I have updated the DFFS package to fix a small issue in license tab in DFFS backend, an an issue with the DFFS Installer not showing all lists in the dropdown.
I have also added a “path selector” to the installer so you can have it in the root site in your site collection and still use it to set up DFFS in subsites:
See the full change log here: http://ift.tt/1AglZXU
Alexander
Best of Microsoft Ignite - Webinar Panel!
The post Microsoft Ignite SharePoint Office 365 Highlights Thoughts and Perspectives #Office365 #MSIgnite appeared first on CollabShow.
Over the past year or so Microsoft for the very first time has made life easier for lots of us by listening to us and then providing content and examples that show us how the best way of building something. This is a great change to see, as we can now download PowerShell, Code and even End-to-End real world examples that show us the how in a better way than previously.
Product overview by Vlad Catrinescu – requested by harmon.ie, but thoughts are my own.
Information Overload is a growing problem both in the workplace, and in life in general. Information Overload is when you are trying to deal with more information than you are able to process to make sensible decisions. The result is that you either delay making decisions, or you make the wrong decisions. And let’s be honest, we all feel a kind of information overload because of all of the sources of information we have today. If you are an office worker, you have to go get all the information from SharePoint, email, Yammer, and other systems you might have such as Zendesk, Salesforce, etc.
harmon.ie latest Outlook Add-in called Collage aims to solve that problem, by using the latest available tools such as Microsoft’s Office Graph API and machine learning. Before starting the review, here are some words from the harmon.ie website!
Collage is the world’s first ‘topic-driven’ interface; it turns your Outlook window into the one place where all your important business information comes together…organized by topic. Simply view an email message and all related information from business apps, documents, or social updates appears in the Collage Outlook sidebar. Making sense of all your disconnected information has never been easier.
Automated Topic Discovery
Collage uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to automatically discover topics contained in business app notifications, email messages, documents, and social posts.
Automatic Topic Matching
Collage employs sophisticated matching algorithms to pair topics across many information sources.
Take Action ‘in context’
Click on an item in Collage’s information stream; the corresponding native interface is opened to the appropriate record, so you can take necessary steps. This currently works for Office 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Yammer
Single Information Stream
Collage brings together notifications from all your information sources into a single unified information stream, displayed conveniently in an Outlook add-in.
harmon.ie Collage is installed as an Outlook Add-in directly from the Office Store. After Installing it, I decided to run it against my real main Inbox. Usually I run reviews on random accounts, however since Collage looks at my emails and assigns topics to them, I really needed an active Mailbox with a lot of context to be able to review its functionality. Since it’s my real mailbox, some items may be blurred, but you’re getting the real thing! Once I added the Add-in, the first thing I had to do was add all my services. Similar to the other harmon.ie Add-ins, you can easily access it from the Ribbon, and it will open as a side panel in Outlook. You can log in to all the services you use, by clicking on the Services tab, and then logging in to each service you use.
I don’t have Zendesk, IBM or Salesforce, so I only connected to Yammer and Office 365. After that, I opened one of my emails for a project I have been working on the past year, which is my book on Deploying SharePoint 2016. As you see in the screenshot below in the red rectangle, Collage analyzed my email and found out that the topic is “Deploying SharePoint 2016”. In the Collage sidebar, I also see all the other emails that talk about the same topic, whatever service they are from. In this particular screenshot, they all come from email. Pretty cool!
From the Collage Bar, I can also search for topics or tags. For example, when starting to type Meta, it proposed me two topics it found which are MetaCaseDesk and MetaOption, which are emails about another review I did on my blog! By searching with those tags, I can easily find all the topics
As all machine learning is not perfect, some of the topics that harmon.ie picks provide no valuesuggests are not interesting. , or do not make any sense. For example, I have emailed a company to reserve something, and mentioned a MasterCard Priceless special price. I can right click on a topic and select to Ignore this topic. In this way, users can train Collage which topics are real, hence improving Collage’s ability to interpret and pick out topics of interest. As a side note, you can see that other than the Blue MasterCard Tag, Collage also identified another tag for my email which is UTC. Secondary tags for the same item will be shown in Gray, and you can also click on them so you can search for this secondary topic. harmon.ie Collage, also allows you to ignore certain users if you wish so.
I can go and see my list of Ignored Topics anytime from the Collage Settings.
