Offline SharePoint

This is my final post on 7 ways to get more from SharePoint. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to share some tips with readers of the offlinesharepoint.com blog. If you’d like to contact me directly, please do so through the contact form on my website.

We’ve previewed a lot of ground that you’ll need to cover in your race with SharePoint, but don’t become disheartened and retreat to the server room. This is where the real action is at … taking what Microsoft has made available in SharePoint and putting it to great use within your organization. Let’s summarize what we’ve looked at:

SharePoint is a broad-brushed platform technology from Microsoft to support many information worker processes in organizations. And it’s clearly important to Microsoft—given the centrality it’s taking in the Microsoft technology stack, and in the revenue that it’s bringing into Microsoft’s coffers.

The tremendous range of flexibility offered by SharePoint means that it can be melded to do many different things for an organization—which is good, and bad. If you walk into the bad territory, then SharePoint will quickly devolve into a chaotic and unmanageable environment that causes great grief and consternation.

There are some very specific activities that you can do now to get more from your SharePoint deployment, such as increasing your awareness of the business reasons for SharePoint at your organization and aligning what you do with SharePoint to those reasons; embracing the Seamless Teamwork approach to make SharePoint the authoritative place for people to work and collaborate; re-examining how business gets done in light of the new technology capabilities that SharePoint brings to the table, rather than just re-creating old ways of doing things with the new tool; and looking at how third-party tools can increase user adoption and team productivity.

Race well … looking forward to celebrating with you when you reach the finish line!

This is the next entry in my 7 part series on getting more from SharePoint now. My last post was on SharePoint governance. This time around, I’d like to look at increasing user productivity.

With SharePoint being a “platform-technology”, Microsoft has to decide which capabilities to support out-of-the-box, and which capabilities to leave for its business partners. One of the areas that SharePoint users benefit greatly from a third-party tool is addressed by Colligo Contributor. Contributor addresses two main ideas: the first is the provision of offline access to most SharePoint data (note that the wiki capabilities in a SharePoint site are not currently supported for offline editing in Contributor) for people working away from an Internet connection, and the second is for people who “live in SharePoint”, and therefore want a more responsive client application rather than using a Web browser. Contributor addresses both, and by lowering usability barriers, helps with increasing the adoption of SharePoint among your user base, and as a flow on effect, it helps with getting more content into SharePoint so it can be managed and shared.

In exploring the potential for Colligo Contributor to help your users, identify the people and groups who fit the two ideal profiles of Contributor users: those that are offline on a regular basis but still need access to their SharePoint sites, and those who work in SharePoint for a high proportion of their day. Once you have identified these groups, get the 30-day free trial of Colligo Contributor, and assess the benefits with real people at your firm.

It’s been awhile since I posted on this series. My last entry was on how standard templates can help you to get more from SharePoint. This time, we’ll look at the benefits of developing an excellent governance strategy.

Governance for SharePoint is worth a whole white paper in and of itself, and maybe even a whole book! So we don’t expect to address all of the key points of governance here, suffice to wave the flag that getting your governance strategy and approach in place before going too far with SharePoint is really important. Here’s why: on the social side, SharePoint can fundamentally re-wire the way that people get their work done and thus what is expected of them in order to carry out their work. Thus you have tremendous power over the way that people work. And on the technology side, there are a raft of decisions that you have to make that have deep technical consequences and implications for your business. A governance strategy ensures that this power is wielded well and for the good of the business.

Some examples the technology decisions are:

• The number and variation of content types to use.
• The metadata to put in place, and which metadata values to mandate vs which are optional.
• The variation permitted in site templates, as we’ve discussed above.
• The degree of custom development that will be embraced.
• The willingness of the firm to customize templates that come from Microsoft.

A governance strategy puts in place the checks-and-balances to ensure that decisions of this nature, in addition to a host of decisions about appropriate use and adoption of SharePoint, are made with due process. The benefit of a great governance strategy is that it launches SharePoint on a trajectory for success, by lining up all of the social and technical factors required to make SharePoint work at a social and technology level.

