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.

…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/

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.

Today, Joris Poelmans (of JOPX on SharePoint) wrote a post against the use of folders in SharePoint. Now don’t get me wrong, I too spend a good deal of my time explaining to customers why folders should be avoided in SharePoint. As Joris says: “NOOOOO …. metadata is the way to go in SharePoint”.

However, there are some cases where folders are absolutely the way to go and I want to tell you about my favourite example.

My customer has a team-site used for collaboration by the Human Resources teams in Toronto, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. Most of the content on the site is shared among all groups, but there are some documents under the control of the VP of HR that are specific for each location. These documents should not be seen by anyone other than the targeted groups.

We already know that audience targeting is not an answer when security matters.

The solution is to create three folders, one for each location, and secure each folder so that only members of the appropriate groups can see them. This means that only members of the Hong Kong group can see the Hong Kong Folder. The VP of HR of course has access to all three folders, so that he can add/edit/delete documents from any folder.
The final step that makes this really work, and avoids an extra click for the user, is to create a default view that is a “no-folders view”. With a no folders view, all the documents are displayed in “flat” format, with no folders in the way. However, the security that you’ve applied to the folder is still in effect, so you will only see files that you have the rights to see.

When you create the view, expand the “Folders” section and select “Show all items without folders”.

The bottom line is: Never use folders in SharePoint, except where they simplify or enhance functionality.