SharePoint as a Knowledge and Ideation Platform with Mike Oryszak

In a recent webinar, I was joined by long-time community member Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) from B&R Business Solutions as we discussed the pros and cons of SharePoint as a knowledge management platform, and how idea management could be leveraged to bolster your KM efforts. Mike was a 5-time SharePoint MVP and is one of my earliest connections from the SharePoint community after I left Microsoft back in 2009, having participated with him in many SharePoint Saturday and other events around the US.

You can watch an on-demand recording of our webinar here: From Ideas to Innovation - Formalizing Idea Management in SharePoint

Following our joint webinar, I invited Mike to discuss briefly some of the concepts covered in our session. Specifically, I wanted to hear more about his deployment experiences and talk about some of his customer experiences in using SharePoint as the primary platform for capturing all internal information assets. This is more than just using the platform to store documents -- but a focused knowledge repository to help drive the "ideation" process within the company. This is an important distinction, because we have many systems that store content, but few that enable us to improve enterprise-wide visibility into this collective knowledge. SharePoint has that potential, with some planning and effort. That's what I reached out to Mike to discuss:

[Christian Buckley] Mike, I appreciate you takin the time to rehash some of the topics we just covered in our webinar. Maybe you can give folks a background on your experience and company before we start?

[Mike Oryszak] Sure, no problem. As you know, I am a Senior Solution Architect with B&R Business Solutions.  The majority of my career has been working in the Microsoft stack, initially developing with ASP, COM and then later web based .NET applications.  Like many of the longtime community members I jumped on the bandwagon early on with digital dashboards and related technologies.  I generally claim 2002 as my official start since by then I was working with Portal Server 2001 in a production capacity and developing solutions.  The organization I worked for at the time was really into pushing the concepts of platforms and code re-use so the timing was perfect to adopt what SharePoint was to become; a platform for hosting unified business solutions.   

[CB] Great, thanks for that. Ok, let's jump into it: In our webinar, we kicked things off by talking about SharePoint as a knowledge management (KM) platform. How has the KM story for SharePoint evolved since the early days (let's say the 2003/2007 versions) of SharePoint?

[MO] In some ways, it seems like everything has changed.  You can start by looking at the format of the content, and how people communicate now.  In those days everything was absolutely document based, in many cases documents that had been scanned from a printed format.  Work in progress documents would of course be in Excel or Word.  Since this was a web-based system, one of the first things I really pushed for was taking some of that content that had previously been document based and move it to a format that is more accessible, easier to consume, and easier to locate; displaying it like a web page.  Why make somebody browse to a library and open up 10 documents to find what they are looking for when you can display a page of content.  Things like employee manuals, standard operating procedures, etc. were prime candidates.  Later when features like the blogs and wikis were added, I really looked to leverage those tools.  While neither are perfect implementations of those concepts, they were an improvement over prior capabilities and helped to move people away from primarily using documents.  Wikis are inherently collaborative, and blogs I’ve always felt offered a much better flexibility than say the announcements list/web part especially since it provides better support for organizing the content with categories and tags. 

[CB] The early versions of those features were really rough. In fact, I wrote a chapter in my 2010 book about making the out-of-the-box blog features "actually" work.
 
[MO] The product has come a long way since those early days, but more importantly the way we work has continued to evolve and people’s expectations are higher than ever.  It forces us to continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what we can do.   One of the bigger issues these days is how to leverage the knowledge you do have in the system and surface it appropriately so that you can take action on it.  With that in mind, we see less browsing for content and more dynamically loaded content suggestions based on relevancy or freshness and intuitive content search interfaces that show much smaller sets of data that can be quickly and easily refined. 
 
[CB] I often tell people that the most exciting new features in Office 365 and SharePoint are the search-based features. But Microsoft is really just responding to the demands of the marketplace. Surfacing content is an important aspect of KM. In your view, what are the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint as a knowledge repository? Where do you see most customers making mistakes in how they deploy and/or use the platform?

[MO] I think at its core, one of SharePoint’s greatest strengths has always been, and continues to be, its flexibility.  Flexibility in what features an organization chooses to use, and how that can be applied to meet a business challenge like a knowledge repository.   I like that it can support informal, unstructured repositories as well as much more formal, structure repositories where there are formal approval and publishing processes to promote or finalize items.  It supports content in a number of formats, and it has only gotten easier to find and surface the relevant content. 
 
One of the bigger weaknesses I have experienced in the past few years is lack of good support for mobile devices including both phones and tablets. 

[CB] Sounds like a great partner opportunity!

[MO] As a consultant, I am more than happy to scope out work to build a beautiful and fully responsive site that can perform well on any device but the time and effort to do that is higher than it should be.  Users expect more, and it should be easier.  I know Microsoft sees this, but I think they continue to lag 3-5 years behind.  In addition many of my customers still using the traditional server version of SharePoint still haven’t implemented the system in a way that the platform is accessible to those devices.  It is trapped behind a firewall and requires a VPN connection.  This limitation isn’t an issue with SharePoint itself, but the overall corporate security policies that should be easy to address.

[CB] Jumping over to the topic of our webinar, what would you say is the value of incorporating idea management into SharePoint? And how does that play into SharePoint's strengths?

[MO] One of the unique and great things about how SharePoint is used in most organizations, is that it is accessible by all employees.  This is certainly true for organizations that use it for an Intranet, but also for department, collaboration, or project sites.  As such, it should get the most visits or eyes on the screen.  Incorporating idea management into a system that is frequently accessed is pretty critical since it increases your chances of getting users engaged in the idea management activities.  Secondly, many of SharePoint’s core features align well with defining content areas (sites, libraries, lists) around a topical idea with flexible security and notification features.  We also have built in features that make search for and surfacing content easier than it is in most systems.  The long term value of these ideas are based your ability to find it when you need to.  With these things in mind, I haven’t seen any solution that is widely adopted and more capable than SharePoint. 
 
[CB] Looking at organizations who have successfully deployed idea management, how much would you say is the technology versus end user education?

[MO] You definitely cannot do one without the other, however most of the tough decisions are rooted in culture issues and not technology limitations.  Who should be allowed to participate and how, then what do you do with that content.  Traditionally management wanted full control over that process and who could participate.  The concept of the idea box on a shop floor became sort of a cliché and was not taken seriously.  Things have changed dramatically though in the last 10 years and employees want to have a voice and be heard.  Modern workers are willing to be engaged in the process of ideation when the organization’s culture supports it and the proper incentives are in place.  Even more important, when you have high engagement throughout the workforce, the quality of the ideas is likely to be much higher, and the ability to refine and take action on them easier.  I believe the companies that are able to successfully manage this will be significantly more successful than those that avoid, ignore, or fail to implement idea management. 

[CB] We can train people on how to use tools, but how important is company culture, do you think?
 
[MO] Each organization is in a different point on the culture maturity curve, but everyone can take a step.  For organizations that are just starting out, we start things small to get that pendulum swinging in the right direction.  It could be something like a simple poll with a small set of choices to get people into the habit of providing feedback.  Executive sponsorship is critical, and incentives always help.  Who wouldn’t be willing to write up a short list of idea contributions for the chance to win extra time off or a night at the movies?  Successful organizations tend to budget for incentives and do a good job marketing the process and results along the way.  Never underestimate the value of a good communication plan. 
 
When the culture is right you can start to fine tune the technology.  One of the keys in my experience, is making the whole process easy for both organizers and contributors.  It helps to have a solution that can support the process from start to finish; from the initial idea, promotion of the idea, refinement, and then later implementation of that idea.  If there are a lot of manual steps in the process flow, it can disrupt the flow and lead to lost momentum and delay the overall implementation of the idea.  Organizations that are successful with idea management remove those impediments.  I have also seen gamification successfully employed in a number of scenarios which can be baked into the platform.  

[CB] Ok, a related question: what SharePoint features or capabilities would you say are underutilized by customers – maybe out of the box capabilities that could help them improve their KM efforts today? Any best practices you find yourself repeatedly telling customers about?