There are many resources available on governance for SharePoint, and a browse or search of the Internet will bring a plethora to light. Three resources of note as you start on your governance journey with SharePoint are:

• Microsoft’s SharePoint governance web site
• Chapter 12 of my book Seamless Teamwork, which addresses the thinking involved in scaling the Seamless Teamwork approach to the enterprise. Chapter 12 was co-authored with Grant Margison of Information Leadership; and
• The book Flapping to Flying, co-authored by Grant Margison and Sarah Heal of Information Leadership in New Zealand.

Well, it’s official, Groove has a new name… SharePoint Workspace 2010. It was made public yesterday on the Groove Development Team Blog.

The name makeover is in concert with the direction the product is going. SharePoint Workspace will provide easy access to SharePoint content (or content from any server that implements the publicly documented protocols) in an effort to provide a seamless online/offline experience.

Can’t wait to get my hands on it to see if it lives up to the promise. As soon as I do (and the NDA is lifted), I will post an extensive review here.

The is the next post in the series I’m doing here on the offlinesharepoint.com blog. My last post, #4, was on re-examining how business gets done. Now let’s look at how you can leverage SharePoint templates to get more from SharePoint.

SharePoint offers many out-of-the-box capabilities for building “sites”, or places for people to do their work. There’s the document library, the calendar, the task list, the custom list, the announcements list, and many more. With such capability comes a huge degree of flexibility to create exactly what is needed by a local team to get their work done. And for those working in larger organizations, it is pretty much guaranteed that most teams will see their requirements as being “unique”, and therefore worthy of a site design that is different to everyone else’s.

Be warned: this is a recipe for disaster, because as the number of customized sites increase, the ability for an end user to seamlessly move between different sites they are involved with diminishes rapidly. In other words, what a user learns in one site (about how to work, or track tasks, for example) will be different in a second site, and different again in a third site. This means that the user constantly has to think about how to work within team one vs team two.

Avoid the problems of having a proliferation of customized site templates by standardizing on “the way we do things around here”. For example, most organizations have “projects” of various kinds that are run through SharePoint, and the flexibility of the tool means that you can do one thing in a multitude of different ways. The idea, then, is to standardize on a particular way of doing things, and make a set of standard templates for team project management in SharePoint. This means that depending on the size of the project, a team then only has to choose the right site template.

There will be some key differences between the way the site is structured for small, medium and large projects:

• Small projects will have all design elements in a single team site, and will probably have only one of each type of design element, e.g., one Document Library
• Large projects—and they are “large” because of the number of people involved, or because the project contains multiple linked stages—will probably have multiple sub-sites under the overall project site, along with say, multiple document libraries in each site, each focused on a different group or a different type of document.

One of the main aspects to design for is the ability to perform roll-up and aggregation of like assets across a collection of sites. For example, tasks assigned to a given individual should be able to be aggregated across multiple sites, giving each individual a coherent view of what they are supposed to do. To make this even a possibility, however, you will need to base the design of task tracking off a common design element.
The next step to move ahead with the creation of standard templates depends on where you are starting. If SharePoint is already in use at your firm, and you have a proliferation of custom templates already—which means that you feel the pain now—then it’s time to review current sites to look for opportunities for standardization. For example, when the same activity is being undertaken in different ways, there exists a prime opportunity to create a standard way of doing things.

If SharePoint is about to be unleashed, then now is the time to create standard ways of doing projects through SharePoint sites. You won’t get it perfect on day 1, but by starting with a small set of templates and by setting the social expectation that customizations will be tightly controlled, you create a great starting place.

Below are Microsoft SharePoint MVP Bob Mixon’s answers to the questions posed by attendees to the recent webinar on Email Archiving in SharePoint:

If you have a hierarchy of folders with email in each folder, can the whole hierarchy be transferred into SharePoint?

If you are referring to a hierarchy of folders in Outlook, I am not aware of a program that provides the ability to pick that structure up and moves it in to a SharePoint Discussion List or Library.  However, I do believe it would be a fairly trivial task to write a small program that could accomplish this for you.