Something I can do incase harmon.ie didn’t pick a topic on an email that I want, is to manually tag it from the timeline, and add a tag to it. In my case I added a new topic called “Live! 360” to this email. Again, as users manually tweak the set of topics, Collage gets better at surfacing interesting topics.
Something that I wish that Collage would let me do, but it doesn’t at the moment is to tag the current email that I have open. When I open an email and Collage doesn’t find any relevant topics, it shows that “Collage didn’t find relevant topics for this email”, but does not allow me to add my own from this view. , I have to find the same email from the timeline, and add it from there. I think that this is definitely a feature that I would want to have, and would love to see it included in a future update.
harmon.ie Collage also has a Discover Tab, which allows you to see trending documents around you, and show you documents that the Microsoft Graph thinks you might find interesting. The idea is really good, and it works well to identify recently changed documents. One minor quibble I had with Collage was that it could not open documents in my default browser, Chrome and instead opened everything in Internet Explorer. It turns out that because the Collage add-in (and all Outlook add-ins) runs in Outlook inside Internet Explorer (Microsoft AddIns Web architecture), there is no option other than opening the document in Internet Explorer.
In this blog post, we have reviewed harmon.ie’s latest product called harmon.ie Collage. Collage is an Outlook add-in that locates and displays all information related to those topics in the same Outlook window – information from applications, documents, other emails, and social interactions. It can currently connect to Office 365, Salesforce, IBM Connections, Yammer and Zendesk and get information from all those sources, in the Collage sidebar. Microsoft Dynamics is on the way.
During my testing, I have found Collage to be really useful, and it was able to identify most of my emails with the correct topics, and allowed me to easily find emails for the same projects, without going to other folders of my email and doing other searches. Something that I wish that Collage had, was the ability for me to tag the currently open email directly, and not only from the timeline, which would allow me to tag items faster. The Discover tab also showed me useful documents from my SharePoint Online tenant, which I found a cool feature.
As with the other harmon.ie products I have reviewed in the past, the quality was top-notch, I didn’t encounter any strange or unexpected behavior, and the interface was super easy to use, without ever needing to open the instructions manual.
If you want to get all the information you are looking for, from multiple systems, directly in your Outlook window, make sure to check out harmon.ie Collage by clicking on the banner below!
The post Review of harmon.ie Collage: Bringing a New Outlook to Your Business appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.
Hello and welcome to this week’s newsletter.
For this issue, we have some great opportunities to learn – both from in person events, blog posts and our very own Summer Games!. Read on and find out more.
[Sponsored Link] Join Office & SharePoint Live! for No Hype, Independent SharePoint and Office 365 Training This December
Today, organizations expect people to work from anywhere at any time. Office & SharePoint Live!, taking place December 5- 9, 2016 at the Royal Pacific Resort in sunny Orlando, FL, provides leading-edge knowledge and training to administrators, developers, and planners who must customize, deploy and maintain SharePoint Server on-premises and in Office 365 to maximize the business value.
Whether you are a Manager, IT Pro, DBA, or Developer, Office & SharePoint Live! brings together the best the industry has to offer for 5 days of workshops, keynotes, and sessions to help you work through your most pressing collaboration projects.
[Sponsored Link] Preparing Your Toolbox for the SharePoint Framework with Angular, Webpack and Kendo UI
With the new SharePoint Framework, Microsoft is no longer dictating our toolset, but embracing open web technologies. There is a lot to catch up on with SPFx so we better get started! SharePoint MVP John Liu and fellow SharePoint Gurus consultant Bart Bouwhuis present two months of their hardest effort to promote modern web technologies and SharePoint as a platform in the form of a whitepaper: Preparing Your Toolbox for the SharePoint Framework with Angular, Webpack and Kendo UI.
