Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

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. 

 

Ascending Denali -- SQL Server, v.next

Today, Microsoft released to the public the product guide for Community Technology Preview #3 of the upcoming release of SQL Server, code-named "Denali."

I had the opportunity in the Spring to see some of the new capabilities of this release of SQL Server, including the (most interesting/exciting to me) reporting tool called "Project Crescent."  Many attendees at this year's Convergence, Tech Ed, and WPC events got to see it included in some of the sexier demos at those events.

The SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3 Product Guide includes useful resources and demos that will help partners like KMA, and our clients, in their evaluation of CTP3.  This includes:

• 14 Product Datasheets
• 8 PowerPoint Presentations
• 5 Technical White Papers
• 13 Hands-On Lab Preview Documents
• 6 Click-Through Demonstrations
• 13 Self-Running Demonstrations
• 26 Links to On-Line References
• 44 Links to On-Line Videos including 26 Presentations from North America TechEd 2011

I would encourage anyone with an investment in SQL Server to avail themselves of these "fresh-off-the-presses" resources, and to take this opportunity to provide feedback to Microsoft on this CTP version of Denali.

The product Guide can be obtained here:  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27069

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, Part 1: Don't Re-Tweet the Revolution

Among the highlights of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston were the keynote presentations.  The keynotes are always a high point of the conference, and this year’s were remarkable because of the size, complexity, and sophistication of the organizations represented (e.g., Microsoft, Deutche Bank, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Avaya, etc.) , and the expertise of the presenters themselves.

One presentation I found compelling was that of John Stepper, a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.  John’s theme was “Stop Evangelizing, Start Doing,” and he echoed a central theme of this year’s conference:  BUSINESS VALUE.

One of the sub-themes that resonated with me was the business challenge: “Help me get through compliance,” a common lament of workers in organizations with strict compliance requirements. Compliance adds cost, time, and hassle to many business processes, often because workers aren’t aware of what the compliance group needs from them.  Not surprisingly, this theme has a corollary from compliance workers:  “Help us avoid surprises.”

Social computing at Deutsche Bank transformed compliance processes by making them more transparent, resulting in:

• simpler processes (internal “customers” can help refine processes that they can see and understand), and
• better-qualified projects (with compliance requirements and processes highly visible, higher quality submissions were received, resulting in a reduction of costly iteration/re-submission).

In providing this and other examples of the commercial benefit of social technology within Deutsche Bank, John showed real business transformation and encouraged the audience to seek similar opportunities within their own organization.  Rather than working from a script of best practices, seek out high-value opportunities that are relevant to you.  Or, as he more succinctly put it: 

“Don’t just re-tweet the revolution – start your own.  Change the work!”

[of course, like 50 people in attendance re-tweeted this pithy remark, some more ironically than others]

One additional note on form:  John also benefited from a slide deck that was as simple as it was beautiful, rooted in the Presentation Zen philosophy.  I'll post or tweet a link if I see the deck posted.

Tip of the Week: Browse Faster, Type Less

People are free to work the way they want, but in much the same way that some expert Microsoft Office users break out in a rash when they watch a (new, less skilled, less experienced, inept, etc.) user perform an operation in an inefficient way, there is a web browser shortcut that I am amazed I don't see used more frequently.

Every time I watch someone type "http://" in front of a web address, I'm dying to tell them this: 

1. For any web address that ends in ".com" just type the domain name, e.g., "Boston"
2. Press [ctrl-enter]
3. Watch your browser (with apologies to Steve Jobs) "magically" infer the leading "http://" and the trailing ".com". 
4. Give your fingers a break, and enjoy the 11 keystrokes you just saved!

For your added computing pleasure and efficiency, here is a list of keyboard shortcuts for many of Microsoft's key products.   What's YOUR favorite way of saving keystrokes?

Geek Reads 2009.2: Free

My reading this summer included Chris Anderson's book, "Free" (I got the Kindle edition, available for a limited time as a free download, of course).

Anderson's seminal work, "The Long Tail" helped explain to a generation how the distribution model of the Internet has fundamentally changed economics of many businesses by spreading fixed costs over previously unimaginably huge audiences/markets.  He continues in this vein in "Free" by tackling the "free economy" and what makes it tick.

In "Free," I learned about Anderson's six models of free:

• Freemium
• Ad-supported
• Cross-subsidized
• Zero marginal cost
• Labor exchange
• Gift Economy

and the important but often-overlooked distinction between "gratis" ("free as in beer") and "libre" ("free as in speech").

