(LAS VEGAS) Lest you be tingling with excitement about the potential enhancements to your less than spectacular content management system, there are two realities for SharePoint 2010: what is promised, and what is hoped for.
Those working with MOSS 2007 can be forgiven for the vacuous deflating sound from their proverbial balloons – those familiar with 2007 promises that don’t materialize as promised (e.g. People Search); others attending the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas can be forgiven for their rapid inhalation of hot air as there is great reason to be optimistic, even excited.
Nonetheless, I’ve been both impressed and underwhelmed with what I’ve seen, but more time is needed for Microsoft to complete the beta testing and final refinements before 2010 ships to customers in the spring of 2010. When I asked SharePoint chief Tom Rizzo to explain how he thought the content management functionality compared with other market leaders, Rizzo – speaking as a proud, if not slightly defensive father – instead turned the question back on me: “I challenge all of the other vendors to offer as comprehensive a platform as SharePoint – nothing comes close.” Touché!
Here are five of the biggest impact, promised improvements to enterprise content management (ECM) that I’ve seen with my own two eyes, and even used (albeit with mixed success as the ‘lab’ demos are not all working as promised, and a demo is in fact just a demo):
1-Publishing platform – the entire publishing platform is, in essence, a wiki. You can choose to lock down wiki or public authoring rights, extend them to some, or extend them to all. However, it is possible to create sites as wikis. The wikis come with complete version control, history and permissions, and the rich editor or “ribbon” functionality (as seen in Word 200).
2-Web content management (WCM) – communications professionals rejoice: publishing news and other static content just got a lot easier. The new publishing includes the new “ribbon” user tool that opens when you click on a page or a document, or you simply hit the edit button at the top of a page. Instead of opening a content ‘template’ the new publishing features in-context editing: click on whatever piece of content you want to “edit”, and edit right there on the page (just as you would a wiki). New image tools allow for better control and manipulation of photos, and you no longer have to make the extra step of uploading a photo to a document library before you input it into the page – you can now pull images right from your hard drive, or a website URL.
3-Records management (RM) – Microsoft has invested a lot of money in improving RM in 2010. Among the many features that have impressed, users or administrators (or someone else that has permission to do so) are able to lock down a document in a document library, as a record. And with a right click, can send that document to a Record Center with confirmation. Additional Life Cycle controls have been added.
4-Digital asset management (DAM) – yes, SP 2010 actually includes DAM – you no longer have to use a third-party option to professionally manage images, video and other multimedia.
5-Taxonomy & meta data – perhaps the single, most impressive upgrade or enhancement to SharePoint is the addition of true taxonomy and meta datacontrols. All content now comes with a Managed Meta Data Service Term set that can be inherited from the global taxonomy (site collection), can be built upon or controlled by an administrator, or open to all users (or a combination). In other words, when content is created, be it a page, document, wiki, meta data can be added on the spot, as determined by the publisher or limited to a pre-determined set or tree of terms that is locked down. End readers and users can ‘tag’ the content as well with term tags, ratings (1-5 starts) and “I like it.” What is most encouraging about the use of meta data is that it can be “forced” or a “mandatory field” for all content (we all know that most organizations have options to input meta tags on content, but most content authors ignore it if given the choice).
Other taxonomy features:
·Term ‘nesting” or “threading”(think of the tree with parent & children categories)
·“Fill-in” choices as an option in locked-down taxonomies
·Different taxonomies at different levels: site collections, sites, libraries, etc.
·Managed meta data service can be consumed by multiple farms
·Multilingual taxonomy support (taxonomies using multiple languages)
·Taxonomy workflow (invite specific people to contribute or review the taxonomy)
·View and filter documents by term:
oGeography
oProduct Category
oVertical Industry
oContent Type
oDeal Size
oFolders
oEtc.