[MO] One area I spend a lot of time educating customers on is Search.  Traditionally I think people have underutilized search, or at least have not optimized it to increase their chance of success.  There really is a lot of power and some great features that can be leveraged there that often are not.  This includes generic search results which I think everyone is familiar with, specialized search centers optimized for a particular set of content, as well as search driven content aggregation and roll-ups.  The past few years I have focused much of my community speaking to getting familiar with things like the content by search web part, custom display templates, and optimizing your search settings.  There are some incredibly powerful tools here that often go underutilized in most environments. 

[CB] From what you understand (or interpret) from Microsoft’s roadmap, what is changing about how knowledge is captured and disseminated in SharePoint? And what will be the role of partners (ISVs and SIs) in that future?

[MO] At the core of my interpretation is the thought that they are trying to simplify things for the end user, and it is hard to argue against that.  As they simplify the complexity, I believe in some cases it comes at the cost of some features that are mission critical to some organizations.  Specifically thinking about things like the modern lists and libraries, which currently have some uncertainty.  I encourage everyone to participate in the discussion through the community and through http://ift.tt/2bewNOA.
 
My approach as a consultant and SI has changed significantly in the past few years.  In the past it was always very effective to build custom server solutions, and capable developers could build and maintain those solutions with ease.  With the way things have transitioned though, I am much more selective with clients on determining what should and should not be built into SharePoint.  And for scenarios where they want to build a robust application, but really only have the requirement that it be surfaced in SharePoint we will look to build the solution in something like Azure and expose it through something like the app/add-in model.  All of the capabilities are still there, upgrades should be easier, and it comes with the added bonus that it could be ported to other platforms or used independently of SharePoint. 

[CB] What kinds of services does B&R provide to help customers build out better knowledge management capabilities?

[MO] Any successful knowledge management implementation is going to start with successful planning exercises.  We have some really smart people on the team that can help work through planning sessions.  We can use that to help identify the goals, the requirements, the types and format for content and then start to align those with out of the box or custom features.  In most cases we look to build an overall implementation roadmap that will last multiple phases.  That is not necessarily because the technology is difficult or risky, but because we want users to have time to absorb the changes and allow any culture changes to happen.  In some cases we stay fully engaged through the future phases, in others we simply come back to monitor and recommend adjustments while the bulk of the work is done internally.  We are pretty flexible with our services, and our best customers are the ones where we have a true partnership. 

Thank you again for expanding on this topic, Mike. And for those who would like to hear more on this topic, you can watch a recording of our webinar here.

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Collaboration Culture and Commitments with Expert Adam Levithan

One familiar face within the SharePoint community is Adam Levithan (@collabadam), a Director of Product Management at Metalogix, and a well-known speaker, business strategist, and SharePoint evangelist. I got to know Adam a few years back while he was a practice lead at DC-based Portal Solutions and I was Chief Evangelist at Axceler, and we've regularly collaborated ever since -- including a blog post here on SharePoint-Community.net a year ago where we talked about his move from consulting into product management. When putting together the panel for the Measuring Collaboration Success initiative, Adam was one of the first to agree to participate.

I recently reached out to Adam to discuss the status of the anonymous #MeasureCollabSuccess survey (take survey here) and some of our early results, and to better understand his perspective on the need to better define and measure the factors that make collaboration successful.

[Christian Buckley] Adam, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Of course, I'm very interested in your perspective on the initiative, as viewed through the lens of Metalogix product management.

[Adam Levithan] Stop the presses, this is the first time that I'm using my new title: Director of Product Management at Metalogix. This means that I get to not only work directly with the community to understand our ever changing needs within  SharePoint, Exchange, Office 365 and other file sync and share, but also guide the creation of solutions to meet those needs. Metalogix as a whole is aligning those evolving collaboration needs to ensure that the right content is secured in the right place/ at the right time, for you to get your work done.

[CB] So Adam, why were you interested in participating in the ‘Measuring Collaboration Success’ initiative? Do you think a community-driven effort to understand how organizations define, monitor and measure collaboration is something that is even necessary?

[AL] The SharePoint community has grown to be an asset for individuals to find their passion, organizations to have access to new ideas about technology, and Microsoft to gain feedback about the systems that community members use every day. The amazing thing is that all levels an outsider can see how the community as a whole has fulfilled its promises. As a result, there's no other way to perform a survey like this than to turn to the people who care the most about the results.

I am interested in participating because I started my career as a consultant in the SharePoint space and know that "collaboration" is a human effort, and as such, varies based on the specific culture of each organization. I also think we've reached a tipping point in technology where the physical aspect of what we do (aka servers, network cards, storage, firewalls, etc) has been pushed behind the focus on managing content and data.

[CB] So you think adoption is up, across the board?

[AL] There is no trend anymore of "adopting collaboration" in my mind, instead it's "what collaboration are you using". So I'm really excited to see the varying answers that we'll get from the diverse community.

[CB] And yet when you ask two people, even in the same organization, what they think "collaboration" means, you'll get varying answers. And if you don't begin with a shared understanding of the definition, how can you be successful? What makes it so difficult, in your opinion, for organizations to define collaboration?

[AL] It's all about perspective. In my daughter's kindergarten class they are teaching the students several pillars to be a good student. You guessed it, one of those pillars is collaboration. When asked to draw an image of collaboration my daughter drew a picture of helping older (by 10 years) sister play soccer. This was her understanding, and I believe similarly that each person has a different definition of what "collaboration" means to them. I like the Wikipedia definition that includes "A recursive process to achieve a goal", but that's the act of collaborating not the description of collaboration technologies.

So we're on this endeavor to put context around the question, build a common set of terms, and at the end we will be able to communicate as a whole on how to make our daily lives better through this thing called "collaboration".

[CB] How does the lack of a clear definition -- and a lack of context -- impact their efforts?

[AL] I have witnessed an exchange between a SharePoint analyst and an IT Director that demonstrates the impact.

SharePoint Analyst "Boss, we've been successful at increasing collaboration across the organization by more than 20%"

IT Manager "That's nice, how much did it cost"

Unfortunately, while a little bit of an exaggeration, this is based on reality. Even though this organization had a business plan to purchase and implement SharePoint within their organization, nobody followed op on the described benefits and turned back to old habits of measurement - cost.

[CB] And the conversation gets even more clouded (pun intended) by the various tools finding their way into organizations. Do you think that the increased usage of consumer-focused collaboration tools (Slack, WhatsApp, Trello, etc) is exacerbated by a failure to clearly define collaboration goals and measurements?

[AL] In the technology marketplace, I don't think start-up entries demonstrates the lack of definition, however, it is a result of larger organizations not focusing on a human behaviors. As a product manager, I'm acutely aware of the difference between building technology because it's really cool, and building technology because people will want to use it. There is a lot of room in the collaboration marketplace for making people's lives run smoother.

[CB] Ok, so what are some of the common mistakes you see organizations making as they set out to establish their collaboration strategy?

[AL] A boiler plate collaboration mission/vision is found and used to describe the organizations individual culture. A plan must be designed that is not a fixed document, but a process of governance and decision making to be able to adapt to the actual usage of the systems.

Commitment. It's not a nice to have, collaboration in its many forms is the way people work. There must be IT and business representatives that have responsibility for the success defined.

[CB] Agreed -- commitment, especially at the executive level, will make or break your collaboration effort. In your opinion, what are the key influences that can make or break enterprise collaboration?

[AL] I can think of so many, but I'll focus on one key area which is to spread the experience from one department to the next. Within the 1000s of implementations that worked on or learned about I can promise you that there is always a department that jumps deeply into the use of collaboration technologies and builds their own definition and measurements of collaboration success. What organizations lack is the mechanism to educate other departments, in business language of the achievements that the practitioner has achieved. If it's a marketing department that has to build a scheduling application, I'm sure the finance department would be interested in doing similar. If HR builds a form that everyone uses and that saves time, organizations don't follow up and socialize that the benefit was brought through a collaborative technology.

