People Wrangling - 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)

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)

8/6/2009

Engaging users and changing minds about SharePoint: Friday Cool Content

There has been a lot of great discussion out there recently about the importance of end user engagement and change management to a successful SharePoint deployment. Your SharePoint solution may be technically brilliant, but if nobody uses it, it won’t be a success. And getting people to use SharePoint often involves getting them to change how they work…or how they think they need to work.

If you are involved with deploying SharePoint in your organization, these links might help you think about how you can integrate a bit of change management into your end user training.

If you haven’t already checked it out, see Wednesday's post "Getting People to Participate in your SharePoint site" by Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com, who suggests you can recruit your “power users” to increase end user participation on your SharePoint site.

By the way, congratulations to Mark Miller and his fellow EndUserSharePoint.com contributors for publishing their 1,000th post this week! We're looking forward to reading the next 1,000.

In “A Change Will Do You Good: Lessons from Change Management for SharePoint Solution Architects,” Susan Hanley makes the case that SharePoint deployments are similar to change management solutions. She urges solution architects to make “the case for change – in every newsletter article, every slide deck, and every conversation.” Hanley recommends using “future scenarios” as a form of persuasion. “Future Scenarios” involve “painting a picture of what the work environment or the job will be like when the solution is fully operational.
In recent post on EndUserSharePoint.com titled “Adoption Tip 1 of 7: Use SharePoint’s Flexibility for Success,” Lee Reed addresses the intimidation many users experience when they are confronted with SharePoint, and he offers some great tips for “[using] SharePoint’s flexibility to gain greater adoption of the platform within your environment.” He also offers some great tips on how you can counter resistance to change by appealing to people’s innate self-interest and showing them how SharePoint can help them with their jobs.
No time to read? Then listen to SharePoint and End User Adoption-Episode 25. In this podcast, Rob Foster, Brett Lonsdale, and Nick Swan talk with SharePoint MVP Steve Smith about many things, including why developers should care about end users (a subject near and dear to my heart), and what to do if no one is using your SharePoint solution. You may want to fast forward about 12 minutes into the podcast to get right to the good stuff.

Have a great weekend,

Laura

SharePoint IW Content Team

Posted at 4:16 PM by | Category: Training; People Wrangling; Planning & Process | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

8/5/2009

Getting People to Participate in Your SharePoint Site

By Mark Miller, founder and Editor of EndUserSharePoint.com

To celebrate the publication of the 1000^th article on EndUserSharePoint.com, I talk about how the site was created, how it has become one of the most popular SharePoint communities on the internet, and how you might use those lessons on your own SharePoint site.

Overview

I get questions every week about how EndUserSharePoint.com has grown so fast. In less than 2 years page views and unique visitors have skyrocketed. Hundreds of people a month participate in the live online workshops. Because of this, I get asked for interviews from companies like MindJet, Bamboo Nation and EventBrite to talk about the work I’ve done to create such a community.

I’m just going to ramble for a couple minutes here to give you an idea on how all this came about and hopefully give you some ideas on how you can grow the audience for your blog or SharePoint site. Sit back, relax and enjoy the tangents.

How It All Started

When I started EndUserSharePoint.com I had a core group of people in mind that I wanted to reach: SharePoint End Users. As the site has progressed, I’ve broken that into three groups: Information Workers, Site Admin/Power Users and Site Collection Admin. If I were to be completely honest, I’d say that when I first started the blog, I was confusing Information Workers with End Users. SharePoint it so broad and deep, there are several levels of End Users, thus the differentiation.

A pyramid gives the best visualization of how I think about End Users of SharePoint. At the bottom of the stack is the Information Worker, the person who must use SharePoint because it has been mandated within the company. This is the broadest base of users of SharePoint, but the hardest to reach because they don’t care about SharePoint; they care about getting their job done. The technology doesn’t matter. “Just show me what to do and let me get back to my work.”

The second tier of users is the Site Admin/Power User. This is the group that has been “volunteered” to lead the charge on the use of SharePoint. In many cases, they requested access to a site for managing their projects or documents, IT told them that there was no such site available, but if they wanted one, they could have one. Sound familiar? You’re not alone because that’s the way most internal sites get started.

The third level of SharePoint End User is the Site Collection Administrator. Again, this person is usually forced into the position because in order for there to be sites, there must be a site collection.

