Recently I read two articles in Computing which highlight the challenges which Executives face in understanding how to use SharePoint technologies to deliver business value.
The first article claims that UK business are struggling with innovation. Accenture estimate that 58% of UK business Executives feel that innovation is essential to their company’s long term success.
“Innovation should not be confined to the research and development function, or even just in the marketing function, in high performing businesses it permeates the culture, metrics and processes of the whole company.”
Typically companies associate innovation with the desire to increase market share. Here is the link,
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2213593/uk-business-struggles
The second article claims that social software has still not shown its business benefits. Half of global CIO’s plan to invest in Web 2.0 technologies for the first time in 2008, according to Gartner but, the article claims, many firms lack understanding of how social collaboration tools can be used to create business benefit. Here’s the link;
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2212380/head-spinning-world-web-3895286
Although you don’t hear it mentioned too often SharePoint is a Knowledge Management tool. What is SharePoint? It is Microsoft’s Information Worker platform. It’s a highly scalable and extensible platform for creating a wide variety of different solutions for Information Workers.
There are two types of knowledge. Explicit knowledge which can be written down or codified in some way; this could be in the form of reports, presentations, spreadsheets, process maps, or any other type of document or artefact. Implicit knowledge is that which is based on experience, it cannot be written down or recorded.
Researchers at the Harvard Business School published an article in 1999 which indentified two basic strategies for managing knowledge (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/0500.html).
A Codification strategy addresses the management of Explicit knowledge. This type of strategy focuses on putting in place processes, policies and technology to capture, store, manage and retrieve documents which contain knowledge vital to an organisation. A Personalisation strategy addresses the management of Implicit knowledge. This type of strategy focuses on putting in place processes, policies and technologies which bring people together, and facilitate the sharing of ideas, and information. Although an organisation may use elements of both strategies the key to success is to identify the one which is best suited to the business model and high level strategic objectives and to focus on this.
For example an organisation which repeatedly solves the same problem, or delivers the same type of solution or service again and again for different clients will probably want to focus on standardisation, increasing efficiency and effectiveness within core business processes and lowering costs. In this case a Codification, or Person-to-Document strategy will probably be most appropriate. Conversely am organisation which offers a highly bespoke service to clients, focusing on quality not volume business will probably be focused innovation, and creativity rather than costs. Here a Personalisation strategy will probably be most appropriate.
SharePoint provides the tools to support both of these types of strategy. For a Codification strategy we have Enterprise Content Management, Workflow, Excel Services, and Document Search. For a Personalisation strategy we have MySite and the Social Networking web parts, People Search, Collaboration, and the Community kit.
Returning then to the two articles in Computing that prompted this post; The value of Social networking and Web 2.0 technologies is that they support Personalisation knowledge management strategies which are key to successful processes on innovation. For organisations that do not value or focus on innovation these technologies may not deliver significant benefits, these organisations may benefit more from those tools that support a Codification strategy.
SJ
Hi,
Here's something to strike terror into the very core of your soul! Web 8.0 is just round the corner....
http://www.webeightpointoh.com/
Regards,
S:)
Hi,
Following links are for the two presentations given at the Basingstoke meeting at ICS Solutions on March 27th.
1. "Planning for a high availability MOSS farm", Lewis Baldwin - Head of Infrastructure and Support: http://www.icssolutions.co.uk/images/SUG_HAF.pdf
2. "Governance: Protect your SharePoint Investment", Symon Garfield - SharePoint Practice Lead http://www.icssolutions.co.uk/images/SUGUK%20-%20MOSS%20Governance.pdf
Regards,
S:)
Just back from the final sessions at this year’s conference.
For me this has been a week very well spent. My head is full of new information and ideas, I have made some great contacts, caught up with old friends and gained a two new MS certifications (MOSS dev and config). :)
As I mentioned in an earlier post I noticed a shift in the content with a growing emphasis on the softer aspects of the technology; not just nuts and bolts but users and uses. I think that this is partly due to the growing body of experience, not least Microsoft’s own. I understand they are the world’s biggest users of SharePoint (no surprises there I guess); they have 325 thousand Portals, sites and Team sites in the business. I have noticed the results of this experience of using the technology for business gain coming through in their sessions. After all the tech guys are also the users in this case and as a result their presentations have an increased maturity about them.
Plenty of announcements made here, including; BizTalk Adapter Pack, Capacity Planning Tool, Extranet Accelerator Kit, Search Server Express released, and the Asset Inventory tool. To name just a few.