Thank you Adam for taking the time to answer my questions, and talk about your involvement in the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative.

If you would like to help the community better understand and develop repeatable best practices around defining and measuring collaboration, please be sure to take the anonymous survey at http://bit.ly/1TKeUbu. This survey is NOT for sales or marketing purposes, and no personal information will be captured. You can read more about the initiative and our panel on the Beezy blog.

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Strategic Planning and the MTCs with Microsoft Collaboration Solution Architect Chris Bortlik

While most people attend the various SharePoint and other technology events for the content (certainly not for the food) or to showcase our products and services, the most important value from these industry events, IMHO, are the personal contacts you make. Most of the content you can pick up from online recordings or documentation, or by dialing into a web demo. No single marketing activity, no matter how compelling, will drive a sale -- only through multiple touch points and marketing messages will people begin to make a decision. However, relationships are the differentiator. And that's the greatest value of attending events in person -- building those one-to-one relationships with your fellow attendees.

I don't recall the year, but it was at one of the early SharePoint Saturday Boston events where I was introduced to Chris Bortlik, who worked for the regional Microsoft office, in Waltham Massachusetts at the time. Over the years Chris has been a great partner and sounding board for feedback while I worked for some of the leading ISVs in the space. I recently reached out to Chris to talk about his latest role at within the Boston MTC (Microsoft Technology Center), and the evolution underway at all of the global MTCs.

[Christian Buckley] Chris, thanks again for taking the time to chat with me. People love the personal deep dives. Can you share some of your background, how long you’ve been working at Microsoft and with SharePoint, what you did prior to SharePoint?

[Chris Bortlik] Thanks for inviting me to chat.

I have been working at Microsoft since April 2008. During the past 8 years at Microsoft I have held various Business Productivity technical pre-sales roles focused primarily on Office, SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365. My primary responsibilities have included leading technical briefings, security briefings, executive briefings, strategy briefings, architectural design sessions, solution alignment workshops, Office 365 pilots, and Customer Immersion Experience sessions with many of the largest enterprise customers based in the Northeast of the United States.

I have been fortunate to work closely with various Microsoft product teams thru the Insider and Ranger programs for Office 365, SharePoint, Yammer, and Office and I was recognized by the SharePoint product team with the Insider “top gun award” in 2011.

I have been working with SharePoint since 2001 and have been a frequent speaker at numerous Microsoft events including the SharePoint Conference, TechEd, and Ignite. I was honored to be rated as the top IT Pro speaker at SharePoint Conference 2014 and was the keynote speaker at SharePoint Fest D.C. in 2015. I was a contributing author of the “Essential SharePoint 2010” book and a coauthor of the “Essential SharePoint 2013” book. I also blog regularly on TechNet and am active on social media platforms including Twitter and LinkedIn. I am a co-organizer for the Boston area SharePoint Saturday events and Office 365 user group.

As of January 2016, I have moved into a new role at Microsoft as a Collaboration Solution Architect at the Microsoft Technology Center in Boston, MA.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, I was a customer for 14 years holding senior technical IT leadership, development, and architect roles at enterprise companies including FM Global, John Hancock (Manulife), and One Communications. I have a Bachelor Degree in Computer Science from Wentworth Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration degree from Bentley University. Outside of work, my wife, Marisa, and I live in Woburn, MA with our 4 daughters: Kayla, Jessica, Liliana, and Sophia.

[Buckley] Maybe you can dig more into the history of your new Collaboration Solution Architect role – and more broadly, the purpose of the MTC? Many who read this many not be familiar with the function of the MTC, much less with your role. Are you involved in customer engagements and delivery beyond the POC, or do you hand off at some point – and to whom (MCS, partners, etc.)?

[Bortlik] The Microsoft Technology Centers (MTCs) are collaborative environments that provide access to innovative technologies and world-class expertise, enabling Microsoft’s customers and partners to envision, design, and deploy solutions to meet their exact needs. There are currently 37 MTC locations worldwide. Boston, MA is the home of the first MTC that Microsoft launched more than 15 years ago.

In my new role at the MTC I will continue to work closely with Microsoft’s enterprise customers, services, and partners to architect solutions that leverage Office 365 and related technologies including SharePoint, Office, Yammer, Skype for Business, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange. My primary responsibilities include leading Strategy Briefings, Architecture Design Sessions, Workshops, and Proof of Concept engagements at the Boston MTC. I am very excited to have joined the Worldwide MTC community and look forward to blogging more, continuing to speak at various external events, and contributing content via the MTC Studios.

The MTC works closely with our customers, and often Microsoft services, support, and partners, to help them architect their solutions and develop a short and long term roadmap to drive consumption and utilization of Microsoft and our partner’s software, hardware, and online services. The MTC does not perform production support or delivery activities rather we work closely with Microsoft Premier Support, Microsoft Consulting Services, and our partner community who assist our customers with implementing and maintaining the solutions we architect together.

[Buckley] What happens in a typical strategy briefing? What does that process look like?

[Bortlik] During a typical strategy briefing, we start by listening to our customers – this is key to the MTC process and our methodology. We seek first to understand what’s important to our customers and their business. We want to make sure there is alignment with the agenda and the goals for the day for everyone that is investing their valuable time with us. We also want to work with our customers to look broader than the day’s agenda – really dig into their business and technical drivers and help them craft and refine their short, mid, and long term vision and roadmap. We usually discuss the evolution of Microsoft and how we are helping our customers to succeed in a mobile first, cloud first world.

The next part of the agenda is typically a visit to our Envisioning Center (EC). The EC has four different sets available for customers to see a “day in the life” of leveraging Microsoft solutions for example as a mobile worker, office worker, home worker, or from another work location. The EC enables our customers to see the “art of the possible” and to brainstorm how these capabilities could be leveraged in their environment.

The remainder of the strategy briefing varies based on the customer’s interests and goals. Often it includes a deeper dive in areas related to Office 365, Azure, or other Microsoft technologies that are relevant to the customer’s solution needs. A key part of the afternoon of the strategy briefing session is spending plenty of time white boarding and mapping the Microsoft solutions to a customer’s strategy then helping the customer develop an actionable set of next steps with a focus on both long term strategy and short term deliverables that can be rapidly delivered and iterated. We want to focus on making this real and driving some quick wins that have high business impact.

[Buckley] I was able to participate in a few of these while working for Microsoft in Redmond a few years back, and those strategy briefings really seemed to provide a lot of value. Jumping to technology -- what has changed the most, in your view, about Microsoft’s collaboration solutions over the past, say, 5 years (aside from the move to the cloud)?

[Bortlik] Great question. For me, it’s really about the pace of innovation and change. When I first started working at Microsoft almost 8 years ago, our collaboration solutions were typically on a 3+year development cycle generally with the 1st year spent on requirements gathering and writing specifications; the 2nd year spent on development and unit testing; and the 3rd year spent on integration testing and preparing the products to ship. Even after the products shipped, it would then often take customers years to test and upgrade the various server platforms (e.g. SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync) which affected the end user experience and how tightly we could build dependencies and integration points across the Office client and server technologies.

[Buckley] Things have changed pretty dramatically.

[Bortlik] Microsoft is now rapidly developing, testing, and shipping new solutions. This is enabling us to be more agile and responsive to customer and partner feedback. This approach is also enabling our customers to more easily adopt new capabilities and work on end user communication and change management since we are not rolling out thousands of new features once every 3 years. Users are seeing a regular set of smaller updates which is very similar to what they are used to as consumers of technologies at home and in their personal lives.

[Buckley] I have to believe that one of the exciting things about your new role is that you get to go deeper into an expanded list of Microsoft technologies. That's a big part of these strategy sessions -- certainly when you're talking with the larger Enterprise customers, who want to better understand not just what is available today -- but what is coming on the Microsoft roadmap. What are you most excited about? And what are customers asking about the most?

[Bortlik] I am excited to be able to go broader and deeper into other Microsoft technologies including the Enterprise Mobility Suite (primarily Azure Active Directory, Intune, and Azure Rights Management), Dynamics CRM, Azure, PowerApps and Power BI.

