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Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 6 (Expert Best Practices)

The second “Best Practices” type of session I attended was SPC245, “Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability” presented by Jornata’s Scott Jamison.  Although he is a principal at a competitor, he is also a top-notch presenter, and I always enjoy and get value from Scott’s presentations.

Clearly vying for the title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” Scott, in his third presentation of the day, blitzed through many specific, practical tips on how to make SharePoint more usable and information more findable, including the following highlights:

• Folders (great for contributors, especially incumbents who have a general sense of where things belong via “tribal knowledge”) vs metadata (great for consumers who understand metadata, but can be tedious for contributors if they have to tag content manually).   One key “Go Do” item Scott frequently advises is to create separate user experiences (via default views) for contributors vs consumers.
• Improving search results by paying attention to how things are named (especially the critical “Title” field) and where stored (e.g., the fewer slashes in the path, the higher-ranked in search)
• Improving search results by measuring their effectiveness with out-of-the-box reports from SharePoint:  search queries that returned no results or no best bets.
• Changing default navigation in simple but effective ways like getting rid of the default left-hand navigation where it works counter to how users will find their way through a portal.

All of the techniques that Scott related were in response to common user challenges that each of us has seen “in the wild,” and they were crisply and artfully presented. 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 5 (Expert Best Practices)

The second wave of sessions I attended at last week's SharePoint Conference comprised presentations by experts about best practices in and around SharePoint.

The first of these presentations was by Sue Hanley, whose work I have admired for a long time.  One of her areas of expertise, and the topic of this session (SPC 248), is “Measuring the Value of SharePoint 2010 Investments.”

This presentation was about "squishy" themes like alignment and story-telling and "hard" themes like ROI and metrics (which are squishy once you understand the assumptions behind the models). There was so much usable content that it would be impossible to cover it all here, but here are some highlights:

1. Measure THROUGHOUT a SharePoint initiative.  Many people make the mistake of measuring success based on an up-front assessment, but measurement during the initiative is critically important in re-focusing on the target (for example, after new stakeholders are identified), assessing the trade-offs that inevitably arise during a project, and tuning the solution once stakeholders have had a chance to evaluate it.
2. Don’t start without being tied to a critical business objective (“the main event, not a sideshow”), and make sure it’s a SMART objective, rather than a platitude (or as Susan called them, “motherhood” objectives that no one can be opposed to.)
3. This is sometimes hard for us ex-CPA and other “quant” types to process, but ROI is only part of the story. Provide hard numbers and be able to support them, but combine them with qualitative measures, and stories that put the numbers in context.  There’s quite a difference between “we increased findability of proposal documents by 40%” and the first-year associate’s testimonial about the proposal that wouldn’t have gone out without the portal that helped her connect to both the best artifacts from past bids and also the experts responsible for them.
4. Differentiate between system metrics (e.g., page views, number of documents indexed) and business metrics (hours per week to execute a process) and incorporate both into the measurement of your solution’s success.

There is a vast amount more content to tap into, and that which cannot be found Susan’s website can be explored in more detail in her book:  Essential SharePoint 2010.

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 4 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

A second Microsoft roadmap session I attended at last weeks’ SPC was session SPC271, David Pae’s “SharePoint 2010:  Improving Productivity with Social.”  It was actually somewhere between a roadmap session and a case study session, with examples of social computing inside Microsoft (and of course, Contoso) that illustrate where SharePoint 2010 and complementary products can foster social computing initiatives.

David Pae and colleague Paul Javid (Social Product Manager) walked us through the history of social computing, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Strategy, some specific examples and demonstrations of social capabilities of SharePoint and other complementary Microsoft technologies.

The most noteworthy things from this session:

1. A REALLY cool demo of Lync doing real-time English-Spanish translation of an instant messaging thread – I’m dying to see more of this, and think that the Lync/SharePoint combination provides an unparalleled communications and collaboration platform.
2. A good audience question about a limitation of the “noteboard” capability in SharePoint 2010.  Out of the box, it is not possible to comment on a comment, or to “like” or rate a comment.  [This question underscored how hard the presenters’ job is in a conference where Microsoft has committed to not discuss product futures, and it’s not fair to certain ISVs to discuss/promote others. (cough:  NewsGator!)]
3. The Microsoft products NOT mentioned.  Although Microsoft does a nice job of presenting a story that incorporates SharePoint, Exchange and Lync (on-premise or in-cloud or hybrid), the following technologies with social or collaboration indications were prominently NOT mentioned: 
   1. Skype, a social and collaboration tool with a huge user base, but what feels like a lack of an enterprise integration story ready to be told by Microsoft (whether for statutory or strategic reasons)? 
   2. SharePoint Workspace – how does the offline client, a necessity to many mobile information workers, impact the social computing experience?
   3. OneNote – shared note-taking is at least as social as IM, and the syncing capabilities with SharePoint create interesting opportunities.

Overall, this session provided a solid overview of out-of-the-box social computing capabilities of SharePoint, although not too much of it would be new to our clients running SharePoint 2010.  There will be, however, some more details gleaned from customer case study sessions (still to come)...

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 3 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

I grouped sessions I wanted to attend at SPC 2011 into three waves: 

1. Overview/roadmap sessions from Microsoft about areas important to me
2. Expert “best practices” sessions
3. Customer case studies

This is the start of the first wave:   Microsoft overview/roadmap sessions.