Plenty going on in the Partners exhibition hall, despite the seemingly low number of places avaialable. My impression was that Business Process Management related vendors were the largest group. There were also plenty of Training, Document Management, and Migration related partners. The standard of presentations on the stands was very high and all the partners who I stopped and talked to really knew their stuff. Might sound obvious, but it's not always the case at these events. Some of the Partner led sessions and stands in Berlin last year were poor. Perhaps another example of an increasingly maturing market?
The SharePoint based Conference site has worked well. It provided a handy-dandy session browser to plan which events to go to; it even integrated with Outlook. Most impressively I can already find most the slide decks on the site. I still have not got my DVD from last year’s event which had the slide decks on!
It was not all good news though. A few people I know who work in the Partner community and do deep dive hands on work with SharePoint day in and day out were very disappointed with the technical level of the sessions. One, who shall remain nameless, walked out of almost every session I saw him in disgust. To be fair for those working at the top level, who already know the product from the ground up are not going to learn that much at an event like this which is aimed at the mass market. Plus this wasn't a development event, that was held last month. Still, a level 400 session should be a deep as it can get.
Seattle is great, especially for Vegetarians and Vegans. Much better than Las Vegas where the DevConnections event was held, at least in my humble opinion.
I recommend the event for next year, as long as it's not in Vegas! There really is a strong business case for it, so start planning to now so you can convince the boss. In the meantime I heard a rumour that the UK will be getting a 'Virtual SharePoint Conference' later this year, but no official announcement yet...
Couple of days off now before flying home on Saturday. That'll just give me time to write up my notes and all those new ideas.....
Regards,
S:)
This is the third SharePoint Conference that I have been to in the past 13 months; two offical Microsoft events and the DevConnections event in November last year. I have noticed a subtle shift in the content in this event.
Microsoft is a technology based company so it's no real surprise that that events relating to their products are largely technical in nature. But, as I often argue, SharePoint is very different than any of their other products. 'Traditional' software products are focused driving efficiencies within structured business process. This produces easily quantifiable benefits and ROI usually in the form of lower costs or increased productivity.
SharePoint is all about Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Web 2.0 and these are all technologies that focus on people, connections and sharing ideas. Delivering business value from these new age technologies and actually proving the results is much more problematic, and is more about people than technology.
Here at the conference we have seen all the usual MVP's and Microsoft experts talking about all the usual stuff; Deployment, Web Content Management, Administration, Developing Web Parts, The BDC, and so on. Of course this sort of Nuts and Bolts stuff is vital, the IT people need to understand how to operate the machinery. But we have also seen an increasing amount of content related to the softer aspects of SharePoint. There is a track dedicated to Governance, a topic which merges both the technical and business aspects of using SharePoint. I went to a session on successful Deployment and it turned out to be an MVP talking to a technical audience about the value of defining business problems, agreeing a mission statement for your SharePoint project and other 'soft' business analysis related topics. It even included interpersonal skills in meetings with business people. Hardly a mention of settings, quotas, servers, bandwidth and the like.
My favourite session so far has been "Web 2.0 What is it? and Why Should you Care?" presented by Forrester Analyst Rob Koplowitz. It was this session that got me thinking and led to me making this Post. The session was part of a series of presentations by analysts rather than technical experts. I've not seen this before at a technical conference. I missed some of the earlier sessions but hear from others that they were equally as good.
I think that it's great that the these non-technical aspects of SharePoint and its use are starting to get mainstream attention amongst the technical community. No point being technically excellent with your SharePoint deployment if no one ever uses it, or it does nothing more than host the lunch menu, internal phone directory and the meeting room booking system.
It was an interest the business value of Knowledge Management related technologies which first led to me getting involved in SharePoint. My impression of the User Group UK is that the membership is largely from a technical background? I'll be presenting a session at a meeting of the group in Basingstoke on March 27th (which Nick has yet to announce - hint hint) on the subject of SharePoint Governance and as I have already said this will cover both technical and business related aspects of SharePoint. Would anyone be interested in other non-technical sessions? Strategies for introducing SharePoint into an organisation; Developing a Collaboration Strategy; Introduction to SharePoint Business Analysis; Developing the business case for Collaboration. Just a few ideas. I've considered doing this before but assumed that there would be little interest. Maybe now's a good time?
