The Practical SharePoint Information Architect

Update: To buy this book (Book/Kindle/Other),
please see the links in the side bar over there →

If you are responsible for any of the business side of implementing SharePoint, then I think you will find material in this book that will be of value to you. This book captures both tools and approaches that I have found to be successful.

The first chapter talks about some of the soft-skills that you need to cultivate to be a successful business analyst (BA) or information architect (IA).  I then dive into the key tools that really help with engaging the client, getting to shared understanding and shared commitment. These tools include: Mind Manager, Balsamiq, BizAgi, Visio and Compendium.

Topics include: taxonomy, navigation, search, business process, governance, adoption and training.

When I planned this book, I did not want to write a giant reference book that a reader would dip into when researching a particular topic. At only about 250 pages, I hope that people will try to read it all the way through in a just a few days, getting a holistic idea of an approach that can help them to become better practitioners. Most of the tools can be learned very quickly, and they start to provide value right away. I look forward to hearing how people use the book and where it provides value to them.

The History of this Book

Those of you who have known me for a while have heard me talking about working on a book for over two years, but I wasn’t sure that I could really do it, so I delayed, and wasted time, until finally I decided to do an outline and start a first chapter to see if I could actually string a bunch of words together. It turned out to be good timing, because a few months after that Apress called. They had seen the agenda of a presentation that I was doing and asked if I could do a book about SharePoint, based on my talk. I crossed my fingers and said ‘yes’, and sent them my outline and chapter. That sealed the deal and the process began.

I thought it would be really hard. It was harder than that. Sitting down in the evening after work to try to write 15-20 pages that would make sense and hang together with the rest of the book was really tough. At one point I thought that I would not be able to actually get it done. That’s when I realized that I would need help. So I called in two people who I greatly respect, and whom I am lucky enough to call friends. Sarah Haase has such great experience with building SharePoint solutions that measurably solve business process issues, and she articulates it so well, that I was sure she could help with the chapter on process. Michal Pisarek is one of those rare people who is really strong technically, yet ‘gets’ the business side of SharePoint and understands how to focus on the problem that needs to be solved BEFORE looking at the technology that will solve it. I had been really impressed with some of his writing on search, and so I asked him to contribute the search chapter. With those two chapters off-loaded, I felt like I could possibly see the light at the end of the tunnel.

One of the best parts of being a conference speaker is that I get to learn so much from my colleagues. There is so much in my book that I owe to people that I have learned from along the way. Some of them, like Marcy Kellar, Paul Culmsee, Sadalit van Buren and Erik Swenson have kindly allowed me to use some of their content in the book. Others like Sue Hanley, Virgil Carroll, Richard Harbridge, Christian Buckley, Dux Sy, Michael Sampson, Erica Toelle, Marc Anderson, Eric Riz, and many, many more will probably hear their words echoed in its pages. It’s even possible (though unlikely) that Geoff Varosky and Mark Rackley have had some influence on me.

I am glad to be finally done – and now the next phase of this adventure begins.

To buy this book (Book/Kindle/Other),
please see the links at the top of the side bar over there →

PS. I have a facebook page for the book: https://www.facebook.com/PracticalSPIA

The title of this post paraphrases Mark Twain who wrote this when his obituary was published in the paper. Today, Mark Rackley (the SharePoint Hillbilly) wrote a post asking: Is the SharePoint Community Past Its Prime?

In my reply below (too long to be a comment on Mark’s blog), I state my case that he is completely, and utterly (ok, maybe not utterly) wrong:

Growth is always tough. Things were fine, and then they changed. Waaah. <– that’s a general comment, not meant to call-out Mark (though he does cry like that, I’ve seen him).

Like Mark, I worry about issues like sponsor fatigue. But then, I see them all come out, in cities (or suburbs) large and small. They must still be getting value out of the opportunity to put themselves in-front of a group of interested and dedicated potential customers.