Read more here: Preparing Your Toolbox for the SharePoint Framework
[Sponsored Link] New Pluralsight Course: Planning for SharePoint Server 2016: Physical Topology and Services
SharePoint Server 2016 brings a lot of changes to the Infrastructure Architecture, with new features such as MinRole and Microsoft Identity Manager. In the latest Pluralsight course by SharePoint Server MVP Vlad Catrinescu, you will learn how to plan your SharePoint 2016 Infrastructure to answer your business needs. This course also covers part of the planning objectives for SharePoint 2016 MCSE Exam 70-339! Check out the course today!
http://spvlad.com/PlanningSP2016-1
Don’t forget to take part in the Collab365 Summer Games
If like me, you enjoy learning in bite sized chunks and enjoy listening to advice and ideas – rather than just reading text – the Summer Games is tailor made for you. Covering topics such as Migration, Search, Adoption and SharePoint 2016 in short sharp bursts, it’s the ideal coffee break site to visit. While you are there, by clicking a few buttons and taking a few simple actions you could also win $150 USD in Amazon vouchers! Drop by now and take part.
Crossing departmental borders with a SharePoint collaboration site (Sergei Golubenko)
Developing a SharePoint-based solution for content or workflow management, companies take lesser risks of its poor adoption as it’s about helping users to manage their daily duties. Sleek performance, easy navigation and integration with enterprise systems can usually ensure the solution’s buy-in.
Is it worth choosing SharePoint over file server? (Vignesh Ganesan)
So this post is on a well-known topic which has been going on for years now as a debate. I’m pretty sure a lot of you would have read many articles/blog posts on this topic. However, in this post I’ll be discussing about my point of view on choosing “SharePoint” over “file server”.
And if that’s not enough learning! Check out our upcoming Collab365 Global Conference and be sure to register now. Free places are getting snapped up too fast to count so do it now while there’s still time.
COLLAB365 24HR GLOBAL CONFERENCE - Join the Collab365 team on the 19th - 20th October, for 24 hours of SharePoint, Azure and Office365 content. Whats more, register now and get free entry into the SharePoint Tournament! (your chance to snap up prizes totalling 800 USD (Provided by Concept Searching) AND be crowned "The Brain of SharePoint").
Get more details and register for your FREE place here - http://ift.tt/2bP4jNV
In the flood of announcements from Ignite 2016 today, I noted down my favorites about Office 365, Azure and SharePoint. Enjoy.
I only found one interesting SharePoint Server announcement today, and that was the announcement about Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016.
The Feature Pack contains among other things:
Those were a few of the tidbits, as quoted from the post I linked to. Go check it out - it's worth investigating this if you're on-premises with your SharePoint and either plan to upgrade to 2016 or if you're potentially already there.
My favorites: Logging of Admin Tasks! Surely we need to know what those admins are doing.
Working with SharePoint since early 2006, progressing to the first edition of BPOS which then became an early version of SharePoint online - or what is now a fully featured SharePoint experience in Office 365, has been an interesting journey for sure.
Though, the journey doesn't end here - it only gets better. Today Microsoft made some announcements at the Ignite conference regarding Office 365 and related services. Here's my collection of announcements for you to indulge.
Delve in Office 365 has been around now for a while, and personally I find it pretty valuable. I suppose it doesn't come as a surprise that they announced the evolution of this product from Delve Analytics to MyAnalytics.
Another announcement that might not come as a surprise is that Yammer is to integrate with Office 365 Groups.
Today, we’re pleased to announce that Yammer is integrating with Office 365 Groups, bringing together the power of open collaboration with the productivity tools millions rely on every day. With this integration, Yammer users can easily turn ideas into action with access to SharePoint sites and document repositories, a shared OneNote notebook, and lightweight task management with Planner. These new experiences and more will be rolling out in phases over the coming months.
Yammer has a lot to live up to. It hasn't yet, in my opinion. Let's see if this brings it closer to the goal - but I'm still not convinced.
An announcement around security today was made, covering Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Advanced Data Governance, Threat Intelligence and Advanced Security Management updates.
If you're into SharePoint and Office 365 and people experiences, there's a good post about the updates around those parts available as of today.
Some updates around the "Mobile and Intelligent Intranet powered by SharePoint" were announced today.
Check out the Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet with team news, apps for Android and Windows and more.
Jeff Teper published this post today, extending the messaging about the cloud-first, mobile-first vision.
There's too much info in there to make an easy summary of it - go check it out.
Now this was a pretty nice move by Microsoft. The StaffHub offers an app for deskless workers to manage their work schedules et al. Something I know many folks in other industries have been looking for, or have problems with today. I'm excited about this, and can't wait to introduce it to the folks around me that I know have challenges with this!
