SharePoint User Group UK

I'll be there

Martin Pritchard

I will be attending

Mark Boyle

I'll be there.

Regards

Maritn Lawson
Hydratight

Brian English who specialises in MOSS platform support will be coming along to this.

Brian will offer experience and advice on architecting best of breed support around a MOSS or WSS platform. 

What makes good change management, how to handle large user base support requirements, good taxonomy, ITIL and the service desk etc.

All of the things people tend to miss when they are planning for MOSS or WSS farms - but are equally if not more important in succesful implementations than many of the usual architecture aspects.

Hope to see you there.

Regards

John

Hi

Unfortunately I am unable to make the event.

However will anyone be recording the demonstrations? If so will they be uploaded on this site.

I am sure this would be of great benefit to many of us who can not make it.

Regards

Vinay

Cannot now make it - sincere apologies.

chris.knee@kcom.com

Thanks to John, Brian and Phil for tonights great whiteboard session. The infrastructure side of MOSS is something I only have an awareness of (I just want infrastructure to work!) so it is always good to hear it discussed and listen to peoples thoughts and recommendations for what makes a good MOSS architecture.

A massive amount of information was covered during the evening but it seemed to be clear from people's questions, and willingness for the session to continue as long as it did, that there is plenty more to talk about.

My thoughts on topics for potential future whiteboard sessions are:

Increasing adoption of MOSS within an organisation - It seems that some organisations have fairly quick adoption without having to promote SharePoint at all whilst others struggle to get people to buy into collaborative working. It would be interesting to discuss what people think helps adoption within an organisation. Are some organisations better suited to collaborative working? What role does company culture play in getting SharePoint used and accepted? Are there certain organisational or political prerequisites for MOSS to be successful? As SharePoint professionals what can we do to promote a successful outcome within our own organisations or our clients?

Information architecture and taxonomy - Looking back through this thread I think Brian was going to say a bit about this tonight ,and we did touch on it briefly, but it is really an entire session in its own right. I have spent a significant portion of my SharePoint life with users trying to explain why structure and metadata is so important for successful management of their information. SharePoint provides us with lots of nice tools like content types and site columns to help us manage the information that is stored within SharePoint. However, say "metadata" to a user and watch their eyes glaze over as they retreat to the happy place in their head that they reserve for these kind of interactions with the IT department. So - what strategies or processes have people developed for extracting the business information from users heads that allow the IT guys to build the information architecture(and don't send the business users to sleep)? This type of discussion could be combined with the more technical considerations such as what are the pros and cons for multiple site collections? What impact does this have on the management of content types?

What do we do with SharePoint? - Most of the time you hear people talking about SharePoint as a solution for content management or collaboration or sometimes business intelligence but if you just want to use it for one of those things then you are better off buying a specialist solution. For example I have been in a company where SharePoint was being compared with document management systems such as Hummingbird and this made SharePoint quite a hard sell. This is because SharePoint was being viewed in that case as only being a document management system and the features it provides for this are no match for Hummingbird. I don't think this is a fair way to evaluate Sharepoint because SharePoint is a platform rather than a point solution. It might not be the best at any one of collaboration, BI etc. but if you want to do a few of those things then SharePoint starts to come into its own. I would be interested to hear what other people think about this and the impact it has on what you are using MOSS for. Is anyone out there yet using SharePoint as a platform for most of their business applications? This is what my last company is aspiring to due to the potential for reduced user training costs and reduced integration costs. What are the practicalities of this? What are the limitations for MOSS 2007 as a development platform that is used to support all (or almost all) of your business processes? Is it even possible in this version of MOSS? What additional functionality or features would we like to see in future releases to achieve this goal? Do people even want or see any benefit to this approach for their organisation?

Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head, I am sure there is much more to talk about and I fear I may have started to ramble so I am going to stop for now! Thanks again to John, Phil and Brian for organising tonight and making meetings like this possible for the people doing the sharing and the pointing in the North East.

Cheers,

Aidan

Thanks to John, Phil and Brian for an excellent session this eve.  Loads covered and a really good mixture of backgrounds and inputs into the evening made it really worth while. 

The format of an interactive whiteboard session worked really well and made best use of the time

Looking forward to the next one....

Justin

Many thanks to John, Phil and Brian. Excellent session, really enjoyed the discussion.

Looking forward to the next one!

Iain Angus

An excellent meeting! Many thanks to John & co.

Particularly good to have a full session devoted to discussions around the issues and solutions we're encountering every day, and to pool the experience and expertise offered by the presenters. Spot on with topics covered and the level of detail without getting too gritty with specifics... also refreshing not to have a powerpoint presentation :)

Glenda

I'll endorse Aidans comments, a humurous summary on an excellent presentation, and I agree with the future subjects.

All my server side bits are looked after by people like John, Brian, and Phil in Germany.  And after the whiteboard session, I'm pleased about that.

My starting point is client side, a lot less technical but I encounter the difficult bit in selling SharePoint to users.  Especially ones who view change as a P45.  After 18 months of head down developments, learning, and training, I questioned the people who got SharePoint signed off on the slow progress.  A reply was that culture change can take 8 years!  That should take me past the recession.

I like to quote this analogy.  Before email we all wondered what email was and why we needed it?  Now how could we survive without it.  SharePoint will have had that same effect in 2 years time.  Here's to a challenge! An idea: Changing Culture through SharePoint.

Looking forward to the next session and I'll make sure the wife hasn't been sitting an hour in the car outside waiting for me so I can have a pint.

Dave Clark

Thanks Dave, appreciate the endorsement.

In response to the statement that cultural change can take 8 years, if I was you, I would be asking what the business is doing to achieve that change whilst offering to help wherever you can to support it with SharePoint. There is a distinct difference between that and seeing SharePoint as being what is expected to drive the change.

I think this is likely to be a far more successful strategy for change than looking to SharePoint as being the driver. I have had this experience in the past and have had some fairly frank conversations with senior managers about the role of SharePoint in a change management program.

It is tempting to think that if you shape your intranet or SharePoint to match how senior management want the business to look then the business will simply follow. In reality you are just setting yourself up for a massive kicking from the parts of the business who are resistant to change - and in time, everyone else as SharePoint rapidly becomes a dirty word and something nobody wants to be associated with.

Cultural change, and the change management to achieve it, needs to come from the business and requires the genuine support of a critical mass of staff at all levels to be successful. I believe SharePoint can play a huge role in supporting this change and be a major contributor in helping it be successful but it should not be what is driving the change. That way madness lies!