If you are referring to a hierarchy of folders on a drive, this can be accomplished by simply connecting to a Document Library in SharePoint with Windows File Explorer.  Once connected, you can use normal drag-and-drop features to move those folders to SharePoint.

Create a mapped drive to SP library?

Yes!  You can add a “Network Place” and/or map an unused drive to a SharePoint Document Library.  WebDAV (web-based distributed authoring and versioning) is a technology used by Windows and SharePoint to communicate with each other.  This is the technology used when Windows File Explorer is communicating with SharePoint.

The following article describes the process for creating a Network Place:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011544651033.aspx

Is SharePoint search is applicable on the attached email content in the document library?

Yes, SharePoint will search attachments.

Can we create custom workflow based on email on document library using metadata from and subject line…like Approved?

Absolutely!  Now this depends on what workflow development tools you use; but most allow you to use metadata for conditional logic.

How does one create a document library in SharePoint with metadata columns such as sender, subject etc. so that people can sort on these columns within the document library? And is it possible in combination with the onsave metadata-prompt suppressed?

I answered this question on my blog in a separate post:

http://masteringsharepoint.com/blogs/bobmixon/archive/2009/04/30/sharepoint-e-mail-integration-how-do-i-support-from-sender-subject-as-metadata.aspx

We currently use Public Folders to store project information.  Each project has its own.  How easy is to move data from these public folders (for later getting rid of this feature MS no longer supports)?

There are a number of publically available 3^rd party products that can ease this process.  If there isn’t too much e-mail too move, you would use Colligo Contributor; it’s a very inexpensive approach.

Is it possible to archive an email from Outlook into SharePoint and have it retain the ‘Category’ that it was assigned in Outlook?

Not that I am aware of.

*** Update from Barry of Colligo. Actually, one of the properties that is extracted from emails by Colligo Contributor is the user specified ‘Category’. You can read more about that in this document. Once extracted, it can be saved as metadata in SharePoint. So it can be used to in views, filters and search.***

Hi I have a selection of users who prefer using folders instead of metadata.  Have tried to dissuade this practice; should we just leave them be or encourage use of metadata?

This really depends on the type of data, where it is being stored and how it is being used.  I wrote an article back in November 2008 on this very topic.  Instead of repeating its content here, you can read it online at:

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=954

We are looking at moving exchange public folders to SharePoint. What is the best way to accomplish this? There are some third party products to do it: Quest, AvePoint, Tsunami.  Any comments on the pros & cons of these products?

I have used all of these products for moving e-mail from Exchange to SharePoint and they all have their own approach, configuration, pros and cons.  I recommend your specific requirements drive the product selection process and have each of them respond to those requirements specifically.

Will Colligo Contributor work and add custom metadata when a user sends an email to an email enabled SharePoint list. Our users have asked for that?

Absolutely, that is one of Colligo Contributor’s best features!

What kind of legal issues can come up by storing email in SharePoint?  For example by storing email in SharePoint does that make SharePoint a legal discovery object?

SharePoint absolutely can be setup to manage files for legal discovery.  SharePoint is a system that can manage the full lifecycle and control of documents; e-mail can be considered one of these controlled documents too.

Is there any limit while sending email to library?

There are limitations to the total size of the e-mail; including attachments.  These limits can be set by your SharePoint administrator or can be reached with a timeout.  However, it’s rarely a problem, typically e-mail attachments are limited to 1 to 3 meg in size and this won’t be a problem at all with SharePoint.

Below are David Scott of Symantec’s answers to the questions posed by attendees to the recent webinar on Email Archiving in SharePoint:

In order to use the SharePoint archive feature, do we have to purchase Symantec Enterprise vault?

To archive SharePoint data into Enterprise Vault you must purchase Enterprise Vault. If you just want to archive mail to SharePoint, you only need to purchase Colligo (or adopt the basic integration between SharePoint and Outlook covered by Bob Mixon in the presentation).

Does deduplication archive to the same link in the "cheaper storage" and what is the nature of the compare?

