The EPC Group Team of Experts

Implementing Global Intranet Governance with a Proper Long-term Roadmap

2012-01-10T04:27:00.000-08:00

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net - January 10, 2012 - 6:52 AM

Original AIIM.ORG Article Found Here

You have probably been flooded with external sources telling you what SharePoint Governance really is and I am here to state mine and my SharePoint Consulting organization, EPC Group’s, definitive and believe only true way to implement Global Intranet Governance with a forward looking roadmap to match. For Global organizations with tens of thousands of users, the Return on Investment by following this strategy below should be in the millions.

I have written a number of articles for AIIM but I can confidently stand behind my position on Global Intranet Governance and Roadmaps because EPC Group is engaged in there literally every day and for nearly the past decade.

To state a few probably obvious facts, but to build the case for EPC Group’s strategy here:

What is Governance?
•Governance is the set of processes and policies affecting the way a system is directed, administered or controlled.
◦Includes the relationships among the stakeholders involved and the goals of the system.
◦Creates mechanisms that try to reduce incomplete information

Why Governance?
•IT’s capability is directly related to the investment choices taken by management that have long term consequences for various stakeholders
•Governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, executive management, customers, and staff have clear accountability for their respective responsibilities in the decision making processes affecting IT.
A Typical SharePoint Governance Plan (Uni-Centric Deployment)

The following are typically subjects hit on in a SharePoint Uni-Centric Deployment plan:
•People
◦Roles & Teams
◦Sponsorship
•Process and Policies
◦Security
◦Content Management
◦Hardware & Services
◦Procedures
•Communication and Training
◦Communication Plan
◦Training Plan
◦Support Plan

Global SharePoint Considerations
(Note: These are all specific to Global, Large Scale, Fortune 1000 Deployments)

•WAN Performance
•Farm Administration
•Help Desk and Support
•Cross Farm Services
◦User Profiles/My Sites
◦Managed Metadata
◦Search
•Availability and Replication

Global WAN Performance
•A typical LAN user will generally have an initial page load time of about 2 seconds.
◦A broadband user, with continental latency, would experience up to 2x-4x response time (e.g. 4-8 seconds)
◦A broadband user, with global latency, would experience up to 4x-8x response time (e.g. 8-16 seconds)
◦Low bandwidth, and extremely high latency response times’ experience is hard to predict

Global Farm Administration Considerations
•Provisioning
◦Web Application Creation
◦Site Collection Creation
◦Content Databases
•Features and Solutions
•Local Service Applications
◦Excel Services
◦Access Service
◦Vision Graphics Service
◦Word Automation Services
◦Word Viewing

Global Help Desk and Support Considerations
•Operations
◦System Administrators
◦Site Collection Administrators
•Multi-Tiered Support
◦Tier 1: Help Desk
◦Tier 2: Subject Matter Experts
◦Tier 3: Farm Administrators
•Support and Administrative Training

Global Governance: Isolation Levels Examples

Level | Definition | SharePoint Meaning (Potential)

Isolation Tier 1 (I1)

(Global)
·Out of the box SharePoint
·Out of the box Security
·Uptime During Business Operating Hours (7am-5pm EST M-F) ·Same SharePoint Farm
Same IIS Application Pool
·Same Web Application
·Same Site Collection
·Same Content Database

Isolation Tier 2 (I2)
(Global)
·Custom SharePoint Features
·Unique SharePoint Permission
·Uptime During Business Operating Hours (7am-5pm EST M-F) ·Same SharePoint Farm
·Separate IIS Application Pool
·Same Web Application
·Separate Site Collection
·Separate Content Database

Isolation Tier 3 (I3)
(Local)
·Third Party Application
·Custom Functionality
·24 x 7 Uptime requirements.
·Unique SharePoint Permission ·Separate SharePoint Farm
·Separate IIS Application Pool
·Separate Web Application
·Separate Site Collection
·Separate Content Database

Global Governance: Service Agreement Examples
Service Level Agreement 1 (SLA 1)
·Recycle Bin Policy set to 30
·Weekly Full Backups and Daily Incremental
·Uptime During Business Hours Backup Retention for 6 months ·Same SharePoint Farm
·Same IIS Application Pool
·Same Web Application
·Same Site Collection
·Same Content Database

Service Level Agreement 2 (SLA 2)
·Recycle Bin Policy set to 120
·Weekly Full Backups and Daily Incremental
·Backup Retention 6 months
·Backup Retention for Incremental Backup for 4 Weeks
·Uptime During Business Hours
·After Hours Technical Support ·Separate Farm
·Separate Database Server

EPC Group's Lessons Learned
•Intranet and Internet Deployments
1.Identify Global Governance Board early
2.Roadmap features and solutions for at least 12 months
3.Get buy-in not only from global stakeholders but from local support groups as well
4.Create a unified governance model for ALL farms as though they are one

•Project and Team Collaboration Deployments
1.Identify the Global Governance Board early
2.Set limits on what is globally governed and what is locally governed
3.Create a high-level global governance which focuses on overall policies, architecture and processes
4.Create local governance extensions which cover people, local policies, local processes and operating procedures and needs.

Summary
A Global SharePoint Intranet or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Deployment is a whole different animal than a non-Global deployment. In the weeks to come I will touch on additional considerations such as using tools such as Riverbed to increase SharePoint's WAN performance, language packs, international law considerations such as the Patriot Act, the Freedom of Information Act, etc. and how those can affect your server placement and how to implement a Global deployment with real cost savings in mind.

I have been extremely lucky to be surrounded by my brilliant colleagues at EPC Group who have also been on the ground in places like Germany, Australia, Japan, etc. and experience these situations first hand and I enjoy sharing this type of real “in the trenches” knowledge from our lessons learned over the years.

I would also encourage you to read one of my previous articles on developing a Hybrid SharePoint Platform as this also builds upon these type of Global Deployment and long-term roadmap strategies and best practices.

Buyer's Guide: SharePoint Archiving Solutions

2012-01-10T04:22:00.000-08:00

Buyer's Guide: SharePoint Archiving Solutions
"Archive SharePoint content to help keep your SharePoint environment running smoothly "

By: Caroline Marwitz
Windows IT Pro

Original article link (Windows IT Pro): http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/sharepoint/sharepoint-archiving-solutions-141264

Microsoft SharePoint has become what email was a decade ago: a dumping ground for content. Companies are realizing that this content needs to be managed, secured, and -- in many cases -- archived.

The first two needs are obvious, but why would you want to archive SharePoint content? For three simple yet compelling reasons: data reduction (which can affect performance), governance, and compliance.

"Archiving tools . . . help you maintain the size of your content databases as well as allow for real-time version-history archiving," said Errin O'Connor, who has more than a decade's worth of experience with SharePoint and is founder and CEO of EPC Group.net. Helping achieve the goals of a governance plan is yet another reason for archiving SharePoint content. "Archiving old sites that are no longer used -- this is key, as it's important to either delete or archive content that's no longer relevant," O'Connor said.