Two hot topics with customers right now are hybrid and compliance/protection.

Many enterprise customers have made significant investments in SharePoint on-premises. Common capabilities moving to SharePoint Online first are OneDrive for Business, team/project sites, and Extranets. Many customers have begun moving their Intranets to SharePoint Online as well. Hybrid search is a key scenario as well – especially with the changes rolling out for cloud hybrid search. Customers are excited to be able to see their on-premises and online content accessible via a consolidated set of search results and to be able to bring on-premises content into the Office Graph and Delve.

As more data is moved into Office 365, customers continue to express interest in how Microsoft can help them protect their data and enforce their compliance policies. We’ve been having lots of discussions around the native Data Loss Prevention, eDiscovery, Auditing, Mobile Device Management, Customer Lockbox, Archival, Retention, and Information Rights Management capabilities that are built into Office 365 and extended by the Enterprise Mobility Suite.

[Buckley] These are areas that were once dominated by the ISVs, but we're seeing a shift in those capabilities moving to Office 365. That shift came up in our year end CollabTalk tweetjam in December 2015, where the focus was on 2016 predictions for SharePoint and Office 365. Looking forward, what from the public roadmap do you feel will have the greatest impact on customers?

[Bortlik] Office 365 Groups continue to impress me especially how rapidly this new capability is evolving and how the product team is responding to customer feedback. I am excited to see how we are now able to really unify the user experience across Outlook, OneNote, Exchange Online, and SharePoint Online. 2016 will see Skype for Business, Yammer, and other Office 365 services integrated into Office 365 Groups as well. To me, Office 365 Groups reflects Microsoft’s continued investments to increase integration across the service and improve the user experience both of which will result in continued usage and adoption of Office 365 which helps our customers to realize the full value of their investments.

There is certainly more to come with the Microsoft roadmap in the near term, with some announcements coming with the general availability of SharePoint 2016. We're all looking forward to hearing more about Microsoft's road map, and as CVP Jeff Teper has stated a number of times in the last few months, for 2016 to become one of the biggest years for SharePoint.

Thank you again Chris for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions and share insights into your new role, and the role of the Microsoft Technology Centers. You can find Chris on Twitter at @cbortlik and blogging at http://ift.tt/1XaDWhY

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

SharePoint Analytics and Reporting with Tal Ben-David from Intlock

The topic of SharePoint analytics has been very popular in the SharePoint space for as long as I’ve been familiar with the platform. Historically, the out-of-the-box analytics have not been good. With the move to SharePoint 2013, in fact, it seemed we lost some of the more granular capability. While Microsoft has stepped up their plans for Office 365, and have made major announcements around Delve analytics and cross-workload reporting, there is still a very strong need for SharePoint analytics and reporting, whether online or on-prem.

One of the leading providers within the analytics category is Intlock, developers of CardioLog Analytics. I started working with the Intlock team following the 2015 Worldwide Partner Conference, and connected with Tal Ben-David to organize and conduct a couple joint webinars. The topic of our forthcoming webinar is The Nuts and Bolts of Measuring SharePoint Activity and will be conducted on Tuesday, January 19^th at 8am PST (you can register here).

I connected with Tal this past week and asked if he could share some of his background and perspective about the SharePoint analytics space:

[Christian Buckley] Tal, maybe you can begin with a bit of an introduction? 

[Tal Ben-David] Sure. I’ve been working in the SharePoint sphere for around a year. Previously, I was a consultant for Accenture. Currently, I’m serving as an Alliance Manager at Intlock, developer of CardioLog Analytics for SharePoint and Office 365. While I’ve only been active in the SharePoint community for a year, my time at Accenture highlighted the growing importance of knowledge management and collaboration solutions for enterprises.

[CB] You really are a noobie. :-) But that's actually a great point to make -- these are not issues just for SharePoint, but for the broader collaboration and knowledge management space. But given your year of experience, what would you say are the top “gaps” in SharePoint analytics, or even the broader KM or collaboration space? Where do most organizations fail when it comes to monitoring and measuring SharePoint?

[TB] I view this as a kind of “two-pronged” gap. First, a gap exists because many organizations fail to recognize how vital it is to incorporate analytics in every aspect of the organization, or lack the resources to do so, including the knowledge management and collaboration space. As cliché as it sounds, we still stick by the old phrase “You can only manage what you measure”.

The second gap is the analytics strategy itself. Once the need for analytics is realized, many organizations fail to employ a dedicated strategy that aligns with their business goals. A dedicated strategy should include having SMART metrics to give the analytics strategy direction, and to turn the data into business potential. This is only possible when the data is harnessed with an advanced analytics solution, as OOTB metrics lack the intelligent insights that advanced solutions offer.

[CB] Not that people even utilize all of the OOTB tools available. Some of that is a technology issue, some of that an education/training issue.

[TB] Exactly. Over and above deploying an advanced analytics solution, companies need to make sure they have knowledgeable personnel who can analyze the data effectively to translate it into an improvement plan. This is often where companies fail to realize the need for external experts or analytics solutions that provide side-by-side consulting services.

[CB] When organizations recognize those gaps/shortcomings, how do they tend to approach the problem? Do they assume everything will be out of the box? 

[TB] Most organizations will approach us with specific and detailed requirements, usually after attempting to use OOTB SharePoint analytics or non-SharePoint specific analytics solutions. The customer will also generally have learned the hard way that in order for an analytics strategy to be effective, both business and IT administrators need to be involved in the process. In fact, what we often find that once the organization has recognized these gaps, an advanced analytics solution inevitably sparks senior management’s interest and drives their involvement.

[CB] As organizations begin to move to the cloud with Office 365, how does that change their analytics consumption/needs, or does it?

[TB] Personally, I see no major shift in the needs of analytics with the transition to the cloud. However, with the investment of migrating from On-Prem solutions to the cloud, organizations are realizing the importance of increasing the ROI of their SharePoint environment. Analytics can be particularly useful, both in easing the pre migration process and keeping track of progress post migration. In short, we have seen that the move to the cloud has been a good entrance point for organizations who have been sitting on the analytics fence.

[CB] Collaboration and Engagement have come to the forefront within many SharePoint environments. My view is that this has more to do with the shift from a technology perspective to a business perspective – and the need to show that business value is being achieved. How can an organization monitor and measure Collaboration and Engagement?

[TB] I think this ties back into my previous mentioning of setting up SMART goals, which ensure that organizations can continuously close the loop in their SharePoint environment, meaning employee collaboration can consistently be measured and improved.

[CB] An iterated upon. You'll never get it right the first time. It takes time and learning.

[TB] It’s important to keep in mind that employee collaboration and engagement is often an abstract and soft concept, so an analytics strategy in this space should preferably include a way to personally engage and collect feedback from users, such as surveys. Additionally, to effectively monitor employee collaboration, organizations need to be able to tie back data to a specific user or user groups through advanced segmentation abilities.

[CB] A topic that I am very passionate about is gamification - which is something we'll be jointly talking about in our February webinar. While SharePoint out of the box is fairly light on the tools to help organizations develop gamification strategies to change the behaviors of their end users, it offers an excellent platform from which to build. How do analytics and behavioral targeting help organizations better organize these strategies?

[TB] Analytics are an essential component of the gamification strategy, because they can give you deep insights regarding top users or groups within the SharePoint portal. Organizations can then leverage these insights to inspire “friendly competition”.

A classic example we’ve seen is creating a dashboard with the top 10 users and top influential content that can be shared across the entire organization. We’ve also seen example of site owners vying to create the most collaborative sites. This represents a sort of “higher level” aspect of gamification to improve portal adoption and collaboration.

Thank you Tal for taking time out of your schedule to talk to me about SharePoint analytics, and their value to every business using the platform. If you'd like to reach Tal directly and learn more about CardioLog Analytics, you can find him at tal.ben-david@intlock.com. Or you can register for our January webinar!

