(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
You’ve
probably seen the term, or heard it bantered about by geeks, or maybe your head
is in it… but you may not fully understand the term “cloud” or “SasS” (software
as a service) or perhaps just think its another catchy marketing acronym like
MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).
The “cloud”
refers to cloud computing that at the risk of over-simplifying is simply
hosting – computer, server, software, and other hardware and infrastructure
hosting. You’re already a cloud customer, probably many times over (someone is
hosting your email, website, blog, etc. In fact, 56% of internet users use
webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail – hosted email in the cloud).
In short,
hosting is provided as a service over the Internet. SaaS is simply hosted
software that could include your website content management system, search
engine, CRM (Salesforce.com), etc. The cloud is merely a metaphor based loosely
on those computer network diagrams that so cleverly depict little computers
with wires running between each other, servers, firewalls, etc.
I was
recently pressed on the subject of a “hosted intranet” and why an organization
shouldn’t outsource their intranet to “the cloud.” God forbid we let
professionals who know what they’re doing maintain our second-rate,
after-though, cost-center of an intranet!
It is
baffling to me that the intranet isn’t hosted externally for more organizations.
Well, I’m well versed with clueless executives with knee-jerk reactions around “security”,
privacy, and “the way things have always been done” but I guess I’m naïve to
have faith that more would start to embrace the 21st century. If these dolts
can Facebook then surely there’s hope, right?
The
biggest obstacle blocking the migration of more intranets to the cloud is
culture and fear of the ‘unknown’. If the host has proper security does it
matter if it’s hosted elsewhere? We do our banking online now – we can’t access
the intranet over the Internet?! Most of our benefits and compensation systems
are now hosted elsewhere in the cloud – we’re talking about people’s pay,
insurance and benefits!
In fact, if
it costs me less money and I don't have to worry about the maintenance then you
better believe I choose hosted – and I have told clients the same. Its one of
the reasons the "cloud" is expanding so fast. It would be 10 times
the size if people would just get beyond the knee-jerk reaction to have
everything in-house where it costs more, and probably enjoys less security than
the top of the line that many hosts employ.
The
downside to avoiding the cloud can be far more expensive: I have one client (identity
protected) who spent well more than $1 million on a new intranet design and
platform and it crashed in the first few minutes, never to go live again
because the organization didn’t have the proper infrastructure. One-and-one-half
years later, the intranet is still not live. This would never have happened had
it been turned over to a host. Instead, millions of dollars have been lost, and
countless thousands of employee hours.
Has your
organization embraced the cloud, or are you wasting valuable time and skills on
hosting and maintenance?
--
NEXT
WEBINAR:
What do
the best intranets look like? What are the best practices and principles for
redesigning an intranet? Having designed and re-designed dozens of intranet
sites (and websites), Prescient Digital Media’s Toby Ward and Catherine Elder
will draw on their experiences to provide best practices in approaching
intranet design.
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.
Microsoft
Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is becoming the dominant intranet
technology platform with nearly half of all large to medium-size
organizations using it (or the previous version) to power some or all
of an intranet’s components.
Here
are some stats:
55% of
organizations have implemented or are considering implementing
SharePoint (Global
Intranet Trends 2009 report - 227 participant organizations)
46% of those
companies using social media on the intranet are using
SharePoint(Intranet
2.0 Global Survey – 430+ participant organizations)
In
this five-week online workshop, we’ll examine MOSS as a technology
platform, and as a communications platform for managing content
including news and social media. MOSS is not known as a strong
solution for a large-size enterprise intranet. But it is good
starting platform in a Microsoft environment, and is very good for
team and group collaboration. This workshop will consider all of the
pros and cons of MOSS, with expert opinion and advice for non-techie
business users and communicators. Included in this Webinar will be:
Introduction
to MOSS—An overview of the technology in non-techie language.
Pros
and cons of MOSS for communicators—The good, bad and the things
Microsoft won’t always tell you.