Easily retrieving that content is important as well. "You may have a project team site that was used for a project and that project is over, but in a year or two a similar project may pop up again and the project manager or team members may want to go back and restore that archived site to follow the best practices or lessons learned from that previous project," O'Connor said.

Archiving is a basic best practice in records management, but there's an even more compelling reason for some organizations. "Archiving is about compliance," said Ron Charity, a SharePoint product manager who has worked with SharePoint since 2001 and focuses on governance, information architecture, technical architecture, and operations. Compliance with industry or governmental regulations is essential for many, if not most, organizations, especially in the United States, which is home to the largest percentage of the world's lawsuits. Compliance and auditing capabilities go hand in hand with archiving. As O'Connor explained, "You can restore an archive to a site or SharePoint instance and make that data available to auditors and e-discovery activities without affecting the live SharePoint farm."

But SharePoint 2010 has the ability to declare records in place, so why would you need a third-party archiving solution? For one thing, Charity said, many organizations need a compliant archival engine (e.g., compliant with US Department of Defense -- DoD -- requirements). Another reason, he said, is that "enterprise records management systems scale much better due to N-Tier architecture and use of the file system for items and SQL Server for logic." Additionally, you can't beat the convenience of certain third-party products' features. "When archived data is disposed of, client systems issue certificates for legal purposes," Charity said.

What should you look for in a SharePoint archiving solution? Seamless integration with SharePoint is obvious, and vendors accomplish this goal in different ways. For example, many solutions stub the item in SharePoint and move it to the archive, whereas some solutions integrate with SharePoint at the event-handler layer to capture items. Can end users search for and access archived content in SharePoint? They'd better be able to, unless you like training them on new solutions and procedures.

E-discovery capability is useful; as part of that, so is the ability to archive all content types and data in SharePoint. Also consider how the vendor packages a solution, whether as a suite or a standalone product (only your organization's needs should determine which option is best for you). Then there are things that you won't know until you try a tool: how flexible it is, how easy it is to use, and how responsive the customer service is.

The buyer's guide table shows a sampling of SharePoint archiving vendors and the particulars of their solutions. If you're still not sold on the need for archiving SharePoint content, read the AIIM blog "The Case for SharePoint Archiving." Another useful blog post on SharePoint archiving and what to look for in a SharePoint archiving solution is Geoff Evelyn's "SharePoint Archiving -- Defining a Way Forward."

SharePoint Consulting - Developing a SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee

2011-11-28T07:57:00.000-08:00

Overview
Within an enterprise SharePoint 2010 deployment, a key best practice to ensure your organization’s long-term SharePoint’s success, is the creation of a SharePoint Steering committee and engaging and\or including your organizaton’s key business and technology leaders to this committee. The SharePoint Steering Committee is the overall governing body of Microsoft SharePoint that ensures the technology is implemented so that it will fit the business and functional needs of the organization for years to come as well as to ensure the decisions that are made will not affect future upgrades of the technology.

I have been working with my senior architecture team at EPC Group on a series of white papers to provide to the SharePoint community through our SharePoint Consulting efforts and lessons learned.

Define
First, determine who the key stakeholders are that should be involved in the SharePoint Steering committee. Initially, develop a somewhat generic forum to discuss the phase 1 and future phase 2 (phase 3, phase 4, etc.) issues as the committee will learn over time how best to work together and will identify internal committee roles that will work best within the organization. Typically, these are Business Leaders, IT Managers, Key Technology Stakeholders, Legal, and Records Management owners, etc.

EducateIs is key that the SharePoint Services Team demo to the SharePoint Steering Committee any existing solutions that have been created in phase 1 and discuss the types of requests that are coming in to the SharePoint Services Team to help the Steering Committee understand the overall scale of the SharePoint, its growth and the types of business units within the organization making the requests. Ongoing demos should continue to be demoed to the SharePoint Steering Committee to reflect any updates or new projects.

SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee Best Practices
The SharePoint Steering committee is comprised of key stakeholders which oversees the strategic service direction and provides policy guidance.

The SharePoint Steering Committee will be comprised of a number of roles through the organization including the SharePoint Services Team Senior Management and SharePoint Stakeholders. SharePoint Stakeholders are defined as those in the business units which rely on the SharePoint Services as a part of their business operation. The committee will meet regularly with defined success criteria and measurable goals based on project definition, design and timeline.

The SharePoint Steering Committee should meet regularly to revisit structure, responsibilities and membership to ensure maximum effectiveness as well as potential scope changes for the organization to address changes in business conditions and technology.

The role of the SharePoint Steering Committee will be to:

•Aligning SharePoint initiatives to overall business goals.
•Set strategic and functional guidance to the SharePoint Platform \ Service(s) Team.
•Continually assess SharePoint project viability.
•Determine corporate standards.
•Approve all governance, standards and policies.
Note: With large enterprise organizations, other business units or subsidiaries worldwide may adopt some of their own regional governance policies (i.e. development, etc.) and the SharePoint Steering Committee will be responsible for taking these local considerations into the overall SharePoint 2010 Governance to ensure SharePoint governance stays up-to-date and relevant.

•Approve content publishing policies and assigning departmental and functional ownership.
•Approve SharePoint branding/usability/look and feel.
•Approve changes to the SharePoint Governance Document.
•Review any 3rd party SharePoint Software Vendor purchase requests to ensure that any large licensing purchases are taken into consideration at the enterprise level.
•Ensure the SharePoint training strategies continue to fit the needs of the organization.
Roles

An overview of Best Practices responsibilities for the an organization’s SharePoint Steering Committee are as follows:

Roles and Their Responsibilities

SharePoint Steering Committee Chair PersonResponsible for Chairing the SharePoint Steering Committee and owning sign-offs and casting the overall vote or decision should any impasse occur.

SharePoint Platform or Services OwnerThe overall platform or service owner of SharePoint who is responsible for all SharePoint Product and Technology Efforts. Leads the SharePoint Steering Committee meetings and is the manager of the SharePoint Services Team.

SharePoint Services Team Manager
The manager of the SharePoint Services team who is responsible for managing the day-to-day activities of the SharePoint Services team and delegating the incoming requests coming into the team from the different business units.

Records Management Representative
A key stakeholder for Records Management within the organization and ensures the technology and business decisions being made for the SharePoint System continue to follow the records management standards within the organization.

Development Team(s) Representative
A key stakeholder or manager representing the SharePoint development teams and providing input on the continued development and how best the custom SharePoint Solutions should be managed and added into the SharePoint platform (i.e. continuing the development of a SharePoint as a Service Concept I have written about in the past).

SharePoint Training Representative
A key stakeholder from training that will continue to monitor the ongoing activities of the SharePoint 2010 initiative while continuing to deliver training to the different audiences to meet the ongoing and possible changing needs and requirements of the SharePoint user base within the organization.

Help Desk or Service Desk Representative
A key stakeholder from your organization’s help desk \ service desk or I.T. support staff that will monitor the activities of SharePoint and report back to the committee on metrics regarding support calls, possible resolutions to reoccurring issues, and ensure they continue to be properly trained and proactive regarding the overall SharePoint Services within the organization.