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Office 365 Task and Project Management with MVP Treb Gatte

For those unfamiliar with the project management space, its amazing to think that even with Microsoft Project seemingly the default project management software, there is no obvious "winner" in the category. In fact, Microsoft Excel is more commonly used to build out task lists and work breakdown structures than is MS Project. Of course, my first real experience with SharePoint back in 2005 was deploying Project Server (well, trying to deploy it and get the analytics to work) with SharePoint as the reporting repository.

And following the history of project and portfolio management solutions, Microsoft was very slow to move this business system category to the cloud, with a number of online project management solutions popping up between 2000 and 2004 while Microsoft was insisting that the future belonged to on prem. Thankfully that's all cleared up now, and Microsoft is focusing on solving the productivity needs of project management teams -- and task management. Which is what this interview is all about.

I'm not sure when exactly I met Treb Gatte (@tgatte), Project MVP and principal consultant at Tumble Road. I started running into him at events a couple years back, but got to know him when he started attending the local SharePoint user group (www.PSSPUG.org) and SharePoint Saturday Redmond (#SPSRED) events. Of course, given my background in project and business analyst roles, I've always felt an affinity toward the technologies in the space, and Treb has become my go-to expert on what is happening in the world Microsoft Project, Project Server, and now Office 365 Planner. I recently caught up with Treb between events and asked him to share his opinions on the history of tasks in SharePoint, and what is happening in the project space:

[Christian Buckley] Treb, I always like to kick off these interviews with the origin story: how exactly did you get your super powers? Maybe you can share some of your background, such as how long you have been an MVP, technologies that you've focused on over the past couple decades, and what your company focuses on today.

[Treb Gatte] I started out as an AS/400 RPG developer after graduating from Louisiana State University, doing document management projects and projects involving working with very large datasets of the time (100 Million rows per table). My first day in industry, 4/30/1990 is the same day that Microsoft Project v1 was originally released. Interesting coincidence. I got my MBA from Wake Forest University in NC, which lead to doing Process Development in a Business Incubator, during the Dot Com days.

[CB] You've hit some of my favorite dot com era buzzwords. Nicely done. What was your first official "project management" job?

[TG] A Project Management Tool Implementation project at Wachovia Bank caught my eye, which turned out to be one of the first ever done using a new Microsoft product called Project Server 2002. New beta tool and no documentation meant learning a lot directly from the Microsoft team.  I left that role to join the Project Engineering team at Microsoft in Redmond for several years, focusing on Business Intelligence. I went on to learn about the consulting world while working for a Microsoft partner teaching and implementing Project Server. Once I was on a first name basis with the United crew between Seattle and Newark, I decided to take over management of the Project Server instances at Starbucks here in Seattle. Finally, I got the entrepreneurial bug and founded TumbleRoad.com, where we design and implement Project and Power BI based solutions. We also do a great deal of custom product and process training as well.

And to answer the first part of your question, I’ve been a Project MVP now for three years. I’ve written books on Project and I currently write a blog for CIO Magazine.

[CB] As you and I were discussing recently, the project management landscape has evolved -- even over the past 5 years. Dedicated hosted solutions in the space have been around for more than a decade, but the rise of more simplistic web-based tools seems to have forced the more structured, enterprise-scale solutions to rethink their cloud strategies. Of course, I am not as plugged in as you are. What is the state of project management in this new era of cloud services -- specifically, from a technology standpoint?

[TG] We are living in interesting times in the project management space. There’s a few different trends which are creating shifts in what we are seeing.

First, the economic downturn of the past few years meant a lot of companies didn’t hire PMP Certified Project Managers and designated on hand resources instead to serve as Project Managers. These “incidental PMs” didn’t have the requisite knowledge to use Microsoft Project or any of the various other formal tools well. Their focus was on getting the work done, usually doing management by checklist. If they were using a Project Management tool, the plans were used primarily for coordination and communication and not for formal scheduling.

Second, the economic downturn also meant a lot of companies downsized workforces. However, they didn’t downsize the businesses as well so now less people are spending more time doing more operational work than before. Time that would normally be spent working on projects. This greater demand for operational time also tended to fragment the work day, leading to less effective use of time for project work. All of this leads to lower project throughput.

Lastly, new work management methodologies and tools have arisen, which focus on managing conversations and information flow rather than managing schedules. These methods and tools tended to be more adaptive, easier to learn and worked better in the more chaotic work place. Some tools like Trello are visual and are free, two very attractive aspects for many small and medium sized companies. Most of these new tools are cloud based, allowing groups within a company to adopt them quickly, when they need it, without IT involvement. Formal tools were regarded as not supportive of these new methodologies, hard to use, costly and you had to get IT involved to implement it. This meant you might get the tool two years after you needed it.

Large companies still want the formal Project Management tools. The question is: what is the Fortune 500 of tomorrow going to use?

[CB] The free tools certainly have been changing things up. I am a huge Trello fan, because it's just simple and flexible, and most important to me -- it doesn't try to do 20 things while excelling at none of them. It's just a simple kanban list management tool, which for me is perfect. But there are other tools which scale much better to small to medium-sized business needs, such as Basecamp. With all of these options now available and gaining more attention, where does Microsoft fit into all of this?

[TG] Microsoft Project has traditionally been the tool of Professional Project Managers and was first introduced in 1990. It’s a powerful scheduling engine and does that job very well. Microsoft Project holds one of the largest market share segments in the PM space. You can usually hire people with Microsoft Project experience pretty easily. However, the market is growing increasingly fragmented.  

[CB] Great points. Between MS Project and Excel, it's safe to say that Microsoft is the leader in project management tools….but for PM professionals, the field is wide open, with no truly dominant player.

[TG] True. There are literally hundreds of tools out there for managing work. Project Server, introduced in 2002, added consolidated resource management, cost management and portfolio management functionality. It offers a much more robust feature set than most of the smaller players, but in the end it all comes down to understanding your requirements.

[CB] While at Microsoft, my team owned most of the SharePoint sites within Online Services, and a common request was for us to help teams build out basic project management and reporting solutions. SharePoint lists are actually a great was to capture and track projects, and with a little bit of elbow grease, can even serve as a portfolio management solution for an organization. But I've always thought Microsoft was missing an opportunity to introduce people to the more advanced features of Project. When they announced the deprecation of tasks capability in SharePoint 2013, people were upset -- but we were promised a better solution. And now we have the recent announcement of Office 365 Planner, formerly Project Highlander, which does some of what SharePoint could do around task management -- but its really something different. Do you see a shift in how Microsoft is approaching the space?

[TG] The shift reflects the market need for better support of collaboration and managing the conversation. Visual tools like Planner are good at managing knowledge work and this keeps Microsoft in the game. Being willing to not push Project for everything work management related is a big change for Microsoft. What’s missing is the Operational work management piece that is consolidated with the other work management tools.

[CB] For many organizations, using Project, SharePoint team sites and lists, and even Excel (and to some degree, Excel Services) was simple and “good enough.” But with the rise of web-based tools such as Wunderlist and Trello, as well as Basecamp and seemingly hundreds of others, the space has become crowded. How does Microsoft keep things simple while also gaining new customers? I know this is a big question, but what are thoughts on how Microsoft can/should cut through the noise?

[TG] This is a huge challenge for Microsoft. Almost every Office tool today provides a way to manage a task. Excel is Project’s biggest competitor. Adding more products increases the risk that customers may choose the wrong tool for the need. Outside of Office, other tools like Team Foundation Server also do task management. The lack of a clear channel through the products makes it confusing for the customer to find their way.

Creating a Planner tool for Office 365 allows Microsoft to create an easy Work Management on-ramp for a large user base, to adopt Microsoft technology for work management. If Planner data can scale up and out into other work management tools like Project, people will tend to stay with the Microsoft suite as it will simply be easier. If we get Power BI integration, the overall integration makes it a much harder decision to use other products.