The first session I attended Monday was SPC249, “Microsoft’s Vision and Strategy for the Future of Business Intelligence [BI],” featuring speakers Steve Tullis and Kamal Hathi.  In addition to the themes of creativity and discovery, and their clear vision about “democratization” of BI (not new, but clearer and closer than ever), the most interesting things they presented in the session were demonstrations:

1. A demo of Microsoft’s “Pivot” technology for information visualization using images.  The demo showed a sales performance dashboard mashed up with Facebook-style avatar and profile information so that salespeople’s pictures are grouped into red/yellow/green groups based on performance vs goal, and a dashboard user can “pivot” to dynamically regroup the pictures by data elements such as time, region, product line, sales manager, etc. The Pivot technologies add an element of fun to the act of discovering trends in data in a very “self-service” way.  I nevr get tired of seeing these demos, and would love to see KMA’s Mekko Graphics product mashed up with “Pivot” to incorporate rich image data into really advanced charts, like Marimekko charts, in the future.
2. A demo of report creation using “Crescent,” Microsoft’s new tool for ad hoc visual reporting that will ship with SQL Reporting Services in the next version of SQL Server, code-named Denali.  Easy “drag and drop” reporting and time series animations were some of the highlights of this demo.

Steve and Kamal also presented a final illustration of their vision of “democratization” of BI by likening it to slides:

When we more, ahem, “senior” folks needed presentation slides years ago, there was a whole complicated process around creation of artwork, sending them out to professional preparers, and use of specialized equipment such as carousel projectors to show them.  Creation of slide decks has now been simplified enough by products like PowerPoint that most 9 year-olds would have no problem creating a slide deck for a school project.  This is Microsoft’s vision for business intelligence:  rather than having to submit requests to the “report Gods” on high with access to the data warehouse and specialized tools, users are being empowered to work with large data sets themselves, create models and reports quickly and easily, slice and dice the data, and to play with the data to see what they can learn. 

If the business intelligence tools Microsoft is putting out there live up to their promise of insight through promoting play, fun, and discovery, I’m really excited about what business users are going to be able to do with them in the future.

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 2 (Monday Keynotes)

Another impression that occurred to me throughout the week at the SharePoint Conference, in stark comparison to the Oracle/Salesforce kerfuffle up the coast at OpenWorld, was that I rarely, if ever, heard about competitive technologies to SharePoint in keynotes or sessions.  No Jive, no Cognos, no Box.net, no Alfresco, no Yammer, no Autonomy, etc., at least in the sessions I was in.

Sometimes, it’s a compelling technical vision (RIP, Steve Jobs), but many times, it’s an existential threat in the form of a competitor that really fires people up: just ask Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff.

So I wonder, and I ask you – would the SharePoint Conference have been better if more focused on key competitors, or was the “we’re winning and we’re increasing our lead every day” messaging of momentum the best way to play it?

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 1 (Monday Keynotes)

This week, I was fortunate to attend Microsoft's SharePoint Conference (SPC) in Anaheim, CA, and to meet and learn from some of the most talented SharePoint people in the world.  I’m summarizing some key take-aways from the conference via a series of blog articles.

The conference opened with keynotes by Microsoft’s Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper, and Kurt  Del Bene. There were approximately 7,500 users in attendance, many of them passionate advocates for SharePoint.   

 
Perhaps I’ve been jaded by 5 Worldwide Partner Conferences and other events such as Convergence and past SharePoint Conferences, but I wake up early to get to keynotes in order to hear the words “We are pleased to announce…” followed by a momentous announcement.  As Microsoft was disinclined to discuss the next version of Office and SharePoint, there were few momentous announcements in the keynotes, and most attendees I spoke to said the same. 

These keynotes were generally celebratory in tone, including such data points as:

• 125 million licenses of SharePoint in use at over 65,000 customers
• 67% of all enterprise customers have rolled out SharePoint to everyone in their enterprise

For me, the highlight of the keynote, however, was a demo of the failover capabilities of the newest version of SQL Server, code-named “Denali,” which entailed a helpful assistant taking down a server (literally unplugging the network cable from a giant rack of servers/storage on-stage, pictured here with my colleague Deanne), then watching an enormous SharePoint 2010 content database running on Denali under an enormous workload (7,500 concurrent users, a 14 TB content database, 107 million records in search results) recover from this total failover in about 40 seconds – a remarkable feat of high availability.

The rest of the keynote was organized around three main themes:

Re-defining collaboration:  It’s not too hard to argue that the prevalence of SharePoint in many organizations has changed the way workers collaborate over the last ten years, and a nod was given to the future in the form of a discussion about self-service business intelligence redefining and democratizing BI in the same way (data in SQL, presentation via SharePoint, analysis in Excel).

A rich ecosystem:  The explosion of SharePoint adoption has been a boon to many system integrator and ISV partners, as well as to Microsoft.  Given that, if SharePoint were its own company, it would still be one of the 50 largest software companies in the world, and the heuristic that each dollar of SharePoint licensing generally begets $8-10 in services revenue, it is no small wonder that the shortage of SharePoint talent is top of mind for every SharePoint partner I spoke to.

An end-to-end platform:  Microsoft has continually improved their story about both host (on-premises, hybrid, third-party host, or Microsoft cloud) and client (PC, tablet, phone) options for SharePoint.

No jaw-dropping product announcements, just good solid “blocking and tackling” for a mature, enterprise-class platform which, perhaps, is what Microsoft wanted us to take away.

Other announcements of note:

• The next (due Q4, CY2011, if I heard correctly) version of Office 365 will support read/write integration with external data sources using Business Connectivity Services 
• A new, elite-level SharePoint certification:  Microsoft Certified Architect
• A great template from Microsoft’s Visio team documenting a SharePoint farm topology automatically, with gorgeous Visio-based graphics.