Ruven’s SharePoint Blog

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.

I just got back from the Best Practices 2009 conference in Washington D.C. and I was sitting here asking myself why SharePoint events are so much more fun than just about any other IT related event I’ve attended over the years. I think it may come down to “collaboration about collaboration” that makes the difference.

When I talk about SharePoint with non-SharePoint IT folks, I always feel like I’m being self-serving when I tell them that “SharePoint is different from any other technology or product you’ve worked with”, but it’s true. For example, if you are an expert in Exchange, or SQL Server, you have a pretty circumscribed set of capabilities that you need to implement. That’s not to say that these products aren’t complex, or difficult to install and maintain properly, but that the “knowledge space” is something that you can draw a circle around. SharePoint is not a product that you can draw a circle around. Even those who come closest to being able to call themselves experts - the Certified Microsoft Masters - are only scratching the surface of the difficulty involved in successfully implementing SharePoint because of the political and social complexity involved in figuring out what your customer wants SharePoint to do and then delivering against that.

So, we need each other. The product is technically large and complex and getting the architecture right is tricky, but much more than that, we need each other to bounce ideas off of - to collaborate. For example: I attended Jennifer Martinez’s session on Blogs and Wikis. The room was full and the audience was desperate for information on how and when these tools are appropriate. Even better, the audience shared their experiences to the benefit of all. And there you have it: At SharePoint events, what you hear from the audience, what you learn at lunch and dinner (and of course, at the bar) are the most valuable elements. In a sense, we are all experts in our own little areas; we’ve tried stuff and we know what worked and what didn’t. We have a strong desire to share that information with each other, because we know how badly we need it ourselves.

Because we depend on and need each other, we interact with each other and we socialize with each other and we get to know and like each other. We do most of our socializing and interacting on Twitter and FaceBook and Blogs, but when we all get together in one place at one time, it’s like all the separate little flames of light come together and create a bonfire (Ok, that was really sappy, but I’m not deleting it: It sounds right to me).  Because we spend so much of our time trying to help our clients to collaborate, we have become experts in collaboration ourselves: We don’t hoard our information, we share it, knowing that by doing so, we will be paid back multiple times over. We exhibit our own best practice!

One of the things that make each of these events fun for me is the growth of the group as an ever wider circle of people come together. Three people that I knew on-line but had never met were Lori Gowin (@LoriGowin), Dan Usher (@usher) and Sarah Haase (@sarahhaase); it was great to get to know them in-person. On the night of SharePint, I had a great dinner with Michelle Strah (@Cyberslate) and Imogen Jolly (@imogenjolly), two people whom I had never met before that day. We got Imogen hooked up on twitter during dinner (I love my iPhone). Talking with Evan Burfield and team was an amazing experience and one of the highlights of the week.

[Note: When you see @Name, that denotes the person's twitter ID. e.g. www.twitter.com/lorigowin - I've included the ones that I know]

As many of you heard at various sessions during BPC09, Andrew Woodward (@andrewwoody), Dux Sy (@meetdux), Paul Culmsee (@PaulCulmsee) and I (@RuvenG) have formed a group called the SamePage Alliance based on our similar thoughts and ideas about how to get to success with SharePoint. After months of conference calls, MSN chats and e-mails it was great to get the team together to discuss ideas and strategy in-person. Special thanks to Dux for his incredible hospitality to us foreigners (from Canada, England & Australia).

I am really proud to be a member of this group: Dux had the highest rated single session of the entire conference for his tour-de-force presentation on Project Management. The rest of us each had double-solo sessions with Andrew scoring the highest rated overall. I was third and Paul was fourth for double-sessions in the SharePoint Track (there was a SQL Server track as well). We had planned to run a mini-conference of our own just before BPC09, but did not reach our minimum number of enrolees. We took advantage of the free time to arrive a few days early anyway and we had a set of great meetings. The number of people attending each of our sessions at BPC09 (and the great feedback) makes us feel that we are delivering information that people need and want; we just have to find a better way to get the word out. Watch out for future information from us.

The keynote presentation was by Arpan Shah. It was great that he came out to speak, but with the NDA still in effect and the big SPC just a month or so away, there was not a lot of new information. The one element that I found really exciting (with some reservations until I see it actually working) is Access Services for SharePoint. This will allow a user to create forms and reports in MS-Access and then upload them to SharePoint where they will be accessible from the browser.  MS-Access is a very much loved and hated product: Loved by users who can build a database application quickly and hated by IT who has to deal with mission critical data on uncontrolled systems. This just may be the solution that brings the two sides together.