I worry about opportunities for new members of the community to speak. But (most recently) at SharePoint Saturday events in Houston, Detroit and Chicago, I have seen great new speakers from the local community. At home in Toronto, I see local speakers ‘cut their teeth’ at user-group meetings in a friendly and relatively low-pressure environment. Yes, there is an ever-growing group of ‘high-reputation’ speakers who are in-demand because they are either very engaging, have great content, or both. This is good for the community as well, as it provides examples to aspire to.

By the way: A side-note here. Sometimes as speakers who go to many events, we may think “Oh, that guy with his same old message”, but for the attendees who are new, and haven’t heard that message yet, it still is highly relevant. Long-time community members have to realize that there are new people joining every day, and what is ‘old hat’ to you is a startling revelation to them. (This is not an excuse for speakers to stop adapting or innovating in your sessions.)

I have felt the sting of not being accepted to speak after taking time to submit. It’s easy to become complacent and build up expectations. But an occasional jolt is not a bad thing. The community is growing – sometimes you need to up your game, and sometimes it just comes down to a tough choice, made by a volunteer who’s doing their best in whatever spare time they can squeeze out of a day. So far, I feel that Mark’s points are things that we should keep an eye on, but are not as bad as he makes out. Sure there are bits of drama here and there. And there’s an occasional jerk who wants to show you up in a session (or, maybe he’s not a jerk – just confused about what you are saying, or weak on social skills). As speakers – especially experienced speakers – we need to know how to handle those people without being rude. Sometimes we need to admit that we may be wrong or that we don’t know.

I completely disagree with Mark about the conference question and who runs a legit conference and who doesn’t. I’ve mostly only been to Best Practices conferences, SPTechCons, Summit (in Canada) and SharePoint Saturdays. I don’t think I would be able to tell if a conference is exploiting the community or not. If they treat the speakers well, and deliver value to attendees, I don’t get what the issue is. If they don’t do either of these things, they won’t get speakers or attendees to come back. (But I’ll admit that maybe I’m missing something here that I have not directly experienced.)

I won’t say much about the MVP program comments. I love being an MVP, but I don’t know how it happened that I became one (I never expected it). It does sometimes seem a bit random. I think that Microsoft could do a little bit more to recognize those who clearly contribute to the community. But, when we complain about Microsoft, don’t forget that at many of those SharePoint Saturdays and conferences you go to, Microsoft’s name is near the top of the sponsor list. As someone who organizes volunteer run SharePoint events, it would be much harder without the support we get from Microsoft including money and prizes. I don’t know how Mark envisions Microsoft taking on a much more visible role without us all rising up and complaining that they’re trying to take over our grass-roots community.

Speaking as a speaker who speaks quite a bit (say that three times) I think the most important thing that we can do is to be welcoming to new members of the community. Don’t sit in the speakers’ room at conferences; attend sessions (especially those of new speakers), encourage them and invite them into the circle when sharing a pint. Don’t create a rift between ‘us old-timers’ and ‘those noobs’. I think that SharePoint as a product has a lot more maturing to do, that our clients need help from knowledgeable people and that anything we can do to help nurture and grow this community (the most amazing I have ever come across in many years of IT work), the better.

So Mark: Waaah, waaah, waaaah. Now that you’ve had a good cry over the changes you’ve seen and worried about, dry those tears and go back to having fun, learning, teaching and being one of the all-time, all-round heroes of the SharePoint community!

Scott Jamison posted a blog follow-up to a session I recently presented at SPTechCon in Boston. I explained how you can drop a document into a document library, at which point the content organizer takes over and moves the document to new location in that library, that site, or even in another site collection.

During the session, someone asked if the person uploading the document needs to have permission to place that document in the new location. I said ‘I don’t think so, but I’m not sure’. In Scott’s post, he verifies that ‘no’ is the right answer, but that raised a new question from Greg Clark: The ability to work around the security model is undesirable, no?

