As many of you are keenly aware, the SharePoint community came to life primarily due to the lack of documentation in the early years of the technology, which gave rise to a number of different bloggers and analysts and support personnel. In the early years of SharePoint, if your job was to support the platform, you didn't have many places to go for help or support. And so people started blogging, sharing their war stories and best practices, and the community reached out to help the community. It's a pretty amazing thing, and I often reflect on how great it is to work with so many people who are passionate about giving back to the community.
Since the time I left Microsoft in 2009, I've run into quite a few people who first found help with all things SharePoint through the blog and forum activities of Laura Rogers, otherwise known to the world as @wonderlaura, who is part of the well-known SharePoint 911 team at Rackspace. I recently caught up with Laura to talk with her about the issue of workflow:
[Christian Buckley] Laura, thanks for taking the time to answer some questions about workflow requirements. Of course, workflow continues to be the number one productivity tool for SharePoint, and people are always interested in learning more on the topic. But can also share your origin story with SharePoint? (you know, like a superhero) Maybe share some of your background, including SharePoint911 and the transition into Rackspace, what you’re doing there, your hopes and dreams, etc etc.
[Laura Rogers] I started out as an Exchange admin at a large healthcare company back in 2002. Our group in the server support team was “messaging and collaboration”, which was comprised of all of the servers for Exchange, Blackberry, etc. In 2004, we were told to try out this new SharePoint thing because it fell under the category of collaboration, and we stood up a server, just for our (large) IT department to kick the tires. We decided we liked it, and we were to stand up a whole farm to roll out to the company.
Before this could happen, a couple of us were sent to SharePoint Administration training in Minneapolis in 2005. Our instructor was the famous Bill English! During the class, he announced to us that he was putting together a team of authors to write a book for the new version of SharePoint (2007). He said that if any of us were interested, to send him our resume and to write a whitepaper. This was to prove we could write and could take criticism okay when it came to the whole editing process, which is sometimes brutal. Here’s the link to mine.
So I went on to write the chapter in the MOSS Administrator’s Companion, all about the out of box web parts. Besides Bill, some of the co-authors were amazing people that I have hung out quite a bit with in the almost ten years since then… Penny Coventry, Daniel Webster, Steve Smith, Ben Curry, Brett Lonsdale, Andrew Connell, Rick Taylor, and a few others.
[CB] And that was around the time you started speaking at a lot of conferences. We used to see each other all over the US…
[LR] That's right. With the chapter under my belt and knowing who I knew, it was easy to get my first speaking gig at the Best Practices Conference in San Diego in 2009, where Brett and I co-presented the “Making the Most of Out of Box Web Parts” presentation. I met Todd Klindt there, and I knew him from some SharePoint forums and from twitter, but that was the first time I met him in person. He told me about this other SharePoint conference that he speaks at, called SPTechCon. So I spoke at my first SPTechCon in 2009, and met the whole SharePoint911 crew there for the first time. I knew them all from twitter, and it was a lot of fun hanging out with them. Shane Young (who was the owner of SP911) and Todd were already good friends, and I pretty much hung out with that group the whole time I was there. Besides Shane, John Ross, Randy Drisgill, Jennifer Mason, and Ryan Keller were there.
After that, I still kept speaking at conferences and SharePoint Saturdays, and Shane ended up hiring me in September that year. So that meant that I got to start working from home like the rest of the team, and most of my SharePoint work as a consultant was remote work, and more book writing. Rackspace Hosting bought our whole company in 2012, which was very exciting. It’s a great company to work for!
[CB] I remember when that happened. It was big news, and really the first of many consolidation acquisitions in the SharePoint space, and I don't think we've seen the end of it. How big of a change was it to move into Rackspace?
[LR] This didn’t change my day to day job much. They let us keep working from home, so I still worked with a lot of the same clients, and on pretty much the same type of projects. I became a manager a couple of years ago, and I have a team of 6 SharePoint gurus, and most of them work from home as well. Over the time, our original SharePoint911 team sort of went different ways, mostly within Rackspace, but it’s still so much fun when the whole group gets back together at SPTechCon and other conferences.
[CB] One of my favorite events, as well. Ok, so jumping over to the topic at hand -- Satya Nadella has made “platforms and productivity” the focus of Microsoft. Within SharePoint, workflow is the #1 productivity activity. When you work with customers, how do you introduce the topic of workflow?
[LR] Usually when working with customers, workflow is not something that I necessarily have to introduce to them. They usually start off by saying that they want to use workflows, and ask me what workflows can do for them. Most of the time, the conversation starts with “We tried to create a workflow…” For people who have never used workflows, I just explain the basic concept of something needing to go through an approval process, and all of the automated things that you can set up a workflow to do along the way, like send emails. For people who have attempted workflows already, it’s actually a lot of fun for me to sit down and ask questions about what the overall goal is, and then explain the best way to accomplish that with a workflow.
[CB] I think that is a great point: you sit down, ask questions, and help the customer articulate their goals and purpose. That right there is a leading cause of SharePoint problems: not taking the time to properly plan. What is unique about the requirements process for developing workflow? Are there misconceptions? Are customers just doing it wrong? And if so, how can they improve their approach?
[LR] The requirements process is interesting, because usually the SharePoint person has had someone in the business come to them with a piece of paper or a word document, with “automate this” or “put this on a web page”. There are a lot of questions to be asked, beyond just creating it as a list or library somewhere and adding columns. The first issue usually arises when the business department hasn’t fully hashed out what the workflow really needs to do. Make them agree on something first.
Usually once this happens, when the SharePoint person is trying to translate what the business wants into an actual workflow, it usually ends up being a much more complicated workflow than it needs to be. They can usually improve their approach by testing what they’ve built, from an end user perspective. I see a lot of people using task actions all over the place. This is a huge pet peeve because it usually puts a lot more burden on the end user than is necessary, when a simple email notification could have done the trick.
Another big thing that people don’t think about, that should be planned with the requirements gathering, is the user interface. What site will the form / workflow be on? Where do users click to start a form or workflow? Where do they go or what do they click in order to see the status of an existing one? Planning and testing, especially for the more complicated ones, is crucial. Not just testing the technical functionality, but testing the whole experience of everyone involved.
[CB] One of the biggest concerns with the release of SP2013 was the change in strategy away from SharePoint Designer as the catch-all for “citizen develop” activities within SharePoint, with more of an emphasis around workflow. What changed in the designer role? What do we know about the role moving into SP2016, if anything?
[LR] This is a tricky one. At Ignite, Microsoft announced that there will be no “SharePoint Designer 2016”. They have not announced what people will use for workflows, so for now, I think that the plan is to use SharePoint Designer 2013 for workflows in 2016. I anticipate that they will probably be doing something new, and hopefully something web based for workflow creation.
As Laura points out, there are a lot of open questions about SharePoint Designer, workflow development, and SharePoint 2016. We're in our first preview of the platform, with another preview due later this year, and RTM sometime in the spring. There is also talk about Azure-based workflow services, but no real details yet. I'm sure that when we learn more about these things, Laura will be at the forefront with content, video, and expertise.
Thanks again Laura for taking the time to talk. And for those not yet following Laura, you can find her on Twitter at @wonderlaura and on her website at www.wonderlaura.com
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
No comments:
Post a Comment