Check out the Microsoft StaffHub public preview announcement
I work in Azure every day. Hence my big interest in what's happening in the Microsoft Cloud. There's some interesting announcements that came out of Ignite today, and what I've listed here are extracts and noteworthy information that I think would be beneficial for others with their heads in the clouds too.
Last year Microsoft announced the public preview of something called Azure DNS. Today at Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta, Microsoft announced Azure DNS General Availability - available for production use!
Azure DNS enables you to host your DNS domains and manage your DNS records in Azure.
Azure Monitor went into Public Preview today (public beta), and looks pretty promising. Use Azure Monitor to overview and manage monitoring tasks from a single UI in the portal, rather than from every resource.
It's already live, and here you can see a quick preview from my own Azure:
Dashboard from the announcements:
The Azure Service Fabric was released last year in the cloud to help devs build and manage cloud-scale apps. Today, Microsoft announced an on-prem edition of the Azure Service Fabric for Windows Server.
Microsoft Security Center has been out there since July this year, but with the announcements today by Microsoft about the Azure Security Center they're showing their committment in improving security across their product and service stack all the time.
On a daily basis I utilize the command-line tools available on routine. Creating new projects, maintaining code or managing cloud infrastructure. That's why I'm personally very excited about the Azure CLI 2.0 preview announced today.
In this post I will discuss how to create a .NET Core application (ASP.NET 5) and build a Docker image that contains our application, and then deploy that to a cloud service of our choice. In my case the cloud services are Azure and Heroku. This post will cover how to create the project, create your docker images and run them on your development box through Docker. In the next two posts I will walk through the steps for deploying the containers to Azure and Heroku.
I will be using Visual Studio Code as I do more and more.
In order to follow along with all the steps in this post, there's a few things we need to set up first:
See the following sections on how to complete these steps one by one.
In order for us to work with Docker on our dev box, we need to install it. Docker is available for download from their website: http://ift.tt/28Kfx5G.
Download, install and you're all set!
You should be able to run docker in your favorite cmdline tool on Windows.
Kitematic is a way to get a nice UI for your containers on your dev box. I'm on Windows, so I'm going to install the Kitematic version for Windows. It is also available for Mac OS X 10.8+.
If you haven't worked with Kitematic before, there's some pretty good documentation on the Docker site: http://ift.tt/2cx3G6s.
Since we're going to work a bit with some of the features in the .NET Core, we should install the .NET Core SDK which you can download here.
Run each of these commands to install the npm pre-requisites, or run them as a single command. Your choice. I'm splitting them up for easier description here.
Install yeoman:
npm install -g yo
Install the ASP.NET Core generator:
npm install -g generator-aspnet
Install the Docker geneator:
npm install -g generator-docker
There's a few very handy extensions for Visual Studio Code that I'd encourage you to download.
The first one is Dockerfile and Docker Compose File (yml) Support
The second one is C# by Microsoft:
We will now build the ASP.NET 5 project (using Yeoman) and prepare it for use with Docker, using the Docker yeoman generator. Tag along.
First we'll create a new web application based on DotNetCore. This is why we installed the Yeoman generator for aspnet.
Navigate to a folder where you want to generate your project, and then tag along.
Run:
yo aspnet
I've used most of the default values in the application. Choose what makes you feel great, then just finish the wizard.
Run:
cd "Your application folder name"
dotnet restore
dotnet build
dotnet run
This should download the dependencies and packages, build the project and host it locally:
You can now navigate to http://localhost:5000 to view your web application:
So that's that. As I've talked about in this blog plenty of times before, generating these projects is super-simple. Since I want to focus on Docker rather than the web app itself, I'll leave it as-is without modifications. Let's move on to the Docker parts.
Now that the project is there, we want to prepare it for running in a Docker image. Using the Docker generator I mentioned previously, makes this very simple. Tag along, again.
Run:
yo docker
This will trigger the yeoman generator for Docker. Here's the values I have entered myself. I've selected .NET Core, RTM, Yes (Use a web server), 5000 (port), default names for the remaining questions and finally "Yes" to overriding the dockerfile, if you get that question.
After running the docker generator, your project will contain a few new important files:
With the new files comes one file named dockerTask.ps1, which is the one I'm interested in.
