Scott Jamison

Hey SharePoint fans! I’m presenting at SPTechCon Boston this week on three topics:

304 Governance Best Practices in SharePoint 2010
Without proper governance, even the best-intentioned SharePoint deployment can go wrong. Do you want to learn how to create an effective governance plan? Would you like to understand the impact of key changes such as social features and solution development changes on your planning process? If so, join us for a timely discussion around planning your SharePoint 2010 deployment through the use of governance best practices.

403 Search Tricks & Tips That Work!
Not satisfied with SharePoint search? Come learn how some easy tricks can help you with your search results, such as tagging (including the one tag you have to get right), search keywords, best bets, synonyms, scopes, authoritative sources and people search.

908 Build It and They Will Come: SharePoint 2010 User Adoption
Do you believe in SharePoint, but feel your hard work is not understood or appreciated? Do you see the value SharePoint can deliver, but feel your investment is wasted? If so, join this session to learn real-world strategies and best practices for driving end-user understanding, appreciation and adoption. This session will walk IT pros, devs and decision-makers through common end-user adoption situations and teach them how to turn naysayers and silent voices into believers!

Download the presentations at http://www.jornata.com/presentations.

If you’re one of those organizations that have put SharePoint in place as a central service to handle the wide array of business requests that come in, it’s likely that you’ll need a good way to track, manage, and prioritize those business requests. I’m calling this concept SharePoint Lifecycle Management.  At TechEd 2011, we announced a free solution and guidance that provides a simplified request and workflow process by using Microsoft Project Server 2010. The solution serves as a function to manage SharePoint projects and related requests in order to view, analyze, and resource them. Business users are able to make SharePoint project requests through a form in Project Web App, while project managers monitor and assign resources, evaluate priorities, and manage their overall project portfolio more efficiently.  The solution is designed to capture the most relevant and important data pertaining to SharePoint requests for an efficient workflow while enabling the business to make the right strategic decisions about the use of SharePoint.  Check it out!

Read the official Project Server blog post at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/project/archive/2011/05/23/announcing-sharepoint-lifecycle-management-solution-with-project-server-2010.aspx.

Watch a replay of the TechEd 2011 session (and download the slides) at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP202.

Thanks to those of you who attended my sessions at TechEd in Atlanta last week!  Here are a few key resources that you’ll want to grab:

1. The SharePoint 2010 Lifecycle Management white papers and resources.
2. My Drive-Thru Best Practices session on SharePoint 2010 End-User Adoption.
3. SharePoint 2010, which will be released toward the end of June. You can read up on SP1 here.

Hey gang!  Thanks for attending my sessions at SPTechCon in San Francisco. We discussed three important topics in the SharePoint 2010 space: governance, adoption, and social computing. The slides for each session can be found at http://www.jornata.com/presentations.html.

Thanks for attending!

Scott

Social Computing is a hot topic in the business world. Companies large and small are looking at ways to keep people engaged and productive. SharePoint 2010 provides ways to do this via collaborative and social technologies.

My session at SharePoint Saturday Hartford entitled “Social Computing Best Practices in SharePoint 2010″ covers the follwing topics:

•Why Social Computing? •Why Social Computing for Business? •What does Social Computing mean in the context of SharePoint? •Best Practices for Social Computing in SharePoint 2010: Top Ten •Governance & Adoption Considerations

Download the presentation in PDF format from the Jornata website.

Thanks to everyone who attended the SharePoint 2010 Governance Best Practices Webinar today! If you missed it, the recording will be posted on the SharePoint Saturday Boston website shortly.

If you’re looking for the slides, you can get them on the Jornata website.

And if you’re looking for the whitepapers I mentioned, you can find them here:

• SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices
• SharePoint 2010 Usage Best Practices
• SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning

Thanks again for attending. Be sure to follow me on twitter @sjam.

One of the more interesting features of SharePoint 2010 is the Content Organizer, which is great for managing large groups of documents. Specifically, this feature enables you to set up rules to accomlish two things:

1. Automatically creating subfolders to partition groups of items (for scalability — so that no folder has too many items)
2. Automatically moving documents to another location (folder, site, site collection) based on document attributes (so you can dictate automatic placement of content)

Two of the questions I get regularly on the content organizer:

1. Does a user need write permissions on the destination location?  Answer: Actually, no! The content organizer will move the content to the new location whether or not the contributing user has access to the destination location.
2. What account is used for the “Modified By” property on the destination document? Answer: The system will retain the original contributor. (The system does not mark the document as updated by ‘system’ or ‘admin’ or anything like that.)