[CB] I agree -- it will be a challenge for Microsoft, but it is a massive opportunity. Of course, with the growth of Office 365 and Microsoft’s push into PM-lite capabilities, I have to ask: what do you think is the future of server-based project or portfolio management? It's been your bread-and-butter for a while, so I'm interested in your perspective.

[TG] There’s a lot of companies out there who need project and portfolio management but aren’t quite ready for the organizational rigor. Resource Management is now the most common pain point for companies, especially after the recent economic downturn.

A coherent PM Lite strategy gives Microsoft a way allow these companies to use Work Management while giving them a way to grow into a Project/Portfolio Management solution. I do see more demand eventually for Project and Portfolio Management, but the growth rate won’t be the same as Office 365.  

If all of the work management products are aligned, work items should be able to be spawned from any Microsoft product (OneNote task, Outlook task, TFS, etc.) and be able to scale up to a Project plan in a straightforward way. Project work should be more accessible and be able to flow down into mobile applications like Wunderlist.

The other change I see coming in Project/Portfolio Management is more off the shelf vertical solutions. Many smaller companies can’t afford a custom-built “perfect” solution. It’s easier for them to buy something close enough to their needs and gain value quickly. The challenge for Microsoft is to enable the monetization of content and configuration, something that they’ve historically not done. This isn’t an app per se so the Office Store approach doesn’t quite fit here. Power BI is close with the Content Pack idea but we need a more holistic solution pack that can be installed over Office 365 and Power BI.

[CB] Where does the industry need to go, in your opinion? If you were Supreme Leader of all things project within the Office family, where would you make changes?

[TG] There’s no clear ownership of Task across Microsoft the way that there is for Document or Spreadsheet. I think this is needed if they truly want to fulfill their Productivity objectives. By assigning an internal champion for all things Task, the messaging, planning and enhancements around Task management (and project management by extension) becomes more cohesive and consistent across all tools. Microsoft’s strength is its ability to integrate functionality across its massive suite of products. It’s time to do the same for Tasks.

As always, some great insights from Treb on what is happening within the SharePoint space around project management tools and practices. If you have more questions about the discussion above or around Project and Project Server, you can reach Treb via email at treb.gatte@tumbleroad.com or through Twitter at @tgatte.

Thank you again, Treb, for taking the time to chat., See you at the next PSSPUG meeting.

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Community, Workflow Requirements, and SharePoint MVP Laura Rogers

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. 

http://ift.tt/1GFKbl6

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

The SharePoint Maturity Model, with Expert Melinda Morales

For those of you unfamiliar with the event, Microsoft holds an annual internal conference called TechReady that pulls together the latest from internal teams, as well as some outside speakers, on basically every product area. People fly in from around the world to participate and get some technical training. Well, its been happening all this week, taking place in downtown Seattle at the Washington Convention Center. My 'Hello World!' moment in the SharePoint community happened shortly after joining Microsoft back in 2006 as part of TechReady, when I was invited by my team member Joel Oleson to help present on the topic of SharePoint governance. It was not new subject-matter for me -- I have been involved in corporate and platform governance initiatives since the mid-1990s, but this was my first foray into the topic with the SharePoint audience. And in 2006, that audience was not very receptive. Governance was still viewed as a "nice to have" activity in 2006.

We've come a long way, baby.

I connected with Melinda Morales (@TrulyMelinda) sometime last year -- I believe it was through some webinar feedback of some sort. At the time, Melinda was leading the governance efforts for a massive SharePoint deployment at Sony Electronics, and providing expertise on the topic to the various Sony divisions. We kept in touch, and when the timing was right, she moved with her family to the Seattle area -- and then I hired her. Melinda is now a consultant with GTconsult, located in Bellevue, WA and focusing largely on helping organizations implement sound governance practices. I asked Melinda to share some detail behind her latest project: the SharePoint Governance Maturity Model, which is something every organization needs to at least take a look at and consider.

[CB] Melinda, what is your background, and how did you get involved in SharePoint? You know… how long have you been working with it, what is your current role, etc?

[MM] Thanks Christian. This is exciting! I’m a business analyst and member of the awesome A-team at GTconsult. Yes, it is as cool as it sounds. I get to help organizations of all different shapes and sizes discover the fun of the world of SharePoint and guide them through their journey. I’ve been working with SharePoint since 2007. I got my first taste of the kool-aid when I was just a little power user at Sony Electronics (SEL) after which I spent the next 8 years growing into new SharePoint dedicated roles and ultimately becoming their business-side platform owner. While with Sony I got to interface with all levels of the organization and really got a good idea of the many different ways users interact with and sometimes even become frustrated with the toolset. I took it as my personal goal to help make transitions easier and to advocate for the users with every step. I still work towards that goal in every project today.

[CB] You’ve recently started writing for ITUnity and started up your own blog, with a strong focus on governance. There is a ton of great information in your posts, and some very practical examples of how to get started. What is your experience, specifically, with SharePoint governance and what is different about your perspective?

[MM] I really am just a newbie to the great big SharePoint community but am super inspired to become involved and learn from all the great people out there. I initially started sharing my experiences, both successes and failures, with SharePoint governance through my involvement with local SPUG’s. I heard over and over again, as I’m sure many people do, that governance is often a struggle and ends up as a huge hindrance when organizations are trying to progress their SharePoint deployments.

As I mentioned before, I am big into user advocacy and governance falls perfectly in line with that passion. Through my time at SEL, we went from having a big ol’ spaghetti mess of an environment to a streamlined and closely monitored business-critical platform. The biggest win in that journey was our approach to governance. We took the long road and had many stops and starts but ultimately the shift in focus to a collaborative, user-centric approach is what made the win for the team.

Over the years while sharing my governance journey, I had a ton of great discussions with people from several different organizations and came to realize that not only was what I experienced with SEL exactly what others experience, but the approach that was successfully implemented was quite intriguing to others. It looked like there was a need for others to be able to leverage my experiences and hopefully help them avoid taking the longest route to success.

Before I get to the answer of what differentiates my preferred governance approach, let me just put a disclaimer out there. I don’t think my approach is really “different” only because there is no one way to tackle SharePoint governance. It is very much a unique journey for each organization and should be approached as such. There are simply too many moving parts to have any kind of one way or the other discussion. That said, there is one thing that I think has defined the success of the approach I prefer – what I call collaborative governance. The most successful governance strategies I have seen all have an aspect of business and IT teams working together toward a common goal. My approach is centered around fostering this relationship.

[CB] I think that's a great point. I think a lot of people are looking for a tool or a magic list of "must do" requirements that will solve all of their problems, but governance is one of those areas where the infamous SharePoint answer of "it depends" really does apply. In your opinion, what is the general state of governance in the SharePoint community? We’ve been talking about it for many years now – is it even still an issue with most organizations?

[MM] Governance is one of those topics that just will not go away, right? It’s like that stuff that gets stuck on the bottom of your shoe. You try to shake it off or scrape it on something but it just won’t go away and actually ends up spreading all over the place. There’s a pretty visual for you. In all seriousness, governance is still a hot topic and will remain a hot topic because it can make or break your SharePoint deployment. No matter how you are using the features of the platform, you will come up against governance at some point. It doesn’t have to be a problem, though. One thing that Office 365 and the mobile first/ cloud first strategy has done is force us to broaden our horizons when it comes to governance. For a long, long, long time we approached governance as an IT security control and nothing more. Today we as a community are finally starting to open our eyes to the fact that it is much more (even though great people like yourself have been telling us this very thing for years).

[CB] You’ve developed a SharePoint governance maturity model, which reminds me of the SharePoint Maturity Model (SPMM) developed a few years back by Sadalit Van Buren, who is now a Partner Technology Strategist at Microsoft. Do you borrow from Sadie’s model, or is this different? Can you walk us through your methodology?

[MM] Ahhh, yes. Please allow me to fan girl for a moment. Sadie’s SharePoint maturity model is such a great tool. I actually used it to help with roadmapping during my time at Sony. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for a great way to illustrate their SharePoint deployment’s level of advancement, especially when transitioning from 2010 to 2013.