I found Virgil Carroll’s (@vman916) session on multi-lingual SharePoint to be very valuable in confirming that Microsoft’s out-of-the-box story on multi-lingual is just not very good.

Zlatan Dzinic (@ZlatanDzinic) was another person who was new to me. I’m sorry I missed his session on records management, but found a lot of similarities between us during his taxonomy talk. Zlatan is a great guy who I look forward to getting to know (despite the fact that he talked non-stop through one of my presentations!).

If you could not be there in person at the event, Mark Miller (@EUSP) from EndUserSharePoint.com did a fantastic job of getting the word out by setting up live-blogging facilities and live streaming. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this effort which was led by the ‘Bama Girls: Lori (@LoriGowin) , Cathy (@catpaint1) and Laura (@WonderLaura). Bamboo Nation was also working hard to get the word out. Thanks to John Anderson for doing such a good job blogging many sessions (including one of mine!)

There are too many other great people to mention, but I couldn’t be done without a shout-out to the Late Night crew: Brett Lonsdale (@brettlonsdale), Sara Windhorst (@sharepointsara), Mike Ferrara (@mikecferrara), Richard Young (@spdick), Dan Usher (@usher), Laura Rogers (the ineffable @WonderLaura), Cathy Dew (@catpaint1) and various others that I’m too tired to remember.

This was my third BPC and it was once again very well organized and run: Hats off to Mark Elgersma and his team, as well as Paul Schaeflein, Ben Curry and Bill English for a great event.

You can read more BPC09 recaps from others here:

Lori Gowin

Paul Culmsee

While I was at the BPC conference, I found out that I will be attending the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this October. I’m looking forward to hearing all about SharePoint 2010, meeting my friends, making new ones and continuing to learn from my community - I hope to see you there!

Ensuring SharePoint Success - Mentoring Workshop

I love going to conferences. I get clues for new approaches, tips to save time or try a new feature and, sometimes, a bit of deeper insight that turns me into a better consultant and helps me to make my clients even happier.

But…

If I am still below the ‘knee’ of the learning curve on a topic, a conference just doesn’t give me enough to go on. I could sign-up for a training course, but that means trying to find a course that matches my exact needs (they never do). Given the lead-time for developing a course, these can sometimes be out-of-date or pitching to the lowest common denominator. Often, they are more focussed on technology rather than solutions.

To the Rescue…

We (Dux Sy, Paul Culmsee, Andrew Woodward and I) are doing something different. So different in fact, that we had a hard time figuring out what to call it.

It is part:

• Conference
• Mentoring
• Coaching
• Workshop
• Consulting
• Training

And it is entirely focussed on delivering successful SharePoint solutions from the point of view of the:

• CIO
• Project Champion
• Project Manager
• Project Lead
• Information Architec
• Decision Maker
• Program Manager
• Business Analyst

In three days of intense workshops and discussion sessions (including optional dinner discussions), we will talk about what has worked in multiple SharePoint installations that we have worked on. Note that we will not be giving you the “formula” for success, as every project is different. Rather, we’ll be giving you the tools that will let you create your own success formula.

It’s in the Washington D.C. area from August 19 - 21. It will cost you less than a thousand bucks to register, there will be less than 30 people there and it will be intense: You will get real news-that-you-can-use value out of it.

You can read the details here:
http://www.innovative-e.com/pages/workshopspa.aspx

I hope we see you there!

…yes, this is about governance

(Warning, shameless self promotion will appear at the bottom of this post: Reader discretion is advised.)

From the phone company’s point of view, if they provide you with dial-tone and then connect your call, they are delivering on their promise. You don’t pick up the phone every day and say “Wow, dial-tone! The phone company is doing such a great job today”.

SharePoint is a much more complex system, so why does IT often act as if all it takes to successfully deploy SharePoint is to deliver “dial-tone”?

• The service is up == Dial tone
• The service is performing == Calls go through
• Let’s limit training and support costs == You can only dial these six numbers (Huh!?!)

