Building Solutions - SharePoint for End Users

11/11/2009

SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: A three-part series on SharePoint 2010

I had the good fortune of attending seven sessions at the SharePoint Saturday in Redmond. The presentations were first class. The conference, breakfast, lunch, and coffee were free. And the crowd was enthusiastic. I took detailed notes on three sessions that I know many of you will be interested in. Here’s the first of a three-part series on SharePoint 2010 from SharePoint Saturday in Redmond.

SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part I - SharePoint 2010 overview

Gideon Bibliowicz, a SharePoint Product Manager from Microsoft, kicked off the day with an overview of SharePoint 2010. Although I‘ve read a few overview presentations and scoured some marketing sites, I liked the way Gideon positioned SharePoint 2010 and went beyond the usual fluffy hype with some fun demos.

Almost everyone has a hard time defining SharePoint when their neighbor asks "What is SharePoint?" Why is it so hard to pin it down in 25 words or less? Here’s a good stab at it:

"SharePoint is a business collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web."

Gideon elaborated some key words. "Collaboration" can occur between 2 or 100,000 people. "Platform" means that there is a complete and entire ecosystem around which SharePoint can be used, extended, partnered with, and customized. "Web" means, it’s not just for the intranet anymore, it’s also an internet, public-facing development platform (See for example www.ferrari.com).

I’m going to expand this definition a bit, and give you my take in exactly 25 words:

SharePoint 2010 is a collaboration platform for organizations (business, education, or government) on the web (intranet, extranet, and internet) that integrates beautifully with Office 2010.

No pie in the sky

Gideon then dug deeper using the new SharePoint pie (or donut, or wheel, or starfish) as the visual prop.

These are the three key messages:

Connect and empower people is the who, and encompasses online and offline Office, as well as external data from Line-of-Business (LOB) applications.

Cut costs with a unified infrastructure is the how, and focuses on IT maintenance and control.

Rapidly respond to business needs is the why, and focuses on improved ease of use for everyone as well as the new composites realm which are the means to the end. (See Demo 4: Composites below)

Of course, there is a bit of a delicate balancing act between the how and the why. IT needs to exert consistency and control within the enterprise, but you as an Information Worker (IW) want to get beyond the "Submit requests to IT and wait syndrome" and get your job done. You both want to do it in a reasonably harmonious fashion. That’s where the concept of SharePoint governance comes in.

In the SharePoint pie, each of the six SharePoint components is expressed in a wheel to show the deep integration of each. They are no longer loosely compiled pillars that sort of work together.

Content: 90% of this is your lists, libraries, pages, and metadata. This is your bedrock or foundation. Lots of ease-of-use improvements here.

Search: This is self-explanatory, but there are lots of enhancements here that empower you (See Demo 2: Find expertise below).

Sites: This used to be called portals, but that word is passé and too limiting. We are now talking sites on the web – inside and outside the firewall.

Communities: There are a lot of new investments in this hot area of idea-generation, Web interactions, social awareness, and people collaboration.

Insights: This is really another way of saying Business Intelligence (BI), but the idea is to emphasize that this is BI for the masses (The middle tier of the BI Big Stack).

Composites: Create powerful solutions without code by using Web Parts, external LOB data, Visio Services (new), Access Services (new), and Excel Services (improved), InfoPath (improved), and SharePoint Designer (revamped). You could say Microsoft Mashups.

For the rest of the hour, Gideon demo-ed some important feature and solution highlights that illustrated these six "value propositions."

Demo 1: Update a web page just like that

The key point of this demo is how incredibly easy it is now to update a web page. You simply edit the page and your changes are published with one click. The UI is simple and intuitive, but has rich controls. The new ribbon interface makes it so easy to discover and find commands. It's much easier to add Web Parts, images, videos, and even Silverlight apps. It's nothing to add your own theme, either built-in to SharePoint or one you might customize in PowerPoint.

A true crowd pleaser is that all of these new features are browser-agnostic, and work in IE, Firefox, and Safari. In fact when Gideon does this demo, he is working in Safari from the get go, and then usually an astute customer points it out.