The lessons I took away from "Free" are twofold:

1. Buy side: When I am offered something for free, I am more guarded, inclined to want to understand why I'm getting the offer (what is the premium item they will have earned the right to sell me? do they want my contact information? am I expected to contribute content back to a community in return? can I "free ride" on this offering?)
2. Sell side:I am more cognizant that the best way to sell consulting services is to give a little bit away. This frequently means providing clients and prospects with something of value at no charge during what consulting guru David Maister calls the "courting" and "super-pleasing" processes.  I've always known intuitively that this was the right thing to do, but this book helped me sharpen my thinking about it, and consider it as part of the professional service firm's economic model.

Office 2010 -- First Impressions

At last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I learned a bunch of things, to wit:

• Microsoft has a HUGE wave of technologies poised to hit the market over the next 12 months (Windows 7, Office 2010, and many others)

• Microsoft LOVES to compete with the likes of Google, VMWare, Cisco, Apple, etc.

Notwithstanding these big, obvious themes, I was pleased to get my first look at Microsoft Office 2010.  Here are a couple of first impressions, formed via Chris Caposella's value keynote, some executive roundtable meetings, and a hands-on lab session with Office 2010 at WPC:

Outlook:

  The ribbon finally shows up in Outlook 2010, eating up some valuable screen real estate but also providing access to some interesting new features.  One is a "conversation view" that allows the user to group messages by conversation, and expand or compress conversations, very easily. 

My favorite new Outlook feature is a "Clean Up/Ignore" function that allows the user to quickly and systematically re-direct or delete messages in a thread -- it's also known as the message "mute button."  For example, once a thread gets unwieldy (5 reply-all's, 5 "please remove me from this thread" messages, 3 "me too" messages, etc.), a user can systematically trim out the chaff, keeping only the messages where a decision was made or action required. I remain curious, however, how this feature will handle branching of messages outward from a thread, and look forward to testing this feature in more depth.  

Another useful feature is the addition of a small, relevant snippet of a calendar view added to meeting requests so that the user can see his/her calendar from within the meeting request.

Excel: 

I'll likely write more about this in the future, but the addition of sparklines and a feature called "slicers" add more BI and data visualization capability to Excel, and the keynote demonstrations included a user easily working with a data set containing 1.5 million rows of data in a workbook via the SQL Server 2010/Excel 2010 integration previously code-named "Project Gemini."  

Word: 

One exceptional thing I saw demonstrated in Word actually applies to several of the Office products:  the ability for multiple authors to concurrently author the same document.  This is a frequently requested capability, and I look forward to demonstrating this when the SharePoint beta is set up in our lab environment.  For now, you can see this process via the demo in this video (note: fast-forward to the 54-minute mark).

 
[BP0VK] The Business Productivity Opportunity: The Next Wave, Your Customers, and You

PowerPoint:  

Other than the co-editing capabilities which I saw only in the context of Word but which I expect to be most valuable in PowerPoint, the most interesting new features I saw related to new tools for editing of pictures and videos from within PowerPoint.

In all of the Office products, the "Backstage" view replaces the combination of the Office button and the Document Information Panel as the place to see and manage metadata and other document properties.

There were several new features in Office applications like Access, One Note, etc., that I saw in demos but have yet to take for a test-drive.  KMA has the bits installed in our lab, so watch this space for more updates as we continue our testing and learning.  Meanwhile, check out this excellent image gallery that shows off the new user interface and other key features in Office 2010, and this overview [Download OfficeOverviewFS].

On-Line Social Stratification: Different = Bad

I recently had the opportunity to hear danah boyd of Microsoft Research speak at a Mass Technology Leadership Council (MTLC) event about social media.  Although the principal themes of the event were supposed to be about ROI on Social Media, Ms boyd's remarks were the highlight of the day for me.  Her topic of study (through her work for Microsoft, Harvard University, Cal-Berkeley, and others) is the intersection of technology and society, mostly in the form of how young people use social media, and her remarks provided useful insights into how tomorrow's information worker regards social media technologies.

Several weeks after the MTLC event, I happened upon a transcript (actually, her crib notes) of Ms boyd's remarks from a later presentation to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.  It captured and built on some of the themes we heard at the earlier event, and provided some timely updates to social media use cases (#iranelection, Michael Jackson's death).

The single most resonant point in Ms boyd's remarks was one that not only applies to Internet-based social media sites, but also much more broadly:

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics."