While not all of these promised improvements were working in the hands-on labs in my time spent using MOSS 2010, this is in-fact only the beta version (in fact, one of the MS officials helping me through the hands-on labs told me that some of the tutorials are in fact still alpha versions. In fact, the first time I used the new wiki I was convinced it was the 2007 version as I could see not a single improvement to it). There is still some 6 or 7 months still to pass before Microsoft has to work out all the bugs, kinks, and refinements (planned release to existing MOSS 2007 customers is at the end of April, though I would not expect something for installation much before the summer; new customers will have to wait even longer).
Finally, it’s worth noting that MOSS is a massively complex, and powerful system. It’s to be expected that some of the promised functionality may not work for some time, or without serious additional development and customization. In fact, any organization considering an upgrade may do well to wait until after the first service pack, or simply trial the new SharePoint Online which will have close to feature parity with the installed, on premises version.
(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.
“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical.I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”
New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:
·Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)
·Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)
·Pfizer
·Library of Congress
·Hawaiian Airlines
·Kroger
·Conservation International
However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.
Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”
“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners). “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”
NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:
·“Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)
·"Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)
·Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7
·Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)
·New sandboxed solutions
·Integrated rich media & Silverlight
·Improved Visual Studio & SQL
·Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010
·Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)
·Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration
·New site scenarios for:
oPricing analysis
oHiring processes
oCitizen management (citizen portals)
oProject tracking
oSales reporting
oConference planning
oDelivery scheduling
oCompliance review sites
SOCIAL COMPUTING
“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”
Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:
Better blogs, wikis, calendars
Co-authoring
Content tagging
Tag clouds
Ratings
Bookmarks
MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
Browse colleagues and experts
“Share This Site.”
“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Improvements to ECM include:
·Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs
·Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)
·Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive
·The addition of true Digital Asset Management
GOVERNANCE
Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.
SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:
·7.5 miles of network cable
·7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth
·297 world class speakers
·70 countries
·165 sponsors
·300+ hours
·240 sessions
·45+ hours of hands-on labas
·18 customer sessions (Delloite)
·2 SharePoint marriages
·Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News
Like
anything, you get what you pay for. However, that doesn't mean a
social media or Intranet 2.0 solution can't be an inexpensive
solution, but it does require proper planning & governance, and
usually some customization.
According
to the results of the
Intranet
2.0 Global Survey
(561 organizations of all sizes from across the planet), 46% of those
with 2.0 tools have spent nothing or very little on the solution:
46%
have spent $10,000 or less
35%
have spent between $10,000 and $100,00; 19% have spent $100,000 or
more
It
should probably come as no surprise then that satisfaction levels
with 2.0 tools is also quite low:
Satisfaction
rates with executives is dangerously poor: 38% of executives rate
the 2.0 tools as poor or very poor; a lowly 23% rate them as good or
very good
Employee
satisfaction is almost poor: 35% of organizations say employee
satisfaction with the 2.0 tools is poor or very poor; only 27% rate
the tools as good or very good
Only
29% of organizations rate the tool functionality as good or very
good; 24% rate them as poor or very poor
In
short, organizations are spending very little on their 2.0
initiatives, and the satisfaction levels are correspondingly low.
Investment doesn't necessarily deliver satisfaction, but a look into
the technologies used reveals some further insight. The vast majority
of organizations with 2.0 tools use free, open source solutions or
those bundled with a platform solution like SharePoint:
48%
of organizations use SharePoint
20%
of organizations use Facebook
17%
of organizations use MediaWiki
16%
of organizations use WordPress
There
isn't a single, dedicated 2.0 licensed solution used by more than 13%
of organizations. The vast majority use free, open source with the
exception of SharePoint which sports 2.0 tools that leave very little
to be desired (although the social media components in SharePoint
2010 are supposed to be spectacular, and represent a heavy portion of
the investment in the SharePoint upgrade).
Two
lessons are worth noting:
1
- Vanilla solutions will deliver vanilla results (without
customization tailored to the target audience.
2 -
Change management is tantamount to success. These tools require
promotion, education, and communications. If you build it they will
not come necessarily, employees need to be instructed accordingly.
The
findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey are highlighted in the
report "Intranet 2.0: social media becomes mainstream on the
corporate intranet."