I can see some useful benefits of the content organizer being able to move a document into a location that one normally doesn’t have write access to, but it does cause some unsettling thoughts:

What if the destination doesn’t have versioning turned on. You could overwrite an important document and ‘invisibly’ change it to say whatever you want. Also, you could be putting unverified information into a location that normally has fairly strong governance about what gets exposed at that location.

You can mitigate the issue of stealth upload by requiring approval before a document becomes visible to a wider audience. However, the one saving grace of this ‘hole’ is that name of the uploading user is recorded in ‘Modified by’. So, while this could happen due to some user accidentally or unwittingly breaking the rules, it will not be anonymous: Everyone will know who-done-it.

There may be other ways to deal with this, and I’d be happy to hear ideas from anyone who has more details.

I’m back home after a wonderful and exhausting SharePoint Technical Conference.

I go to these conferences for three main reasons:

1. To learn (there’s no better way to avoid pain than learning from the hard-won knowledge of others)
2. To speak (giving back to the community, and learning from my audience)
3. To spend time with an awesome group of wonderful people (a great mix of old friends and new)

SPTechCon hit all three points for me. I went to great sessions with Laura Rogers, Mark Miller, Andrew Connell, Gary LaPointe, Randy Drisgill, John Ross, Mauro Cardarelli, Joshua Haebets and Steve Fox.

I presented three sessions, and a quick glance at the evals (and chatting with attendees) leads me to believe that I provided good value to those who took the time to attend.

And, finally, this was an event with a great collection of SharePoint people (speakers, attendees and sponsors) who know how to have fun both during and after work hours.

My Sessions

My first session was “Mind Mapping tools for the Information Architect”. There are no slides because I use Mind Manager to present, but you can see a PDF of the main map and all examples here: http://bit.ly/SPTechCon-MM

The tools that I demonstrated in that session were:

MindJet Mind Manager: http://www.mindjet.com/
Balsamiq Mockups: http://balsamiq.com/
Bizagi Process Modeller: bizagi.com
Microsoft Visio 2010: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

My second session was “Explaining Metadata to Your Stakeholders” . You can download my deck plus I’ve posted the tools that I’ve developed. I do this because? ____________ (My attendees know the answer to that question)
http://bit.ly/SPTechCon-ExpMD

My third session was “Metadata Management with (Oh No…!) Folders in SharePoint 2010”. This was mostly a demo session, but I find it annoying whenever I download a deck that has three intro slides followed by a slide that says “DEMO” with no further detail. So, my deck has screen-shots of almost every screen that I demo’ed.
http://bit.ly/SPTechCon-MD-Folders

NOTE: In my third session, quite a few people were interested to hear about how my VM was hosted “in the cloud” using Amazon EC2 Web Service (aws.amazon.com). The cool thing about this service is that you only get charged ($0.50/hr) while your machine is on. Turn it on for the session, turn it off again after; costs a dollar (plus bandwidth and storage, but they are very reasonable too). Go here for a great blog that gives instructions on how to do this.

A few people told me they liked my invented company for illustrating taxonomy issues: Multi Mega Industries, the world’s number one supplier of missiles, produce and soap.

The Conference

The conference itself was well run. Thanks to David Rubenstein, Kathy Bruin and their capable team for always being there (I had a few special requests).

With a sell-out of over 1,000 attendees, the rooms were sometimes overcrowded and hot, and the show floor was constantly packed (which was good for the vendors, I heard). Next year, SPTechCon will be at a larger venue which will be better able to accommodate the large numbers of attendees.

The Community

It was great seeing old friends and meeting new people.

A lot of the ‘fun’ of this trip centered around Mark Rackley (the SharePoint Hillbilly). The constant crew included John Ferringer, Brian Jackett, Brian Hunt and Tasha Scott. Along the way we’d pick up Michael Doyle (@SharePointNinja), Geoff Varosky, Joshua Carlisle, Susan Lennon, Sean McDonough and Erica Toelle (one of my favourite people). In an action packed evening we had Japanese Hibachi for dinner, then moving on for drinks (and figuring out the stained glass caricatures at John Harvard’s in Harvard Square. It was great to finally meet Andrew Connell in person (he was channelling Maverick from Top Gun that evening). I met a new friend – Shelby Boyd – followed by memorable karaoke at Maluken.