SharePoint Governance, as we all know is one of the major keys to any organization's SharePoint long-term success, and implementing a SharePoint 2010 Steering Committee is something that myself and my team at EPC Group.net have helped to establish within orgnaizations and its something that is overlooked in at least 80% of enterprise SharePoint implementations.

Best Practices for SharePoint Cultural Change Management - From the SharePoint Consulting Trenches

2011-11-17T22:38:00.000-08:00

Originally Posted on EPC Group’s AIIM.ORG SharePoint Expert Blog –

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net and the EPC Group Team of Experts

I wanted to share with the AIIM Community the overview of a White Paper that myself and my team at EPC Group.net have been working on by studying approximately 35 enterprise SharePoint 2010 implementations we have completed between March 2011 and November 2011.

It is not unusual for those implementing SharePoint 2010 to experience a fair amount of change and conflict as part of their deployment process. Other than e-mail, no other product that you will implement will have as wide or personal “touch and feel” as SharePoint 2010 if you intend to implement this product in a wide, deep, and pervasive way. When SharePoint Server 2010 is implemented in your environment, you’re not just implementing a simple document management or Web-based collaboration solution. You’re implementing change; Culture change. Business process change and Information management change. Usually, when change happens within an organization, power balances get shifted and conflicts can ensue.

Understanding Change in a Corporate Environment – EPC Group

It was once thought that a manager could simply tell everyone that they were going to do things a certain way and everyone would salute and follow. In today’s corporate environment, that is a misconception. In fact, there are several misconceptions about change that need to be recognized.

The first misconception is that a great solution, like SharePoint 2010, will be accepted just because it is a great solution with real ROI. When it comes to SharePoint, it might be a great software product with a lot of helpful features that solve many existing information management and collaboration problems, but that doesn’t mean it will be readily accepted. The fact is that even some of the best ideas are not readily accepted. Remember the old Sony Beta technology for videocassettes? Sony had a clearly superior technology to the VHS videocassettes, but due to poor marketing and other factors, the VHS became the adopted standard. If we borrow from family theory for just a moment, family therapists will tell you that the family system will put pressure on the individual who is changing to remain the same—even if the change is for the better. Human beings are wired to resist change. Just because it’s a good (or even a great) idea doesn’t mean the idea will be automatically accepted.

Another misconception is that all you have to do is explain the new idea and the explanation, by itself, will remove the resistance to change. Explain it, perform some training activities, and get people excited and you’re done. No follow-up is needed. No care and feeding is warranted. If you’re thinking this way, please be prepared for a long, sustained effort. The reality is that introducing change in an organization requires persistence. You need to be in this for the long haul if you’re going to be successful.

New software roll-outs always represent change at the desktop. (You need to consider SharePoint to encompass a similar effect as updating the Office suite at the desktop because of its pervasive and persistent touch and feel.) Have you ever rolled out a new software product only to find that, over time, the product is not persistently used and the old methods are still the primary methods of accomplishing work? In many organizations, change can be an illusion while the old reality persists.

A third misconception is that implementing change slowly while building grassroots support will result in nothing getting done. In fact, the opposite is true. What research has shown is that while bottom-up change is more gradual, it addresses resistance more effectively. The emphasis in bottom-up change is on participation and on keeping people informed about what is going on, so uncertainty and resistance are minimized. Furthermore, research has revealed that people are not resistant to change; they are resistant to being changed. People are better at coping with change if they have participation in bringing the change to reality. This is why—with or without grassroots support—the best way to introduce SharePoint into your environment is through a gradual, collaborative process where your users, managers, and executives all have input into the overall deployment objectives and direction.

Common Types of Change in a Corporate Environment

Experts in change management tell us that organizations can experience several common types of change:

•Structural Change. This type of change looks at the organization as a set of functional parts that need to be restructured. The parts are re-configured (re-organized) to achieve greater overall performance. Mergers and acquisitions are two examples of structural change.

•Cost Cutting. This type of change focuses on the elimination of nonessential activities or on other methods of squeezing costs out of operations.

•Process Change. This type of change focuses on altering how tasks and activities are accomplished. Examples include re-engineering processes or implementing a new decision-making framework. The introduction of new software products onto the desktop clearly falls into this type of change.

•Cultural Change. This type of change focuses on the human side of the organization, such as a company’s general approach to doing business or the relationship between its management and employees.

Cultural change nearly always involves relational change. Since relationships are built on personal interaction, how people communicate and interact with each other helps build the culture. Introducing SharePoint Products and Technologies into your environment introduces culture changes because SharePoint Products and Technologies introduce new communication paths and new ways of relating to co-workers, partners, vendors, and customers.

SharePoint represents change in three out of the four areas: structural, process, and cultural. It is structural in that the major parts of the business (however this is defined) will need to adjust their work habits to incorporate SharePoint’s features into their daily work routines. For example, end-users will be managing Web sites while power users will be managing a range of Web site administrative tasks including the security of the information that resides in SharePoint. Another example is managing documents in a library versus a file server. This is a significant change that will be felt by everyone in the organization.

SharePoint represents huge process change because we’re now going to ask everyone in the organization to (more or less) get on the same page when it comes to information management and information process management. And since SharePoint has a huge touch and feel at the desktop level, the process changes will be experienced by nearly everyone in your organization who uses a desktop computer.

Finally, SharePoint represents significant cultural changes because of the way it handles information and the new communication paths that are created by its introduction. Collaboration moves from e-mail threads to team sites. Discussions are handled online while offline synchronization involves Microsoft Office Outlook or Groove.

Workflows introduce an electronic way of gaining document approvals, and communication about approvals involves both e-mail and the browser. Hence, implementing SharePoint Products and Technologies in your environment represents significant, pervasive change. If this aspect of your deployment is not managed correctly, the chances are increased that your deployment will either fail or not be as successful as initially envisioned.

How Different Individuals Accept Change

Not everyone in your organization will accept change in the same way or at the same pace. This thinking has been around since the early 1900s, but was refined in 1953 by E.M. Rogers in his book, Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers defined diffusion as the process by which innovation is communicated through channels to the members over time. In this thinking, diffusion included four main elements:

•Innovation. The new idea is incubated and defined.

•Communication Channel. The methods or paths that messages flow over between individuals. Time Three factors were mentioned here, but for our purposes, the innovation’s rate of adoption is the one factor that is most important. How fast the new idea is accepted and utilized is part of the diffusion process.

•Social System. The set of interrelated groups that are working toward a common goal.
The overall thrust was that a new idea or an innovation needed to be defined, communicated, and, over time, adopted within the social system of the organization. From a diffusion viewpoint, SharePoint represents the new idea or the innovation.

The communication channels that currently exist in your organization will need to be utilized to introduce SharePoint Products and Technologies to your environment. The rate of adoption will likely depend on how adept you are at working with the five groups described below and meeting each of their needs. And a solid understanding of your social system, the stakeholder’s needs, and your overall culture will enable you to manage the potential pitfalls along the way.

As you look to implement SharePoint in your organization, you’ll need to be aware that these four factors cannot be avoided: You must define, communicate, be patient, and work within the social structure of your organization if you’re going to be successful.

