Offline SharePoint

We ran a survey of registrants to the last webinar and I thought the results were interesting. Here’s a snapshot. About 40% were from organizations with over 1,000 employees. Sample size is about 1,700.

Question 1: SharePoint Usage

• 4% – Not using SharePoint
• 9% – Planning to deploy in 12 months
• 4% – Planning to deploy in 24 months
• 27% – Deployed in certain departments
• 56% – Deployed enterprise wide

Question 2: What are your plans to manage Email in SharePoint?

• 22% – No plans
• 40% – Not sure
• 21% – Planning to deploy in 12 months
• 4% – Planning to deploy in 24 months
• 12% – Already using

Question 3: Are you planning Outlook Integration with SharePoint?

• 40% – Yes
• 40% – Not sure
• 18% – No

No surprise that over 90% were either using SharePoint or planning to deploy. For me, the interesting stat was that only 12% were currently using SharePoint to manage email. That’s a pretty low penetration, however another 21% ARE planning to deploy email management in SharePoint in the next 12 months. I wonder if the release of SharePoint 14 has anything to do with that.

Note the very high interest in integrating SharePoint with Outlook (only 18% are not planning). Stay tuned as we start to talk about the interesting new features for email management coming up in version 4.0 of Colligo contributor Add-In for Outlook – to be released in June

Yesterday’s webinar with MVP Bob Mixon, of Mixon Consulting, and David Scott of Symantec was a resounding success with almost 1,700 registrants. The title was “Tips and Trick for Email Archiving in SharePoint”.

You can now access the webinar resource center where you can get an on-demand replay of the webinar, download a whitepaper and get a trial of the Colligo Contributor Add-In for Outlook.

Check it out!

Here’s the latest in the guest series I’m doing here on 7 ways to get more from SharePoint. My last post was on designating a “go to” person for SharePoint.

When a group first forms, it has to make a decision how it will get its work done. This decision process is informed by the technology available to the group at the time, the previous ways that individuals in the group have carried out other similar work, among other factors. What happens over time, though, is that well-formed groups standardize on a particular way of doing things, and those approaches remain impervious to external shocks … the comings and goings of new people, the technology that is being used, etc. So if you install SharePoint and give it to a well-formed group, the most likely outcome is that the group will make the capabilities of SharePoint work in such a way as to support the work process they already have. Thus by default, while the technology has changed, the work practice has not, and has merely been transferred from one tool to a new tool. Is this progress? No.

What’s needed, therefore, is an intentional re-conceptualization of the way that works get done by groups when a new tool is introduced, with the goal being to improve productivity and effectiveness by eliminating unnecessary steps, cutting wasted elapsed time, and streamlining the distribution of accurate information so people are working on the right priorities.

The process of re-examining how work gets done comes down to observation, process mapping and process re-imagining. You need to gain an understanding of the work that people are doing today, using the various tools at their disposal, and then get that understanding into an externalized representation that can form the basis of both discussion and analysis. Often an external person—an outsider to the group—can see things about how the group is working today that members within the group are unable to see. To members inside the group, the way they work is intuitively accepted as the best way of doing things, because they are operating within the system. To an external observer, however, they are not constrained by the non-articulated reasoning for why work is done in a particular way, and are free to challenge assumptions and suggest ways that the group can improve their performance.

This is the fourth post in the series I’m doing here on the OfflineSharePoint blog. The last post was on Embracing the “Seamless Teamwork” Approach.

With the SharePoint software installed, business value can start to flow as soon as you align the use of SharePoint with the technical capabilities that are available. This requires consultation with different business groups about how they get their work done today, and follow-on analysis of how and where work process can be improved. This type of analysis is not generally what IT is good at, so you need to find and designate someone (or multiple someones) to form the bridge between the SharePoint group in IT and the business groups wanting to use SharePoint. Let’s call them a “business process improvement analyst”, or for short, the “go to” person for SharePoint. And for your firm, there may already be such a group in existence—it’s time to co-opt their help with understanding what SharePoint can do to help improve business performance.

The goal with having a go to person for SharePoint is that it puts a face on the technical capabilities of SharePoint. The individual concerned is able to explain to business groups in business terms how business processes and work practices can be improved with SharePoint, and then translate the business requirements into technical requirements for the IT group.

What’s the next action? Look at the staff currently working in IT, and see if you have a natural boundary spanner on the payroll. If you do, refocus them on being the bridge between the capabilities of SharePoint and the possibilities and opportunities for applying SharePoint in the business groups. They will need training and mentoring to grow into this new role, as well as introductions to others inside the business.

The next post in the series titled “7 Ways to Get more from Your SharePoint Deployment” discusses how to get more value from SharePoint by embracing an approach I call “Seamless Teamwork”. The last post dealt with gaining clarity around the business reasons for SharePoint.