Speaking of new friends; on the first night while checking in I met Steve Pellegato. We immediately hit it off and had a great dinner at an Irish pub and then went off to find Mark.

It’s always great to hang with the “frequent flyers club”: Joel Oleson, and Paul Swider. Along with Christian Buckley (nice chats about life and family), Fabian Williams, Mike Ferrara, Geoff Varosky and Jim Bob Howard we had a late-night tour of Quincy Market. This was after a great dinner of Afghan food with Joel, Mark Miller, Brett Lonsdale and Sara Windhorst, Marcee Henon and Dux Sy.

On the final night Joel drove us (the usual suspects plus my fellow Torontonian, Rob Windsor) to an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End  called La Famiglia Giorgio which came highly recommended by Andrew Connell. We had a delicious and huge dinner. It was a little crowded: We squeezed 8 people into space for six, including Jim Bob sharing a spot at a neighbouring table (it was the kind of place where that was OK).

It had been many years since I had spent much time in Boston. It’s a great town that I really enjoyed. The icing on the cake was a giant regatta on the Charles on a crisp and sunny fall day.

My SPTechCon experience was wonderful in all respects and I thank all those who helped make it that way: See you at the next one in San Francisco!

Sometimes, when I am a few weeks away from speaking at a conference, a friend in the town where I’m going may write to me to say: What times are you speaking? Maybe we can meet up right after your session. I have to let my friend down gently and tell them: Sorry, I’m not just there to speak, but to learn as well.

There is no better place to put this into action then at the Best Practices Conference coming up this August 24-27 in Washington D.C.  The number and quality of speakers is truly amazing. I always advise my clients to attend this conference. I tell them they will be surprised at how rapidly they can advance their knowledge about what is possible with SharePoint and how much they will learn from others about how to do it right. I even tell them that, if they possibly can, they should send two people as there are so many sessions that they are sure to be sorry about missing one or two in each time-slot.

Now some of you may tend to knock the term “best practice”; we all know that every situation is different and that a best practice in one scenario can be a worst practice in another. So, don’t take the title to mean: Everything we say is the one-and-only best practice FOR YOU. Rather, listen for speakers to talk about their experiences and their emerging best practices based on that (often painful) experience. Then, correlate their environment and experiences with your own, and choose and adapt what you have learned so that you can apply it sensibly in your own environment. By the way, most speakers are savvy to this issue and will often fill-in the blanks for you, stating the circumstances when something they recommend is not a good idea.

There is another great thing happening at this conference: The incredible growth in the number of speakers who are women. I have seen presentations by most of the women speaking at this year’s conference, but I’ve never seen so many of them presenting at one conference. (Check out http://womeninsharepoint.org for more info if you are a woman looking to grow your career in the world of SharePoint.)

One last thing: SharePoint conferences are a lot of fun. Make sure you come out for “SharePint” in the evening. You’ll be able to chat informally with your fellow attendees as well as the speakers. These are people you’ll be able to e-mail with your toughest questions in the future.

I really hope I see you there: You will learn WAY more than you expect, you will meet a lot of great people and you’ll have a lot of fun as well.

Erik Swenson has published a post showing his phenomenal collection of wireframes for SharePoint 2010. I remember when he showed me his SharePoint 2007 wireframes in Montreal last year and being blown away.

Erik’s approach is to go super Hi-Fi. By that I mean that he creates exact, faithful reproductions of the SharePoint interface in Visio. But, since Erik is not allowed to share these widely, you may want to consider another approach: Instead of creating Hi-Fi wireframes (and investing the incredible amount of work required), try the Lo-Fi approach.

I prefer this course of action, because, depending on the phase of the project, I don’t want clients to think too much about how it will ‘actually look’, but more about ‘what function/element belongs where’.

