What are the 10 most notorious pitfalls when developing a web strategy

 

Dorthe Raakjaer Jespersen (sorry for the “English” character translation), wrote an excellent blog entry on the 10 most notorious pitfalls when developing a web strategy.  If you’re developing any sort of web application, I would highly recommend taking a look. 

If you happen to be in or near Aarhus, Denmark next week, you can also catch an expanded version she’s presenting at the J Boye conference where I’ll also be presenting two sessions: “Managing a SharePoint project” and “Finding Content inside of SharePoint” (with Stephanie Lemieux).

SharePoint 2010: Service Applications

Freshly back from the SharePoint conference in Vegas, I was slightly overwhelmed with the new content come from the product team.  While there’s much of 2010 that remained fundamentally the same from 2007, there are also a lot of new concepts.  Of particular interest to me and a number of my clients is the new Service Application architecture.

In the “old days” of SharePoint 2007, you had Shared Services Providers (SSP).  SSPs contained a number of common “services” that were used by Office SharePoint Server (not WSS), like profile import, search and the business data catalog.  It was an interesting concept at the time and got hyped initially, but most SharePoint farms ended up with simple implementations.

In the 2010 timeframe, SSPs go away and you now have Service Applications and Proxy Groups.  Service applications are the atomic equivalent of  individual services within the historical SSP.  For example, there’s a profile service application as well as one for search.  In addition, there are Service Applications for other new functions like metadata management, word services and access services.  Each service application stands on its own, has its own database and can be deployed separately across one or more servers (load balancing for service applications is built in for scalability).

If you’re interested in getting a bit deeper, take a look at Spencer Harbar’s blog post: SharePoint 2010: Service Applications Part One: Model Overview.  You can also refer to the new Technet content on 2010; here’s a page on how SharePoint 2010 works.

Conference Appearances through 2009

It’s  been a busy year for conference attendances and speaking engagements.  However, as 2009 winds down, there are still great conferences coming up.   Here is a list of conferences I’ll be attending or speaking at through the end of 2009:

• Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 (attending)
  Las Vegas, NV
  19 to 22 October 2009
  
• J Boye International Conference (presenting)
  Aarhus, Denmark
  3 to 5 November 2009
  
• KM World (presenting)
  San Jose, CA
  17 to 19 November 2009
  
• Gilbane Boston (presenting)
  Boston, MA
  1 to 3 December 2009

If you happen to be attending or presenting at any of these conferences and want to connect, send me an e-mail (shawn_shell<at>consejoinc.com) or a tweet (@shawnshell).

Content Types in SharePoint

Taxonomy expert Stephanie Lemieux (Earley & Associates) and I had a great Skype discussion about creating and managing content types in SharePoint.  The conversation centered around whether you should create lots of content types, supporting a very granular taxonomy of documents or creating fewer content types, supporting a larger variety of documents.  Stephanie published a great blog article about it on her blog.  

Stephanie and I both concluded that fewer content types is probably a far better bet.  In fact, there are both taxonomic and technical reasons supporting our position.  From a content management perspective, content management guru Bob Boiko had a great quote in the article:

"How many content types is the right number? The fewest possible to squeeze the most value out of the info you possess.”