I was definitely inspired by the ease of illustration through the use of a maturity model when introducing a new framework. While the maturity assessment method I used is similar to many maturity models out there, the areas of measurement are completely focused on governance. The SharePoint governance maturity model is very specialized and focuses only on the core framework for growing into a collaborative governance strategy.

In the assessment in particular, we take a look at four major pillars of a holistic collaborative governance strategy - Foundation, Administration, Communication and Adoption – and how you get from being in a chaotic, ungoverned position to implementing a cohesive governance strategy.

Aligning with this maturity framework means you will explore:

• team formation
• priority setting
• policy
• platform structuring
• security
• growth of soft skills
• establishing ownership
• user empowerment
• reporting and monitoring

There is a great deal of detail on each of the pillars available in a free whitepaper over on the GTconsult website!

[CB] I'm always a fan of the self-promotion! The fact that I helped write the paper is icing on the cake. But back to the topic -- I’ve always felt there is a huge gap between guidance from the “experts” and the practical application of governance. You and I have talked about this on numerous occasions. People tend to gravitate toward tools and technology rather than solve the fundamental issues that cause governance problems. What is your approach with customers that only seem to focus on the tech?

[MM] I second that emotion! Governance consulting is a hard nut to crack, I think. It is a pretty long, involved process and requires a lot of hands-on work. The focus on tools and tech, in my opinion, stems from the need to have a quick fix. I seriously think this contributes to why governance has remained such a hot topic for so long. In order for governance to be successful, you have to build a strategy. Unfortunately this sometimes means the need for governance gets deprioritized because resources are tight and there is no quick fix tool to slap on and be done.

I have to say, I don’t think I have had a customer that WASN’T focused on the tech. One of the things I love to do with customers is to dive in and do some discovery involving their users and site administrators. Most often IT is the team doing the inquiry into governance and perhaps solely owning the SharePoint space which usually leads to a little bit of a narrowed view of how the platform is being used and what it is being used to accomplish. Having sit downs with business users is always an eye opening experience and also serves as the very first opportunity to start bridging some of the gaps that may exist between the two “sides” of the platform. It is not as scary as it sounds. There are absolutely ways to facilitate these discussions in a positive manner and the output is uber valuable – and usually ends up steering your aim toward process instead of tech!

[CB] Rarely do organizations have a clean slate or a brand new SharePoint deployment on which they can build the perfect governance framework. The reality is that governance is often mentioned only after problems pop up. Suddenly there is some kind of data breach (yes, I went there…but I’m not naming names) and the executive finally recognizes that governance is not an unnecessary cost. Where do you go from there? How do you apply your maturity model to that scenario?

[MM] “…………….” Is my answer to your not so subtle call out. And you can quote me on that!

Data breaches, accidental leaks, audits, user adoption decline, user dissatisfaction. I have seen all of these as catalysts leading to governance discussions. It is very common to not even realize you need governance until you NEED governance. That seems to be the nature of the beast because of SharePoint’s epic ability to touch every part of our organizations without administrators even realizing it is to that point.

Let me start by explaining a little bit more about GTconsult’s governance strategy focused workshops (called Jam Sessions). We engage and explore, make recommendations then help implement and coach. The governance maturity model is just one of the many tools used during our discovery phase. It is a good way to get an idea of where an organization is in regards to implementing a holistic, collaborative governance strategy and how far they may need to go to get to where they want to be. All of our governance offerings start with this basic discovery. This enables us to jump in and assess governance at any stage then help to define the “Where do we go from here?”

Along with a picture of where the organization is currently with respect to governance, we also conduct several other discovery exercises including a technology culture assessment. This allows us to get a good understanding of where potential roadblocks may be and who the key players are. I recommend this kind of discovery for anyone looking to start down the path to governance, even if it is in response to a large event on a mature environment.

If anyone wants to take a gander, the tool is available for anyone to use in order to help kick start discussions on governance strategy as a whole and can illustrate a clear, defined path to achieve results. http://ift.tt/1JxlDzF

[CB] Back to your more recent content – what are you writing about these days? What are your most recent posts?

[MM] Over on my blog http://ift.tt/1KBYj2p , I try to keep up with posting and have a variety of topics. There is a pretty cool walkthrough on a mechanism for measuring user knowledge in SharePoint and one of my favorite posts “Smile, Your Users are Watching. The #1 Soft Skill for the IT Pro” because it’s just fun and something that people forget. I also plan to write some on the Windows 10 experience, wahooo!

I find inspiration in the wackiest places sometimes (such as my 4-year old son playing Minecraft) so you never really know what will pop up on my blog.

Thanks again to Melinda from pulling yourself away from Minecraft with your son to answer my questions, and for sharing links to such great content. You can reach her at melinda@GTconsult.com, on Twitter at @TrulyMelinda, or visit her blog at www.TrulyMelinda.com. As I mention above, the Governance Maturity Model whitepaper with free assessment survey are things that every organization need to review. There is always room for improvement, and Melinda and the GTconsult team have made it easy to create your baseline.

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

The Expanding Opportunity for Social in SharePoint, with Expert Jordi Plana

I published my first article on the rise of instant messaging back in the late 1990's, and have been tracking the development of social collaboration technologies ever since. When I started investigating SharePoint back in early 2004, one of my primary criticisms was the lack of social capabilities within the platform. At the first European SharePoint Conference held in Berlin, for example, I presented a scorecard around SharePoint 2010's social functionality, comparing it with the other leading platforms.

SharePoint has come a long way, baby. While the roadmap as of late may be confusing to some folks, much of what Microsoft has been doing, in my opinion, has been directionally correct: focus on providing connections to the Office Graph, providing end-to-end experiences through NextGen Portals, and integrating Yammer through inline social conversation. However, I've always felt that Microsoft has missed the mark around the on prem social experience, focusing on its Yammer pure-cloud experience. While there may be long-term architectural reasoning behind this decision, the result has been confusion and disillusionment with many customers.

Enter the partner opportunity. My feeling is that this space has real room to grow, and no single firm has yet to step up and take a dominating position in the SharePoint space….but Beezy (www.Beezy.net) is primed to take that position. You could say that I am a real fan -- while NewsGator went on to acquire Sitrion, switch its name to the latter, and turn its focus to SAP, Beezy has been winning deals against Jive, IBM Connections, and Sitrion -- wins not only for Beezy, but for Microsoft, as many of these customers would otherwise be lost to SharePoint and Office 365. And with Microsoft Ignite just around the corner, Beezy is finally looking to make some noise in the community and get noticed.

I recently reached out to Beezy founder and CEO Jordi Plana (@joplana), who spends time between Silicon Valley and his development team in Barcelona, Spain, to talk about the opportunities he sees for social in the SharePoint space:

[CB] Jordi, what is your background in the SharePoint space? Can you tell me a little bit about your experience in the social collaboration community, how Beezy came about, and your life before your current role?

[JP] After several developer and software architect roles, I funded a Microsoft consulting boutique in 2001 in Barcelona. We focused on .NET (ASP+ back then) and SharePoint Team Services, which I believe was the first ever version of SharePoint…so I guess we can say we’ve been working on the platform since the very beginning.

We soon became a well-known SharePoint specialist, mainly in Europe, and our several MVPs executed many large and challenging projects for Microsoft. We also built many Contoso demos for Microsoft keynotes at large events like TechReady, MGX, WPC, etc. and we even built solution offerings for some Industry teams in Redmond. It felt great being awarded as the 2009 Global Partner of the Year for Public Sector!

Then, in late 2010, two of our biggest customers started asking for a ‘Facebook for SharePoint’. IT was under heavy pressure from Business to provide users with modern collaboration tools with a much better user interface. We did some research and found that large companies wanting to implement an ESN had to choose between innovative and unreliable start-ups and the slow with a poor UX –but trustable– large vendors. So we thought “Why choose if you can have the best of both worlds?” and in 2011 built Beezy in a way that satisfied both IT and Business.

Then in 2013 we moved the company to California and here we are.

[CB] For those who don’t know your company, Beezy, what is your elevator pitch? What should people know about Beezy?

