SharePoint User Group UK

Well, I've been with my new employer for three weeks now.  It turns out that they are one step further forward than my previous employer, but they have made some of the 'mistakes' that I was trying to avoid at my old place already.

For example, the intranet is being migrated (from a lovely( - not!) InterWoven CMS) with a completely free hand.  No concepts of IM or DM are being implemented - it's a complete free-for all.  The search isn't even being tweaked from what comes OOB.  If I've learnt anything from all those SharePoint UserGroups, it's that SharePoint Search needs optimising!  As seems to be the norm, they've only bought SP Standard, so no InfoPath still :sigh:  I shall be interested to see how they intend to deal with that one when the time comes to kill off Interwoven entirely :-S

My one hope is that this organisation is (allegedly) very open to feedback and suggestions, so I shall be trying to persuade them to be a bit more structured, even if it is respectively.  And just one caveat - I could have got entirely the wrong impression about the SharePoint/ IM strategy here - I'm prepared to back pedal if I find any evidence to the contrary of what I've said here ;-)

Well, it's been a while since I last blogged, it's been a busy old time at work and I've also had a bit of a holiday in amongst it all.

The Intranet Replacement project (using SharePoint) has been put on ice until January 2010, pending the creation of a stronger business case, but meanwhile, the pilot SharePoint sites that were set up are going to be (wait for it.....) operationalised...... whatever that means. :-S

Our SharePoint partner has made it quite plain that a full review of the pilot sites needs to be done, and that a holistic review of the existing governance and architecture is needed.  That seems VERY sensible to me.  I am still a little disconcerted though.  Below are the reasons why - perhaps some of you can allay my fears or tell me how to avoid these pitfalls?

These pilot sites do not cover the full range of SharePoint functionality, and neither do they replicate the functionality that is needed to replicate the intranet here.  They don't replicate the intranet in terms of content types either. I'm fearful that by the time SharePoint is applied to the Intranet, I will have inherited an inflexible architecture and number of content types that are only applicable for a small subset of information here.  I worry that the range of what I can then do when the Intranet is replaced will be limited or creation of content will be confusing due to non-relevant pre-existing content types.

I'm also worried that as IT is driving the operationalisation of the pilot sites, governance structures such as taxonomy management, document lifecycle management and information retention standards will not be given thorough enough consideration and will only be derived using the sites that are being 'operationalised'.  I fear that this will lead to a narrow definition of standards and that this will lead to increased pain if the standards need to be altered when the Intranet is replaced.  (I had planned a business wide setting of these standards as part of the initial SharePoint deployment).

I am also concerned that management of SharePoint will sit entirely within the IT department too (and consequently, fail to meet the needs of the business).

So, am I being daft, or are there even more dangers to this phased implementation that I haven't even anticipated?

Well it's even longer between this post and the previous two. Sorry.  Time is just rolling away here and the work on this project is going slower than a dying snail.  We will be having inital deep requirements workshops in April (yep only theee months after the original requirement workshops), but meanwhile the Head of IT here is giving little SharePoint sites to groups who can make use of them.  It' worries me a bit as they aren't shown how to use them, and there isn't any corporate branding being applied.  They are being told that these sites must be disposable, but you can bet your bottom dollar that they won't turn out to be, and will need to be migrated across the the fully deployed Sharepoint architecture. :-(

We know that we already have two big business requirements for SharePoint - to replace our intranet and to take over online internal communication messaging (plus probably replacing our knowledge repository - but that is snied in politics :-S).  That should be enough to keep everyone busy for a while.  I've been working to try and get the current Intranet ready for migration and to motivate the authors to do some tidying up work.  The request for Intranet authors to do some work will go out to senior management this week.  I'm still working on the assumption that SharePoint may not happen this side of Christmas so I'm only doing work that is of use whether or not SharePoint comes at the moment.

We still have no movement on how to resource the SharePoint project either.  I thyink the project will be pointless if the senior management here don't give it a push, back it, and make some decisions about it.  So I'm trying all I can to try and get them to do that too.  It's tricky managing upwards though :-S

Ok, it's been a while :-)  Almost a month off in September hasn't ultimately helped with my over-all stress levels (even more work to clear), but there is some good news at last!

I got a MySite to play with last week :-)  It looks dead easy to use if a little Microsoft-y.  I've heard that we already have one or two sites in development to deal with specific needs but I have no idea what they look like or really contain.

I've been sent a Project Initiation Document for me to complete in order to replace/update the current (and very old) intranet.  And there starts the trouble.....

I see a MySite - which is basically like having a bit of file storage and a pinboard for all your personal info/musings.  I have an intranet in which certain people can (with difficulty) share HTML content (and sometimes other file formats) with the rest of the business.  I'm now struggling to see how the two reconcile  (well at least how the people here can reconcile it anyway)?

