SharePoint Conference 2011– Good Reminder, Few Surprises

Microsoft wrapped up their SharePoint Conference 2011 on Thursday this week.  In attendance were some 7,600 people, all seemingly enthusiastic for the phenomenon that is SharePoint.  While there were few surprises, Microsoft did remind everyone why the platform is so popular.

If you’re interested in a complete review of the conference, check out my posts on the Real Story Group blog:

• SharePoint Conference 2011 day one
• SharePoint Conference 2011 final wrap up

It’s fair to say that we haven’t seen the crest of SharePoint popularity or growth.  Microsoft even made an out of character announcement regarding another SharePoint conference in 2012 being held in Las Vegas.  Two conferences in two years – sounds like something new may be announced.  Stay tuned!

What to do with SharePoint when you’re not a Developer

Much of what is published and presented on SharePoint is aimed at a relatively technical audience.  If you review the myriad of SharePoint conferences, SharePoint Saturday sessions and blog content, you’ll find very little content for non-technical folks.  More importantly, much of the content that does exist, wants you to come to one conclusion – SharePoint is the right platform.

Unfortunately, if you’re a manager or an executive trying to understand the strategic choices related to SharePoint as a platform, or perhaps you’re trying to decide what to do with an existing implementation, it’s difficult to find good objective guidance.  Worse yet, if you’re evaluating whether SharePoint is even the right platform for certain requirements, how do you effectively compare your options?

Recently, the Real Story Group and Information Today developed a new conference, the SharePoint Strategy Summit.  This conference is specifically targeted at the non-technical manager or executive.  The program, just a brief two-day affair, focuses on providing you with the information necessary to help you make the strategic decisions necessary for a successful SharePoint implementation (including helping you understand when SharePoint isn’t good choice). 

During these two days, the conference covers topics including:

• SharePoint as an Enterprise 2.0 platform
  

  SharePoint might seem nearly ubiquitous as an enterprise collaboration platform, yet many organizations are still in the process of deciding whether or how to adopt it as part of a broader intranet platform. In the meantime, Microsoft is heavily touting new social and community services in the latest version, SharePoint 2010. Get an objective overview of what works well—and poorly—in SharePoint 2010.

• Strategic alternatives to SharePoint
  

  If you don't go with SharePoint, or chose to put boundaries around the platform, what other alternatives await you beyond Redmond? Learn the pros and cons of SharePoint alternatives.

• Compliance and Records Management
  

  Records management is not a SharePoint strong point. Large SharePoint deployments represent a particular challenge when it comes to the long-term retention, disposition, and discovery of information. This session explores the limitations of the platform and the alternatives you may want to consider. What sorts of steps do you need to take to batten down SharePoint so that it passes regulatory muster?

• The Real Cost of SharePoint
  

  The licensing structure for SharePoint has been a source of confusion for many customers.  However, once you buy the software, the real costs of a solution begin.  What should expect to spend?

• Governance Models and Lessons Learned
  

  Everyone agrees governance is critical—even essential—to long-term success with SharePoint. But how to do it and where to start? Join a panel of consultants and customers who will outline different ways that they’ve gotten SharePoint under control within their organizations. There’s no simple answer here—but you should come away with an approach that works for you.

Unlike other conferences that tend to be heavy on PowerPoint presentations, this conference has a pretty even mix of panel-style debates, moderated roundtable discussions and more traditional presented sessions.  The goal is to create a very interactive experience and enable attendees to get closer to experts, as well as more deeply engage with other attendees.

If this sounds like the right conference for you, visit the SharePoint Strategy Summit registration page.   The conference is just two weeks away and there are just a few remaining slots available.

Getting to know SharePoint

Coming in May of this year, the new SharePoint 2010 promises to be a vast improvement over the existing 2007 version.  Like the transition from 2003, organizations are struggling to make key decisions about when to move to the latest version and what advantages it might provide.  In many cases, the answer greatly depends on your needs.    For enterprises that don't yet have SharePoint, but are evaluating the tool, the environment is probably even more confusing.