In EV 8.0 Optimized Single Instance Storage is a newly designed storage model in Enterprise Vault. OSIS uses a new fingerprint system that allows a document to be stored once and share it across all archived information. This new storage model allows for local or geographical or global single instancing through the new Vault Store Groups feature that allows you to draw a circle around your archive and determine how you want to reduce your storage footprint. It also allows for attachment level sharing as well as sharing between email, SharePoint, files, etc. Optimized Single Instance Storage enables Enterprise Vault to be an enterprise platform for all unstructured information. This new storage model allows you to reduce the amount of storage required, cutting server and storage capital and operating costs. The comparison to determine single instance is done at the file level.

This release also introduces integration with intelligent storage arrays that provide native block level de-duplication such as NetApp’s FAS de-duplication and Data Domain, further reducing storage cost.

Is Enterprise Vault included with the NetBackup product or does it need to be purchased separately?

Enterprise Vault for SharePoint is not included with NetBackup – it is a separate purchase.

If you are using an enterprise search engine such as FAST ESP instead of SharePoint Search, how do you handle mapped security for linked archival storage?

When an item in SharePoint is replaced with a stub/shortcut all of the metadata is retained. In the current product, SharePoint search will index the metadata in our shortcuts/stubs within SharePoint but it does not index the full item. In an upcoming release we will add the ability to index the full item when a shortcut is present in SharePoint.

Longer term we are working on a Federated Search integration for SharePoint that will allow you to search within SharePoint and retrieve results for all data sources within Enterprise Vault. We do not allow SharePoint to index Enterprise Vault directly but will leverage our own index instead and present the results from each data source in a separate window.

In add cases, users will only have access to items that they have access to within SharePoint.

 Is the next version of SP going to store documents directly on file servers rather than in SQL? If so, how will that affect your product?

We have not heard anything about Microsoft moving away from SQL aside from moving items onto disk via Remote Blob Storage. We work very closely with Microsoft and will provide an update on Enterprise Vault support for SharePoint 2010 when it is closer to release. Our goal is to release as closely to the official GA of SharePoint 2010 and to continue to deliver not only storage optimization but also provide a single repository for all your archived data for compliance/discovery needs and IP protection.

Can SharePoint index the data in Enterprise Vault?

SharePoint cannot index Enterprise Vault.

Many thanks to all the attendees of our recent webinar for posing many good and challenging questions. My answers to the ones about Colligo are posted below. Please don’t hesitate to comment or send me a message through the contact form here on offlinesharepoint.com.

Q) When something has been archived is it still available off-line in Colligo?

A) Yes, as long as you select “Make this list or library available offline” when you connect the library into Outlook.

Q) With Colligo, do you still need to manually enter metadata? Does Colligo work with Outlook 2003 without any limitations?

A) You only need to enter metadata if you decide to configure it that way. For example, you can also turn metadata prompting off completely by right clicking on the library or folder name in the breadcrumbs navigation and selecting “Default Metadata Values”. This can also be done programmatically (see  Metadata Prompt).

Email metadata (properties such as To:, From: etc.) are automatically extracted (see Metadata Mapping).

You can also set default metadata at the library and folder level so when content is dragged into the folder it automatically sets the specified metadata to the default values (see User-Specified Default Metadata).

Then if you turn metadata prompting off as described above, it will be set to those values without any manual intervention required.

A) Yes, Contributor works with Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.

Q) Does colligo support custom metadata in its current versions? e.g. column project, metadata, P1, P2, P3 … so when we drop an email we can specify the metadata straight away.

A) Absolutely. It supports custom metadata, also default metadata at the library and folder-level.

Q) Can Barry talk about the licensing structure of the Colligo product? That is, do we need a license per user/PC in the organization?

A) Colligo Contributor is licensed on a per seat basis, so you need a license for each PC that it it being used on. You can request more about pricing here: Volume Pricing Request Form

Q) What is vNext for Colligo in the Office 14 timeframe?

A) Version 4.0 of Colligo Contributor will be released in June of this year. We have not yet announced the new features, but will in the next 6 weeks. Version 5.0 will be released in the spring of next year and will fully support Office 14. We have not finalized our product plans for this release yet.

Q) Is Outlook 2007 required?