She uses this point to underscore social stratification in on-line communities along lines of age (teens don't Tweet), socio-economic status (Facebook vs MySpace), race, sexual preference, etc., but it also applies to smaller communities.  It's critical for us, as those who help information workers effectively implement and use these technologies, to keep this in mind as we look to social media and on-line communities as ways to bring people together within an enterprise.  We heard plenty of "Mom and apple pie" sentiments of this type at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e.g., "It's about culture, not tools," "It's 90% sociology, 10% technology," etc., but seeing this point borne out in the larger Internet environment and supported by broad, rigorous research really brings it home.

A good rule of thumb in practice seems to be:  if your people won't pick up the phone to call one another to ask for or offer help, a well-engineered implementation of SharePoint, Lotus Notes, SocialText, Jive, etc. although useful for many things, is not the solution to your collaboration problem.

Braindump: 2009 MIT CIO Symposium

In addition to the data stream of 140-character bons mots, I feel inspired to write in more depth on some of the themes we explored at yesterday's MIT CIO Symposium, perhaps due to a great article by Adam Singer entitled "19 Reasons You Should Blog And Not Just Tweet."

This MIT CIO Symposium, my fourth, was themed, "Sustaining CIO Leadership in a Changing Economy," and I attended sessions as follows:
-- CEO Keynote Panel
-- Academic Keynote Panel
-- CIO Keynote Panel
-- Lunch Presentation from Attivio
-- Breakout:  Enterprise 2.0 Panel
-- Cloud Computing Keynote Panel

The CEO Keynote Panel was noteworthy because of the assembled CEOs' ability to succinctly talk about what they  need and expect from CIOs in a changed world.  A key concept that they stressed was simplicity.  In fact, they emphasized that CIOs should use this downturn as an opportunity to prune their portfolio of projects (and vendors) to focus on those most closely aligned with the organization's strategy.  One CEO's best-of-show aphorism was "Do less with less," while another's was to "Stamp out diversity [of platforms]."  The CEO panel also told us that the CIO's job is to "hold up a mirror to where the CEO is not thinking about the business correctly," although we all know what a challenge it is to do this directly and still keep one's job.  (link to prev blog article on CIO/CEO exchange)

The Academic Keynote panel is always a favorite of mine, as it represents the chance to listen to some of the best and brightest researchers from MIT relate their thoughts on the "Next Big Thing" in IT.  Of the most interest to me was Tom Malone's assertion that the NBT is "Collective Intelligence," the collecting and harvesting of knowledge via tools like Google, Wikipedia, and Innocentive.  I'm interested in how organizations use social media and collaboration tools to drive efficiency, speed, and innovation, and will follow this trend closely.  Professor Malone suggested that perhaps we should be talking less about "Cloud Computing" and more about "Crowd Computing."

My biggest takeaway from the CIO Keynote Panelwas the emphasis on Portfolio Management, deemed a critical skill/process for CIOs -- this should be welcome news to our partner William George Associates, who should benefit from their specialization/expertise in this discipline.

The lunch was punctuated (rather than interrupted, as in the past) by a brief presentation from Sid Probstein, CTO of Attivio, a company I've been kind of ambiently following for quite some time via a friend who works there.  Their value proposition of integrating SQL-style joins among structured data sources with rich full-text searches of other unstructured data sources could make for a separate blog post on its own, and I will be researching this more.

I had high hopes for the afternoon's Enterprise 2.0 Panel, not least because I always enjoy Andrew McAfee as a moderator and/or participant.  However, I was disappointed in that there was only one CIO actually on the panel, and there was relatively little talk about how enterprises were using Enterprise 2.0 applications behind their firewall.  The most interesting answers for me were to the question "Are people acting differently [as a result of these tools]?"  Several changes are afoot that the panelists summarized as:

• increased desire to/comfort with "putting one's thoughts out there"
• the blended lines between private and public communications (save for regulated communications)
• the increased permeability of organizational boundaries and informality of corporate communications
• the increased velocity of information (e.g., wikis for agile development, integrated presence)

The final panel of the day was dedicated to the theme of the "cloud," loosely defined by the panelists as computing:

• with no capital expenditure (via a third party, outside your organization's own data center)
• with elasticity of supply (pooled resources delivered over the web)
• powered by software
• providing new business capabilities

One data point of interest mentioned by the panelists was how consistently an upgrade in an organization's core messaging platform (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes) served as an inflection point for CIOs evaluating moving applications to the cloud.  There is enough acceptance of cloud applications (e.g., SalesForce.com) in the marketplace and price pressure to force them to consider this option.  Principal barriers to CIOs adopting applications hosted in the cloud were observed to be:  regulatory requirements, sunk costs in data centers, and "fear of trying."