[JP] Beezy is an Enterprise Social Collaboration solution natively built on SharePoint. We help organizations improve the way their employees´ collaborate and communicate through the platform they already have: SharePoint.

Of course SharePoint is a great collaboration platform, however it falls short when it comes to user experience and it is way too complex to use for the average non-IT user. As a consequence it is not being adopted broadly. Moreover SharePoint also lacks some (basic) enterprise social networking features.

If you want to convert SharePoint from a platform into a collaboration solution that your employees finally use, you will have to spend big money in consulting services…at least once.   

Also, with Beezy there’s no need for large SharePoint organizations to have a separate system (like Jive or IBM Connections for which we provide migration tools) for social collaboration. Beezy has the same broad feature set these other vendors offer but natively integrated into SharePoint, with obvious benefits not only from the user experience perspective but also from the IT Governance one.

In short : Beezy brings easy to deploy Enterprise Social Collaboration to SharePoint. Business people love the UX and IT people like it because it is non-intrusive SharePoint.

[CB] My first question is sort of the elephant in the room: with Microsoft’s focus on Yammer, and its concentration on the cloud for all social innovation, why do you continue to focus on social within the on prem environment?

[JP] First of all Beezy focuses on cloud as well. We are announcing our Office 365 version release very soon, which is currently being broadly deployed at a Fortune Global 100 company.

Having said that: you are right that most of our customers still prefer SharePoint on-premises (or hybrid) over Online. And they also demand innovation and user friendly social collaboration solutions. Of course they will eventually move to the cloud, but at their own pace and in a seamless way. There is still a lot of business to be made on-premises, and we cannot leave our customers behind.

Obviously we are heavily investing in Office 365, but we are making sure that both our on-premises and cloud offerings have the same feature set and superior user experience.

[CB] With such a strong need for social capabilities on prem, and Microsoft focusing their innovation in the cloud around Yammer, why turn your focus to the cloud now? 

[JP] Well, there are a number of reasons…integration, customization, simplicity.

• Customers don´t want to waste money on SharePoint integration efforts. As Beezy is built for SharePoint, integration comes naturally.
• “One size fits all” solution doesn’t work for large organizations. That´s why Beezy offers a high degree of customization and extensibility capabilities.
• End users are fed up with SharePoint's complexity. They want a simple and intuitive consumer-like interface.

But most importantly, we want to be very clear upfront in that we are not competing with Yammer in the cloud environment. Our product goes well beyond Groups, Newsfeeds, Comments and Likes. We offer a full blown collaboration suite that includes wikis, blogs, idea elevation, advanced social Q&A, gamification, endorsements and more. Our cloud solution can be quickly deployed in a self-service mode where business users do not need IT to operate the network (which is today impossible with O365 and Yammer in large organizations). We are presenting this at Ignite and if you pass by our booth you’ll see how Beezy is taking social collaboration to the next level.

[CB] If you go back 4 or 5 years, social collaboration was a hot commodity. SharePoint 2010 delivered a poor social experience, and the competitive landscape was heating up. As a result, SharePoint 2013 had a strong social focus. And then the Yammer acquisition happened. What is your perspective on Microsoft’s social reset with Yammer?

[JP] I think it was a much needed move, probably a bit too late though, more from a positioning and messaging perspective rather than from a product fit. It was a clear message to the market that Microsoft was betting big on enterprise social, they earned serious share and some coolness, and also learnings on agile SaaS software delivery dynamics…  

We are super glad Microsoft acquired Yammer. They are doing a great job at evangelizing the ecosystem on the huge benefits of enterprise social for organizations all sizes, and as a result there’s no discussion on this topic anymore. Microsoft invested lots of money in marketing and generating demand for Yammer/enterprise social, and of course we are riding that same wave.

Yammer is a great standalone product. Over the last 3 years we have seen Microsoft spending a lot of effort integrating Yammer with SharePoint/O365, and it’s not fully there yet in the way customers expect. As a result, innovation at Yammer has been slow for a while. And enterprise social is not only about newsfeeds, comments and likes anymore.

[CB] How important is ‘curated community’ today? By this I mean that most early social endeavors were about building a community site. In some ways, we were seeing the replacement of the intranet with a flatter, more social community site with less structured collaboration, less focus on documents and metadata as with formal document and content management systems. Do you see a continuing trend toward social, or has the marketplace moved past the novelty of new social features toward a more balanced platform?

[JP] In the early days of enterprise social there was a lot of hype, some organizations were deploying social tools just for the sake of it, because it was cool and trendy.

We believe enterprise social has to be spread across your Intranet, your business processes, your daily flow of work…where it really makes business sense. Social with a purpose. And for that we need to apply more structure.

With our Knowledge Centers we are addressing this need…we combine the formality of well-structured content of old and boring knowledge management systems with the informality, engagement and massive adoption of enterprise social networks.

Finally, our most mature customers are asking us for ways to capitalize the gigantic amount of organizational knowledge hidden in their social communities. For that, I can anticipate that we are also making big investments in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to understand what conversations are about and who are the subject matter experts…We are working on an auto generated Questions & Answers solution that is fed from enterprise social communities. Of course this will be leveraging Office Graph and interacting with Delve.

This might very well fall into a new category of enterprise software : social knowledge management.

[CB] As Yammer becomes more of an integrated experience within the Office 365 platform, it feels as if the platform is going in a different direction than outside vendors. As Microsoft matures their social capabilities, what have been the gaps, and what are you doing differently?

[JP] Let me first go back in time a bit. When Microsoft bought Yammer everyone expected it to be integrated into SharePoint/Office 365 almost immediately. 3 years later, reality is that after the WebParts got deprecated recently, all we have is an iFrame and an API not ready for prime time.

If we had followed everyone’s advice, we would have probably given up and left the space, like other vendors did. Fortunately we predicted it would take a bit longer and kept investing in Beezy, and today we have a stronger than ever offering.

Now, Christian, let me disagree a bit with your statement…

We see Yammer being diluted into the platform and becoming a “comments and likes” platform commodity. Someone in your last #CollabTalks suggested that Yammer should operate like Disquss (i.e. a comment/like plug-in). We believe enterprise social collaboration is a lot more than that.

SharePoint has had workflow capabilities for some time now, and there’s still the need for third party vendors if you are serious about business process management. We believe the same will happen with enterprise social collaboration.

[CB] What are the use cases that you see most often with your customers? Are there persistent themes? Do companies have a clear idea of what they want, or does social fall into the “it depends” category of SharePoint solutions?

[JP] Organizations that approach us can be divided into 2 categories. The first set has a clear theme. It is mostly a business department (Internal Comms, HR, Employee Collaboration, ) who want to increase transparency or improve internal collaboration & communication. The other category consist of the IT department who wants to actively offer an ESN because they anticipate a business need for it.

[CB] Looking forward at the SharePoint roadmap, what are your hopes and expectations for the year, and beyond?

[JP] I would like Microsoft to avoid confusion as much as possible…future releases of SharePoint on-premises yes/no, then suddenly realizing they needed to consider the hybrid approach, etc… you know what I am referring to. All the uncertainty they created in the past just put the market on stand-by…

Also, as part of my wish list, I would like Microsoft to keep investing in O365 as a development platform with a predictable and reliable roadmap. I think Chris Johnson and his team are doing a great job in that direction, but the ecosystems expects more.

We need robust and trustable APIs to better complement Yammer/O365.

Please invest in platform and don’t pretend the platform to be a solution. Leave it up to the ecosystem.

Undoubtedly, we're going to see much more innovation coming out of this segment at Ignite, and throughout this year. While the term "social collaboration" has been a bit overplayed, the needs for organizations to better connect and share knowledge in a social manner have not decreased. As such, we'll continue to see innovation from Microsoft and vendors like Beezy to help us improve our employee, partner, and customer interactions.

Thanks again to Jordi for taking the time to answer my questions. I'm looking forward to seeing more from the Beezy team at Ignite next week! See you there.

by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community