A) Contributor works with both Outlook 2003 or 2007.

Q) we use an exchange public folder for receiving department e-mails (e.g. department@mycompany.com). Can colligo automatically process these into a sharepoint library?

A) Since the Colligo Contributor Add-In installs in Outlook, you can use Outlook rules to automatically move content form the Inbox to SharePoint folders. While users could drag and drop from public folders to the Colligo SharePoint folders, I do not think Outlook rules can be used to do this. There is a more direct way to accomplish this, though. Instead of using an exchange public folder, just set up a mailbox on the system with the email address “department@mycompany.com”.

Then install Colligo Contributor on the machine with that email address. Next, set up an Outlook rule to move emails to SharePoint folders when they are received. The advantage of this is method is that any authorized user can now sync the SharePoint folder to Outlook on their own with no IT involvement required.

Q) If an email is uploaded with Colligo and the subject of the email contains the forbidden characters for file names in SharePoint, Colligo shows an error. Will there be a solution were Colligo simply replaces those characters?

A) I am surprised that you are experiencing this problem, since Contributor already removes invalid characters. Please see this tech note: Invalid characters removed. If you are still experiencing this issue, please contact support at support@colligo.com.

Q) What issues do you see with corporate adoption for Colligo?

A) None that I am aware of. We have over 1,000 organizations using Colligo Contributor. There is actually a lot of support for corporate deployment and configuration. For example see this article: Contributor Configuration Settings.

You can read the case studies of a number of companies that have deployed Colligo Contributor at our Resource Center here: Colligo Resource Center.

Q) What method to alert the user if the requirements for a metadata field have changed, using a lookup or drop down for an example? Option#1 and Option#2 were the original metadata options, but subsequently, the scope changed to further granularity with Option#3 and Option#4.

A) Choice fields in the metadata prompt are automatically updated when Contributor syncs with the server. So, once they are changed on SharePoint, desktop users will then see that change reflected on their PC after the next sync, just like SharePoint does.

Q) is the colligo outlook addon fully supported in a terminal server environment?

A) We do have several customers using Colligo Contributor in a terminal server environment, but it is not an out of the box supported configuration. Whether it will work depends on a number of factors. If you are considering using it that way, please contact support@colligo.com for help.

Q) how can do this without 2 way sych i.e. I only want to save from email to the sharepoint site

A) We have a version of the product that only supports one way sync (from Outlook to server). Please contact sales@colligo.com for more information on the Outlook online-only configuration of Colligo Contributor.

Q) Has Colligo addressed concerns regarding load on the client computers, that is, performance?

A) Yes, version 3.2 had significant upgrades to the performance in Outlook with large lists and folder trees. Please download the latest version from the Colligo website at Colligo Contributor Info Request Form.

Q) With Colligo, what happens if two Outlook users drag and drop the same email into a SP document library? How does Colligo handle duplicates? Please explain more about how the folder-level metadata actually works in Colligo.

A) Colligo Contributor has a robust conflict resolution engine that notifies the user and allows them to take corrective action if this happens. See Conflict resolution for more info on this. Folder Level default metadata enables users (and organizations) to specify default metadata at the folder level that gets automatically applied when a user drops content into a Colligo library or folder. Please see this document User-Specified Default Metadata.

Q) How can you control who can save email to Sharepoint either by through email enabled document libraries or Colligo Contributor? I realize enterprise vault can clean it up once it is there but I would like to control/prevent as much junk email getting out to sharepoint as possible.

A) Colligo Contributor respects the permissions set up on the SharePoint server, so if you want to restrict who can save emails to SharePoint it is simply a matter of changing permissions on the server.

Q) Can you specify the versions (outlook & SharePoint) mandatory for this integration scenario? Does the integration with colligo, work with Outlook 2003 & WSS 3.0?

A) Colligo Contributor works equally well with WSS 2.0 or 3.0 and Outlook 2003 or 2007.

Q) Contributor looks like a dream come true. Are there any limitations or enhancements with Exchange 2008?

A) Thanks for the positive feedback. No limitations or enhancements with Exchange 2008 that I am aware of.