S:)
SharePoint conference 2008 opened this morning with Keynote speeches from Bill Gates, Kurt Delbene Vice President of the Office Business Platform Group.
Unfortunately I am having to spend far too much time sitting in my hotel room working on this trip, so I don't have time to give a detailed review; but here are a few headlines:
First some info on the event its self:
- 3,800 attendees at the conference
- 500 people on the waiting list
- 22 countries represented
- 61 partners exhibiting - the partner sponsorship sold out in 24 hours
Some SharePoint facts:
- SharePoint has now joined SQL and Exchange as a billion dollar server product
- Expecting to hit 100 million SharePoint licenses this year
- Bill noted that this puts SharePoint in a different league to specialist point solutions in the markets such as ECM, BI, Collaboration
Announcement: SharePoint as a hosted service
- SharePoint and Exchange are now available as a hosted service to organisations with less than 5000 seats. Here's the link, check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.mspx
- We were given a pretty compelling demonstration of how an organisation can combine a locally hosted Active Directory with a hosted Exchange and SharePoint implementation running in the Microsoft Data Centre.
- If this is the future then where exactly do the Microsoft Partner Community fit in I wonder? It has clear benefits for MS in terms of controlling licenses.
Announcement: MS Search Server Express released today
- Following the announcement of Search server Express beta at the DevConnections conference in November last year, the product is fully released and ready for down load today
The next version of SharePoint:
- Not much on this so far but in the Q&A session Bill talked a lot about the ability to surface SQL tables in the SharePoint environment and the ability to create a SharePoint list and declare it as a native SQL table. This, he claimed, will bring together the richness of SharePoint lists with the functionality of relational database tables.
- This will certainly see SharePoint develop further as a fully fledged Application Development platform.
- There was a brief mention of the further development of the BDC as the technology of choice for accessing backend data systems. We had been wondering if the Fast acquisition would signal the end for the BDC as we currently know it, but it seems not.
Increased support for deploying SharePoint:
- We were given demos and overviews of four solution accelerators recently developed for SharePoint
- The SPConfigurator for deploying .wsp, content types, master pages, audit settings and the like across one or more SharePoint farms
- Asset inventory tool which scans your network or IP range and produces a SQL server based report showing all SharePoint assets and content it finds. Very nice, I like this a lot!
- The Capacity Planner tool. This has been around a while now, must be several weeks at least, provides a wizard for inputting information and assessing the capacity of a given SharePoint farm topology.
- The Extranet Accelerator kit. Uses forms and workflows to enable users to quickly provision Extranet sites from SharePoint.
Announcement: Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint
- Some very nice demos of rich internet applications using SharePoint and silverlight
- Announcement of the release of a Silverlight blueprint for SharePoint which includes guidance and code to integrate Silverlight into SharePoint web parts.
- I was a non-believer in Silverlight unitl today, they are winning me over
By midday my head was spinning with too much new information! SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint. Where will it end????
Oh yes, I also took advantage of the free Prometric tests which are available here and I am now a certified MOSS Technical Specialist. I am going to hang the certificate on my wall next to my 100m swimming certificate and Cycling Proficiency badge.
The backpack is a briefcase style bag, and the Microsoft branded water bottle was a huge disappointment
More news as it breaks....
S:)
The MS SharePoint conference 2008 kicks off in Seattle on Sunday night. The Great and Good, or should that be the Good, The Bad and the Ugly? From the SharePoint world are heading to the airports this weekend.
Rumours abound that we may get a sneak preview of the next version of SharePoint which I hear is due for CTP release soon.
There's a party for the UK delegates on Monday night - be there or be square!
I can’t wait for another free backpack and all those SharePoint branded goodies.
More news as it breaks.....
S:)
Just back from the final sessions here at the DevConnections / SharePoint Connections conference in Las Vegas.
As with any event like this there were the Good, the Bad and the downright Ugly sessions.
My personal favourites were from some of the usual suspects: Andrew Connell gave a great session on WCM which included one the clearest explanations of how SharePoint works under the bonnet which I have heard, Todd Baginski gave a good session on the BDC and one of my favourite sessions was from a name new to me, Michael Noel, on SharePoint and virtualisation. It was here that I heard a rumour regarding the next version of SharePoint....
... there is speculation, (and only speculation) that the next version of SharePoint will ONLY run on a 64bit platform. As an aside, the general view from this event is that MOSS is best deployed on a 64 bit platform anyway. There is obviously a longer conversation to have here.
