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.)

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.

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, part 2: The Revolution Will Be Recorded

Each year, I attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to get some visibility into where social and collaboration technologies are headed.  I attended the keynote speeches Tuesday, comprising eight presentations of 15 minutes each delivered rapid-fire style.  This post is the second of what I expect to be three "echoes" from these keynotes.

Among the most interesting keynote presentations was "Managing People and Process Across A Networked Organization" by Jim Grubb, VP, Corporate Communications Architecture, Chief Demonstration Officer [note: what a great title!], Cisco Systems, Inc., who detailed Cisco's vision for collaboration. Jim discussed the fusion of synchronous collaboration (e.g., voice communications, and live + virtual meetings where parties are interacting with one another in real-time) and asynchronous collaboration (tools and techniques we more frequently associate with Enterprise 2.0, e.g., wikis, blogs, document-level collaboration tools, etc.).

The most interesting, and I dare say chilling, aspect of the keynote was a vision of a world where voice communications can be integrated with asynchronous collaboration tools using the following scenario:

• A meeting, either live or remote, is convened.
• The meeting is recorded for future usage ("we have so many meetings in part because we don't remember what we discussed")
• The meeting proceedings are transcribed, indexed, and stored.
• Meeting proceedings can be searched from collaboration workspaces and portals.

This scenario made me think about the potentially chilling effect of the recording on meeting participation and the free-wheeling, thinking-out-loud, spitballing, serendipitous style of collaboration so important to innovation and the creation of new ideas. This free exchange of ideas between people (also sometimes known as "Ideas Having Sex") is absolutely critical to trust.

If I knew that all of my participation in meetings and conference calls would be recorded, indexed, and forever searchable, I know that I would be far more judicious in what I said, especially in internal conversations.  Perhaps we would get used to it the same way that we are used to being videotaped by ubiquitous surveillance cameras today, or recorded on customer service phone lines, but people at Enterprise 2.0 with whom I chatted about this idea (including one who knows a lot about e-discovery) shared my initial, chilled impression about the potential unintended consequences.

How we manage, culturally, to bridge the inherent conflict between the need to find and record the fruits of our information workers' labors and the need to provide safe places where colleagues can freely share ideas, even bad ones, will be fascinating to watch over the next several years, and will be critical to our success as information workers and knowledge managers. 

How are you planning on balancing these conflicting needs in your organization?

Tip of the Week: Browse Faster, Type Less

People are free to work the way they want, but in much the same way that some expert Microsoft Office users break out in a rash when they watch a (new, less skilled, less experienced, inept, etc.) user perform an operation in an inefficient way, there is a web browser shortcut that I am amazed I don't see used more frequently.

Every time I watch someone type "http://" in front of a web address, I'm dying to tell them this: 

1. For any web address that ends in ".com" just type the domain name, e.g., "Boston"
2. Press [ctrl-enter]
3. Watch your browser (with apologies to Steve Jobs) "magically" infer the leading "http://" and the trailing ".com". 
4. Give your fingers a break, and enjoy the 11 keystrokes you just saved!

For your added computing pleasure and efficiency, here is a list of keyboard shortcuts for many of Microsoft's key products.   What's YOUR favorite way of saving keystrokes?

Office 2010 Web Applications Preview

In this window between Microsoft's July Worldwide Partner Conference (with many Office 2010 previews) and Microsoft's October SharePoint Conference, I'm working to learn about Microsoft's Office 2010 applications.

A recently posted video shows an interesting aspect of Office 2010:  Office Web Applications that are positioned as an on-line companion to the richer Office client experience, for users with only a browser and needs for high-fidelity collaboration around Office documents.

Office Web Apps Video

Office 2010 Preview Site

Late addition:  ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley wrote a great article recently summarizing Ten Things To Know as Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers. 

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.

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].

On-Line Identity Management 2.0: DandyID

Our firm focuses a great deal on collaboration as a way to solve business problems, and we view social media tools as a great addition/complement to the Microsoft Information Worker technologies we use and advise our clients about every day.  Accordingly, several of us have accounts with such services as:

• Typepad (blogging)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Delicious (social bookmarking)
• Twitter (microblogging).

One of the most difficult things about using all of these "best of breed" services is maintaining a centralized record of account credentials for each of these services.  I recently learned of a tool that I've been looking for for quite a long time: DandyID, an on-line tool for managing, in one place, all of my on-line identities.

I tried out DandyID this week, completed my profile, associated my DandyID with my various on-line profiles (out of the hundreds they offer), and used DandyID to verify my credentials with the services that offer this option.  I also was able to see where I rank among the digiterati, as far as the number and quality of my on-line presences.

I then took a link to my DandyID profile and dropped it into my e-mail signature so that people can follow me on-line using the services and accounts I've chosen to share with them.  (NOTE:  This is not managed on a user-by-user level via DandyID -- content is shown or hidden based on security/privacy settings in each of the individual services.)

  

I've used the free version to do everything I've described here, but DandyID also has a premium offering for $4.99 a month that includes social stats and analytics about how and where people interact with you on the Web.  I've also yet to explore the "Contacts" functionality in DandyID -- looking for a good use case to test this.

Now, if I could only find a centralized service to manage all my passwords across those accounts...

NOTE:  Shout-out to @DougCornelius and @jackvinson for the Tweets that led me to this tool.

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.

Integrating Search with Office Applications -- New from Office Labs

I discovered a great tool recently thanks to a colleague at Microsoft:  an add-in from the Microsoft Office R&D group known as Office Labs called Search Commands.

It's a tool that uses search to simplify navigating the new user interface in Office 2007 by dropping a "Command Search" tab into the ribbon in the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications.   This will be another useful tool in helping users make the transition to the new version of Office by allowing them to easily search for and find commands that may be hidden or in an unfamiliar place.

Here's how it works: 

1. Download a small (< 3 MB) file from Microsoft Office Labs. [direct link to download]

2. Install the add-in.

3.  Fire up Word, Excel, or PowerPoint 2007.

4.  Click on the "Search Commands" tab in the toolbar.

5.  Enter in the search window the command or function you are looking for.

6.  Select the command you want from the results, shown in the ribbon.

7.  Extra bonus:  note the little flyover that provides details about where on the ribbon to find the command in the future.

Between this tool and another Office Labs tool called Community Clips that allows you to create, find, and share screen recording videos to create on-the-fly tutorials for colleagues or others, Office Labs is working hard to smooth the way for broader adoption of Office by enterprise customers.