To
download a free, summarized version of the Intranet 2.0 report please
visit:
An
organization without a 2.0 strategy risks being left behind, or
outright failure (though death may be slow). Employees want to work
for progressive and innovative organizations, and expect 2.0
environments from employers of choice.
561
organizations of all sizes from across the planet participated in the
Intranet 2.0 Global Survey
and the results
reveal rapid adoption of social media on the corporate intranet in
the past year.
Once
a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs,
wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in
nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in the Western
World.
Intranet
blogs, wikis and discussion forums are quite pervasive, while other
less common tools such as podcasts and mashups remain an
after-thought at most organizations:
47%
have intranet wikis (17% enterprise deployment); 10% have no
plans or interest
45%
have intranet blogs (13% enterprise deployment); 11% have no
plans or interest
46%
have intranet discussion forums (19% enterprise use); 9% have
no plans or interest
46%
have intranet instant messaging (29% enterprise use); 21%
have no plans or interest
19%
have intranet social networking (6% enterprise use); 20% have
no plans or interest
Microsoft
dominance
Microsoft
is leading the 2.0 charge and dominating all competition. For those
organizations that have deployed 2.0 tools inside the firewall, about
half of all organizations have SharePoint (in some shape or form):
48%
of organizations use SharePoint
20%
of organizations use Facebook,17% of organizations use MediaWiki,16%
of organizations use WordPress
Cost
of Intranet 2.0
Intranet
2.0 is cheap. Of those organizations that have implemented 2.0 tools,
almost half have spent $10,000 or less on these tools:
46%
have spent $10,000 or less
35%
have spent between $10,000 and $100,000,19% have spent $100,000 or
more
Poor
execution
Sadly
though, despite the low cost of entry and ease of technology,
satisfaction levels with Intranet 2.0 tools are dangerously low:
Only
29% of organizations rate the tool functionality as good or very
good; 24% rate them as poor or very poor
Satisfaction
rates with executives is dangerously low: only 23% of executives
rate the 2.0 tools as good or very good; 38% rate them as poor or
very poor
To
download a free, summarized version of the report please visit:
36%
come from the U.S; 24% from Europe; 11% from Canada; 11% from
Australia / New Zealand; 10% from UK
61%
have more than 1,000 employees; 32% have 6,000 or more employees;
39% have less than 1000 employees
53%
of organizations have had an intranet for 7 or more years; 17% of
organizations have had an intranet for 2 years or less
13%
of the organizations are government; 13% from technology; 12% from
financial services; 6% from healthcare
The
survey was led by Toby Ward, President, Prescient Digital Media
About
Prescient Digital Media
Prescient
Digital Media is a group of senior intranet and Internet consultants
that provide strategic Internet and intranet consulting, planning and
communications services to organizations of all sizes. Our clients
include: Amgen, Covidien, CBC, CIBC, HSBC, Liberty Mutual, Manulife
Financial, Mastercard, Nintendo, Pepsi, RBC Financial Group, TD, and
more than 100 others. Prescient’s focus includes the
assessment, planning, technology selection, content and launch of
intranets, websites, and web-based tools. For more information please
contact Prescient Digital Media through the website at
www.PrescientDigital.com
or phone 416.926.8800.
This
video will create some diverging opinions and controversy, just as my
presentation “SharePoint Pros & Cons” did when I delivered it
in Denmark. This on-camera interview was conducted in Copenhagen immediately after my presentation (at IntraTeam). Granted I was severely jet-lagged
and suffering from exhaustion when I did the interview, but I stand
my words and assessment: SharePoint (MOSS 2007) is a fantastic
solution, but it is not the best solution for every scenario, and
every organization. Anyone who argues this should throw-away the
Kool-Aid.
As
I stress in my comments, SharePoint is ultimately what you make of
it, and you can do some amazing things with it, at any organization.