Launch a PowerShell console, and execute the following script (yes, from the same project dir):
.\dockerTask.ps1 -Build
That will look something like this:
Now that the PowerShell script has taken care of building the image, as we saw previously in the picture above, we should verify that it works.
Run:
docker images
It should give you something like this:
It's getting exciting, isn't it? Of course it is. We're just about to run the image on our localhost to make sure the docker image works. And it should, given we've not changed anything from the default generated content using the yeoman generators etc.
Run:
docker run -d -p 5000:5000 -t webapplicationbasic:debug
In the above command, the -d means we'll run detached so we don't need to keep the cmd busy. The -p 5000:5000 means we'll map the host port of 5000 to the image port of 5000. The -t webapplicationbasic:debug means we want to launch the webapplicationbasic (name of our image) with the debug build/tag. The values for these can be seen in the previous picture when you ran docker images.
We want to verify that the image is spinning in docker now:
Run:
docker ps
Awesomesause! The image is running in docker, and listening to port 5000.
Simply launch http://localhost:5000 and you should see your website, now running inside docker!
While I love living on the command line for many reasons, there's also the Kitematic tool which is actually a pretty smooth way to overlook your local containers, and which can see and manage your stuff in the Docker Hub.
Launch it by clicking the Docker tray icon (on Windows..) and select Kitematic:
You can now see your local containers:
You can see that:
We've taken a look at how we can use .NET Core and Docker together, hosting our web application (or .NET Core console app or DLL etc..) in the docker container image.
Next steps are of course that we would love to host this somewhere. I'd recommend taking a look at Azure, or why not Heroku and their docker support. There's plenty of options - we'll cover them in future posts.
Thanks for tuning in. Leave comments below if you want :-)
Well it’s conference time again, this time it is the big boy, Microsoft Ignite. Today Microsoft made some announcements and released a few updates about SharePoint and Office 365 that are really really important for us to all know.
I have broken the changes into the following groups to make it easier to follow.
OneDrive for Business
Some great announcements were made today, really focused heavily on improving the sync process for all files as well as the mobile experience.
New sync capabilities include:
With the new world of branding a tenant on Office 365, styling the suite bar and using a theme (aka Composed Look) can take you pretty far toward improving the user experience. A Composed Look is made up of (potentially):
I won’t go into all the details about how this works, but each setting above is somewhat optional: you can use an existing spcolor file, for example, but create your own spfont file. If you want to understand all the mechanics, check out Benjamin Niaulin’s article Step by Step: Create a SharePoint 2013 Composed Look
Here’s a quick tip about spcolor files. I was tearing my hair out over the last few weeks trying to figure out why sometimes my iterations of an spcolor file were working and other times they weren’t. By not working, I mean that the Composed Look would simply disappear from the Change the look page. I’d revert to my last working version and slowly inch forward again.
It turned out to be something silly and obvious – once you know it!
All of the color codes in the spcolor file MUST be all capitals. So, for instance, this:
<s:color name="ContentAccent1" value="0057b8" />
would not work, but this:
<s:color name="ContentAccent1" value="0057B8" />
would. That was *not* easy to spot, but spot it I did.
Don’t let this one bite you; I hope that your Binglage has led you here for a solution and this helps…
Developing a SharePoint-based solution for content or workflow management, companies take lesser risks of its poor adoption as it’s about helping users to manage their daily duties. Sleek performance, easy navigation and integration with enterprise systems can usually ensure the solution’s buy-in.
But as soon as a company decides to implement SharePoint for collaboration needs, there comes a waterfall of challenges. What is more important: interface or functionality? Which features are necessary? How to retain users’ satisfaction? How to ensure cross-departmental collaboration and engage specialists from different departments? The questions swarm around SharePoint and make the project’s prospects hazy.
To address these challenges, we suggest considering the concept of a dedicated SharePoint collaboration site as the key to successful collaboration and knowledge generation.
One of the common mistakes causing SharePoint failure usually lies in the initially incorrect approach to developing a collaboration solution. Non-customized out-of-the-box tools have no chances to gain users’ affection and incite employees to actively use them. A fruitful collaboration can only exist in the heart of a forum-like full-fledged solution, such as a SharePoint collaboration site that serves as:
A single source of information. A site allows to perform tasks via a unified collaboration platform and share valuable information with colleagues instead of just storing it on PCs, in the cloud or even on paper. It also enables employees to accumulate important work-related information in one location and reuse it at any time.