Caught you with that last parallel, eh? But, if you take a look at the discussions of governance that are out there, you’ll see that they are very much focussed on dial-tone-like approaches with many limitations on what users may do (i.e. very IT centric).

Let me ask you:

• If your SharePoint service is rock solid, fast and has 100% uptime. Will SharePoint be successful?
• If your backup and disaster recovery processes are extensively tested and well understood. Will SharePoint be successful?
• If your source code is designed correctly, well tested, and responsive. Will SharePoint be successful?

I could go on with a much longer list of items that many governance plans cover, but we have found that all of these elements are NBNS ^TM: Necessary But Not Sufficient for a successful deployment.

By the way, when I say “we” I’m referring to a group of SharePoint people (Paul Culmsee, Dux Sy, Andrew Woodward and me) who have found that we had a lot in common with our approaches to SharePoint deployment projects.

We have come to realize that all of these governance plans, efforts, practices and initiatives are NBNS unless you have one more, essential element: Shared Commitment and Shared Understanding. (Ok, that’s technically two elements, but Shared Commitment comes from Shared Understanding, so they are connected.)

Collectively, we have found that building Shared Understanding & Shared Commitment into our projects has been spectacularly successful. Now, making this happen requires a shift in thinking, and it requires tools and techniques that require some practice but are not hard to learn. Read Paul’s series: One Best Practice to Rule Them All for a lot more detail.

I’m really excited to report that all four of us will be touching on these topics when we speak at the upcoming Best Practices conference in Washington DC in August. But, I am even more excited to tell you that since the conference has brought us all to the same place at the same time, the four of us are going to do a deep dive on Successful SharePoint Project Delivery during a three-day workshop running August 19^th - 21^st in the DC area (the week before Best Practices).  This is a fantastic opportunity, as we come from the corners of the earth (Australia, England, Canada, USA) and so getting together is a rare event. Here is a post with more details: Our goal is to run a highly interactive workshop for a small number of attendees, where we will work through - in detail - the thinking and the tools of our approaches, while having enough time to talk to you one-on-one to help you deal with the unique circumstances of your own organization. The cost for the three days will be $1,750 per attendee, with a 10% discount for those who are also attending the Best Practices conference the following week.

If you are interested, please let us know by visiting Dux’s site: http://sp.meetdux.com/workshop_interest.aspx (this is not a registration site, just a place to record if you are interested).

I look forward to seeing many of you at the Best Practices Conference, and I hope some of you will consider attending our workshop.

You want to attend one of the big conferences this year, don’t you? You want to hear SharePoint experts speak so that you can get great new ideas and you like bumping into fellow SharePointers for networking and fun.

But…

Justifying $500 - 1,000 for airfare, $300 - 600 for food and hotel and more than $1,000 for the registration fee just won’t fit your departments (or your personal) budget?

Well…

If you live in the Greater Toronto Area, you have a fantastic option coming up very soon. On July 11^th, there is going to be a FREE conference in Toronto. This is put on by the community (i.e. unpaid SharePoint experts). Microsoft is lending us their meeting rooms at their head office in Mississauga.

And…

If you think that you’ll be getting any less of an experience than you would at a ‘big’ conference take a look at who’s talking:

Bill Brockbank  - MVP
Reza Alirezaei  - MVP, Author, International Conference Speaker
Rob Windsor - MVP, International Conference Speaker

The co-author of Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® 2007 Design by Wrox Publishing, Coskun Cavusoglu will be there and others that I’ve seen speak before include Kanwal Khipple, and Shai Petel.

And, of course, me! You can see me here for free, or you can pay to see me speak at the Best Practices conference in Washington in August. I’ll be presenting my talk on MindMapping for the Information Architect, which was rated 3^rd out of 75 sessions by attendees at the February Best Practices conference in San Diego.

See the complete list of speakers on the site.

So…

Hear some of the best in the business; get all the knowledge and networking that you need and want; get a free lunch (yes, it does exist); and, like the guy on the ING Direct ad says: “Save your money”.

I hope I’ll see you there!

Register on-line at: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/toronto/

These types of events have often been very technically focused, so I wasn’t sure how many people would turn out for my sessions on “Mind Mapping Tools for the Information Architect” and “Effective Requirements Gathering Workshops – How to organize and run them”. I was pleasantly surprised when my room filled up nicely (between 40 - 60 people at each session), with quite a few staying for both.