However, success with MOSS is a function of time and money. The
out-of-the-box solution is not appropriate for all business scenarios
in all companies. But it is an excellent solution for a small to
medium size business, or as a department-level solution in a larger
enterprise. Given the cost and complexity involved with
customization, I don't believe it makes sense to use it as a large,
enterprise intranet be-all solution for larger organizations; its
possible to make it so, but what is the opportunity cost versus other
portal or ECM solutions?
Feel
free to comment and weigh-in with your opinions, but no flame mail
please (I will just embarrass you for doing so). If you're a
Microsoft employee or partner, then please disclose that you rely on
SharePoint to make a living. Ditto if you're a Microsoft customer or
independent consultant.
Keep
in mind, I too am a SharePoint user, but we (Prescient Digital Media)
also uses other CMSs, portals & social media solutions too. We
are strictly technology-neutral with no reseller agreements. I have
no agenda or ax to grind; I merely seek to inform my readers and
clients about the strengths and weaknesses of the superb, but not
perfect solution that is MOSS 2007.
Social
media adoption has accelerated on the corporate intranet, led by
blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Despite a low cost of entry—often
below $10,000—adopters are not reporting outstanding satisfaction
with the investment, especially among the executive ranks, driven by
inadequate planning and weak or non-existent business plans.
This
data is contained is contained in the results of the Intranet
2.0 Global Survey,
which included the participation of 561 organizations of all sizes
from across the planet.
Intranet
2.0 Global Survey Results
“Once
a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs,
wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in
nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in North America,
Europe, and Australia and New Zealand,” says Toby Ward, the study
author, and President, Prescient Digital Media.
50%
of money on external dollars; 50% internal time and resources
Implementation
strategy
Standard
SharePoint
Limited
external application integration
One
platform for public website, extranet and intranet
Strategic
direction
Operatonal
efficiency
Functional
development
Governance
and resources (single governance structure for all sites)
Challenge
/ problem: Variation system
Custom
development to allow for
Submit
variation to slected country sites
Reject/Accept
a submitted variation
Submit
variation' doesn't work for web parts
Reuse
of language versions not possible
Challenge:
separating language/locale
Only
one language version
Spanish
in Spain, Chile, Colombia, etc.
English
in UK, India, US
Many
languages are supported – but its not supported to have one
language for the CONTENT and another rfor the authoring environment
Challenge:
Image management
Where
is a particular image used? What pages?
Different
versions of the same photo are not grouped together by type
Overly
basic / simplistic
Challenge:
creating forms (complicated for authors)
Challenge:
formatting is difficult with standard editor (reusable cotnent
doesn't work with the RadEditor)
Integrator:
Fishbone Systems AB
Analysis:
well this blows out of the water the notion that SharePoint shouldn't
be used as an external website platform. The Alfa Laval site is
impressive – with 60 sites in 25 languages. Microsoft would do well
to add this to their case studies alongside Hawiian Airlines.
(PHILADELPHIA,
PA) Presented by Dorthe R. Jespersen, J. Boye, at J. Boye –
Philadelphia 2009.
Key
recommenations:
Don't
assume that because its used for the intranet, it will be good for
the Internet
Compare
with alternatives
Manage
expectations
Keep
it simple
Have
a strategic plan
Get
to know your IT
Focus
both on micro and macro governance
Stay
updated with service packs
Follow
best practices
Pay
attention to release information
Notable
client quote: “Only after implementation did we start to learn
about what the system could do. In hindsight we should have utilized
the integration with office Word. Also, we are beginnning to rebuild
our templates, as we didn't hink through the advanced features
SharePoint offers the first time.”
Other
learnings:
“It's
free!” - WSS is free, MOSS 2007 can be very expensive
(particularly customization)
Training
is required and costs money, as does maintenance
All
Microsoft parnters are not created equal
Notable
client quote: “I didn't know you could disable My Sites. Our
integrator told us it wasn't possible. But you have done it already?”
Notable
quote: “We are using Sharepoint 2003 and need to upgrade. But we've
decided to skip MOSS 2007, and go for 2010 instead once that gets
out.”