MOSS
for content management—The elements and functionality of the
content management system and how it compares to other systems.
Planning
& Governance—MOSS can in fact create more problems without the
necessary planning and governance. We’ll tell you what you need to
prepare.
Plug-ins
and alternatives to MOSS—MOSS is a very complex platform, but
there are many additional modules and plug-ins that can enhance it
greatly… We’ll also compare MOSS to other alternative solutions.
Webinars
are asynchronous-you participate when it’s convenient for you. A
new text-based lecture is posted each Monday morning, but you can
take advantage of it whenever you have the time. Be sure to watch the
video demo of the webinar format to determine if it’s right for
your professional development needs.
(AARHUS, DENMARK: jboye08) You’ve seen American
Idol, and perhaps even the brutally awful version from Canada, Denmark, the UK and others… and now there’s Web
Idol, for CMS vendors.
A
fast-paced, entertaining set of competitive demos alla American Idol. Five CMS vendors present 7-minute demos
showing the best features of their CMS systems. Five succinct,
comparative presentations are judged by an expert panel of judges that offer
pithy commentary. However, like Idol, the audience vote for the winner!
Sitecore led-off and did
competently in the 7-minutes provide for the demo. I like the insite
editing alla Red Dot. The ciritcs were fair, but critical.
SDLTridion followed and was…
confusing. I like the on-page AJAX driven editing without
having to load multiple windows. I like the Tridion folks, but the critics were harsh.
Open-source CMS Hippo was next-up. More
focused, I like the drag-and-drop AJAX interface under user
management. I don’t like the lack of in-site editing – it’s the 21st
century. To quote Tony Byrne, “…like a hippo it’s (the CMS) potentially fatal to
humans.” Overall, the judges appear to like Hippo best… thus far.
eZ ran in 4th. The
two-time defending champ and open-source CMS led with a very smart demo
site that included advertising and lots of multimedia, and even Google
maps. I like the integration of commenting and Web 2.0 with the in-site
(in-context) editing. The judges seem confused and uncommitted.
e-Spirit in the anchor
position had a very competent, but lightning-fast confusing demo. The
presenter was very quick and the system seems quite capable… but drab. The
speed of the demo confused me greatly… I couldn’t follow what he was doing
or why. Unlike the other vendors, e-Spirit finishes early… but I’m
confused. I shall not be casting my vote for e-Spirit. The judges also
seem confused.
Tony was
a very good judge with some very good remarks, analysis, and quite funny. Erik
and Claudia however looked and sounded lost… Where have all the good judges
gone?
VOTING
Remember,
like Idol, this is not comparative analysis of which CMS is best, it’s a popularity
contest based on a lightning fast demo. The winner is voted on by the audience.
I voted for eZ Systems. I like the AJAX, multimedia and Web 2.0. The demo
site was nice and progressive.
The
audience cast their votes…. And the winner is…Denmark-based Sitecore (1st time winner).
(AARHUS, DENMARK: jboye08) “SharePoint
is good at a number of things,” says one SharePoint expert, addressing a group
of SharePoint users and followers here in Aarhus. “But it’s bad at just as many.”
There
continues to be much discussion, debate, interest, enthusiasm, and caution
about SharePoint (MOSS 2007). Such is the case here at jboye08 where I’m addressing
the conference on the subject of Intranet 2.0 (today) and eHealth 2.0
(tomorrow).
Gartner
nails the analysis in its spring report Five Best Practices for Deploying
SharePoint:
·“Though it covers a broad spectrum of capabilities, MOSS
2007 is not yet a full enterprise content management (ECM) system.
Organizations requiring advanced content management capabilities and
process-centric applications will need to augment their capabilities with
partner offerings, or deploy MOSS 2007 alongside an ECM system rather than as a
replacement for it.”