The tool I use is super fast and easy (and cheap), and you can even use it interactively during client workshops. It is called Balsamiq Mockups (www.balsamiq.com).

And, just when you think this can’t possibly get any easier, along comes Gordon MacLeod (a fellow Torontonian) who has created a bunch of pre-built SharePoint elements that you can download for free from here: http://mockupstogo.net/prebuilt-sharepoint-elements.

I have heard great arguments for both the Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi approaches, and they both have their uses. For me, fast, schematic and interactive wins out.

Happy wireframing,

Ruven

It’s been a couple of weeks since the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas wrapped up and I’ve had some time to recover from the #ShareFlu and think a bit about what I saw and heard.

Four-lane escalator highway

Microsoft used SPC09 to take the wraps off of SharePoint 2010, the next version that will be released in the first half of next year. The embargo on information before the conference coupled with the incredible growth of SharePoint over the past couple of years made this a highly desirable ticket, and the show sold-out with over 7,000 attendees. It was great to see a lot of people that I’ve met at conferences where I have spoken before, and to meet a lot of my twitter friends in-person .

For the most part, SharePoint 2010 offered more than I was expecting. Many pain points from 2007 were so well addressed that I was thoroughly impressed. But I am not going to recap all the new features of SharePoint 2010; there are tons of sites and blogs out there that cover that. I will just tell you about about a couple of high-points for me, and a few lows as well, and give you my take on what remains important (but not discussed at the conference).

I am very excited about Access Services for SharePoint 2010. In my ancient past, I developed a lot of MS-Access applications for clients large and small. Access was a great platform for delivering powerful solutions very quickly. It had a great forms editor, report writer, query engine and development language. It was easy to prototype quickly and then customize with code where required. There were some major downsides: The database used a file-share which was susceptible to corruption. In the corporate world, the IT department hated Access because the projects were usually done outside the control of IT and mission critical data was sitting on someone’s desktop with no backups or disaster recovery plan.

SharePoint 2007 has been an ‘almost but not quite good enough’ platform for developing simple apps. It lacks validation, referential integrity, table joins and other elements that would make it a great tool for building quick solutions. A number of these issues have been addressed in SP2010, so very simple applications are now easier to build with out-of-the-box SharePoint. But, there is still a gap between very simple apps and custom applications that require a developer. If it works, Access Services will fill that gap, allowing power-users/developers to quickly develop applications with reporting, querying and custom forms and reports that can be stored in and shared from SharePoint. These apps will be developed in Access but available to users from the browser. The best part is that IT will love it too because now, mission critical data will live inside of a corporate system that is professionally managed and backed up. (Data storage will still be an issue, and teams may have to justify their use of a custom app from within SharePoint, but these are political, not technical issues.)

I was also very impressed with the new taxonomy management features. Along with improving records management features in SP2010, we are getting much closer to an enterprise platform.

The items that disappointed me were mobile access to SharePoint (the demo was a real dud) and multi-lingual capabilities (with the exception of multi-lingual capabilities with taxonomy elements). For our clients, we rely on third party tools for multi-lingual solutions and it looks like we will have to continue to do so with SP2010.

Finally, after seeing all the whiz-bang new features, I thought about the impact on my job as an information architect. I help clients figure out what their pain-points are, what they want SharePoint to do (if SharePoint is even the right solution), and how they will structure their sites, their navigation, their documents and their pages. I didn’t see much that would change what I do  and how I do it. All the great new features and technology means that actually building SharePoint solutions will be faster and simpler, and we’ll be able to come closer to the ideal that the client is looking for. However, jumping into the new version of SharePoint without understanding “what do we need and why” will lead to just as many messes and outright failures as with previous versions.

It was great seeing everyone in Las Vegas, I’m looking forward to seeing some of you again at SharePoint Saturday in Virginia Beach on January 9th. I’ll be speaking there about my techniques and tools and how to use them to deliver successful SharePoint projects.