People say to me: How do you find time for yet another source of information? Keeping up with the enterprise social stream (in my case, Yammer) on top of email and Lync messages, not to mention personal social media just seems like too much. It’s like drinking from the fire-hose non-stop. Whenever I hear this, I give…

Enterprise social networking is not about “Facebook for the enterprise” and it’s not about using Twitter and Facebook for communicating with your customers. What it is about is enhancing your knowledge management and collaboration solutions by giving everyone access to the information inside people’s heads, no matter…

I met a friend for a drink the other day, and we were discussing how we share our presentation materials. I said “I just send people my whole presentation – or make it available on Slideshare.org.” I do this because they can see the animations and read the speakers notes (of which I have many, because my slides are…

People who have seen me speak, or read my blog before know how much emphasis I place on visual tools for reaching shared understanding. The evolution of my practice with visual tools, from mind mapping to Dialogue Mapping was prompted by Paul Culmsee. Paul is a great writer and a brilliant thinker who has forever…

If you don’t know what Dialogue Mapping is, you have a bit of reading to do. I’d recommend Paul Culmsee’s excellent series of blog posts on the topic. Or, go back to the originator, Jeff Conklin and his Cognexus Institute. But, if you have been using or learning about Dialogue Mapping, you’ll know that the standard…

I’m writing this post on the plane, flying home from the SPC12 conference in Las Vegas. When I used “in the trenches” in the title, I mean that particular bit of hell we’ve all been in: Crammed between the window and a person whom I’ve never met who likes to order the smelliest sandwich on the cart. In this less than…

My history with building business solutions goes way back to MS-Access 1.0 (“Cirrus”). Although it was meant to be a PowerUser tool, I found that I could employ it to build powerful (but not large-scale) business solutions relatively inexpensively. I made my living by teaching Access Developer courses, and using that…

Hi friends and followers, today I want to tell you about a new chapter in my life: I am changing jobs once again. I never expected to be writing this only a year and a half after joining Navantis and his was one of the toughest choices I’ve made in my professional career: I have really loved working at Navantis. The…

Update 2: People looking to download the files mentioned in the book can find them here: http://bit.ly/sps-sample-files 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…

(Thanks to Marcy Keller for the JumpShot at Disney) I’ve just returned from the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim. This conference was a great experience, even though there is no way it could live up to the previous conference when SharePoint 2010 was revealed along with all the crazy new metadata capabilities and (one…

How a couple of books have radically changed my PowerPoint presentations. I do a fair number of presentations. I speak to our internal teams, to our clients, and to attendees at conferences. While I feel that I have pretty good content, I want to do a better job of conveying my message in a more engaging way. One of…

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…

Ok, that title is a bit of stretch. Here’s the explanation: Richard Harbridge and I gave a full-day workshop on Information Architecture that included over 400 slides in 8.5 hours. If that’s not ‘singing for your supper’, I don’t know what is. Then, on the last night of the conference, we went to La Famiglia Giorgio in…

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…

I’m back home after a wonderful and exhausting SharePoint Technical Conference. I go to these conferences for three main reasons: To learn (there’s no better way to avoid pain than learning from the hard-won knowledge of others) To speak (giving back to the community, and learning from my audience) To spend time with…

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…

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…

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. 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…

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…

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…

…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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Those of you who know me, know that I consider Mindjet’s MindManager is the greatest invention since sliced cheese. I use it for almost everything that you could think of (and a few that you couldn’t). I’ve only had a couple of hours to test the new version so this is just a short post with my first impressions. The…

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…

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…

SharePoint’s people search is a SharePoint feature that many organizations want to take advantage of. (I’ve heard stories of people sitting for weeks within 25 feet of a new co-worker, and even having e-mail conversations with them without realizing who they are.) However, at the time that most SharePoint deployments…

Last week I attended the SharePoint Best Practices conference in Washington DC. I learned a lot and I had a great time. This was the first Best Practices (BP) conference put on by Bill English and Ben Curry of MindSharp. The BP conference was a great follow on to their recently published book: SharePoint Best Practices…

Welcome to my first post. My main goal for this blog is to cover issues related to Information Architecture (IA) for SharePoint. However, this blog will also cover many other aspects of SharePoint. Ruven Gotz As a consultant who leads SharePoint projects from early planning through deployment, I deal with questions and…