In an effort to help clients better understand both the upcoming version and the ecosystem in general, Consejo will be presenting at several regional and international events over the coming months.  If you're looking for greater insight into how SharePoint may or may not be a fit, I would highly encourage you to attend one of the following upcoming events:

1. "What's so special about SharePoint" (webinar) hosted by the Real Story Group, 6 April 2010, 1 to 2 p.m. EST.
   The buzz around Microsoft SharePoint has grown steadily since the product's introduction in 2001.  With the advent of SharePoint 2010, the buzz has reached a cacophony.  This raises the question: what's so special about SharePoint.  Shawn Shell, Principal and Founder of Consejo, Inc.  and Tony Byrne, Founder of the Real Story Group will present a one hour webinar to help organization separate fact from fiction and help organizations figure out if SharePoint is right for them.
   
2. SharePoint Summit 2010, 12 to 14 April 2010 in Montreal, Canada
   Shawn Shell, Principal and Founder, Consejo, Inc. will be presenting a session on "Managing a successful SharePoint Project" and participating on a panel discussing findability in SharePoint ("Findability to be or not to be").
   
3. Midwest SharePoint 2010 Conference hosted by Imerge Consulting, Milwaukee, WI, April 15, 2010
   Shawn Shell, Principal and Founder, Consejo, Inc. will be presenting a session on "SharePoint Tips, Tricks and Traps" to help organizations take advantage of all that SharePoint has to offer, as well as helping them avoid potential pitfalls.
   
4. Hardlines Technology Forum hosted by American Hardware Manufacturers Association (AHMA), 18 to 21 April 2010 in Schaumberg, IL
   Adonis Latham, Consultant at Consejo, Inc. will be presenting a session on leveraging InfoPath forms to help enhance SharePoint implementations. 

As the year progresses, there will certainly be more conference opportunities.  If you can't make it to one of these events, subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you're aware of future events that may be of interest to you.

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).

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).

SharePoint at the JBoye Conference in Denmark

As the JBoye 2008 conference in Aarhus, Denmark wraps up the final day, I can't help but be amazed at the popularity of SharePoint in both in the U.S. and abroad.  With a great deal of Consejo's work located in the U.S., it's easy to get caught up locally and forget the more global community.

During the conference, there was one consistent theme from the largely European-based audience: most European customers are struggling with the same or similar challenges as their U.S.-based counterparts.  Here are a few of the challenges I heard during my presentations:

• With very large installations (e.g. tens of thousands of employees), there are some significant challenges in SharePoint deployment.  The example I heard from an Austrailian (living in the Netherlands) was they had so many employees, they had to deploy multiple SharePoint farms just to enable My Sites for everyone.  As a result, surfacing alerts to users tended to be problematic, since alerts don't travel between SharePoint farms if you're not careful about your Shared Services configuration.
• Variations work generally well for presenting multiple language versions of a primary language site.  For example, presenting a Spanish version of an English site.  However, if you have two Spanish sites -- one for Mexico and one for Spain as an example -- SharePoint does not allow you to leverage the Spanish site to help "seed" the Mexican site.  Both the Spanish and Mexican sites can only be sourced from the English site.  This situation leads to one of two options -- spend more in translation OR copy and paste content from the ES-ES site to the ES-MX site manually.
• On the topic of languages, SharePoint will allow you to store content in any language in any site.  This is fantastic for sharing language specific content.  Unfortunately, the interface (administrative menus and functions) can only be displayed in one language.  This means that if your affiliate in France sets up a SharePoint site with the French language pack, everyone visiting that site will see the French administrative options and functions.  There's no capability for displaying English menus to the British or Spanish menus to the Spaniards.  While most companies I spoke with generally use English as their official company language (creating an English standard for all interfaces), that approach is limiting where English isn't pervasive -- like in Russia or France -- and where the native language isn't commonly spoken beyond the locale.
• SharePoint search facilities continues to be the target of both deserved and undeserved criticism.  Many attendees lamented about the lack of wild-card search support, the inability to submit boolean queries and the inability to "tune" results.  While results tuning is a weakness compared with other enterprise engines, wild-card and boolean support is the result of interface limitations and not limitations of the engine.  In fact, most add-on search vendors simply take advantage of build-in engine capabilities that the Microsoft-supplied search interface fails to surface.