Microsoft Press recently published my first book—Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways (see www.seamlessteamwork.com). The point of the book was to show business people how they could embrace the out-of-the-box capabilities of SharePoint to support collaboration, and hopefully to make the case that SharePoint offers better technical capability to support everyday collaborative processes than current tools such as email and file attachments.

One of the key messages in the book is that SharePoint can be much more than merely a replacement for sharing files. In other words, we want to minimize the use of SharePoint as a replacement for the file server, but we need to show people and business teams how they could do that. So the book takes the approach that SharePoint can be used for three complementary strands:

• It can help the project team actually get the work of the project done.
• It can help the project team stay in coordination about who is doing what on the project, and when and how various people on the team need to undertake certain activities.
• And finally, it can help the project team share the context of what’s going on in the wider spheres of people’s work and personal lives, that impact on their ability to respond to others and work on joint deliverables.

The book is built around a fictitious but true-to-live case study of Roger Lengel and the project he is asked to lead through SharePoint at his firm, Fourth Coffee. While the exact project process in Seamless Teamwork is likely to be different to your project process—and that was both expected and is absolutely fine—you need to take the main ideas of Seamless Teamwork and bring them to life at your firm for the business people using SharePoint to support collaboration.

The benefit of embracing the Seamless Teamwork approach is that it improves project productivity, and builds future capability amongst employees for how to use SharePoint effectively. The flow on effects are clearer lines of accountability, it’s easier to add and remove people to projects, and because training time is decreased through standardization of templates and expectations, there’s a faster time to business value.

To start on your own Seamless Teamwork journey, head over to Amazon.com and buy a copy of the book for all of the project leaders at your firm. Once they have the book and have reviewed it, schedule a workshop to work through the ideas in the book, and to discuss with them how the ideas they have for applying SharePoint. Given that the book advocates the use of certain functionality to support certain teaming processes, you may find that the very things you want the project leaders to do become things that they are rabidly asking you for. In other words, they’ll create a demand for what you have to offer, and they’ll think it was their idea all along, and you’ll still get what you wanted them to do all along without having to resort to pleading.

This is the second post in a series I’m doing here on 7 ways to get more from your SharePoint deployment. The first post was an introduction to the series.

The first way to get more from your SharePoint deployment now is to be fully aware of why SharePoint is being used at your firm. What are the business outcomes that your senior managers are looking for? Or don’t they know about SharePoint? If IT has slipped SharePoint in without going through a process of understanding what the business needs from SharePoint, then you are working from a place of weakness. Be warned.

To answer this question strategically, you need to know:

• What business strategies does SharePoint help our firm implement?
• Which senior people will evangelize the use of SharePoint, and therefore get the appropriate resources applied to SharePoint endeavors, and help break through the barriers erected by reticent end users?
• Which specific business people that you know are excited about the technology of SharePoint and how that technology can be applied to help them in new and enhanced ways?

The benefit of aligning your investment of SharePoint with business priorities, is that it elevates the view of IT from hardware and software provider to solution provider. As IT becomes an integral part of the discussion about how work gets done most effectively, then IT is taken seriously at senior levels. And from this recognition flows authority, a wider mandate, and greater opportunities.

There’s a range of actions that you will need to take in order to align the world of SharePoint with the world of your business, and here are some examples:

• Arrange to have lunch with a mid-level or senior manager in the next week, and enquire about the business challenges they are facing? You want to build a relationship with people like this, and create the opportunity for coming back with ideas and solutions to help them.
• Set up appointments to observe people at work from their desk and in meetings, and note the pain points that they are experiencing on a daily basis. Such empirical data will give you a grounding for recommending new ways of working, and new tools that can help them in their work.
• To get ideas on how other firms are embracing SharePoint, and the benefits they are experiencing, read through a couple (or ten, or a hundred) of the case studies that Microsoft has published on this topic. These case studies can then form the basis for a presentation to senior managers about how other firms are experiencing benefits from SharePoint.
• Download the free summary document for my white paper—SharePoint for Business—which outlines a 6-step approach to maximizing the business value of SharePoint for collaboration. If the summary document proves to be of interest, buy the complete white paper for your firm.

As Barry mentioned, I’m doing to do a series of posts over the next few weeks based on the material presented in the webinar I did with Colligo back in February titled “7 Ways to Get More From Your SharePoint Deployment. Now!”. I’m really pleased to have the opportunity to post here on the offlinesharepoint blog. Hope you find them interesting. If you have any comments or questions, please post them here or contact me directly at the coordinates on my contact page.

So, here we go. This first post is an introduction to set up the series.

The implementation of the technology of SharePoint signals the start of the race. Beyond the starting blocks is a set of twists and turns over the course of the race as you speed towards the finishing tape. How you handle the twists and turns determine whether you win the race or don’t. As with most races, there’s a supporting cast gunning for you to win, and a group of sponsors who have their reputation on the line.