I’ve heard all the talk about getting End User buy-in: “Manage your sites so it’s easy to find Double Bracket: Yeah, right, and while you’re at it, why don’t you bake me a cake…? information”, “Get a good governance policy in place before you begin”, “Make sure you have a good Information Architect in place to build the hierarchy of sites”, “Provide great content to get people to come to your site”. Yeah, right, and while you’re at it, why don’t you bake me a cake, with my favorite frosting, but you’ve got to guess what kind of cake I like and what ingredients I’m allergic to when you make the icing. Come on, give me a break! I didn’t ask for this job. All I wanted was a place to put my documents.

Let’s get down and dirty here. You’ve got a site that you didn’t want in the first place, but now that it’s setup and part of your responsibility, you want people to use it. Who are you going to try to attract and why would they come?

Power Users: That’s Your Ticket In

The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they're the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. -- Seth Godin

I like that, so I’ll repeat it again: Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people…

Your job as a site manager isn’t to provide all the content for your site. Your job is to take care of and nurture those that will. That was one of my major epiphanies that changed the direction of EndUserSharePoint.com. I, Mark Miller, am nothing more, or less, that a content manager for authors who would like to give the community information about how to use SharePoint. I like to think that anyone who reads EndUserSharePoint.com on a consistent basis realizes the content is not from one source, but from a diverse group of authors who want to contribute to the growth and education of SharePoint Power Users and Site Administrators.

That leads me to the main point of this diatribe: The Site Admin/Power User Double Bracket: The Site Admin/Power User is the group you need to get to for End User buy-in of your SharePoint implementation. is the group you need to get to for End User buy-in of your SharePoint implementation. By virtue of proximity to the site, they become the first line of support for Information workers, not the IT help desk, which probably doesn’t know much more than an average Power User anyway.

I used to think SharePoint Information Workers were the most critical to End User buy-in because they are the widest audience at the base of the pyramid, but I have changed my mind.

Power Users are great because of their need for immediate information. This is the main audience for EndUserSharePoint.com. We’ve setup a SharePoint Q&A forum for them that is moderated by other Power Users. We provide simple solutions in our articles to help them solve the interface problems that can get in the way of finding and managing information. The Weekly Newsletter provides free downloads for solutions that can be immediately implemented on a SharePoint site.

What we do on our site is something you might consider on your internal site: provide solutions to common problems that occur frequently enough that you’re tired of hearing about it! Where’s your list of common, reported requests? I’ve got reams of pages that I keep of ideas that are generated because the same questions keep coming up over and over. Until I discovered the power of OneNote, I was hitting Staples every couple months for a stack of yellow legal pads to keep my notes.

The questions that come at you as a Site Administrator can help you become more proficient at determining what your core audience is looking for.

Real World Story

When I started EndUserSharePoint.com, the purpose was to Double Bracket: Information Workers don’t want to get a handle on SharePoint! handle those day-to-day issues that Information Workers were running into when trying to get a handle on SharePoint; and that was the problem. My audience was extremely limited because Information Workers don’t want to get a handle on SharePoint!

SharePoint is just a tool Information Workers have to learn in order to do work they already do to their own satisfaction. “Why do I have to put this thing in this new location? We’ve already got a file server for that.” “My Excel sheets are working fine. I email them out every week and everyone is happy. Why in the world would I want to spend time putting that stuff in a new location?”

With a Site Admin/Power User, you’re not going to get that kind of push back. These people are your supporters. They want your SharePoint project to work. The problem is, there are usually no in-house resources to support them, there’s no budget to get training, there’s no line item in their job descriptions that says “Allocation of 10 hours a week towards SharePoint site management”, and a myriad of other things that make SharePoint life miserable at the company level.

Here’s a little secret for you: there’s tens of thousands of you out there! EndUserSharePoint.com started to take off when I realized that the audience who really cared about SharePoint, the hardcore evangelists, didn’t have a single point of resource to go to when trying to get information about a specific problem they were having. Once I recognized who the real audience was, it didn’t matter that the largest base of SharePoint End Users is the Information Worker. Those weren’t the people looking for help.

Let’s Do a Little Math

Microsoft tells us that there are 100,000,000 licenses sold for SharePoint. Whether you believe that number or not, is not the point. The point is there is a boatload of seats sold. What we have to think about from the EndUserSharePoint.com perspective is how many of those people are part of our potential audience. Keep in mind that we don’t do anything server related or programming related. “Deploy to the server” or “Put it in the GAC/12 hive/Whatchamacallit” doesn’t even exist in our world. If you want to talk about that stuff, don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, because nobody here is going to understand a word you’re saying.