Gideon related a story where a cruise ship line wanted to quickly update their Web site to ease passenger concerns about the swine-flu virus on board their ship. It was easy for the captain to do this because the cruise-line was using SharePoint 2010.

Demo 2: Find expertise, not just people

Search is new and improved (Really!) with better algorithms, Best Bets, and refinement panels for easier filtering and sorting. More importantly, search is organic. It’s empowered by ratings, tagging, metadata, keywords, taxonomies, folksonomies, all of which when used by an organization make search much more relevant for your company.

Also, when you click a link to a document, it can open up in Office Web Apps (and not the client) so you can quickly see the contents or find a slide to a presentation in great fidelity on a Web page.

User profiles and organizational browsing are rich and integrated with Search so that if you, for example, type the word “gears” in the mythical company of Contoso, you quickly find who knows all the ins and outs about gears, where in the organization they sit, and who their manager is. You can even add a note to someone’s Noteboard (a new feature) to say you would like to meet with them when they get back from their business trip, let’s say.

Tag clouds help you find out who the most knowledgeable folks are and what level of expertise they have. Employees can create rich and deep profiles of information that are used by Search to analyze and surface the right content and people you are looking for.

"Metadata for the masses" is another important 2010 feature. You can quickly create, update, and evolve taxonomies and folksonomies that are relevant for your organization and use these terms in search, in view columns, and in large content sets (more on that in Part III of this blog series).

Demo 3: Visualize insights

A key addition to SharePoint 2010 has been a big chunk of PerformancePoint features and functionality, including an advanced dashboard designer, Web Parts, scorecards, KPIs, data source connections, data visualizations like the decomposition tree (a sort-of visual PivotTable), and well-organized business intelligence centers.

Combine this with Excel’s new slicers (think flexible, re-arrangeable filters), Sparklines, and the PowerPivot add-in (analyze 100 million records in the blink of an eye – I kid you not!), and you have all the tools you need to create and use BI in your team or group without a PhD in Computer Science.

Did I mention that the new Chart Web Part incorporates the acclaimed Dundas visualization technologies?

DEMO 4: Compose a business solution with Composites

How hard is it to incorporate LOB data from SAP, SIEBEL, or SQL Server into SharePoint and leverage that data in a quick business solution? This time around, it's not hard at all. You now have bi-directional, read/write access to LOB external data. Gideon used the thoroughly revamped SharePoint Designer (more on that in Part II of this series) created an entity, which is essentially a data connection, an external content type, which is a set of columns from a table or query as well as a filter, and a mapping of fields between the LOB database and this newly-created external list. It was all done with easy-to-understand web pages, dialog boxes, and data designer tools.

As mentioned, the end result is an external list that looks and acts suspiciously like a native list in SharePoint. To prove the point, Gideon updated a list field, and showed the change in a SQL Server database query. Then he showed how easy it was to incorporate this data into an Outlook contact, or Word document using fields.

All of this was done without using a single line of code. All of a sudden, external data from legacy and LOB systems can be deeply integrated into SharePoint, whether or not you are a developer.

Wrap up

Gideon finished with a 10-minute video from some big customers, Sony, Chevron, and Del Monte, who all have been using SharePoint 2010 to make their companies more productive. The key message delivered was: how easy it is to develop solutions, and how much time was saved in creating those solutions.

When the usually-down-to-earth Steve Ballmer recently delivered the keynote at the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, he said, and I quote: "SharePoint is a magical product." Now I hope you see why he said that.

There’s a lot more to SharePoint 2010. Watch for: SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part II - SharePoint Designer 2010 Overview and SharePoint Saturday in Redmond: Part III – Enterprise Content Management Overview of this three-part series on this blog in future posts.

Tell us what you think.

Mark Gillis

Posted at 9:00 PM by | Category: Building Solutions; Business Intelligence; Collaboration; Education; People Wrangling; SharePoint 2010; Social Networking | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

10/26/2009

Access Web Databases and The Access Show

There are a couple big announcements happening today for the Access community. In partnership with Channel 9 we are launching a new show called The Access Show. It will feature Ryan McMinn, myself and others from the team. We will talk in-depth about what is new in Access 2010 and share feedback from the community. Additionally, at the SharePoint Developers Conference we are disclosing more details about Access Services. Access Services is a new SharePoint 2010 feature that allows users to create web databases in Access, host them on SharePoint, and available through a browser.