A corporate knowledge base. A collaboration site gives the opportunity to broaden a corporate knowledge base that can be used to accumulate data on a company’s current activities, to conduct market research on new business areas and opportunities, as well as to educate new team members in order to facilitate and shorten their introduction period.
A unified discussion hub. A site is a great tool that enables employees to instantly discuss business issues without disrupting their personal timetables with lengthy meetings. Posted opinions and ideas will never be lost and can be revised or elaborated further whenever a team needs it.
At the same time, to achieve success while using a SharePoint collaboration site, you will face three major challenges: to manage large volumes of content, to assign user roles and to win employees’ loyalty to the site.
As the concept of a collaboration site is built around publishing information, employees will have to deal with large amounts of content. The site should offer the possibilities to easily publish new materials and to sift it out in order to prevent the site from becoming a data dump.
Content publishing features can help employees to make posts on the collaboration site in a unified style. Fortunately, SharePoint provides an embedded HTML-editor that covers the whole range of functions from text formatting to inserting files and pictures. The objective is to let users edit and publish their content on their own and make it readable and easy-to-understand for other community members.
Content moderation features aim to minimize the risk of a site’s ‘informational pollution’ and give the green light to valuable and relevant data. Additionally, we recommend to assign a content moderator responsible for content filtering. This way, every post draft will first go to the site’s moderator and will be published only after his / her approval. It’s also possible to create a rating scale to assess every publication from irrelevant to top important. This is how every post will have a rate enabling users to find the most valuable content easier.
Both content management and content moderation rules can be described in detail and placed in a separate content guide tab to let employees consult the guidelines at any time.
In order to ensure a transparent user structure, it’s advisable to foresee at least 3 groups of users provided with relevant permissions according to their role on the site, in order to ensure the site’s optimal functioning and prevent chaotic site management.
Observers. These are users who aren’t team members and don’t participate in team collaboration actively but want to follow the community, see new publications and expand their knowledge on a particular issue. This role doesn’t allow to publish any content but permits to access the collaboration site, read posts and search for information. Whenever an observer wants to join the community, he or she will have to apply.
Contributors. All the active team members who regularly add content and participate in the discussions can be called contributors. This group of users should be able to make new publications, edit them and leave comments. Contributors are also provided with personal pages that they can use as their personal knowledge boards.
Moderators. Depending on a team size, a collaboration site can have one or several moderators. A moderator is a user with the most extensive permissions allowing to evaluate others’ publications, reject a post if it doesn’t meet the requirements of the content guide, rate posts and participate in the development of the site by adding new topics and subtopics.
Another challenging task while working with a SharePoint collaboration site is to motivate all the team members to use it in order to develop a centralized knowledge baseregularly. There are a few features that will help to stimulate user activity.
‘User catchers’. To hook the community’s attention, ‘user catchers’ can be created. It might be a system of automatic notifications that will inform users on every new publication or weekly updates made on their collaboration site. This could invite them to enter the site and participate in the discussion, ensuring their better awareness of the content.
Personal ratings. By evaluating content, a moderator guarantees the relevance and the value of every post that appears on the site. The system of an automatic personal rating can be also introduced to determine the most active members, e.g. to rate best publishers of the week or of the month in order to let the team see the most active contributors. For more passive team members, it will be reasonable to introduce a dynamic chart that will show their own activity progress throughout different timeframes (e.g. weeks, months or quarters).
Personal pages. A strict moderation that prevents the site from clogging implies that a number of posts will be sifted out. But what could you do if a team member wants to keep a post containing important information that is too specific for the rest of the community? To publish posts with no previous moderation, employees can be provided with their personal pages that will give them more freedom, will let them store all the information they need in one place and share it with other members even if it’s not published in the general newsfeed.
Custom design. Last but not least, custom design is actually what a collaboration site cannot succeed without. A site should give the sense of belonging to a community and reflect the domain users are working in. Custom design isn’t an option in this case, it’s a must that will help to increase user acceptance significantly. We encourage companies to spend some efforts on creating a custom master page, as well as a few templates for subsites, which will help to visualize the general concept (e.g. if your team specializes in healthcare, create pages with ‘healthy’ design).