So let’s cutout 90% of the seats sold and we’ve still got 10,000,000 Site Admin/Power Users interested in SharePoint. Do you see where I’m going with this? Even after segmenting the market into different levels, there’s enough of the pie to go around. EndUserSharePoint.com was lucky to find the core audience and build from that, but there’s still so much headroom available, it’s almost unfathomable.

How does that relate to your situation as a Site Manager? To me, the little story above says “You don’t have to sell your site to the entire company. You have to sell it to the people that need it.”

Another Real World Story

I had a SharePoint site manager come to me and say “I’m pretty low in the corporate Double Bracket: “How am I going to get buy-in from all those levels above me when I build out my SharePoint site?”

You’re not! food chain in the overall scheme of things. This is a 7000 person company and my team is buried about 5 levels deep in the company hierarchy. How am I going to get buy-in from all those levels above me when I build out my SharePoint site?”

My answer: You’re not! Your core audience is the set of people who will be using your site on a daily or weekly basis, not the five levels of people above you. Get your house in order and then worry about the other guys. Create a site that is easy to navigate, easy to manage information flow and simple to maintain. Work with your team to get your site in shape so they can use it.

By doing that, you will create evangelists for your project, people who talk about it and sell it for you. Once people see what you are doing with your site, then you can start working with them to help build a consistent structure.

Yes, I know, people are going to scream “But Mark, how can you say that? We’ve got to have a governance policy in place before we can do anything. We’ve got to agree at a company level on how these things are going to work. You can’t just tell a site manager to go off on their own!”

Well, I’ve got news for you: In most cases it’s too late to do that. SharePoint is already out. People are already porting over content from their existing files servers by cutting and pasting entire hierarchical structures of folders and if you’re going to wait for all that to get hashed out before you start structuring your own share of the world, you’re going to be sitting there a pretty long time.

You’ve got to start somewhere. Why not in your own backyard? Clean up and structure to the best of your current knowledge and then start helping people around you. That’s a real Power User.

Where to Go from Here

I told you I was going to ramble a bit, but hopefully there are a couple tidbits for you to work with. The key is to find out who the core audience is, who will benefit the most from what you are trying to do. By concentrating on providing the most value you can for this audience, not only will your site be more useful, you will generate a core group of evangelists who bring more people to your site with their enthusiasm and belief in what you are doing.

Take a breath. Don’t be afraid to start. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be you.

About the Author

Mark Miller is founder and editor of EndUserSharePoint.com, one of the most popular sites for SharePoint End Users. He coordinates a group of a dozen contributing authors, managing the day-to-day aspects of editing and publishing content for the site.

When not teaching or writing about SharePoint, Mark can be found designing paper airplanes and studying the origami of Robert Lang. He lives in New York City with his wife, two children, one gerbil, one goldfish and one Nintendo DS that is constantly being fought over by the gerbil and the goldfish.

Posted at 3:03 PM by | Category: People Wrangling; Site Admin; Training | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

7/7/2009

Reflections on the New Zealand SharePoint Conference

by Michael Sampson, The Michael Sampson Company
Author of Seamless Teamwork and SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration

The first SharePoint Conference in New Zealand took place last week in Wellington, on July 2-3. The conference was “community organized,” meaning that it was organized by volunteers, rather than by a commercial conference company. I attended as a speaker and delegate … and I was blown away by the quality of what Chan Kulathilake, Mark Orange and Debbie Ireland (all SharePoint MVPs in New Zealand) pulled off.

First, the quality of the speakers was top notch. There were numerous international speakers—Joel Oleson (ex-Microsoft, now at Quest Software), Steve Smith (Combined Knowledge), Erica Toelle (Seattle), Paul Culmsee (Seven Sigma Business Solutions, Australia), and others. The speakers—both international and local—addressed the technology of SharePoint, along with the business aspects. It was a well-balanced conference in terms of content, and there was always a session that I wanted to attend. A couple of other people that I spoke with said how much they enjoyed the “voice of the customer” stream, featuring local case studies about how firms here are using SharePoint.

Second, the number of attendees was outstanding. I have been to commercially organized conferences in Wellington that have struggled to pull in 20 paying delegates; the SharePoint conference last week had over 300 people. There was a real buzz in the sessions I attended, and during the breaks in the exhibition hall. The price for the conference obviously made a difference in attendee numbers—NZ$500 (about US$300) for the two days.