The theory of diffusion holds that a new idea will be adopted faster when the following is present:

•The new idea is perceived to have more value than the current system.
•The new idea is compatible with existing values, past experiences, and current needs.
•The new idea is not overly complex.
•The new idea is testable before its production implementation.
•The new idea results in visible, measurable positive outcomes.
Critical mass is achieved once enough individuals in the organization have adopted the new idea so that the idea is commonplace and self-sustaining. In short, critical mass means the new idea will survive. The problem with achieving critical mass is that there is a time lag in how fast new ideas are adopted. This is why it is important to understand the different groups that naturally exist in your environment as you try to introduce SharePoint Server 2010 into your environment:

•Innovators. This group makes up about 2.5 percent of the overall population. They accept new ideas quickly and need little persuasion. They often like new ideas simply because they are new. They tend to be venturesome, daring, and risk-takers. They also tend to have the financial resources to absorb a loss if the new idea proves to be unprofitable. Finally, this group has the ability to cope with a high degree of uncertainty about the innovation along with the time to understand and apply the technical knowledge the innovation represents.

•Early Adopters. This group represents about 13.5 percent of the overall population. They are open to new ideas, but will accept them only after serious consideration. This group usually holds the greatest degree of opinion and thought leadership within an organization. They tend to look for the strategic opportunity an innovation can provide. They serve as role models for others in the organization and they tend to be highly respected.

•Early Majority. This group represents about 33 percent of the overall population. These folks frequently interact with one another and tend to be followers, not leaders. They want to see that others have been successful with the innovation before they adopt it themselves. Critical mass is usually achieved once this group has adopted the new idea.

•Late Majority. This group is also about 33 percent of the overall population. These folks tend to be skeptical and cautious and will usually adopt new ideas only when pressured to do so.

•Laggards. This is the last group to adopt a new idea, which by the time they adopt it, is a current or fading idea. This group possesses no opinion leadership at all. They tend to be isolated and suspicious of new ideas and will filter these ideas through referential points in the past. Their acceptance of a new idea results from other’s pressure coupled with the certainty that the innovation cannot fail.
Managing Environmental Change - EPC GroupOnce we understand the basic ideas in Rogers’ (and others’) work, there is an opportunity to apply how change should be managed when it comes to doing a SharePoint implementation.

First, in some environments, SharePoint 2010 will be perceived as a huge step forward by the decision-makers because of the features and benefits inherent in the program, such as collaboration, information aggregation, or publishing. Many customers with whom we work don’t have a problem seeing the obvious advantages that SharePoint brings to the organization. Yet sometimes, there is little grassroots, managerial, or information technology support; when this support is absent, the task of working within existing communication channels and the social culture will be foundational to success.

Second, SharePoint 2010 is rarely seen as a system that is incompatible with the organization’s values and goals. Because the system is so flexible, it can be used by nearly any organization. We have yet to encounter a customer who found that SharePoint was inherently in conflict with his organization’s goals and values.

Third, SharePoint 2010 is sometimes thought to be a system that is highly intuitive for non-technical people who work with it on a day-to-day basis. This assumption needs to be challenged. While SharePoint’s interface is rather easy to use and is somewhat self-explanatory, we still find that users need a solid base of education on how to use the product and the scenarios in which certain features would be used.

Some customers have balked at purchasing SharePoint until they knew their user-base would be adequately educated to use the software appropriately. In short, everyone in your organization will need education if you are planning on obtaining a robust Return on Investment (ROI) for the money your organization has spent on SharePoint licenses.

Fourth, SharePoint 2010 can be (and should be) tested in a proof-of-concept (POC) before it is deployed into production. POCs can be great tools to learn about a new software product and simulate a production environment. In our experience, however, the danger is that the POC often morphs into a production environment because the test team members tend to really test SharePoint, find that they like it, and then dump all sorts of mission-critical information into the POC.

After that, they have little interest in pulling out the information and re-doing their work in a production environment. So while a POC or some type of pre-production test is a good idea, you should also have clear agreements about when the POC will start and stop and the expectations that users will have regarding the information they have placed into their POC sites.

Finally, the ability to measure SharePoint’s ROI is probably the highest pain point in this entire discussion. How “success” is defined is elusive and this results in measurements that tend to be more emotional or anecdotal in nature as opposed to being more structured and objective. But there are some ideas you can work with to help understand if your implementation is successful or not.

First, count the number of site collections in your farm. Just add up the number of “sites” on your content databases and this will be a rough equal to the actual number of site collections in your farm.

Second, you can measure database growth patterns and determine if the growth rate is what you had hoped it would be.

Third, you can count the number of people who have attended SharePoint training as another metric of success. Or you could use one or more of these metrics plus others that you develop yourself and then use those numbers to determine if your implementation is successful or not. While still a subjective measure, it will add some statistical support to your conclusions.

Most organizations don’t roll out SharePoint to everyone on the same day. Most IT personnel would strongly advise against this. Given that there are five types of people in your organization (from an adoption-of-innovation standpoint), best practice is to find one or two groups that like to work with new technology and roll out SharePoint just to those groups. Not only will they enjoy having a new technology with which to work, but you will have the opportunity to refine and mature your rollout processes so that by the time you’re rolling out to the Early Majority, you’ve fixed the bugs in the rollout process and have better defined how to use SharePoint in your environment and how to present its usage to your users.

So find out who your Innovators are in your environment. Go to them with SharePoint. Let them use it and get excited about it. They tend to be opinionated, so get their feedback on how to use SharePoint better in your environment and then use them as your first “win.” Others will see what is happening, the Early Adopters will likely want to get going with SharePoint, and your adoption will spread.

In EPC Group's experience working with customers, most have a hard time throttling their deployment because the demand for this product is so strong. Don’t give in to the large demand. Stay methodical about your deployment and ensure that you move along at the rate you had hoped. Don’t let demand push you into going too fast. If you do, you might find that the demand was more vocal than serious. Going more slowly will help you resolve nagging problems early in the deployment so that those in the Early and Late Majority groups will have better experiences once they start using SharePoint.

Having said all this, it is highly probable that you’ll roll out SharePoint Products and Technologies to a departmental team composed of people from all five groups. If possible, try to avoid this scenario. But if you must roll out to a group that is mixed in their attitudes about adopting SharePoint Products and Technologies, then please take the time to communicate with them about the “how’s and whys” of SharePoint Products and Technologies and ask for their input and help in adopting SharePoint Server 2010. While bottom-up changes take longer, the resistance will be less and, in the end, you’ll have a more successful deployment of SharePoint in your environment.

Understanding Power Dynamics and Change

If you’re like most information technology professionals, it is likely that you don’t spend much time thinking about the power dynamics in your organization. Yet, there is nothing more demoralizing than feeling you have a creative idea or a unique skill to help solve a significant problem and then encountering resistance to your ideas from individuals within your organization. You might even be someone who has become disillusioned and cynical about the realities of how managers and peers improperly use their power in ways that negatively affect you.