Implementing SharePoint collaboration at an enterprise isn’t an easy task. Any attempts to deliver an out-of-the box solution won’t work, as the risk of rejection is too high. Moreover, even a feature-rich solution can also fail if it doesn’t meet users’ needs.
The development course should be designed with employees’ expectations in mind. When taking up a SharePoint collaboration project, start with drawing a portrait of the future user and describing their information needs, then think together with a SharePoint consultant about how the site can become an integral part of the users’ working days.
We are looking forward to hearing about your experience of adopting SharePoint-based collaboration solutions. What were the pitfalls of implementing such a solution at your organization? Which features are considered the most popular and proved to help with user engagement? What do you think are the ways to make SharePoint collaboration projects more successful?
This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.
As if it’s a real treasure island, innovation companies and their R&D departments strictly guard their most precious assets – valuable knowledge and human resources. However, even with a small number of employees, innovation-focused companies are not so simple to manage, as their vitally important task is to handle some very specific processes such as research, idea generation, screening and nurturing. Moreover, innovation companies have to attract investors to raise funds for their breakthroughs. In biotechnology, as we have seen in our practice, there is even a bigger challenge of coming through years of tests and approvals before reaching a plateau of productivity.
To cut short, it is not hard to understand that innovations have a lot of pitfalls. This is where innovation management software can help. Among numerous solutions offered to support innovations, SharePoint is the one that successfully combines knowledge management, collaboration and security mechanisms which form three pillars of innovation management.
The process of idea generation has almost stayed the same through centuries: it still starts with someone’s light-bulb moment or in-depth study.
Searching for a high-quality concept, innovation-responsible employees generate dozens of ideas every day. Before they discard some of them as unrealistic, you will want to take care of all of them in case they turn out to be a jewel (remember James Watt, a famous Scottish mechanical engineer? His steam engine that started out the Industrial Revolution was used just for pumping water out of mines for almost 50 years!)
To keep track of them, ideas should be stored in an appropriate knowledge base (KB). SharePoint can serve both as a knowledge base and an effective tool to manage a company’s internal knowledge treasury.
ScienceSoft’s tip: SharePoint as a knowledge management system is clockwork if you restrict use of other KB management systems or prevent your employees from storing their ideas out of your SharePoint site. Provided that your SharePoint KB is permanently renewed and represents the warehouse of unique ideas, it will serve you well.
Meanwhile, let’s keep in mind that document storage is not knowledge management yet. To become a real knowledge, information should be discussed, shared and expanded. And here we come to the second pillar.
Innovation is undoubtedly a team activity. Once generated, any idea is rather raw and shapeless. Collaboration is a magic key to transform a newborn idea into a well-shaped concept. Considered as an internal social network or intranet, SharePoint encourage employees to collaborate. It includes a number of tools that make a company’s social computing and communication enjoyable:
Why is collaboration important? Collaboration is the way to a higher team productivity, as it accelerates both idea generation and nurturing. SharePoint is a good example of collaboration software that helps to raise the level of employees’ involvement. Co-creation boost innovative thinking that expands a company’s innovation pool and increases the visibility of ideas.
Here you can find our customer’s success story that proves the effectiveness of SharePoint as an innovation and collaboration platform.
ScienceSoft’s tip: SharePoint can also help to overcome that fear of failure. Creating the area for idea generation and discussion, an innovation manager can be sure that no idea is lost on the way due to fears (‘Nobody can understand and appreciate my idea’) or doubts (‘I think, somebody has already shared the same idea’).
In innovation management, security issues are of top importance, since know-how leaks can lead to tragic consequences. As an innovation management solution, SharePoint provides effective, in-built security protection tools:
ScienceSoft’s tip: Do not underestimate user trainings. A wide range of security issues can be prevented by explaining employees the importance of the data they store and share. Point out that extracting documents from the internal SharePoint site and using them in external resources (personal email, file hosting services, etc.) can lead to undeliberate breaches in their company’s security.
When used and managed properly, a SharePoint site contributes greatly to a company’s knowledge base evolution. Effective for the purposes of collaboration, knowledge management and security, SharePoint is a handy tool to accumulate more valuable knowledge and protect it properly from security breaches.
For more details on SharePoint advantages in innovation management, please contact our SharePoint consultants.
This article originally appeared on ScienceSoft Blog and has been republished with permission.