Third, the conference showed me that SharePoint is maturing. I have been talking about the importance of an end-user focus with SharePoint for over 2 years, and I met people at the conference that are saying the same thing—Steve Smith with his end-user adoption framework, Paul Culmsee with his consulting work around SharePoint, and Erica Toelle with her comments on managing change. This bodes well for the future of SharePoint—as the focus shifts off having a nice shiny technical implementation, and increasingly focuses on getting a business return. While a balance is needed between the two, there is such a need for the user and business focus to increase.

All-in-all, it was a fantastic couple of days. I look forward to the 2010 conference in New Zealand—and hopefully you can come too!

Posted at 5:27 PM by | Category: Collaboration; Productivity; People Wrangling | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

6/19/2009

Twynham School shares their story; what's yours? - Friday cool content

We don’t get out much. That's just the practical reality of software documentation. So, when we heard that Mike Herrity and Dave Coleman from the Twynham School in England agreed to take time out of their busy schedule during a recent visit to the Microsoft campus to talk to us about their highly successful SharePoint implementation everyone on our team was front and center.

For days – and now I can say weeks – afterward we’re still talking about what we heard. The reason: It’s so exciting to hear about how SharePoint has made life easier for not only the people who use it, but the people who implement it.

In a nutshell, since Twynham deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 to its staff, students, parents in March 2007, grades and attendance have dramatically improved. Mike, Assistant Headteacher, and Dave, Network Manager, showed us how they’ve implemented SharePoint, and peppered us with statistics and anecdotes about how things are so much better.

One of my favorite stories: One summer Dave converted all of the school’s physical media assets to digital format, so students and teachers now have 24/7 access to video files directly from a browser. One teacher was so reluctant to relinquish her TV and VCR that Mike finally convinced her to put it in a closet. After it had been there for months, Mike asked her to think about how long it had been since she needed to use it. Turns out, she hadn’t used it for years!

Other stories: They’ve shown that students who are able to view their grades and attendance records by using SharePoint Web Parts achieve better test scores and show up at school more frequently.

Mike and Dave illustrated a clear picture of how user involvement in SharePoint can make a big difference. At various milestones during implementation they used surveys to make sure that students and teachers would be happy with the plans and the user interface; or at least to learn about the issues that they might face with the adoption of the plans.

What’s unique about Twynham is that they have shared the nuts and bolts of implementing SharePoint with several hundred other schools to help them get up and running faster, and we think that's cool!

Do you have a SharePoint story to share? We’d like to hear about how SharePoint has changed the way you do business or influenced the culture in your organization. Drop us a line at gtpteam@microsoft.com if you're interested in writing a post on the subject.

We're probably not the only ones who don't get out much.

...Renée

SharePoint End User Content Publishing Team

Posted at 1:52 PM by | Category: Cool Content; Education; Collaboration; Building Solutions; People Wrangling; Planning & Process | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

2/24/2009

SharePoint MVPs: See you at the Summit!

Calling all SharePoint MVPs (Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals)!

We're looking forward to seeing you at this year's MVP Global Summit. Members of the SharePoint End-User Content Team will be there to greet you and talk about content plans for the next version of SharePoint.

Later this week, we are posting drafts of our content plans on the MVP extranet to share and get your feedback. At the Summit, we hope to see you at any or all of the following activities:

Ask the Content Experts session on Monday, March 2 from 9:00 - 10:30 am. This is a time for us to talk informally about SharePoint. We'll also be confirming or collecting your contact info at a separate table. In another area, we'll also be interviewing select MVPs for Tell Us Your Success Story podcasts.
Scenarios Content Plan Sharing session on Monday, March 2 from 1:30 - 5:00 pm. Members of the SharePoint Content Team want to discuss with you the content plans that we posted on the extranet site.
Product Group Dinner on Monday, March 2 after the sessions. We'll be there to chat over dinner about SharePoint content.

If you are an MVP, but you aren't attending the Summit this year, we still want to hear from you. Please review the content we posted on the extranet site.

If you aren't an MVP, we'll share our content plans and content for the next version of SharePoint at a later date. We always welcome your ideas, if you care to leave a comment here on the blog.

Thanks and take care,

Matt Evans

SharePoint End-User Content Team

Posted at 5:24 PM by | Category: Social Networking; People Wrangling; Feedback | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

2/18/2009

Love at first site

A few years ago, the mega-company I worked for was bought by an even-more-mega-company. Soon after, my boss told me our new parent used something called SharePoint, and we were “encouraged” to use it, too. Because I was a tech writer, and SharePoint “has something to do with documents,” it was only natural that I was assigned to figure out how to use SharePoint in our group of about 150 people.