Here is the inaugural episode and one of the first public demos of an Access Services application running in the browser.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Access/Microsoft-Access-2010-Demo/

Enjoy!

Clint Covington, Program Manager, Access Team

Posted at 1:40 PM by | Category: SharePoint 2010; Building Solutions | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/19/2009

Stay in touch with the SharePoint Conference 2009

In addition to the liveblogging that's going on here and elsewhere, you can read about many of the SharePoint 2010 features in a blog post by Jeff Teper, SharePoint's corporate vice president, on the SharePoint Product Team blog.

He explains some broad thinking about this release, and describes 40 of its features. He released his post while more than 7,000 people are in Las Vegas this week to attend the Microsoft SharePoint Conference.

You can also watch a new SharePoint 2010 video about no-code solutions called Composite Applications on SharePoint 2010 as well as other videos on the GetStartedSharePoint channel.

Composite Applications on SharePoint 2010

To keep up with the conference, stay tuned for more posts on Get the Point and visit the Microsoft SharePoint Conference site, where you can view video highlights, including the conference prep (i.e. the "making of" SPC).

To track the conference on Twitter, follow the SharePoint Conference Twitter account and search for the the #SPC09 keyword (aka hashtag). You can also find a number of blog posts, videos, and other content from conference attendees.

Cheers,

Toni and Matt

SharePoint Content Team

Posted at 5:52 PM by | Category: Building Solutions; Productivity; Collaboration; SharePoint 2010 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/14/2009

Using SharePoint Designer Workflows to migrate data into SharePoint lists

by Rod Stagg, SharePoint Solutions Architect/Developer
http://www.rstagg.com

Overview

Recently our IT department embarked on a collaborative effort with a key business stakeholder to develop a standardized quoting and bidding solution. The solution is an interim solution (2 years) replacing a current set of processes (both manual and automated). We needed to develop the solution quickly and efficiently to address a current need.

The solution:

Take advantage of SharePoint’s collaboration and document sharing features and built-in workflow capabilities for lists and document libraries to provide a standardized workflow process and centralized repository for tracking and reporting purposes.

Example SharePoint Designer Workflow

The challenge:

Migrating historical data into existing SharePoint lists and libraries. A key requirement required migration of historical data into the new solution’s lists, document libraries, and ensure they function properly with existing SharePoint Designer workflows.

No Easy Button:

We quickly determined that importing the data into SharePoint as entirely new lists from either Excel or Access by itself was not a viable option given the approximately 100 fields involved that varied in type from one datasource to another.

The historical data was stored in Excel spreadsheets and Access databases. In one case 10,000+ records were stored in a single Access 2003 database.

Solution approach for migrating the data:

Use SharePoint Designer workflows to map the fields and import the data into existing lists.

Steps we took to manage the migration:

Import the existing historical data stored in Excel Spreadsheets directly into SharePoint as new temporary lists to be deleted when migration was complete.
Export the data stored in the Access databases directly to temporary lists in SharePoint using the export to Windows SharePoint Services feature.
Develop SharePoint Designer workflows for each temporary list and set the workflow to start manually and also whenever a list item is updated.
Add a custom column to each list to track whether an item had been migrated.
Add a workflow condition to check whether the item has already been migrated before starting the workflow i.e. if the custom migrated field equals “notmigrated” initiate the workflow.
Add actions to create a new list item in the destination list(s) for each desired field/value from the source temporary list.
Add a final step to the workflow to update the current item’s migrated field to “migrated” following the creation of the new list item preventing the workflow from looping endlessly.
Run an append query from Access to update the custom migrated field in each list item of the temporary list. This update initiates the workflows.
If necessary, develop a simple Windows application to append a specific field in every row of the temporary SharePoint list. In our case, Access was timing out for our large number of records.
We handled special cases for data mapping in code in specific cases where our historical data contained values not present in our new choice fields.
Monitor your source temporary lists and destination lists to ensure the workflow runs successfully.