This is an interesting situation — it means that users can effectively add content into a place where they technically don’t have permissions. Not directly, mind you. But in effect.

To replicate this behavior, you can do a quick test as follows:

1. Create two site collections. (I created one called ‘from’ and one called ‘to’ .)

2. Make sure that Content Organizer is enabled on both root sites by enabling the Content Organizer feature (Site Actions–>Site Settings–>Features) :

 3. Create a user that has write permissions to the ‘from’ Drop Off Library, but no permissions to the ‘to’ site. Mine is called “Joe ReadOnly”. Don’t let the name fool you – he has no access whatsoever on the destination site.

4. Enable a’ send to’ location in central administration. (Central Administration->General Application Settings->External Service Connections->Configure Send to connections:

5. In the Content Organizer Settings (Site Actions–>Content Organizer Settings), check the “Allow rules to specify another site as a target location” option.

6. Create a Content Organizer Rule that moves the document to a target location to “Another content organizer in a differnent site” (selecting the ‘to’ location).

7. Log in as your restricted-permissioned user. Upload a document to the Drop-off Library in the ‘from’ site. The content organizer will move the document to your ‘to’ location, using the original user in the ‘created by’ and ’modified by’ columns — without that user having any actual permissions to that site.

When deploying SharePoint in your organization, you’ll hit two main types of hurdles: the technical ones and the non-technical ones. The technical hurdles are pretty common:

• Did we get the logical architecture right?
• Did we get the physical architecture right?
• Do we have enough network bandwidth?
• Are our content databases sized and partitioned well?

And so on…

A tougher and more nebulous topic is the set of non-technical items that you’ll need to consider. Two of these include adoption (getting your solution accepted and used by the messes) and usage (do your users know how to make use of SharePoint and get the most out of it)?

Susan Hanley and I recently tackled these questions in two whitepapers that are now out on the Microsoft website.

The SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper helps you to create an adoption strategy and training plan to encourage usage of SharePoint in your organization.  Questions answered by the white paper include:

• How can I get my employees excited about using this new collaboration technology (champions, incentives)? 
• How do I make sure all the employees in my organization understand and feel comfortable using SharePoint? 
• How can I make sure that SharePoint fits into existing business processes, and makes people’s jobs easier? 
• How do I manage the behavioral change required to integrate SharePoint into the way people work?

The SharePoint 2010 Usage Best Practices White Paper helps you understand best practices for using SharePoint on an ongoing basis.  Questions answered in the white paper include:

• What collaboration methods and site templates are most appropriate for which types of situations?
• What should I ask myself before setting up a SharePoint site? 
• How should I manage content? 
• What should I think about when tagging? 
• Etiquette for social interactions?

I hope you find these white papers useful!

Do you keep your users in mind?  And do you have the right policies in place to prevent catastrophe?

Whether it’s getting user buy-in up front or asking for their feedback six months later, the business users of SharePoint should always be top of mind. For example, one of the questions to ask on every single SharePoint project is “what’s the feedback from our users?” 

If it’s not user-centric, why do it?

Back in July, a survey sponsored by AIIM was summarized in this article by Klint Finley. The article mentions that “26% say implementation is being driven by the the IT department with no input from information management professionals.”  That means that in some SharePoint deployments, IT has put a tool in place without finding out if users need, want, or could benefit from the tool.

The article also mentions that “only 58% of organizations with active SharePoint implementations say they have a policy on site ownership and responsibilities.” In my opinion, this is the #1 factor in getting a successful SharePoint deployment right. If you get the technology right but don’t have policies in place, you’re asking for a mess down the road. It’s like having perfectly engineered automobiles and highways but no traffic lights or speed limits. It’s literally an accident waiting to happen. Users need these ”rules of the road” to tell them how to use the tool effectively.

In short, make sure that your SharePoint implementation has a clear set of goals in mind, involve your users, and put policies in place.  And if you need help with how to come up with those policies, be sure to check out the SharePoint 2010 governance white paper, which provides helpful guidance and outlines a number of best practices.

Thanks to everyone who attended the SharePoint 2010 Executive Briefing at the Microsoft offices yesterday! You can find the slides on the Jornata website.