Despite the various complaints, SharePoint is generally very popular.  Companies like Alfa Laval, ExxonMobil and British Telecom had representatives all sharing their experiences with SharePoint.  The attendee from Alfa Laval presented her experiences in developing a public web site using SharePoint  -- across 60 countries an 25 languages.  Despite the challenges she faced during the implementation, she was very positive about both the product and their implementer.

In the end, there was one common thread throughout the conference: users need better information and guidance on the best practices for SharePoint implementation.  This includes not only technology help, but general governance assistance.  In fact, one presenter suggested that the viral growth challenges of SharePoint were largely due to a lack of discipline in many large organizations.   As I and my co-authors point our in the SharePoint Report 2008, published by CMS Watch, there are number of factors to both successful and failed implementations.  However, good governance practices represent a key success factor for any organization.

If you would like to learn more about SharePoint or are looking for guidance on best practices, there are two upcoming conferences that I would recommend:

1. IIR's Enterprise-3 Conference in Las Vegas, 10 to 12 November
2. Gilbane Boston 2008 in Boston, 2 to 4 December

I'll be presenting SharePoint 1/2 day workshops at both conferences in addition to a regular session at the Gilbane conference.  I look forward to seeing you there!

IT and Business Alignment Forum

UPDATE: Changed Discount Code

International Institute of Research (IIR) recently created a new, combined conference that brings together the best of business and IT strategy (Enterprise Architectures Conference, Business Process Management Conference and Enterprise Web, Portals & Collaborative Technologies Conference).  The new IT and Business Alignment Forum will be held 10 to 13 November at the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.

As a multi-year speaker at the Enterprise Web, Portals and Collaborative Technologies conference, I have had the opportunity to interact with many off the attendees and see, first hand, the value that content has provided.   From social networking in the enterprise, to best practices in portal development, to how to create a real adoption plan for web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise -- the conference has both depth and breadth.  With the addition of content and speakers from the other conferences, the Alignment Forum promises to really bridge the gap between the disciplines and enable better and more productive discussions around creating real solutions in the enterprise.

This year I'll be leading a pre-conference seminar on making SharePoint Work in the Enterprise.  I'll be covering topics like:

• SharePoint overview
• SharePoint's strengths and weaknesses
• How to integrate SharePoint with other enterprise systems
• Performance and Scalability
• Overall governance (specific to SharePoint)

If you're interested in attending, you can find more information on the conference web site.  You can also get a discounted registration for the conference by using the following promotion code: SPKRITBIZSS

I look forward to seeing you there!

IIR Enterprise-3 Conference

This week I get the opportunity to attend and speak at the Enterprise-3 conference, hosted by International Institute of Research and BI Research.  I'll be chairing a series of pre-conference seminars on SharePoint with Microsoft MVP Bob Mixon.  In addition, I'm presenting a session on "Sorting out the Productivity Suite Mess," which looks at the major competitors of Microsoft Office as alternatives to the market leading productivity suite.

If you're interested in broader collaboration and content management topics, check out CMS Watch Founder and fellow analyst Tony Byrne's talk "Enterprise 2.0 Technology: A Critical Evaluation."  Tony always has terrific insight into the collaboration, portal and content management space.  In addition, there will be a host of other industry leading speakers there to lend their insight into the space.

For those of you attending the conference, I look forward to meeting you there!  If you won't have the opportunity to attend, please send me an e-mail or give me a ring; I'd be happy to share what I learned as an attendee as well as sharing my presentations.

SharePoint Conference 2008

I just finished my time at the 2008 SharePoint conference in Seattle (admittedly a little early).  By all accounts, this conference was well attended with over 3800 participants.  Keynotes at the conference were given by Bill Gates, Kurt DelBene and three-time Tour de France winner (and first non-European winner) Greg LeMond.  In addition there were a whole slew of sessions on everything from Search Server 2008, Branding SharePoint and Microsoft's latest technology acquisition search vendor Fast.