Key Take-Aways:

Server Settings:
Depending on your server settings it may be necessary to update your server’s workflow settings to accommodate a large number of concurrent workflows. I changed the timeout to 25 minutes.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441390.aspx

Create new list items rather than copying. Creating new list items in your workflows and providing the associated mappings turned out to be more reliable than copying list items.

Re-use workflows when possible.
We saved time by reusing the same SharePoint Designer workflow on another separate list by simply replacing the listid GUID in your workflows .xoml file

CreateItemActivity ListId="{}{[yourlistsid]}" x:Name="ID30" Overwrite="False" __Context="{ActivityBind ROOT,Path=__context

Use content-types:
When working with a large number of fields consider grouping into content types if appropriate. This is especially useful if you need the ability to easily filter based on the original datasource or want to provide a specialized form based on the originating datasource.

Manage list size:

For large number of data items consider using separate lists in your solution to limit the number of total list items in any one list to 5,000 or less.

Other Approaches we considered:

Develop the code in C# and use the SharePoint object model to both import/export the data to SharePoint and also provide the mapping of fields. Given the number of fields approached 100+ we determined handling everything in custom code was not the most efficient approach.

Use Access to import all of the Excel spreadsheets into the Access database and then create append queries in Access to append the data into the existing SharePoint lists. Seems like the obvious approach but after testing with a subset of the 100+ required fields we determined ensuring that each field/data type in Access was compatible with the corresponding fields/data type in the SharePoint lists was too time-consuming.

Also, possibly related to the large number of 10,000 records involved, the Access append query we used for testing frequently timed-out or locked-up before completing.

Posted at 11:26 AM by | Category: Collaboration; Lists and Libraries; Planning & Process; Productivity; Team Sites; Business Processes; Building Solutions | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/15/2009

Using SharePoint Themes to Customize your SharePoint Site

by Rod Stagg, SharePoint Solutions Architect/Developer
http://www.rstagg.com

Overview

We recently started an effort to provide a centralized and secure collaboration space for information sharing and collaboration across the enterprise using SharePoint 2007 and WSS.

The first phase of the project consists of a complete site redesign to provide the organization a consistent navigation and “Look and Feel” along with a consolidation of all existing SharePoint sites into a unified and secure SharePoint platform.

As part of the site redesign effort we investigated which approach would be most efficient for implementing the “Look and Feel” while also avoiding disrupting our existing WSS sites and users.

Technical Approach

The two primary choices for customizing the look and feel of both MOSS 2007 and WSS sites we evaluated were using custom alternate CSS stylesheets or using SharePoint themes. These choices would not require making significant changes to the sites' existing masterpages and templates. For our approach we decided to start with one of the existing SharePoint themes and customize it to match our branding.

What is a SharePoint theme?

SharePoint themes represent a collection of graphics and cascading style sheets that can modify how a Web site looks. Themes can be customized using SharePoint Designer or using the Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint.

Our customized theme for SharePoint 2007 and WSS sites look like this:

Home Page

News Template

Site Settings

Search

Advantages of using SharePoint themes:

The SharePoint site settings interface provides the ability for both site administrators and site owners to customize the look and feel of their site by selecting from a pre-defined list of available site themes.
The site settings interface provides the ability to display a preview/screenshot of the selected theme before they choose to apply it to their site.
Themes can be easily removed via the SharePoint site settings interface.
Themes packaged and deployed as a site feature simplify deployment across a SharePoint farm for IT administrators.
Developers can take advantage of the set of ten Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint projects containing design themes for SharePoint provided by Microsoft as a starting point for developing a custom theme.

Applying a site theme:

From Site Actions select Site Settings and then Modify All Site Settings. Under the Look and Feel section choose Themes.
You will find the selection of available themes to apply to your site.

Development of a custom site theme:

Developers can install the set of ten Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint projects containing design themes for SharePoint provided by Microsoft as a starting point for developing a custom theme.
You can download theme templates from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a87658f-20b8-4dcc-ad7a-09ad22641f3a
Navigate to the installed theme folder (the default location is C:\Program Files\Microsoft\TenThemesForSharePoint)
Open one of the Visual Studio theme solutions in Visual Studio 2008
Modify the CSS classes directly in theme.css classes as needed.
Drop in the necessary graphics/images into the projects local image directory.
Build the project.