What is power? Power is the potential of an individual (or group) to influence another individual or group. Influence, in turn, is the exercise of power to change the behavior, attitudes, and/ or values of that individual or group. It is easier to change behavior than attitudes, and in turn, it is easier to change attitudes than values. Power and influence are always at work within organizations. For example, most organizations experience conflict over resources, schedules, or personnel. These conflicts are inevitable and their resolutions often require the intervention of someone with influence and power. Organizations consist of individuals and groups with divergent interests who must figure out how to reconcile these interests.

Power comes from several sources within an organization, and those sources are as follows:

•Formal Authority. Formal authority refers to a person’s position in the organization hierarchy. The higher in the corporate hierarchy or the greater the scope and scale of responsibilities, the more power that person will have. Most workers today don’t respond well to the raw use of formal authority.

•Relevance. Relevance refers to a person’s ability to align work activities with corporate priorities. The more relevant a person is in his or her job, the more powerful that person will be. For example, in a company that focuses on innovation, the vice president of research and development will likely yield power and influence that is beyond her stated job description.

•Centrality. Those occupying central positions in important networks in organizations tend to have power because others in the organization must depend on them for access to resources or for help in getting critical tasks accomplished. Hence, a person’s position in the workflow can yield power or influence beyond a stated job description or place in the organizational chart.

•Autonomy. The greater one’s ability to exercise discretion or freedom in his position, the more power and influence that person will have within the organization. These people generally do not need to seek out approval from a superior. Tasks that tend to be novel or highly technical tend to have considerable autonomy, since it is difficult to develop guidelines or rules on how the work should be done.

•Visibility. Those whose job activities tend to be highly visible to other powerful
people within the organization will tend to have more power than those whose job
performance is less obvious.

•Expertise. Those who possess technical expertise or hard-to-find skills typically are people who are in a position to influence the opinions and behavior of others. This is because others need to rely on their expertise or skills to accomplish their own goals and objectives.

Understanding Specific Changes that SharePoint IntroducesFor those who are new to SharePoint, an immediate change will be how documents are accessed and consumed. At present, many companies have shared network drives that host large data sets with hundreds or even thousands of folders with tens of thousands of documents. It is not uncommon to hear of shared network drives that host a terabyte or more of data, much of it redundant, old, outdated, and unusable. So, two problems immediately present themselves in this scenario.

First, as SharePoint is increasingly used, users will not access the shared network drive to work with a document. Instead, they will access the document using a URL namespace via their browser or their Office client. The catch is that it’s difficult to use the Office client to access a document library until the user has manually created a Web folder client connection to the document library, or the user has created a mapped drive to the document library, or the user has visited the library and worked with documents in such a manner as to have the Web folder client connection automatically created in their My Network Places on their desktop.

This need to “visit-first” in order to obtain a shortcut route to the document library can be frustrating for your users.

Logically, the shared drive’s contents will likely not be hosted in the same document library. In nearly all scenarios, this shared drive’s content will be re-hosted in SharePoint spanning many, many document libraries. So, what once was a single drive mapping for the end-user that resulted in wading through countless folders to find their documents now becomes accessing information through a plethora of Web folder client connections while learning to manage documents across many different document libraries and sites.

Governance and Potential ConflictsIt is very important that proper governance is for the new SharePoint environment is in place. Without strong governance, you’ll likely encounter at least three major conflicts in your SharePoint deployment:

•Confusion about where information should reside
•Confusion about how information is to be handled
•Confusion about who makes which decisions in SharePoint

Knowing Where to Put Information

You cannot assume that users will know where their information should be hosted in your SharePoint environment. Without communicating a corporate-wide set of expectations about where information goes in SharePoint, users will be left to make the decision on their own and you’ll find that each one will have a different idea as to where their own information should reside.

If your organization can’t bring itself to make core governance decisions, then conflict is bound to erupt based on the lack of direction for your SharePoint deployment. Because users will decide where their information goes, they will necessarily end up negotiating where they will collaborate within SharePoint.

Someone in your organization needs to make some high-level decisions about where information will go and who will manage it. These decisions need to be communicated and then enforced if you plan on avoiding conflict surrounding where information goes in SharePoint.

Knowing How Information Is to Be Handled

In most organizations, there are different kinds of information with different security levels. For example, payroll information is often highly secured, whereas public Web site information is generally less secured.

When users are developing information within SharePoint, they cannot be assumed to know how their information should be managed. For many, the prospect of managing and securing their information is a new task; in the absence of direction, they’re bound to violate some unwritten rule or expectation. Best practice is to have an organization wide information architecture from which document-type definitions can be described and then implemented in SharePoint.

Knowing Who Makes Which Decisions

At the core of your governance plan is the need to decide who can make decisions within your SharePoint implementation. A myriad of configuration settings are available for manipulation at four basic levels: farm, Web application, site collection, and site. Generally speaking, SharePoint farm administrators will manage the options at the farm and Web application levels, whereas power users with advanced training will manage the options at the site collection level. Nearly everyone in your organization who is involved with content creation or management will manage configuration values at the site level.

Your governance plan needs to specify which people and positions will be able to make decisions and commit changes at each of these four levels. Planning this out before you deploy SharePoint Server 2010 is the optimal method of ensuring success for your SharePoint deployment.

10 SharePoint 2010 Methodology Best Practices Articles from EPC Group

2011-11-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

10 SharePoint 2010 Methodology Best Practices Articles from EPC Group

EPC Group's Summary of Methodologies on our Award Winning Approach to Enterprise SharePoint 2010 Deployments.The original AIIM.ORG SharePoint Expert Blog posts an also be found at: http://www.aiim.org/Community/members/blogs/4affeb16f1494069ab772955fd5bde7e
"Methodologies and Enterprise Blog Strategy Posts by EPC Group's CEO Errin O'Connor as well as the EPC Group team of Senior SharePoint Architects, Developers, and Business Analysts"

Article 1) Why Large Enterprise and Global SharePoint Deployments Will Not Work in the Cloud“Everyone is going to want one of these,” Gary Dahl half-joking said. Gary Dahl is an author and advertising executive, but more importantly, the inventor of the Pet Rock. A Cloud-based SharePoint... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Why-Large-Enterprise-and-Global-SharePoint-Deployments-Will-Not-Work-in-the-Cloud)

Article 2) Is Records Management and Usability, Together, Even Possible?Why are 75% of the organizations in the United States (with an enterprise presence) looking at implementing a records management solution and why are they drawn so much to a particular Microsoft platform... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Is-Records-Management-and-Usability-Together-Even-Possible)

Article 3)SharePoint 2010 Web Standards, Accessibility, and Usability Quick Reference GuideThe following is a SharePoint 2010 Web Standards and Usability Quick Reference Guide following EPC Group’s best practices for SharePoint GUI development (master page) and configuration best practice...Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/SharePoint-2010-Web-Standards-Accessibility-and-Usability-Quick-Reference-Guide )