I suspect that it is all about getting the governance right - making sure that people only have access to place content where they are 'trained' to put it, but how do they know where to put it?

Also, we've also already got a Knowledge Base (which was a big investment), and I hear that SP can do that quite well too ( - what!? With suggestions and everything?).  Can it really?  Our current Knowledge Base has it weaknesses, but it also has its strengths and is tailored to the needs of a specific user group.  I think I might have just answered my own question in the last part of that sentence actually! ;-)

What I'm really nervous about is people having stuff on their MySite that they should be sharing, but then again, I guess that's no different than someone having something stashed on their private drive that they should be sharing :-)

So, how do you go from a MySite to putting something onto a Corporate SP Intranet - I think that's what I need to find out next.  So I need to find that out and define an Information Sharing / Collaboration Strategy to make sure we use SP for the right reasons and the right needs too!

It could be a another long time until my next update then!

I feel ashamed to admit that six months ago I didn't even know of the existence of Sharepoint.  Then we get a new head of IT and 'bang' my world comes back to life after years of being down-trodden by low IT support.  The new IT head goes and buys Sharepoint licences and XP licences (yep, we're only on 2000 at the moment).

I can still hear the IT department whimpering, and to me it sounds like a world of possibilties and a possible world of pain.  The reasons for that will be clear if I tell you a little of my history first, I guess.

I'm an Intranet Manager.  For that, read 'smoother of choas'.  I have looked after the Intranet here for 9 years (I really can't believe it's been that long).  I got the Intranet by pure chance but could immediately see the benefits it could bring to my financial services employer and I set about making it a useful tool for everyone at work. 

It was then that I hit my first hurdle.  The Intranet had come about not by some elegant business plan with a sound financial case behind it, but more because we had some NT servers that could host web pages, and someone in the business had the time to play.  When I first got it, it had about 100 pages of content on it.  I set about telling people to use it a way to share information and do things more efficiently than passing paper around.  I managed to get enough support that I was formally made Intranet Manager and soon enough I was busy trying to help more and more people create content in a non-content managed system.  The poor authors just had to use Word or Excel (or if they were really clever, PowerPoint).  People wanted to use the Intranet for more sophisticated content - I was asked to create a Forum when we had a new business strategy that we wanted to discuss. But [first hurdle] I had no budget [workaround] but I as Intranet Manager, did have FrontPage 98!  Yes - Discussion Topics could (clumsily, I subsequently found out) do that.  So I delivered a forum for discussion of our new business strategy!

That set a precedent for the Intranet - it could develop as long as it cost nothing, and required no IT resource.  I rapidly skilled up to be able to develop little databases and applications to deliver other bits and bobs on the Intranet, like polls and a staff directory (although that wasn't able to interface with our Oracle HR system to be truly powerful).  This was my second hitch.  We are an Oracle House.  This means we love Oracle and frown on Microsoft.  If Oracle did a desktop app that people could use, we'd have it :-|  As my luck would have it though, Mircosoft has the market buttoned up so that's what all our computer desktops run. Phew - if not for that, the Intranet might never have existed.  However, my development of apps outside of the core architecture caused ripples and I was moved into the technical infrastructure team to be brought under control.  All I did was learn exactly how the Intranet worked (I finally understood IIS for example), and I got a good look at our horrid Oracle email system. 

I carried on working on the Intranet though, and by my cajoling and championing, the Intranet grew and grew until it had about 10,000 pages of content.  The need for Content Management became more and more desperate and I was busily building a case for this, when along come a new executive and 'bam', we're implementing a Knowledge Repository.  There was no way this organisation would pay both for KM and a CMS.  Somehow I had to crowbar a CMS into a KM.  Doomed from the start you say?  Correct. It didn't, and hasn't, happened.  And I still have no CMS, no consistent look and feel, and due to my involvement in KM taking me away from the Intranet, I don't even know who is creating content on the Intranet anymore. Sob!

So the budgetless, direction-less intranet has been crying out for something to give it some life, and along comes SharePoint.  I'm told we've bought it, now we have to decide how we want to use it.  I'm hugely excited - it sound like a great opportunity, but what do we do next?

The IT department is undergoing a major re-org due to the new head of IT, I still have no budget and also, as I now work in Internal Communications, not very much time to investigate SharePoint.  I've spent a couple of months digging around the Internet and have found a few webinars and this Forum.  I want to keep a record of what I find out, and will use this blog to note it all down.  I hope that someone else in the same situation as me might find it helpful in the future, I will find it useful just for me any how.

That's all I have time for now.  More later on in the week, with any luck!