Source code for the customized version displayed above available by clicking the icon below.

Deployment

Copy the Visual Studio project’s bin folder to your production server.
Locate the setup.bat file in the debug folder.
Open the setup.bat file in Notepad and modify the DefaultWebUrl and DefaultSiteUrl to point to the web application where you would like to install the theme.
Save setup.bat and run as administrator.
Navigate to a site and from the Site settings page select Site features, locate your theme and activate the feature.
Open your portal site as Administrator and go to Site Actions>Site Settings>Modify All Site Settings. Under the Look and Feel Section, click on Site Theme and choose the newly installed theme.

Posted at 5:01 PM by | Category: Branding; Building Solutions; Design; Team Sites; Site Admin; User Experience | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (4)

8/26/2009

Preparing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a SharePoint project

If you are planning a SharePoint project that will involve a vendor, you may be preparing a Request for Proposal, often called an RFP.

While your company's procedures or policies may vary, you'll want to consider how to best define and communicate your needs, and to compare the different approaches from vendors.

West Monroe Partners has recently authored a paper called "Guidelines for developing a SharePoint Request for Proposal" to help organizations better understand and articulate the benefits they hope to achieve from a SharePoint project.

"Over the last several months, we have seen an increasing trend in which organizations are ready to start their SharePoint implementations but don't know where or how to start. We developed these guidelines in the hopes of pointing these companies in the right direction and providing them a template to get their project off the ground," Doug Armstrong, Managing Director of Customer Solutions Practice at West Monroe Partners, said in a recent news release.

You can find a link and more information about the paper on the West Monroe Partners site.

Cheers,

Toni

Posted at 9:59 AM by | Category: Building Solutions; Planning & Process | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

8/21/2009

Latest report from Tinseltown (via Redmond, WA): Access 'n SharePoint heating up?

First heard Access 'n SharePoint were getting a little bit cozier back in 2003, but things didn't really start heating up until 2007. Lots of blanket coverage here (If you catch my drift). Can we say "bi-directional linking"? (wink, wink, nod, nod).

But this just in from the juicy-tidbits-grapevine, A sneak preview of coming attractions for 2010, wherein you'll find positively, steamy chatter about "SharePoint performance and offline," "Browser apps," and other hot items. Tsssss!

Speaking of celebrity blogs (Take that Arianna!), you should follow Clint Covington's blog. Heard from those in the know that he scoops the Access 'n SharePoint watch even before the Paparazzi do.

News flash! These tasty morsels are just in from the rumor mill: Synchronize with SharePoint under the hood, Code to refresh SharePoint Link Tables, and Access Runtime support for SharePoint Offline. Did I say "synchronize" and "refresh" in the same sentence? Oh my!

Be in Vegas in late October to catch more scoops that won't be staying in Vegas for long. Will chapel bells be ringing?

That's it for now from your roving romance reporter, Mark Gillis.

Ta Ta!

Posted at 11:28 AM by | Category: Building Solutions; Productivity; User Experience | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/17/2009

Integrating Your Library System with SharePoint 2007: As Simple as BDC

By Miles Stauffer, MLIS
CIRPD | http://www.cirpd.org

As a consultant librarian I have been given many opportunities to work with technology. By far the most rewarding was my experience with SharePoint 2007 and the Business Data Catalog.

For those of you who don't know the Business Data Catalog happens to be the most amazing, simple, and under rated feature of SharePoint 2007. Essentially it allows you to connect to all your other business applications without any coding. I am still shocked that as a librarian I was able to do this!

In this article I am going to explain why this is such a valuable tool, and to give you some direction if you want to know more. Future posts will walk you through the different library systems.

Why is this so interesting?

There are numerous reasons why this is so interesting, so let’s start with the library world. At the moment there are multiple content management systems that allow a library to integrate all of their holdings into one slick portal interface. Products such as Encore, VuFind, and Scriblio are incredibly popular, but there are two glaring problems with these data aggregators: 1) your library portal is still separate from your intranet, and 2) you still have go through all the work of implementing this brand new system instead of using the SharePoint installation that already exists.