Article 4)Selecting the Right SharePoint Consulting Firm: Comparing Apples to Apples, or Apples to OrangesBackground on One of Many Similar Situations I Have Come Across in the Past 24 Months As a disclaimer to this article, I do own a SharePoint consulting firm, EPC Group.net, and am writing this ... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/SharePoint-2010-Web-Standards-Accessibility-and-Usability-Quick-Reference-Guide)

Article 5)The SharePoint 2010 “Magical Mystery Tour”The Perceptions vs. Reality of I.T. and New Technologies When discussing with a client who is considering or beginning the process of rolling out SharePoint 2010, I sometimes feel like a broken... Link to Article (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/The-SharePoint-2010-e2809cMagical-Mystery-Toure2809d)

Article 6) A “Phase 0” Approach for SharePoint 2010An approach that I have seen work well for a large number of organizations either implementing a new SharePoint 2010 enterprise implementation or possibly upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/A-e2809cPhase-0e2809d-Approach-for-SharePoint-2010)

Article 7) Navigating the “World of SharePoint 2010” and All It Encompasses - Part 1Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is one of the most popular software programs \ platforms in history and with it has come a community with a near cult following as well as a large number of extremely powerful... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Navigating-the-e2809cWorld-of-SharePoint-2010e2809d-and-All-It-Encompasses-Part-1)

Article 8) SharePoint 2010 - A Learning Management System (LMS) for Government\DoD, Private Sector\Fortune 1000, and Educational Institutions (SP vs. Blackboard)Your organization more than likely already owns SharePoint licenses and may be using it for collaboration, the Intranet, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) \ Enterprise Records Management (ERM)... Link to Article:(http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/SharePoint-2010-A-Learning-Management-System-(LMS)-for-Government5cDoD-Private-Sector5cFortune-1000-and-Educational-Institutions-7c-(SP-vs-Blackboard)2010)

Article 9) Mobility, Browser Compatibility, Compliance, and its Continued Dominance in the Marketplace... Like a stock trader who has purchased a “put” on a stock in hopes the stock value will decrease, I continue to see articles and blogs every now and then asking questions and making statements on do... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/SharePoint-2010-A-Learning-Management-System-(LMS)-for-Government5cDoD-Private-Sector5cFortune-1000-and-Educational-Institutions-7c-(SP-vs-Blackboard)

Article 10)Developing a Hybrid SharePoint 2010 ERM \ ECM Platform (SPaaS)In developing any Enterprise Records Management (ERM) or (ECM) Platform, the key to long-term success is your organizations ability to develop a roadmap that takes into consideration the hybrid type... Link to Article: (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Developing-a-Hybrid-SharePoint-2010-ERM-5c-ECM-Platform-(SPaaS)For additional information contact EPC Group at sharepoint@epcgroup.net or http://www.epcgroup.net/

SharePoint Deployment Tips - Commonsense Comments from a Near-Decade's Worth of SharePoint Diving

2011-11-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

SharePoint Deployment Tips -
Commonsense Comments from a Near-Decade's Worth of SharePoint Diving
SharePoint Pro Magazine Article Originally Posted Here
Posted @ 10/28/2011 5:08 PM By Caroline Marwitz

"SharePoint is typically one of the most high profile deployments," says Errin O'Connor, founder and head of EPC Group. "People have their jobs on the line. EPC has a unique approach to helping organizations deploy SharePoint that allows companies to be like partners."

Based on experience that goes back to the original STS 2001, and bolstered by projects such as helping Chevron, Continental Airlines, the US Naval Air Command, and the National Institutes of Health with their SharePoint deployments, O'Connor's SharePoint knowledge runs deep. In fact, you could get lost for days in it. Here are a few tips for success gleaned from a short conversation with O'Connor and Miranda Price, EPC Group's Vice President:

1. Approach a project with the mindset of SharePoint as a service and as a platform. "It's a hybrid solution. It's not only an intranet--if you want to transform it into a records management solution, you'll be ready."

2. Engage power users. "Companies put their budget into administrator training but you need to develop the folks that implement SharePoint for a specific reason--they tend to implement it for other things, too."

3. Keep SharePoint simple. It's important to follow site provisioning and permissions best practices. "You can end up defeating the purpose of SharePoint if you have five sites that do the same thing or store the same documents. We try to ensure there's an approval process to create sites."

4. Governance, governance, governance. "We like to set up governance committees. Governance is thrown around a lot-it ranges from provisions, security, roadmap, content types, to end-user training. It consists of two parts-infrastructure information management (server side-load balancing and DR) and information management (site collections, site creation)."

5. Don't re-invent the (training) wheel. Re-use training--a centralized training model can do wonders. Consider doing an organization-agnostic training for all departments--implement once, take a roadmap approach.

6. Get a store. "We have a private cloud with a private app store where folks in the organization can go in and see what other departments have done and go in, download a web part, code, business requirements in the documentation--it's like a solutions gallery where you can get help or support."

7. Get organized. "We saw the NIH buying AvePoint, Idera, Colligo, three or four times over--we worked with all their vendors so they could buy a solution one time and reuse it."
To learn more about EPC Group, see the company's website.

Why Large Enterprise and Global SharePoint Deployments Will Not Work in the Cloud - AIIM.ORG SharePoint Expert Blog

2011-11-13T21:46:00.000-08:00

Expert AIIM Article: Why Large Enterprise and Global SharePoint Deployments Will Not Work in the Cloud

Original AIIM.ORG Post Located Here

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net
November 10, 2011 - 6:17 AM

“Everyone is going to want one of these,” Gary Dahl half-joking said. Gary Dahl is an author and advertising executive, but more importantly, the inventor of the Pet Rock.

A Cloud-based SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise-wide (i.e. Fortune 1000 sized company) and\or globally implemented deployment simply will not work. It may be initially appealing, but without the organization’s Information Technology executives completely owning the environment and its governance, customization, and federation strategy it will be a long-term failure and future migration project (from the external cloud into an internally hosted Private Cloud).

An enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented in a Private Cloud, an environment internal to the organization with total control of its servers, permissions \ security, customization and deployment policies, and federation between line-of-business systems and various data sources is the only deployment platform global and large enterprise organization should focus on.

There is a place for a cloud-based SharePoint 2010 deployment in small to medium sized businesses who only mostly require out-of-the-box features and functionality and siloed \ departmental permission strategies. Organizations like these can utilize a cloud-based solution to not only be quickly up and running on a SharePoint 2010 solution but take advantage of the lower cost of ownership.

There may be some folks jumping up and down stating that a SharePoint, cloud-based hosted SharePoint environment, can easily scale to 5,000 or 15,000 users and I don’t doubt it can, but what does “scale to” really mean? SharePoint 2010 should be implemented as a Service with a Platform \ Hybrid methodology in mind. It will evolve to more than 1 or 2 specific business or functional requirements. It may be a collaboration and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution initially, but will eventually have workflows, executive dashboards \ KPIs, Social Networking, and probably many other capabilities. SharePoint 2010 seamless federation and single sign-on integration with other business systems is a core requirement of many enterprise and global companies.

It is very challenging to federate a hosted SharePoint 2010 solution with your organizations other internally hosted applications and data. It is also a challenge to deploying custom SharePoint-based applications your internal I,T, staff may have built within the cloud.

