, then "rescue" the really important ones.
• The degree to which noise or echoes are being made about a topic is more related to the topic's velocity than its value.  Weigh content from trusted, primary sources high and tune out the rest (e.g., US Geological Survey usually  > a blog about geology).

(to be continued in part 2)

[photo credit:  "Knowledge Management," originally uploaded by F. Montino]

Today's Boston KM Forum Meeting at Bentley University focused on "Personal Knowledge Management," and I was fortunate to attend three interesting and divergent sessions.

The first was a panel discussion focused on personal information management.  The speaker from I took away the most actionable content was Stever Robbins, aka "The Get-it-Done Guy."  Although the panel mostly focused on e-mail management (and I don't subscribe to much of what I heard, being of the "store it in a pile and use search and metadata to find everything" school), the following ideas were of note:

• Reduce any KM tool to Return on Investment (ROI).  What is the cost of getting the information in & out of the system?
• Test ANY tool you want to use to see if it makes you more productive.  Just because you use something a lot DOES NOT mean you like it, or that it makes you more productive (e.g., iPhone, heroin, etc.).
• Take a "deathbed" perspective once in a while.  How important is this e-mail, or document, or presentation, REALLY, in the big picture?
• Use the same structure to manage your data on every platform (consistent folder taxonomy, tags, etc.), and keep it simple:  no more than 4 or 5 top-level folders.
• For all you "Inbox Zero" devotees, try this:  move EVERYTHING to your deleted items folder, then "rescue" the really important ones.
• The degree to which noise or echoes are being made about a topic is more related to the topic's velocity than its value.  Weigh content from trusted, primary sources high and tune out the rest (e.g., US Geological Survey usually  > a blog about geology).

(to be continued in part 2)

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. 

Serendipity and Weak Search -- For When The Stakes Are Low

I've been playing a lot lately with a music service called blip.fm (@mikegil), where one can "virtually DJ" songs stored by others to create a playlist.  When trying to find songs based on a keyword or theme, I'll often search based on that word (for example, "Saturday").

Blip.fm doesn't have anything like faceted search, and very little metadata associated with the songs, so the search results may return anything from songs with "Saturday" in the title to bands with the word "Saturday" in their name.  Pretty sloppy, right?  Lousy user experience, right?

As it turns out, no.

Perhaps it's the unique nature of music, but the imprecision of blip.fm's search actually makes my searches fun -- I often find some little pearls that I didn't expect and frankly wasn't looking for, but am happy to encounter.  I've discovered songs and artists I never would have found otherwise.

Commentators often lament the "niche culture" and "death of serendipity," those precious moments where you find the unexpectedly fascinating article on page 2 of the Metro section instead of the one article you googled and found on Boston.com, so this imprecise search has been a breath of fresh air.

However (and this underscores points we make all the time about the difference between enterprise data and consumer data), I'm not seeking serendipity when I'm searching for my firm's institutional knowledge.  I need one authoritative data point, not ten decent ones.  This requirement frequently means insertion of a human into the process to broker the flow of knowledge. 

Am I going about it wrong?  Is there a place for serendipity, for Amazon-esque "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." suggestion, or is precision the most important?  Is the distinction a work/fun one?  An enterprise/consumer one? 

There's some great reading on this point -- I especially recommend the work that Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo have done on behalf of AIIM in the area of findability.

Boston KM Forum Event: Virtual Teams and Social Media Tools, Part 1

At this week's KM Forum eventat Bentley College in Waltham, the theme of the discussion was "Leveraging Virtual Teams and Social Tools for Business Advantage."

A variety of presenters shared valuable (and frequently entertaining) insights, but in this post I'll focus on the first presentation, by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge, who shared with us some best practices around optimizing the performance of virtual teams.

Their key themes included:

• the definition of a virtual team

• studies performed/published on virtual team effectiveness (including a great article from the May, 2004 Harvard Business Review -- subscription required for full article)
• the building blocks of virtual team effectiveness:  people, purpose, links, and time.

Some of the noteworthy best practices for working with virtual teams that Lipnack and Stamps have seen and prescribed include:

1. Give your teams rich teleconference AND shared workspace capabilities. You MUST give them both, as they serve very different purposes.
2. BAN e-mail as a tool for teamwide communications. It's for old people.  :-)
3. Create and enforce ground rules for conference calls.  Some really useful ones are included in more detail in their presentation, but the caveat remains:  Many people know these already, but relatively few have the will and discipline to live by them.
4. Standardize the structure of your team workspaces. For team members to find the information they need shouldn't require treasure hunts. (I loved Lipnack's "lightswitch" metaphor here:  if you walk into a dark room, of all the hundreds of square feet of wall space available, you still grope around very specific places for the switch.)
5. Ifyour collaboration strategy doesn't include people outside your entity/firewall/premises, you're missing the point.

Lipnack and Stamps also provided many tidbits and resources (little mental bookmarks for me) that merit further investigation and reading.  I want to think and write about these in more depth, but here's a quick list, as much a placeholder for me as a reference for you:

• Tim Berners-Lee's quote from April 2008: "The Web is still in its infancy."
• The "50-foot rule" about physical proximity needed for effective collaboration, based in part on research by MIT's Tom Allen.
• Michael Sampson's "When to Travel" flowchart.
• Albert-László Barabási's book "Linked." (just went on the Kindle wish list)
• NetAge's "OrgScope" software application for mapping organizations and networks.

It was fascinating to hear from consultants who have studied and coached high-performing teams over many years.  Among their many pearls of wisdom was one I'll leave you with, a quote from technology luminary Paul Trevithick about something we as practitioners often see in the field:

"We always get the technology right and the sociology wrong."