Let’s take a step back from the library world to get a bigger picture of this. SharePoint 2007 using the Business Data Catalog allows your company to aggregate all of your specific software solutions into one platform. With regards to usability, user centered design, and accessibility it is amazing that SharePoint can provide one interface where users are able to access all types of information regardless of what system they live on.

Next Steps

To make this a reality there are a few tips, tools, and sites that you will need.

Documentation – to me there is not too much written on the internet about how to use the Business Data Catalog. Three sites come to mind – ones that I use all the time;

Software – there are 2 programs that allow you to create BDC definitions files

The MS BDC Editor in their SDK package (free)
BDC Meta Man which is not free, but a great tool to work with

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 can integrate and leverage all of your existing software services with no coding needed. For me this has been a rewarding process. These projects promote the visibility, flexibility, and the importance of the library. Libraries always have to fight for their importance, take the next step and wade into the waters of the BDC!

Posted at 9:55 AM by | Category: Building Solutions; Business Intelligence; Compliance | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

8/11/2009

Educational Program Review with a SharePoint survey

by Greg Shymko, MCTS
FiveSix Consulting | fivesixconsulting.com

One of the great things about doing consulting work around SharePoint is that sometimes implementing a solution does more than just solve a business problem. It can also help organizations change. Not too long ago, my business partner and I took on a volunteer effort at a local high school that proved to be invaluable, both in the lessons we learned and in the impact our work had.

Background

Inglemoor High School in Kenmore, Washington has a vibrant, growing program as a member of the International Baccalaureate Organization. Nearly a third of the students at the school participate in the program, which is driven by a standardized curriculum that is international in focus and subject to peer review by organizations around the world.

Inglemoor recently had to complete a fairly lengthy staff, parent, and student survey as part of its five-year program review evaluation. The effort was important, both to the program participants and to the school. The program coordinators were approaching the deadline for the survey to be completed, but also had to complete exit exams and an array of other tasks as the end of the school year approached. There was too much to do in too little time, but it was a critical effort for the school.

As I talked things over with my wife (one of the program coordinators), the idea of using a SharePoint-based survey to speed up the process came to mind. Doing things with a web-based tool would allow for more accurate and faster data collection, and SharePoint’s team collaboration features would also support collaborative document creation and discussion about the results which were appealing possibilities. We decided to give it a try using a WSS-based hosted environment that my company offers to customers for demonstration efforts.

Survey Creation Tricks

Before too long, it became clear we would have to try some tricks to get all the questions completed. The survey was rather long, with four different subject sections and more than 100 total questions, and the survey had some convoluted sequencing with multiple part steps.

This is where the use of branching and sub-questions helped. Initially, I tried to model the online survey to faithfully reflect the paper version. But this resulted in one long survey that was much too big to read. It needed sensible pagination to allow people to keep their focus on the material.

After fiddling with the use of branching that SharePoint surveys support out of the box, we were able to split things up more sensibly. The trick was to use a branching question that fed to the same next step regardless of the response. We set up a question for users to simply confirm that they had completed the previous section; this forced a break in the display and a sort of pause for people to catch their breath.

Here's the way we set it up in the survey:

Branching fix

And here's how it looked to respondents:

Branching view

The other hurdle came when we had a large number of Likert-scaled responses to collect. The use of separate questions and the introductory material for explaining the scale was repeated for each question, which just made it all too long.

Then came our discovery of sub-questions, which aggregated all of the Likert-scaled responses into one question with multiple parts. This was a big win, because people could respond to all the questions using the single explanation of the scale.

Even this had its limits, though. One question had a definition that exceeded the 255-character limit for a single sub-question, producing this error:

Survey error

But, by separating out the offending question into its own section and reordering the questions, we managed to get everything to fit.

It took about four hours to get everything set up, and another two to add user accounts for all the potential survey respondents, but after two days of sporadic effort we were able to get things into place.