Winning the race with SharePoint involves shifting a significant degree of focus and attention onto what happens after the technology is implemented.

What are the business problems that the capabilities of SharePoint are harnessed to solve?
How do you get employees to change their current ways of working and embrace SharePoint?
How do you make it easy for people to work with SharePoint, streamlining their work each day rather than adding unnecessary complexity?

In this series of posts, I talk about what happens after all of the geek stuff is done and the race begins. My intent is to lay out some very specific and very doable activities that you can follow in the current difficult economic environment that will propel your SharePoint deployment beyond mere great technology to outstanding business results.

Framework for Productivity with SharePoint

There’s a lot that we could say about improving business productivity with SharePoint, and that could (and maybe should) be a white paper or book in its own right. But for the purposes of this series of posts, what we’ll say is this: one way to get a productivity jump is to eliminate the low-value and time-wasting activities that your information workers find themselves engaged on during the day. For example:

• Dealing with document hell, where Sally has sent out a document for review to 10 people, everyone has commented using Track Changes, and now Sally has 10 different positions to reconcile.
• Handling unclear commitments, where Bruce, Joe and Andrea are all working on the same task from last weeks meeting, because each thought they were tasked to do it. But actually, only Andrea was, so Bruce and Joe are wasting time they should be investing in other areas.
• Eliminating the uneven distribution of information across a project team, division or the entire organization, whereby one manager or team thinks that “Strategy Kappa” is driving activity in 1Q2009, but actually senior management has moved on to Strategy Lambda.

There are many others … but in all cases, if SharePoint is used well and put to the right purposes, all of these issues can be eliminated.

There is a second way in which SharePoint can dramatically assist with productivity gains, but first let’s address where it won’t. If you are looking to improve business performance through IT, and you take the work process that has been supported by a legacy IT system and introduce a new IT system but don’t change the process, you won’t get any performance benefit. You might get an IT benefit … lower storage costs or less network traffic … but that’s fairly thin ice. Your Board of Directors isn’t going to sign off on something like that. What you actually need to do is to help your business users re-conceptualize how work processes could be done based on new capabilities in new technologies like SharePoint. And once work process has been re-conceptualized, then you need to help them shift from where they are today with the old system to where they want to be with the new one.

Let’s Talk about SharePoint

SharePoint has taken the world by storm. It has re-defined most enterprise collaboration discussions, and has forced major changes in how document management and records management vendors talk about their offerings. You could say that the vendor community either has a strategy to integrate with SharePoint, or fight against it. And for enterprises, it has been elevated to a place of centrality in decision making about information management, intranets and collaboration.

Why is this? For one, it’s from Microsoft, and so the stability of the vendor is guaranteed. They aren’t going anywhere, so a SharePoint play is a long-term bet. For two, Microsoft Office rules the desktop in organizations across the world, and being that products are from Microsoft, there is tight integration between Office on the desktop and SharePoint in the back room. And three, SharePoint is a broad-based platform to support many different information worker-related processes. If you buy into the full MOSS edition, you have capabilities available to support collaboration, search, portals, content management, business processes and forms, and business intelligence, not to mention the application development capabilities of SharePoint so that organizations can build custom-tailored solutions to their own requirements. And to top it all off, there is a growing base of knowledgeable business partners available to support organizations in realizing the capabilities that SharePoint offers.

While this sounds nice, the market figures are there to back up what Microsoft is doing with SharePoint. In March 2008 (almost a year ago), Microsoft said that it had sold 100 million licenses to use SharePoint, and that its annual revenue from license sales was over US$1 billion. We’ll just point out, however, that 100 million “sold licenses” doesn’t equate to “100 million active users”, but whatever the real figure of active users is, it’s a big number.

The Challenges With Platform Technologies

Platform technologies that offer a broad-brushed set of capabilities—such as SharePoint—across a range of information management disciplines can be summed up in one phrase: “they offer tremendous flexibility”. Unfortunately, that is both a huge opportunity and a huge drawback. It’s a huge opportunity because it means that any and every firm can make SharePoint whatever they want it to be. And it’s a huge drawback because if they do it wrong, a huge set of unintended consequences can occur, and pretty soon you find that it’s not a tiger you have by the tail, but a fire-breathing dragon.