It might be the product for
you, but how do you know unless you analyse your requirements
A phased implementation
appears to be more successful, add bells and whistles later
Sharepoint in itself is not a
'strategy' - it can be part of ECM, Intranet or collaboration elements of
your overall Information Management strategy
Contrary to MS marketing
hype, Sharepoint does not actually do everything brilliantly
A Sharepoint deployment, like
any other technology implementation will ultimately fail if not aligned
with strategy, and if not properly planned with comensurate governance in
place
I should
disclose at this point that perhaps it might appear that I’m not a fan of
SharePoint – or that I oppose it. Not at all; in fact, we use SharePoint for
our own intranet and are upgrading to MOSS 2007. As well, we have many clients
that use WSS and MOSS. However, I do think however that SharePoint is being
used by too many organizations, including clients, that aren’t well served by
it.
I believe
there are two telling quotes, both by Shawn Shell and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, the
co-authors of the CMS Watch The
Sharepoint Report 2008 (TSR) (the best analysis report on MOSS that I’ve
seen) that best sum-up MOSS:
“MOSS is very good in smaller, workgroup environments (it’s not traditionally very good
for 5,000 or 10,000 concurrent users),” Alan Pelz-Sharpe (see SharePoint
overview (pros & cons, MOSS).
A number
of experts and users (owners / licensees) have weighed-in on their expert
opinions and analysis of SharePoint. To avoid any controversy and to protect
the individuals who were freely expressing and sharing their opinions here at
jboye08 in Aarhus, here are some of the more frank quotes:
“The perception is that the
search engine is terrible. I’m not 100% in agreement… the engine is pretty
good, but the search interface can be weak (e.g. the engine does support
wild card and Boolean searches, but usually the implemented interface does
not).”
“Personal sites (My Site
functionalilty) is both interesting and scary at the same time.”
“The complexity across farms
is ridiculous. Make sure your consultant (MS partner or implementer) give
you a list of those things that stop working across farms.”
Still
more advice from Information Week writer Nicolas Hoover (thanks to our own
Cathy Mcknight for bringing this to my attention, Can
Microsoft Keep SharePoint Rolling?)
“The software's
Swiss Army knife approach helps companies create more useful intranets, set up
document sharing, offer blogs and wikis, and build a richer online company
directory. This boundary-blurring nature is part of its appeal, and can even
help in budgeting: IT teams that might not get the nod for document management
software have been known to slip SharePoint into the Microsoft Office budget.
But
SharePoint's feature sprawl can be part of the problem. By taking what comes
bundled in SharePoint, companies can end up compromising on critical functions
compared with best-of-breed tools. And SharePoint deployments easily can go
wrong if IT teams just turn on additional modules without considering the
business case, requirements, and training needed to make them part of a
business process. SharePoint's all-in-one appeal may lessen as content
management standards become more prevalent, making best-of-breed approaches
more viable. Still, it's undeniable that SharePoint's on a roll because of
intense demand to better manage and share an expanding glut of diverse content."
If you
have MOSS, or are thinking of buying, Gartner offers the following
recommendations:
To ensure that SharePoint
does not become another content silo, build or update your enterprisewide
content management strategy to address collaborative and basic content management.
Build a broad inventory of
existing content management applications and repositories and assess the
investment levels in those before bringing in another platform such as SharePoint.
Define business requirements
and the corresponding technical and functional needs, which may span
collaborative and process-centric content applications. Map your content management
products to them with an eye toward minimizing the redundancy in
application development, IT operational or other costs.
Examine the integration
points required between MOSS 2007 and an ECM suite and assess the
availability tools and technologies to ensure interoperability.
Establish and enforce
governance policies regarding when to use and when not to use SharePoint.
MOSS 2007
is a wonderful solution – but its ideal for smaller companies, and can be a “massive
problem” for larger ones. I like it a lot, but I’m technology neutral and am
frank about its strengths and weaknesses. I’ll continue to recommend MOSS for
some, but not for others.