I attended some really interesting sessions as well:
  - MOSS Search: Why it’s not enough to just turn it on by Nadeem Mitha
  - Effective Deployment of SharePoint Publishing Sites by Ivan Neganov
  - Architecture into Implementation: The practical limits of people and SharePoint by Eli Robillard

For those who are looking to download my presentations, they are at the following link:

http://bit.ly/AoF8

The items that begin with “Ruven Gotz” are the actual presentations. The rest are PDF’s of Mind Maps that I used as examples.

For more on my demo of Balsamiq Mockups, see the Balsamiq site: http://www.balsamiq.com

Congratulations to Eli Robillard and Bill Brockbank (and a ton of other volunteers) for putting together a great event. There were well over 200 attendees and I heard a lot of positive comments from a number of “Happy Campers”.

There’s a new blog in town and if I tell you it’s called The SharePoint Mad Scientist, then I’ve told you just about all you need to know. If I tell you that it’s written by Mike Watson, that’ll fill in the rest of the picture.

If you want to check it out, read this post first. You’ll learn that Mike comes from years at Microsoft, but is now with Quest and that his mind doesn’t necessarily work the same as yours and mine, but that’s what makes his stuff interesting. I’m looking forward to his impact on the SharePoint world, both from his work at Quest from the book he’s working on with Joel Oleson.

I’m going to the Best Practices Conference in San Diego, and I went to the last one in Washington as well. It’s true that I am a speaker, but I signed up to attend the last one before I knew I was going to speak. I just knew that I was going to learn a ton based on the speaker list, and I did. 

Times are pretty tough right now, but hopefully ROI still remains king. If you can justify the short-term cost with short, medium and long-term gains, you’ll have a pretty good chance of getting management to see that it’s worth the cost to send you. Here’s something I overheard at the last one: “I went to the experts panel, and now I know what I need to do for the next six months: I’m set.”

SharePoint can be a nasty beast: Handle it properly and it will reward you, but screw up - even a little bit - and be prepared to suffer the consequences. Last week, Joel Oleson (www.sharepointjoel.com) was here in Toronto, and I got to the answer to a question that I was about to learn the hard way. Joel’s going to be at the conference, and he’s very approachable. You’ll be able to ask him your questions and save yourself some considerable pain.

I’m a huge (long-distance) fan of Paul Culmsee (www.cleverworkarounds.com). He’s going to tell you about SharePoint ROI, and more importantly, he’s going to set you straight on “Wicked Problems”. SharePoint implementations often fail due to these types of problems. Learn from Paul how to tame your wicked problems and you could save your company the tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars that a failed implementation could cost.

Getting governance right is one of the most important factors in a successful SharePoint implementation. At the conference there will be no-less than four sessions on governance that you just should not miss. Paul Galvin (http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/) was my favourite speaker last year: I’ll be sure to attend his and Natalya Voskresenskaya’s (spforsquirrels.blogspot.com) governance talk this year.

To shamelessly plug myself:  I’m going to talk about requirements gathering and how to communicate with clients and stakeholders.  If you can’t get the requirements right, you can’t deliver what the users need and your project will be a failure. I have developed a collection of techniques and tools that help me make this process (which is really, really hard) a bit easier. As I’ve refined these techniques I’ve had great success in delivering what’s needed (even more important than delivering what’s asked for).  I’m pretty sure that these techniques work because our clients invite us back for return engagements. I was also lucky enough to lead a SharePoint project that won this year’s Information Worker Solution of the Year award from Microsoft Canada. (First shameless plugs, and now bragging… sorry.)

So, bottom line: It’s about the bottom line. Save your company money and come to the SharePoint Best Practices Conference.

When you search the net for SharePoint answers, how do you know if what you find is a good answer or not? Sometimes a post that’s been around a long time comes back much earlier in the results, even if newer and better approaches have been documented or discovered.

Into the fray jumps StackOverflow.com where people can vote answers up or down. This site is targeted mostly at developers, but even though it only launched recently it already has over 200 SharePoint questions many of which are not directly about programming.

Some of the nice features are how the site is very reputation driven: People who have built up more reputation have the power to do more things, like edit questions or answers; answers that become outdated can be voted down, allowing better answers to float to the top over time.

It’s still early days for this site, but it looks really promising to me.