Q) Do you lose exchange feature when you transfer your archive outside of Outloook and Exchange?  Does Colligo contributor handle multi-languages e.g: French ? How would you access the email once they out of outlook with outlook to send as emails?

A) Since Contributor saves emails and attachments in the .msg format, they can be opened in Outlook, or moved to Outlook folders (like the inbox) just as if they were stored in Exchange. So none of the features are lost to my knowledge. Yes, Contributor has been localized to English, French and German. See this for more information French Language Support.

As mentioned earlier, emails that have been saved to SharePoint will open natively in Outlook, and can be forward, relied to etc., just like any email in your inbox.

Q) Clarification please. Email-enabled lists in SharePoint stores as .eml, not .msg? So, if you were to email a doc to a SharePoint library it’s not saved as a msg file?

A) Unfortunately, email-enabled SharePoint lists separate the attachment from the body, store the body as a .eml file and the attachment as whatever file type it is. .eml files cannot be opened natively in Outlook, just Outlook Express.

Q) Any thumb rules for how much space storing emails in SP takes? Do all of email options connecting with Outlook require Outlook 2007 and/or Exchange 2007? Does Colligo Contributor require Outlook 2007?

A) The amount of space can vary widely depending on the size of attachments. If you use a product like Enterprise Vault to archive email from SharePoint and replace it with a link, the amount of SharePoint storage for emails can be reduced dramatically (to a few K per email). Colligo Contributor works with Outlook 2003 or 2007. It doesn’t specifically talk to Exchange so you can use any version.

Q) Does your product work with Outlook Web Access?

A) Contributor synchs SharePoint folders through the Outlook client, and the sync engine operates on the PC in which Outlook has been installed (let’s call this the “Outlook Client PC”). These folders, however, are part of the users mailbox profile so they are visible through Outlook Web Access (let’s call this the “OWA PC”). That means you can move content into these folders through the OWA PC interface even if the Outlook Client PC is offline. When the Outlook Client PC comes back online, emails that have been moved to these folders through OWA are automatically synched up to SharePoint.

Q) Can you point me to where I can find info about using OWA and the Colligo/Symantec Vault systems.

A) Please see the answer to the previous question. Content that is moved to SharePoint via Colligo (even if it originates through OWA) will be automatically moved to Enterprise Vault if the rules are configured to do so.

Q) Unless I missed the portion all the features with outlook – is it possible with Exchange yet ?

A) I’m not 100% sure what you are asking here, but I’ll take a stab at answering. All the Colligo Contributor features work through Outlook and not directly with Exchange. Since SharePoint files are cached on the local file system and synched through Contributor, there is no need for PST or OST files to cache emails locally.

Q) Is colligo contributor a server/client app? How is it deployed to individuals? Where are individual prefs saved, local or server? How about Entourage support/use?

A) Colligo Contributor is a client application. Here is a tech note on how to deploy the Add-In Outlook Add-in Deployment.

Individual preferences are saved locally in the registry. The SharePoint cache is stored on the users file system and can be relocated. Re: Entourage, unfortunately we do not support MAC applications at this time.

Q) Does you product support enforced automatic/manual meta data assignment for Word, Excel, PPT, etc?

A) Colligo Contributor supports all Office 2007 properties from applications such as Word and Excel etc. If you edit document properties dialog in Office 2007 applications, that information will be automatically reflected in the Contributor interface and synched to SharePoint. Contributor enforces required metadata as well. Here’s a brief tech note on it: Office Metadata Integration

Q) Is the Colligo Contributor installed at each workstation or at the SharePoint Server level? Can it be installed via GPO software policies?

Colligo Contributor is installed at each workstation, not on the SharePoint server. Contributor can be silently installed and uninstalled and is configurable. Here is some information on the Colligo Contributor admin shell that provides a simple text based shell which enables access to interactive, command line or scripted commands to perform the necessary maintenance and support services: AdminShell.

Here’s a tech note on automated installation: Automated install/uninstall of Colligo Contributor.

Here’s a note on configuration through MSI properties: Contributor Configuration Settings