The SharePoint “App Store” concept is something of beauty but it is limited in scope in a hosted SharePoint cloud. There may be a set of reusable web parts the cloud may offer that may appeal to the masses, like an image rotator web part or commonly applicable solution for Policies and Procedures; simple things like weather or aggregation web parts but they are still mostly limited to data and content within the cloud or data that is publically accessible.

When you are working with business and functional requirements of enterprise and global organizations, you are also going to run across requirements wildcards such as:

•Countries who have issues with storing data in US-based data centers who must adhere to the Freedom of Information Act as well as the Patriot Act.

•Organizations who store HIPPA-related data and\or PHI and PII sensitive data.

•The storage of tax related documents and the way that content must be tracked and secured.

•The administrative access of the cloud hosting company (as they still can probably give themselves access, if desired, which can open the firm who is hosting their organization’s SharePoint deployment and content there up to possible litigation).

•Wanting to deploy and host custom applications built on SharePoint within the cloud environment | Deploying custom web parts built internally

•Federating massive active directory environments to a SharePoint cloud

•Federating internal data sources and other line of business systems to the external cloud

•Implementing Executive Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that pull from multiple data sources including those that are non-SharePoint based

•Deploying custom workflows that may have multiple “swim lanes” and may cross and need to access these multiple data sources

•Managing your organizations future SharePoint Mobile Experience and related "edge devices"

•Sensitive or Highly sensitive data

◦Both in the private sector as well as in government, there is data that is highly sensitive and possibly top secret. This goes without saying, but you must take your organizations governing laws as well as retention and access control policies into consideration at all times.

◦This includes information security related to applications hosted on the platform for which your data is stored

Myself and my firm at EPC Group have also run across Countries and International Laws that prohibit the storage or access of content outside the borders of their country. We have dealt with this in places such as Germany and many countries in Africa where the ability to search data cannot return results either inside or outside (depending on the scenario, internal or external) of the country.

I believe that the Private Cloud, internally hosted and mostly on virtual platforms, is the only real solution that large enterprise and global organizations should rely on to meet their current and also future I.T. roadmap for SharePoint Server 2010 as its capabilities lead to SharePoint becoming a hybrid ecosystem within most of these organizations.

Expert AIIM Article: Are Records Management and Usability, Together, Even Possible?

2011-10-25T06:27:00.000-07:00

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net

October 25, 2011 - 6:40 AM

Why are 75% of the organizations in the United States (with an enterprise presence) looking at implementing a records management solution and why are they drawn so much to a particular Microsoft platform?

Can you have an enterprise content management (ECM) \ enterprise records management (ERM) solution with an easy to use interface that users are drawn to? How about a centralized platform that the organization can use as a Service? Lastly, can the organizations Intranet be seamlessly integrated as well as your file shares, exchange public folders, and other online or proprietary applications?

Ohh, and its needs to be accessible via an extranet and on mobile (Tablet and smartphone) devices as well.

The answer to these questions is why FileNet, LiveLink, Documentum, eRoom, and about 15 other platforms I can think of are losing market share by the day. I know I may get the “open source” and Microsoft detractors or those whose technology platform are in the direct line of fire of this tool or whose online “cloud” service can’t match up (comments), but that is understandable.

I thank my lucky stars every night that I joined the right team. Implementing a multi-million dollar ECM\ERM solution several years ago and literally having users not use it has happened all over the map. Enter SharePoint 2010…

I will also play devil’s advocate for a second as I had an interesting conversation with a client the other day regarding their company’s new records management plans and future roadmap. The organization had already made its mind up that SharePoint was not a true records management platform.

In fact, they did not even want to see a live demo of 3 different Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions that EPC Group had built and were in production for 3 Fortune 500’s that everyone would recognize as almost baseball and apple pie in the U.S. Did MOSS (SharePoint 2007) cause this? Probably so, and if all they had seen was an out of the box “record center” in MOSS than I can hardly blame them. In SharePoint 2007, there was a whole lot of customization \ configuration that had to be done to compete with the FileNet, LiveLink, and Documentum’s of the world.

It was very possible but not very attractive to the masses. In over 150+ implementations of SharePoint 2007, my teams and I at EPC Group don’t disagree on what you may have seen in MOSS (out-of-the-box) but SharePoint 2010 is a whole different animal and SharePoint 15 is not going to be any different…but back to the main point.

Why have so many Fortune 1000 organizations aligned themselves and committed to a SharePoint future roadmap strategy? They combined Gartner leading quadrant records management requirements with a tool that is easy to use and can meet the needs of 10 different enterprise requirements including social\professional networking and guarantee of a solution that will be around for at least another decade.

What would users think of when they hear the word usability or just “easy to use”?

•Effective and efficient in supporting work
•Easy to learn and memorize
•Error tolerant and efficient in error recovery
•Allows for a pleasant and safe working environment
•Making sure our end-users have an easier time learning new training, remaining productive, and accepting change if the end product is easy to use.
So what does usability really impact? What’s the ROI (we are looking at the bottom line these days!)?

•Continued productivity in core task activities
•Acceptance of changes
•Increased effectiveness in training
•Increased speed of adoption
At its core?

•Users can complete high-impact, critical must haves
•Users have productivity level understanding of easy to use ECM and collaboration tools
Note: Also, if you’re not doing it before your competition or spending the time and money to innovate you may lose market share and fall behind.

A lot of us who work from both sides of the isle (the company looking for a consulting firm and partner to assist them in integrating such a high profile project \ solution AND the consulting organization who is trying to not only win your business but show why they are different than all the other SharePoint firms and why you should feel safe spending your available budget and signing on for the engagement) understand budget is tight and every last dollar must be squeezed but there can be no cutting corners or taking shortcuts. It’s a hard decision for clients’ \ companies but one that must be decided. When does not spending money and saving budget start to kill innovation?

Usability is not only about the Internet Browser from a laptop or desktop and SharePoint 2010, it’s about mobility and those “edge” devices. Every single item discussed above must also be thought of in a case of a tablet device or a smartphone.

Usability must be managed in your companies MME or Mobility Management Experience. You may refer to it as a different acronym and I believe this thought process will continue to evolve but take into consideration not only company issued devices but the iPad that your CFO is about to get for his\her birthday. How do you manage usability on that device and govern it? Can you even do that and are your companies’ policies and procedures not yet updated to cover a situation like that? You’re not alone and it’s something that must be addressed and soon.

By selecting a platform that is going to give you not only ROI by replacing other expensive systems and allowing everything to be centralized, but to choose a solution that is going to be uttered every few seconds because it’s being used constantly its key to measure its “Usability Value” -

•Measurement and validation of end-user performance
◦Core work tasks
■Critical Must-Haves
■High Impact changes
◦Easy-to-use Information Management and Collaboration tools (Add Social\Professional Networking)
•Measurement of solution’s value to Businesses and End-Users
•Identify performance and feedback-based usability gaps and provide recommendations for solutions to usability gaps
•Advocate on behalf of End-Users and ensure their feedback is heard
•Decrease need for redesign in the future or missing things like mobility -> Evergreen

What true solution “statement” or usability “core values” should be required for success?