Response Day

The target was a drop-in survey response event where teachers, parents, and students could come to a computer lab in the school library to answer the questions in an environment where expert help was available. While there were some technical glitches and some (understandable) confusion over the survey content, we managed to get about 25 people through the survey at the event, and about a dozen more were able to complete it later over the web.

Survey room

The program coordinators were able to get the data they needed in the span of about 10 days, without having to organize and transcribe data from a paper-based effort. This was a significant accomplishment, but the more important impact came after the responses were collected.

Next Up: The Real Questions

The process of asking pointed questions about the program’s governance, strategic direction, and evaluation processes led to a series of important developments for the school. In effect, the process of completing the survey led to real conversations about what would come next for International Baccalaureate eduation at Inglemoor.

Parents and faculty became more interested in formalizing processes for evaluation. Program coordinators became engaged with planning, asking bigger questions like “What does success look like?” and “How will we make decisions going forward?”

Doing the survey as a web-based, transparent exercise for the program review made stakeholders realize how important the program really is. That was gratifying to see.

Lessons

After talking over the sequence of events with my wife, a couple of interesting lessons came out:

· The tool mattered! By removing the complexity and mechanics of getting people to participate, everyone had room to focus on the issues and ideas behind the questions being asked. Ultimately, this led to efforts to improve the entire program. The fact that SharePoint had a capable survey creation tool that also allowed easy integration with Excel made a big difference in getting the evaluation completed on time.

· Putting a survey on the web created a transparency about the program review that was critical to getting people to participate in meaningful conversation.

I think it all boils down to this: it’s rarely just the people, the processes, or the tool that can make a difference in changing organizations. But get them all aligned, and you just might be on to something.

Posted at 10:45 AM by | Category: Building Solutions; People Wrangling | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

6/29/2009

Lessons from Building a Community Site

by Greg Shymko, MCTS
FiveSix Consulting | fivesixconsulting.com

Recently I noticed a message go by in my inbox, and it led me to discover that it was the one-year anniversary of the creation of a community web site I helped organize while working at the University of Washington.

I know this because the welcome announcement – done in SharePoint – still sat unexpired and date stamped on the site!

While the announcement content was a bit stale, the contributions were not. Information Technology support staff from across campus are actively using the site. They share solutions and report issues with the campus Exchange service used by around 4000 staff members from across dozens of departments.

It remains an active community, and that fact led me to think about why this effort didn’t die on the vine like many community sites do. There are probably several parts to the complete answer. This post is about the mechanics of why SharePoint was a fit and how we used it.

Requirements

The site was driven by the needs of a natural community of people who tackle similar problems, but perhaps haven’t solved them on their own before.

A good community site had to be a place where busy IT support staff could find answers quickly, but also ask for help from other people similar to themselves. It needed to be peer-based and solution-oriented, with a little bit of information to orient new folks to the service. We also wanted a way to get announcements about changes or outages to the right people in a timely fashion.

And it had to be easy for people to contribute. This meant a simple, flat group permission structure, basic document library functionality, and the ability to interact with a discussion list by using email.

SharePoint was a good fit for two main reasons: it had the right features, and it allowed us to ramp very quickly.

Mechanics

We started with the Fab40 template for “IT Team Workspace”, then pared that template down to include:

· an announcements list

· a discussion board

· an FAQ library

· a knowledge base library

· a link list

· custom tracking lists for group membership and service feature enhancement requests

We had one planning meeting after setting up the basic site layout to create a simple taxonomy of FAQ keywords and to clarify ownership and maintenance roles.

We configured site owner and contributor groups, and did a bit of cleanup on the Quick Launch, and after a review meeting to validate that things would all work as expected, we were ready to go.

Top of page Web Part layout

In the span of two planning meetings and a day of prototyping and testing, we were able to meet the requirements and get the site launched. A year later, it’s still running.

Summary

After thinking about it, I think the site remains active a year later primarily because there is a compelling need for the types of communication it facilitates. Email alone wouldn’t work. File shares wouldn’t do the trick.

But a simple mix of web-based collaboration features worked well enough to be useful, and by building something functional for a group of people who had a common need, we found a recipe for success.

Posted at 3:45 PM by | Category: Building Solutions; Collaboration | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

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