Most significantly, Microsoft made a few announcements/general statements -- some surprising and some expected:

• "Cloud" Strategy
  Microsoft is making a commitment to introduce managed SharePoint and Exchange services to a broad range of organizations.  Up to now, only firms with 5000 or more seats could participate in their managed strategy (primarily because they were testing and hadn't worked out a multi-tenant approach).  During the conference Bill Gates and Kurt DelBene (Senior Vice President, Office Business Platform Group) announced that they are introducing multi-tenant (more than one client on a "box") managed services for both Exchange and SharePoint (in addition to rolling in LiveMeeting).  Both services will also enable single sign-on, so that historical issues with multiple authentication prompts should be a thing of the past, and a provisioning workflow for both sites and users.  Ultimately, the strategy seems to create an offering where clients can get an "enterprise" experience, where users can leverage a full compliment of traditionally on-premise applications -- like Exchange, SharePoint, Live Communications Server -- through the cloud.  Based on the demo they showed it looks promising.   You can read more here.
  
• SharePoint-like Lists in SQL
  One of the more surprising announcements by Bill Gates was a suggestion that the next version of SQL may contain a SharePoint list-like construct within a table.  Taking that a step further, it may also be possible to directly link a SharePoint list to a single table!  After speaking with some of the product team members, I think this announcement was a bit premature (they appeared to cringe when reminded of what Bill had said during his keynote), but I'll be interested to see how both SQL Server and SharePoint progress in the next release.
  
• Office Online
  While the executives stopped short of saying "we're going to give you Office over the web," they hinted we could be seeing versions of some of the Office suite products being offered over the web -- in thin-client form.  Never one to shy away from a good dig, Bill Gates took aim at Google's "consumer" centric approach, offering that they're (Google's) online productivity products aren't ready for the enterprise.
  
• Visual Studio 2008 compatible Extensions for SharePoint in June
  One source of frustration is the constant marketing of VS 2008 improvements over 2005, but a complete lack of support for SharePoint projects (with the exception of workflow).  Product team members were on hand to assure everyone that the extensions are coming, with cool enhancements over the current 1.1 release for 2005.  They estimate these extensions will be available by June of this year.
  
• Fast Search Integrated with SharePoint
  What was both disappointing and encouraging, Fast has folks onsite to discuss their work to integrate with SharePoint.  The downside was that it felt more like a marketing pitch than a "real" discussion regarding how they were going to enhance SharePoint.  That said, they did demonstrate some of the key advantages of their tool, in the SharePoint context.  In addition, they demonstrated some admittedly very slick Silverlight-enabled search result/interaction controls.  They also demonstrated a search-centric personalization approach with faceted navigation that was novel, even if it was not entirely new.
  
• Browser Compatibility and Accessibility 
  This is less of an announcement and more of what should be a red-faced admission that SharePoint isn't as cross-browser compatible as anyone would have hoped, nor as accessible.  While 2007 is vastly improved over 2003, there are still pretty significant issues on both front.  In both cases, the product team assured everyone that this was a priority for vNext (Office 14/2010ish).  As a short term fix, they're pointing people to Telerik for their "upgrades" to the rich text editor, blog editor and wiki editor.  For accessibility, there's  a "toolkit" (developed with HiSoftware), to help with the accessibility aspects.
  

Beyond the announcements, the conference was full of the usual information sessions.  Microsoft seemed to have a good mix of services partners, ISVs and  Microsoft employees (both Microsoft Consulting Services and product team folks).

I was able to attend a number of sessions, but was generally dismayed at the lack of real depth or new material.  As mentioned earlier, the Fast search sessions were only slightly better than marketing pitches for their software.  Sessions on best practices rehashed the same stuff that virtually anyone in this space would know and has already heard a dozen times. If you had attended the previous SharePoint conference, it seemed like many of those sessions were repeated at this event (more than a year later).  And, in what seemed like a bizarre event, other attendees reported that in one session, two speakers began to disagree with each other during their presentation and  the talk degraded into unintelligible babble.

There were a few bright spots however.  The sessions on the new Search Server 2008 struck a nice balance between technical detail and actual usage.  Customers like EasyJet and Chesapeake Energy did a good job of relating how their SharePoint implementations progressed and the value that they received (a similar presentation by Best Buy for Business was less interesting though).  Finally, the session on the latest version of the Community pack for Wikis was quite interesting, if only to demonstrate how SharePoint can be extended beyond it core competencies, as well as the community support behind the product.