Without getting into the weeds, it was an 18-month exercise of trial and error – lots of ideas that sounded good but didn’t quite work out, lots of false starts and do-overs, lots of frustration and a bit of anger. We made it up as we went along, even as people in the group began to rely on SharePoint in their daily work and to ask for more functionality. At times, it felt like we were trying to change a flat tire while driving down the road: exciting but scary.

It turned out that, for our group at least, implementing SharePoint was technologically pretty easy and organizationally pretty difficult.

I vowed that if I ever had to do it again, I’d do a lot of things differently: Before I started building sites, I would spend a lot more time talking with people about what they wanted to do, planning the organization of the site collection, and working out the policies and practices that people would use.

Fast forward: Now I’m working for the very company that makes SharePoint. When the opportunity came up to write an article that could help people get started with SharePoint, I thought my experience might be useful. The article Planning for your first Microsoft Office SharePoint Server site is based on the lessons I learned, plus a lot of good advice from others. My aim in writing it was to help you avoid the missteps that caused a lot of frustration and rework. Think high-level roadmap. It isn’t techy, but it does give you links to resources you’ll find useful. If you’re in the same situation I was, I hope this article will help.

Dennis

SharePoint End User Content Team

Update: The Office Online article is currently experiencing technical difficulties. We've also uploaded the whitepaper to this blog.

Posted at 3:38 PM by | Category: Collaboration; Design; People Wrangling; Planning & Process; Site Admin | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (3)

2/13/2009

People wrangling for SharePoint success: Friday cool content

Last Friday, I shared a link to Three myths of enterprise wiki deployment, which talks about the cultural and process-related changes you might need to effect in your organization to ensure the success of your wiki project.

Today, I was happy to read Lee Reed's 3 Ways to Use a SharePoint Blog for Project Success at EndUserSharePoint.com. Reed talks about how to use an internal blog strategically to communicate to your project’s customers – to keep them informed, happy, engaged, responsive, etc.

The SharePoint Services product team here at Microsoft recently launched an internal blog that works in many of the ways Reed describes, and they’ve been using it quite effectively to communicate product development news and important technical information to a wide range of stakeholders around the company. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for it, and it has become a daily source of important information. Not all of the internal blogs I subscribe to are this useful, so there’s definitely some strategy and effort required to maintain a useful blog.

These two articles have way more in common than the use of the number 3 in the title. Both focus on what I like to think of as the “people wrangling” dimension of a successful technology project. People wrangling is something we’d like to discuss a bit more on this blog because it's critical at so many levels to the success of a SharePoint deployment. How you plan for and use SharePoint in your work is every bit as important as what the product can do.

If there are people parts to the SharePoint puzzle that have you perplexed (couldn’t resist), feel free to share those with us, and we can talk about them here.

Have a great weekend,

Laura

SharePoint End User Content Team

Posted at 4:08 PM by | Category: Collaboration; People Wrangling | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (1)

2/6/2009

Wikis that work: Friday cool content

For the last five years or so, it’s been something of a joke in my group here at Microsoft that a new project or endeavor is not actually official until somebody creates a new SharePoint site for it. With the release of SharePoint Server 2007 this has kind of evolved. I think it would now be more accurate to say a new project is not official until a new SharePoint wiki site has been created for it.

A while ago, I tried to count the number of “mission critical” wiki sites that I need to refer to on a daily basis to get my job done, and I stopped counting at six. IE bookmarks are my friend. It would be great if some of these wikis could be consolidated. Also, not all of them are of equal quality, or well-maintained over time. But they all exist because somebody, at some point, decided they needed to capture important information.

Don’t get me wrong…I love wikis. I think they’re a powerful tool. But I think the most important factor in the success of a wiki is not the technology under it, but the people using it. So I was very excited to stumble upon the article Three Myths of Enterprise Wiki Deployment. The article discusses common assumptions companies have when they launch a wiki, and I recommend reading it if you’re interesting in finding ways to ensure the success of your wiki.

Feeling enlightened and empowered? Check out this demo that shows how to create a wiki on a SharePoint site.

Have a great weekend!

Laura

SharePoint End User Content Team

Posted at 11:26 AM by | Category: Collaboration; Productivity; People Wrangling | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

SharePoint for End Users

Other Blogs

11/11/2009

8/11/2009

8/6/2009

8/5/2009

Overview

How It All Started

Power Users: That’s Your Ticket In

Real World Story

Let’s Do a Little Math

Another Real World Story

Where to Go from Here

About the Author

7/7/2009

6/19/2009

2/24/2009

2/18/2009

2/13/2009

2/6/2009