If you are not familiar with Mr. Connell and Mr. Baginski then I recommend that you check out their respective blogs and web sites. They both promised to post their Conference content. Todd’s includes an .stp file which contains a pretty good demo of the BDC web parts which ship with MOSS, complete with instructions. They are both easy enough to find but here are the links.
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/tbaginski/default.aspx
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/
I must just have a quick rant on one subject:
Presenters, please don't start your sessions with excuses!
Things I have heard here this week include, "It's not my slide deck", "I am not supposed to be doing this presentation", "The VPC I was sent doesn't work", "You can laugh at me if you want", "I may fall off the stage", "I can't dress myself" (seriously).
Sure anyone can suffer the odd, unavoidable technical blip, but these should be few and far between. Anything else is just poor preparation! One guy (who shall remain nameless) had an audience of 100+ sat there watching whilst he searched in vain for the correct VHD file on his laptop so he could do the demo. Just not good enough when people pay to see the show. It was a shame because the rest of his presentation was pretty good.
The Latin Grammys are being held here in the Mandalay Bay hotel tonight and the sight of thousands of IT Pros, still wearing the Windows Mobile baseball caps, free promotional t-shirts and coloured back packs mixing with the glittering, glamorous, Latin celebrities (who I don't recognise) is a little surreal. Only in Vegas I guess.
Overall, a pretty good event and one I would recommend for next year. I have a few days off now before I fly back to the UK, now I wonder what there is to do in Las Vegas then?????
Regards,
S:)
The conference got underway this morning. Thousands of IT professionals resplendent in their Windows Mobile baseball caps, and free promotional t-shirts, all wearing different coloured backpacks to indicate which Connections track they were on flocked into the Mandalay Bay Convention centre. With an 08:00hr start many were bleary eyed following an evening of excess in the City of Lights.
I started the day with the SharePoint keynote speech entitled "Driving the business with SharePoint" and presented by Tom Rizzo, Microsoft SharePoint Director.
As the room filled up and we waited to begin the session Tom warmed the crowd up with a few "show of hands" questions. Most of the 1000+ strong audience raised their hands when asked who had deployed WSS V3, there was a similar response when asked about MOSS 07, but interestingly there were very few who responded when asked, "Who has used MOSS for their public facing Web site." Perhaps only a dozen or so. Maybe this is just a quirk of the American market.
Much of the presentation was update on material we have heard before at other events such as the SharePoint Conference in Berlin last February. Some points of note:
- 85 million licenses MOSS licenses worldwide
- 17k customers worldwide
- Microsoft’s SharePoint revenues have now exceeded $800 million and is heading for the billion dollar mark
- Many Fortune 500 companies have adopted the technology, especially for Web sites
- Microsoft have 325k portals, sites, and sub sites on their implementation with a Database size of 15TB
I am always interested in peoples attempts to give a short answer the question "What is SharePoint?", and Tom gave two:
- "A business productivity server"
- "A middle tier Operating System"
My preferred answer is, "SharePoint is Microsoft’s Information Worker platform".
The big announcement was one which many of you may already have picked up on the wires regarding the new product MS Search Server 2008. Currently in Beta and due for release in the first half of 2008 this product will replace the Search only license version of MOSS already available, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for Enterprise Search.
The new product is, "an updated and rebranded" version of the MOSS Search product. Key investment areas were listed as:
- Simplified install with a "three click" server preparation
- Enhanced Administration
- New federation capabilities based on the OpenSearch standard
- Performance and scalability enhancements
- No preset document limits
We were treated to a quick demo and some screen shots. The federated search looks good, this enables Search Server to send the users query to a variety of external search providers including public providers such as Wikipedia and MSN Live, and internal providers such as SQL Server. All handled through a handy dandy web part.
There will be two versions of the product:
- MS Search Server 2008
- MS Search Server Express 2008
The only difference between the two is that the Express version will be limited to a single server deployment. Users of the current MOSS for Enterprise Search will receive an update early next year.
Time to head back for the afternoon sessions. Now where did I put my baseball cap and backpack????
S:)
Just back from the opening Key Note Speech here at the DevConnections conference in Las Vegas. Steve Guggenheimer, General Manager Server & Tools Marketing at Microsoft, addressed an audience of 5000+ developers and IT professionals with an hour long presentation entitled "Dynamic IT and the 2008 Launch Wave". Tough audience!