Problems like:

• Chaotic viral adoption, where people are recklessly creating short-term SharePoint sites to deal with a perceived business challenge, but then the site is abandoned and the corporate information they contain is hidden from authorized systems.
• Too much experimentation, where business users start configuring a whole set of different sites to do similar things but in the aggregate, in very different ways. One firm claimed to have 325 projects on the go using SharePoint, and each project site was based on a different design. So someone involved in 4 different projects—not an uncommon number today—had to remember 4 different ways of tracking tasks, for example.
• Unauthorized adoption by business teams, outside of the purview of the IT department. One US firm had its corporate deployment of SharePoint all ready to go, but before they pushed “go”, did an audit and found 15,000 undocumented sites that they didn’t know about. Business managers were buying SharePoint on their credit cards and installing Windows Server 2003 boxes under their desks, and IT had no knowledge that business information was being stored and shared through commodity systems with no backup and security procedures in place.
• Top managers hearing that SharePoint is the “way of the future” and telling IT to “have at it”, but with no clear picture beyond the words of what that actually means and the requisite changes involved in getting a business return from an investment in SharePoint.

We could go on. If any of these are happening at your place of work, you know the pain associated with this.

In my next post I’ll start to look at some of the things you can do to maximize the opportunities (and deal with the challenges) posed by the deployment of SharePoint in your organization.

Some of you may have seen our webinar in February with Michael Sampson, author, blogger and SharePoint consultant. The webinar title was “7 Ways to Get More From Your SharePoint Deployment. Now!”. It was very, very well received by the audience of over 1,500. Michael delivered some very useful tips to help organizations leverage their investment in SharePoint. For those that missed it, there’s a replay of the webinar at the Colligo Resource Center.

We’re really fortunate that Michael has agreed to do a guest series here based on the webinar. Over the next few weeks, Michael will publish his 7 tips from the webinar. I hope you find his insights useful to help your orgainzation get more from SharePoint.

Here’s Michael’s bio:
Michael Sampson is an author and the principal of the Michael Sampson Company, a consulting company that focuses on improving the productivity of distributed teams. Michael helps organizations understand the collaboration landscape and consults with clients on improving the performance of distributed teams through collaboration technology. He is also the author of “Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways”, published by Microsoft Press.

We are really fortunate to have Bob Mixon, SharePoint MVP, and David Scott, Group Product Manager for SharePoint Solutions with Symantec, joining us for our next webinar on Wednesday, April 29th. This webinar will be packed with useful information about email archiving with SharePoint. As usual, we will maximize the content and minimize the sales pitch.

It’s absolutely free. You can register here. Hope you attend.

The blurb (with more details) is below.

What You Need To Know About Email Archiving With SharePoint

As more organizations adopt SharePoint to manage emails and documents, understanding the architectural choices and developing best practices for archiving this content are becoming increasingly important. Factors such as findability of emails and attachments, compliance with eDiscovery and legal hold requirements, storage costs and end-user adoption make choosing the right SharePoint email archiving solution a critical part of an organization’s knowledge management strategy.

Join Bob Mixon, Microsoft SharePoint MVP and principal of Mixon Consulting and David Scott, Group Product Manager at Symantec in this important webinar designed to provide practical information and real world examples of how to implement an efficient and cost effective email archiving strategy with SharePoint.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• What is driving the requirements for email archiving
• How SharePoint changes the email archiving game
• Advantages and disadvantages of different architectural approaches
• Tools and techniques to improve the user experience and adoption
• Lessons from organizations that have implemented email archiving solutions
• How an end to end solution can be built using off-the-shelf components

If you are a CIO, CKO, IT Manager or SharePoint Administrator responsible for ensuring your email archiving strategy meets your organizations needs – register HERE today.

WHAT: Tips and Tricks for Email Archiving with SharePoint
WHEN: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 11:00 AM EST
PRESENTERS: Bob Mixon, SharePoint MVP, Principal, Mixon Consulting / David Scott, Group Product Manager, Symantec Corp / Barry Jinks President & CEO, Colligo Networks Inc.
TIMES: 8:00 AM PDT / 11:00 AM EDT / 4:00 PM London / 5:00 PM Paris

Guest Speaker – Bob Mixon
Microsoft SharePoint MVP and Consultant

Bob has been providing technology solutions since the 1980’s and is currently the co-owner of Mixon Consulting (www.MixonConsulting.com), a consulting and training company providing technology solutions for SharePoint, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, and Business Process Management. In 2009, Bob received a 4th Microsoft SharePoint MVP award for his continued efforts and dedication to growing and helping the SharePoint community. Bob is the author of the SharePoint Beagle newsletter and maintains a popular blog on the Mastering SharePoint community site. Blog: http://masteringsharepoint.com/blogs/bobmixon/

Guest Speaker – David Scott
Group Product Manager, Symantec Corporation

David Scott is a Group Product Manager at Symantec focusing on SharePoint solutions. He is primarily responsible for Enterprise Vault for SharePoint, NetBackup for SharePoint and Symantec Protection for SharePoint Servers. David has been with Symantec for 15 years focusing on a wide variety of products including Symantec Mail Security for Exchange and pcAnywhere.