Home Bloghttp://www.concurrency.comFri, 18 May 2012 02:06:33 GMTSat, 18 May 1912 02:06:33 GMTSharePoint 2010 and Office 2010: Sneak Peek Recaphttp://www.concurrency.com/q12010seminarsThu, 04 Mar 2010 22:18:59 GMTRich WoodWow!

That just about sums up my reaction to our latest seminar—this time a series of demo scenarios from Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010—that wrapped up this morning. I’m fired up, and not simply because we gave away another ten t-shirts to bold members of our studio audience.  

No, the key here is that Milwaukee and Wisconsin at large are truly excited about upgrading to SharePoint 2010. In late January we had the chance to spend 90 minutes talking with a different crowd (and I do mean crowd—we packed the Crowne Plaza again with nearly 150 attendees, just like last time) about the rich new features of ECM in SharePoint 2010. Lots of great feedback was received, but the most telling piece was the number of people asking for demos.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Truth be told, we didn’t do the demos last time because the new ECM features are so powerful and so rich that we knew it’d take us an hour and a half just to talk about them, let alone show them off. So this time around, we cut back on the PowerPoint and went full-speed-ahead with the demonstrations. And oh! Such demonstrations had not been seen yet in Milwaukee:

• The new SharePoint 2010 UI and the pervasive Office ribbon…
• The Backstage panels of Office 2010…
• Visualizing BPM with Visio workflows…
• FAST Search, Document Sets and Managed Metadata for truly enterprise ECM…

And that’s just for starters. All of these demos were built hands-on in our new Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) Lab—a fully-fleshed working environment we’re using to showcase the very real power of these new Microsoft tools.

Stay tuned—SharePoint 2010 is almost here. Talk to us if you want a sneak peek.

 

 

 

]]>http://www.concurrency.com/q12010seminarsEnterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2010http://www.concurrency.com/ecm-in-sharepoint-2010Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:45:56 GMTRich Wood
Looking at ECM in SharePoint 2010 with Concurrency’s AIIM ECM Master, Rich Wood.

1: Microsoft's ECM Message

 

I want to lead this post with, and/or highlight Microsoft's key message / focus for SharePoint in general and each feature set in particular, and for good reason-- these turns of phrase are more than semantics.  They're core concepts behind the software, and understanding them will be essential in understanding the detail of the solutions built upon them.

 

For ECM, Microsoft is taking the old saw of "ECM for the Masses" and giving it much more than a basic push.  They seem really committed, and to judge by the explosion of new functionality available in the ECM space, it's not just the hot air that some commentators seem to fear.  Within that message, Microsoft sees Document Management as the core aspect of its ECM strategy.  As we know, it's a primary asset of SharePoint in its own right, but the core DM features run throughout SP.  Obviously Records Management and WCM, but also Collaboration, Social Networking, Search all depend on services that find their primary raison d'être in Document Management.

 

Microsoft's expanded ECM feature set is grounded in the so-called "Three Tenets of ECM".  AIIM would like this, and probably wishes they'd come up with it first-- three simple concepts that are essential to successful ECM, and lo and behold, they all start with the letter 'E' (gasp!).

 

Three Tenets of ECM:

  • Easy to Use: This is self-evident… usability is important, and never moreso than today.
  • Everyone Participates: Content management is no longer the domain of the grubby guy with ink on his hands, and for good reason-- you don't realize much value or ROI that way.
  • Enterprise-Ready: Get out of your silos, kids. True ECM sits on one stack and is pervasive throughout it, sharing features and content across site collections and even farms.

Another key message focuses around disposition.  If ECM is (as we've been saying for years) the management of unstructured content, the key is in disposing of as much of the "dead" content as you can and making sense of the rest.  Deleting as little as 20-30% of content created over a ten year period can have a significant impact on costs for backup and storage.
 

2: SharePoint ECM-- New and Upgraded Features 

 

So what's new with ECM in 2010?  Here's a look at features both new and updated for Document Management. 