As the name suggests the focus of the speech was on the upcoming releases of MS technologies, and with the current SharePoint technologies a year old SharePoint hardly got a mention. It's so old hat already!
The technology focus was on Visual Studio 2008 (due for release in Q4 2007), Windows Server 2008 (due for WW release on Feb 27th 2008), and SQL Server 2008 (due for release Q2 2008). We got ten minute demos on each from the product managers.
Microsoft were keen to emphasise that they "eat their own dog food", with the Microsoft.com site, one of the top ten visited sites in the world, already running on the Enterprise class, secure and trusted platform created by the aforementioned new technologies. Apparently the site has been using SQL Server 2008 Beta 3 for the past six months. Much was made of the fact that VS2008 had been built using VS2005. They claim that the new version can produce increases in productivity AND quality. I can already hear the cries of disbelief from Project Managers "Time, Cost or Quality. You can't improve all three!"
The Windows Server 2008 demo focused on the Virtualisation features. SharePoint wasn't mentioned specifically in the demo but judging by the increasing number of clients which are asking me about SharePoint in a virtual environment this will become a key area of interest for us in SharePoint land. Plus of course WinServer08 includes IIS 7.0. which features a very nice new UI. Gone are the endlessly tabbed dialog boxes for IIS admin, they are replaced by a nice, clean Office like UI. The scenario based demo featured a financial company with two offices, which then acquired a third thus increasing the load on the corporate web site by a third. Within 2 or three minutes we were shown how easy it is to add a new virtual Web Server to the farm and then to implement and configure failover clustering. Not my area of expertise but it looked far simpler than I remember from working with WinServer03 and it was very well received by the audience. For the SharePoint people the demo finished with the creation of a virtual application which the users accessed through a SharePoint based web part. V. nice!
The SQL Server 2008 demo covered some of the new data types. Using the new geospatial data type the presenter showed how to store the location of coffee shops in Seattle in SQL server and then created queries such as "show me all the coffee shops within 1000 metres of a particular road. The results were plotted on a map. Again V. Nice demo.
We were also treated to a Silverlight demo using Expression Designer, Expression Blend, VS and Expression Encoder. Now I don't know about everyone else but I am so busy trying to keep up with developments in good old fashioned products like Office and SharePoint that this Silverlight stuff from a design background is still a bit of a mystery! I get the general idea of rich web applications etc, but I'll be interested to see how long it takes for those controlling IT budgets to become convinced that data visualisation is an area which can deliver real business benefit or Return On Investment. The Microsoft demos I have seen so far feature a Golf Score vista gadget, trailers for the Fantastic Four film and today's demo was a weather report with animated sun and clouds. Looks great, but lacks commercial impact I feel. Does anyone else have any real world scenarios for this stuff? I'd be interested to hear them.
The session closed with a quick mention of the next new product suite codenamed "Oslo" which includes: BizTalk Server 6, BizTalk Services 1, Visual Studio 10, System Centre 5 and .NET framework 4.
The key message from Microsoft is that their vision is to take the existing best of breed products and to link them all together, "building bridges" between IT roles such as developers, administrators, testers, the business and of course the users. As SharePoint experts we will all need to develop a broader understanding of how the Microsoft product stack is evolving and how it all fits together to deliver Enterprise Class IT infrastructure.
More SharePoint specific stuff tomorrow...
Regards,
SJ
A great new SharePoint resource from Microsoft, being championed by Lawrence Liu. As the 'About Us' section on the site explains this is not a Wiki, it's a 'Pedia' a compendium of useful SharePoint related content and it's hosted on SharePoint technologies. I like it.
Here's the link..
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/pedia/Pages/Home.aspx
Regards,
S:)
I hear that Windows Server 2008 will not include WSS 3.0 by default. As with Windows Server 2003 (before R2) users of the new 2008 server system will be required to download WSS as an add on. WSS 3.0 will remain license free. Here's the link for more info...
http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2007/10/29/windows-server-2008-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-update.aspx
S:)
Arrived in Las Vegas on Friday for the SharePoint Connections 2007 Conference.
Conference kicks off on Monday night with opening Key note speeches, then three full days of conference sessions Tuesday through to Thursday. Here’s the link to the event in case you missed it.
http://www.devconnections.com/shows/FALL2007SP/default.asp?s=105
If anyone else from the UK is in town and would like to grab a networking drink then post a comment.
More news as it breaks....
S:)