Through the day, there were lots of references to many IT standard heuristics, for example, "5% of revenue dedicated to IT," "60-70% of all IT expenditures dedicated to maintenance," etc. but there was also an interesting glut of references to the recently released McKinsey study (pdf) debunking some conventional wisdom about cost savings of cloud computing.  The debate has been ongoing since the days of time-sharing on mainframes, and won't change any time soon.

All in all, this is an event that I look forward to each year.  Through KMA's affiliation with both SIM and MIT, we know many of the attendees, enjoy learning side by side with our clients, and have a significant presence here.  We are already looking forward to May 19, 2010. 

Some final, relatively random, thoughts and musings from the day:

• "Never waste a crisis" -- most of current Fortune 500 companies were formed during past economic downturns.
• CIOs need to do less with less, by de-selecting projects.  Focus on customer-facing initiatives.
• CIOs need to "seduce the business people" with capabilities that add value in order to get joint sponsorship/CEO's ear.
• Four years into my attendance at MITCIO, and I've heard presenters refute Nicholas Carr ("IT Doesn't Matter") each year.  Think he hit a nerve?
• On Federal Economic Stimulus accountability:  "We are bound to not get it right the first time."  (evolving processes)
• On Enterprise 2.0:  Beware the "trough of disillusionment"phase of its lifecycle.

Great article, but I just skimmed it

In this month's Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr explores the notion that the always-on, always-at-our-fingertips nature of the Internet in general and Google specifically is changing the way we, as humans, process information.  It's worth a read (not just a skim, seriously -- really READ it), and perhaps a re-read. 

Nick Carr is one of the most skilled people on the planet at thinking and writing about this type of subject matter, and I found it interesting that when I met and chatted with him at MIT last week where he was plugging his book, he said he had quit Twitter.  We didn't talk about it much at the time, but Twitter is precisely what brings out the feeling in me that he writes about in the article:  that all of my ideas and discourse are getting distilled/compressed/dumbed down into, and consumed in, sub-140-character chunks.

I hope I can make it through his book in my dumbed-down state.  Nick stays top left on my PageFlakes "A" list blogs page.

Clever Idea: Metadata Included

I encountered an interesting innovation this week.  I was at MIT to hear Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite writers/bloggers/thinkers about technology, speak.  While people were gathering and chatting before the presentation, I met a few people and we exchanged business cards.  One of the attendees shared with me his business card, and it was unique.  Not just unique in the "I've never seen that before" kind of way (although it was), but unique in the "tailored precisely for this event" way.

The typical business card I encounter typically has the following elements:

• name
• title
• company name
• mailing address
• phone #
• fax #
• e-mail address
• [optional elements:  blog, IM, etc.)

This one added two elements:

1. a picture (more on this in a moment)
2. a quick blurb saying where we met: "We met at T-Systems Event at MIT 5/29/08"

I thought the blurb was ingenious.  It instantly added context to that card by placing the person at a specific event, and it saved the recipient from having to do what I often do after events:  jot down some notes about where I met this person on the back of his/her card.  This addition clearly reflects a super-organized person who tailors his business cards to every networking event/opportunity.  The downside, of course, is that it seems impossible, even given typical high-quality business printing capability, to create the letter-quality, printed-on-80-pound-stock business cards that are de rigueur in most businesses. I found the tradeoff to be worthwhile in this instance, although if I made up cards like this, I would likely keep a cache of traditional, higher-quality business cards on hand for more formal customer meetings.

Of the picture, I am a little more skeptical.  Generally, in my experience, real estate agents are some of the only people I've seen who can get away with having their picture on the face of their business card, and even then it is often, for lack of a better word, cheesy.  Of course, my experience is relatively parochial (I've lived in the Northeastern US all my life), so I'd welcome dissenting comments/points of view from readers farther afield who've had different experiences. The one mitigating factor in this case is that it complements the blurb well -- the next time I am at an MIT networking event, I am more likely to recognize only this person's face and recall where we met.

It was just a tiny idea, but clever - one often finds innovation in places (and at events) like this.  My old habits are hard to break, however, and I'll bring traditional business cards, and a pen, to future networking events.