 

Folders:

I like the approach here a lot.  Folders have value in SP 2010 when you want to apply shared Security, Metadata, or Disposition across a batch of documents.  We spent the last three years downplaying folders in favor of Views with Groups and Filters, in large part because they couldn’t have metadata assigned to them.  With this change, the Folder is officially resurgent.  Sort of.  I still wouldn’t use it to replicate a classic file-system structure.  That remains a Really Bad Idea.

 

Records Center:

Still exists, though it's perhaps not as essential to good Records Management as before thanks to in-place records management (which allows you to assign "record" status, and thereby apply "records management" features like litigation holds and disposition workflows, to any document within the platform regardless of its precise location).  There are also new options for the "send-to" feature, which previously only created a copy of the document in the Records Center.  Now, along with the copy, you can move or move and leave a link to the new location.  This is made possible through new, unique Document ID tags (which you can define as a setting).

 

Document Center:

Also still exists, but at the SPC 2009 conference Microsoft stressed another point I always make to customers (gee, don't I feel smart today)-- there's nothing you can do in a Document Center that you can't do on any old collaboration site.

 

Managed Metadata Service:

This is a really cool (okay, only really cool to information architect geeks like me) new tool used to define a centrally-controlled corporate taxonomy.  Features include:

  • Auto completion of choice fields (nice-- our clients ask for this a lot)
  • Nesting of terms (they ask for this too)
  • Taxonomy that evolves organically due to feedback (email) and easy updates/ adds of columns through the interface, which is a good deal friendlier now
  • Managed Metadata itself is like a column that pulls data from another source (like a Lookup list column, really) like the central taxonomy or the folksonomy (user input)
  • Term Store Management is the tool that manages the Managed Metadata Service and allows it to be shared across collections and farms.

Document Sets:

These are batches of documents that can be given common metadata, zipped up in a zip file, moved around together etc.  We knew these were coming, but they still rock.  They provide a great way to manage batches of documents, which was previously unavailable in SharePoint's 2007 iterations.

 

Content Type Syndication:

Content types are now available at the enterprise level and can be shared across site collections and even farms.  We knew about this one too, but that doesn't make it any less nifty for us info geeks.  We love to classify.  Muhuhuhuahahahaha!  Now we can enforce standards across entire portals!

 

Content Organizer:

This feature automates the organization of content, based on the metadata that describes it.  A must-see.

 

Office Integration:

When you go to create a new document in Office, SharePoint document content types will be included in your template options.  Damn cool.

 

Part 3: Records Management in SP 2010

 

Microsoft approaches Records Management not just for documents, but for any/all files and objects within a SharePoint repository.  Their strategy is founded on these three key tenets:

 

Integrated Governance

Microsoft see governance as tightly bound to collaboration experiences-- a wise approach.  Governance now can be implemented on a wider variety of SharePoint objects.

 

Familiar and Easy to Use

The right trade-off between feature richness and end-user freedom is essential.

 

Flexible

The platform should be configurable to the organization's needs.

 

Beneath this, it's important to understand how they approach SharePoint's Records Management Feature Set.  It includes the same four feature buckets as existed in 2007, but they have gone deeper into them (richer features) and made them pervasive across the platform with "in-place records management".  This means the services previously restricted to Records Center can now be applied to any file, anywhere in the SharePoint portal.

  • Recordization (i.e., making a document into a record and locking it down)
  • eDiscovery and Legal Holds
  • Auditing and Reporting
  • Retention and Expiration

On top of this, the use of Document Sets for batch changes/movement, the Unique Document ID to eliminate redundancy and replication, and other cool stuff has catapulted SharePoint 2010 firmly into the forefront of the enterprise content and records management conversation. 

Legacy vendors are already running scared—witness the profusion this past year of hardcore “document management” and/or “records management” repository vendors hastening to position their products as back-end repositories for SharePoint content.  They see the writing on the wall and will struggle to keep pace, but if you have one of these silo solutions and SharePoint 2010, you’ll be junking the silo and going all-in with SharePoint within two years.  And why not?  Paying for all those expensive legacy licenses when you already own an equally viable solution is just bad math.