In all, the conference wasn't a waste of time, but I would have preferred better material.  I would have liked to have seen deeper material around all of the topics (in fact for developers, the Office Developers Conference earlier this year in San Jose was the place to be).   Better titles for some session would have also helped -- a sessions titled "My Content is in SharePoint, now what" sounded like it would have been about adoption or user experience, but really ended up being about securing content.  A good topic, to be sure, but poorly "branded." Finally, the best practices session is something everyone wants (the room was packed), but they should have focused more on the specific challenges in running a SharePoint implementation like: provisioning (the explosion that can occur), the challenge around taxonomy development, when to create site definitions vs. site templates, how to train users, dealing with varying levels of Office and so on.

If you were at the conference, I'd love to hear your feedback.  Like it?  Thought it was a waste of time?  Were there particular sessions that piqued your interest?

IIR/SharedInsights Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference

[UPDATED: 25 November 2007 - Slight flow changes to the content]

I've just returned from the IIR/SharedInsights Portals, Collaboration and Content Management conference.  While I've been speaking at this conference for a few years, this year's conference was a bit unique.  Unlike past conferences, where the vast majority of the attendees were more business oriented and "non-denominational" when it came to technology, this year's attendees were more technical and were very interested in specific technologies -- a good many of them interested in SharePoint.  It seemed that many of the attendees were either starting to implement or had implemented "phase 1," a smaller percentage were making their final decisions around what portal platform they would implement in the coming months -- almost universally, SharePoint was in the product mix, if not the chosen portal platform (hence the interest).  However, there still seemed to be a lot of basic questions about how SharePoint would fit in the enterprise.  To that end, I wanted to recommend a book written by some former colleagues of mine.  It's called Essential SharePoint 2007. 

Amazon.com: Essential SharePoint 2007: Books: Scott Jamison,Mauro Cardarelli,Susan Hanley ISBN: 0321421744 ISBN-13: 9780321421746

What makes this book somewhat unique in the space (since there are absolutely tons of book on SharePoint 2007) is that it takes a less technological route.  The book focuses on business usage more than technological implementation.  I would recommend it as good starting point for anyone interested in SharePoint -- whether or not you're technically inclined.  In addition, CMSWatch also has a number of reports which compare SharePoint to other tools in the ECM/Portal space.  These reports would also be valuable for anyone considering SharePoint.

Now, even in the SharePoint 2003 days, there was great interest in SharePoint -- organization's interest in 2007 is not really unique.  In a good majority of the cases, the Windows SharePoint Services component was and is a very big leap in accessible (easily obtained and easy to install) collaborative technology, but it is also just darn easy to use for the vast majority of typical Office users.  Contributing to this ease of use is the fact that the technology is directly integrated with Office -- even people with older versions of Office can use it (you don't have to match SharePoint's version with your Office version).  However, the 2007 version (and WSS v3) seems to have created a great deal more buzz.

From what I heard from attendees, most organizations were hoping to leverage the portal capabilities found in MOSS.  There was a slightly smaller group interested in pure team collaboration management -- project teams need a place to deposit assets and work from one "song book."  Finally, there were those groups who felt that SharePoint was almost a "blight," but needed to figure out how to manage it (my guess is that these individuals got caught in the WSS explosion that occurs in many organizations). 

If I were to identify the biggest changes/advantages, it would be in two categories: 1) expanding content management capabilities and 2) improved extensibility.  On the content management side, web content management tops the list.  This feature allows you to manage traditional web sites using SharePoint.   In addition, Microsoft has added new forms of contribution with the addition of Wiki and Blog templates.    When you add these capabilities to the business intelligence and forms processing features, Microsoft has taken SharePoint native content management function to a whole new level.

For the developer types, 2007 represents a leap forward in extensibility, where almost everything inside of SharePoint is accessible through the object model.   For example, you can write your own authentication provider, to enable SharePoint to use something other than Active Directory to authenticate users (unheard of in SharePoint 2003).  It's also now possible to easily add new interface elements to native SharePoint administrative screens using the "features" capability.

For those of you who might be interested in some of the content at the conference, IIR has posted some podcasts on their web site.   More podcasts will be posted as time goes by (include my own).  If you're interested in attending the spring conference, you can find more details on the IIR web site (you may want to wait a few days before searching around, since the current conference is still running as of 8 November).