]]>http://www.concurrency.com/ecm-in-sharepoint-2010Green Tea and Governance Takeawayshttp://www.concurrency.com/green-tea-and-governance-takeawaysFri, 30 Oct 2009 22:43:38 GMTRich WoodI spent yesterday morning with a series of grande green teas in a number of governance sessions.  The first was put on by a pair of experts associated with SharePointGovernance.org -- curiously a site co-sponsored by our friends at AIIM.  The second was presented by the Burton Group analyst who did Microsoft's internal governance planning back in 2004.  If you’ve been working in this field or working with us here in the Concurrency ECM practice for these last two years, there wasn't a whole lot here that you didn't already know, but I took away some observations that will be worth keeping in mind as we continue to provide governance solutions to our clients.
 
How to properly plan and execute SharePoint governance is no longer a secret.  Sites and blogs have been launched, and books published around this topic.  There's not a whole lot of new stuff, at an intellectual level anyway, that can be brought to the table at this point.  Everybody and his uncle is slowly beginning to realize—or has already realized—that SharePoint governance is not (and in fact has only a precious little akin to) traditional IT governance.  This is Organizational Change Management, really.  Communication and Training, all the fun stuff of user adoption has to be included on top of defining Policies, Taxonomy, supporting processes and organizational structures, security frameworks, etc.
 
That said, actually executing on the advice that's out there is an entirely different matter.  This is where we at Concurrency provide value to our clients.  The full-blown governance and user adoption planning endorsed by Burton and the others came with a very telling caveat: only the largest organizations will have the resources and financial wherewithal (never mind the foresight) to devote even one full-time resource to SharePoint strategy.  Obviously, there are only a handful of such organizations within the local market.  We at Concurrency have the expertise and experience to help those clients without enterprise-level resources assemble, and execute on, an enterprise-level Governance Plan for SharePoint 2010.
 
The role of strategic governance and planning will only expand with upgrade projects to 2010.  The use and application of metadata (particularly taxonomies, folksonomies, enterprise content types, and the pervasive use of all the above through Office integration), as well as the planning aspect of how and where to take advantage of all the new Office features (Visio Web Services, friendlier workflow assembly, etc) makes governance essential.  

]]>http://www.concurrency.com/green-tea-and-governance-takeawaysVisio 2010 Will Eat You For Lunchhttp://www.concurrency.com/visio-2010-will-eat-you-for-lunchMon, 09 Nov 2009 19:46:38 GMTRich WoodThe keyword Microsoft uses for Visio 2010 is diagramming.  This is exactly what it sounds like.  It may just be due to my English degree, but it put me in mind of diagramming sentences in grammar class back in grade school.  We broke out the component parts of sentences-- clauses, parts of speech, etc.-- and organized them logically.   Diagramming in the Visio world is simply doing the same thing with business processes, organizations, etc-- so to a Concurrency consultant that means business process mapping, structure mapping (think organizational hierarchies and site architectures) and the like.

Visio Services are now available right within the SharePoint interface ("Visio Web Services")-- you can build the Visio model on SharePoint, based on live business data.  It's available both in hosted and non-hosted SharePoint and is included in the 2010 Enterprise CAL.

Visio will be able to display business data in visual format (think Excel and KPIs) in a more interesting / alternative way; SP will allow you to share Visio diagrams with non-Visio users.  Visio can be used for much more than just drawing pictures-- now it's a BI tool as well.  Data sources can be as intuitive as another SharePoint list.

If you can use Visio, you can build these models, displays  and reports. They call this (duh) data visualization.  

In session at SPC 2009 this past October, I got to see examples in Visio of process models and hierarchy maps, obviously-- but also:

• Sales team reports and forecasting
• Live ski lift status displayed on a photo map (think Google traffic flow mapping—and yes, I don’t like them much and think they’re out to kidnap all of your information for their own nefarious purposes, but it’s a good example)
• Spatial and geographical data (maps-- think the red/blue state maps the talking heads continuously point to on Election Day)
• Manufacturing plant floor layout with metrics/measurements of the various departments, the machines and their production
• Value stream map - manufacturing process broken down by cost per unit - in Visio, diagram is connected to live data

Because Visio has so many templates already in house, the time to produce a Visio model may well be fairly quick if we can take advantage of the available tools.  Obviously, in every case you will need to customize to some degree, but the template library has the potential to be a real cost saver.

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