•SharePoint 2010 brings significant changes for the end-user
◦New work practices and attitudes around E-mail, messaging, and social (professional) networking
◦New collaboration and document sharing practices
◦New work operating system and digital work environment (Think about going green in the future with OCR \ Scanning solutions that are seamlessly integrated with SharePoint 2010)
•SharePoint 2010 End-Users will have an easier time learning new training, remaining productive, and accepting change if the end product is easy to use.
•Ensuring the usability of SharePoint 2010 will involve a process of examination, testing and refining by applying usability methodology.
◦This must include 508 compliance which has been overlooked for years but is now a core requirement for many organizations (especially government)
This all falls under governance, no surprise, but instead of just throwing around the G word, think true “Operational Governance” and a living breathing Governance strategy that aligns with your organization’s roadmap.

Myself and my team and EPC Group constantly discuss how an enterprise SharePoint project touches just about every area of an organization. Usability \ user experience is one that is not always on the forefront of peoples thoughts but it should be

My Site Implementations in SharePoint 2010 - A Best Practice

2011-10-12T22:59:00.000-07:00

Original Article posted on EPC Group's SharePoint Expert Blog Profile which can be seen at the following AIIM.ORG Link: http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/My-Site-Implementation-in-SharePoint-2010-e28093-A-Best-Practices-Strategy

A SharePoint 2010 Enterprise initiative must be approached in a manner to ensure it is implemented with a “Platform Strategy” and “SharePoint as a Service” in mind. This not only includes the implementation of a Document Management \ Records Management SharePoint 2010 enterprise initiative in mind but all of the other facets that SharePoint 2010 bring to an organization.

I speak with business leaders and CIOs\IT Directors on a regular basis during my day-to-day activities at EPC Group and one question I continue to hear from many organizations is, “what is your opinion on how we could successful roll out SharePoint 2010 My Sites to our organization and how many other similar companies like ours are rolling it out”? The answer is currently about 60\40 in that 60% of organizations are rolling out My Sites and 40% are in a “wait and see” pattern and are struggling with legal & compliance or leadership who have serious concerns about rolling out My Sites.

I always discuss with client, in terms of a record, what is the difference between an email or a post on a My Site? Is there really any difference in the two from a legal perspective and unless the organization regularly monitors a large subset of employees emails, which is rare. My Sites are my more easily monitored and governable. In this, SharePoint 2010 My Site Governance is key and some initial core areas of consideration should be:

•All My Site Public View content must contain only work-related material. This includes work-related documents, discussions, pictures, links, calendar events, and related content.
•No My Site Public View content can contain any confidential or private data. If the organization would not allow all users within the company with a domain login to view this information, consider whether it should be on your My Site Public View.
•Content pertaining to human resources or legal (sensitive in nature) is typically considered confidential and should not be listed on My Site Public View.
•No PII or PHI (personal health information) information should ever be present in My Sites
◦PII: Organization may differ on what PII they may consider PII data. Data about an individual that could potentially identify that person, such as a name, fingerprints or other biometric data, email address, street address, telephone number or social security number. A subset of PII is PIFI (personally identifiable financial information).
◦PHI: under HIPAA includes any individually identifiable health information. Identifiable refers not only to data that is explicitly linked to a particular individual (that's identified information). It also includes health information with data items which reasonably could be expected to allow individual identification.
•Public and already released financial data must be reviewed prior to its posting on My Site Public View. (i.e. Reports, etc.)
•Content on the private site must not contain personal audio files, inappropriate pictures, or other materials not allowed within the organization.
•All discussions or blogging done within a My Site must follow company policies and must not contain sensitivecompany material or defamatory comments about any person within the organization.
I think a key area for organizations to look at is first not thinking of My Sites as the “Facebook” of the enterprise, even thou it was a lot of similar characteristics. Facebook is a poorly governed (by its out-of-the-box configured) nature and the user is responsible to setting proper permissions, showing what posts can be publically viewed, etc.

Its key to think of SharePoint 2010’s My Site as “Professional Networking” and that is the only term they should ever be referred to as that help set a standard and mindset within users. The other key area of concern I see is that organizations fear that existing and approved “policies and procedures” or “standard operating procedures” could be confused by someone’s “best practices” post on their My Site and again this is easily addressed. Having users sign either an online My Site “Professional Networking” user agreement or a paper based user agreement with the governance items and conduct responsibilities clearly spelled out is a great way myself and my professional networking teams at EPC Group have seen completely change the mindset and landscape of fears organizations face.

My Sites are an extremely powerful tool that, in my estimation, 40% of organizations are putting on the back burner or “in a later phase” that is causing them to loose productivity with this amazing tool at their fingertips (and by the way you already purchased\own it). You can institute My Site governance policies as well as actually configure the My Site templates with only the web parts and functionality you would like your user base to access and you do not have to give them all the capabilities right out of the gate.

My advice would be to pilot My Sites within 1 or 2 departments and test these strategies with these users and see how much ROI you really get out of them as I can guarantee you will be amazed at user productivity. One last area of concern I wanted to address is that organizations sometimes see the “My Site” as a replacement to the users existing personal file share. This may or may not be the case but my setting quotas on the My Sites and instituting required Content Type \ Metadata selection when they save documents will make a huge difference in your thinking in this area. These documents will also allow the users to fully search them with SharePoint’s native search and save the user time by searching rather than hunting and pecking around usually very poorly organized file shares.

In the past 4 months, we have completed over 5 extremely large enterprise My Site implementations in both the commercial (2 Fortune 500) and 2 mid-size organizations (1 government) and have not seen issues where they caused any major issues but rather training requirements to help users get used to having this powerful tool at their fingertips.

In summary, pilot My Sites for "Professional Networking" within 1 or 2 departments as you will not regret it.

Selecting the Right SharePoint Consulting Firm: Comparing Apples to Apples, or Apples to Oranges

2011-09-19T07:16:00.000-07:00

Selecting the Right SharePoint Consulting Firm: Comparing Apples to Apples, or Apples to Oranges

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net - September 19, 2011

Background on One of Many Similar Situations I Have Come Across in the Past 24 Months

As a disclaimer to this article, I do own a SharePoint consulting firm, EPC Group.net, and am writing this based on my opinion and those of CIOs and IT Directors that I have interacted with over the past 24 months.

In working with clients and gathering their business requirements as well as their detailed functional requirements as well as listening to their past experiences in working with SharePoint consultants on previous versions like MOSS 2007 or SPS 2003, or even SharePoint 2010, I continue to hear an opinion and small pattern for which I thought I should address.

As an example, a few months ago I was asked to assist in scoping out a full FileNet to SharePoint 2010 migration initiative. There was no existing metadata, the security of FileNet was quite old and not aligned with the business, and the users could not get off of FileNet and into SharePoint fast enough; a department within the firm had implemented their own small SharePoint 2010 implementation and a number of staffers in this company had seen its capabilities and wanted in, and wanted in yesterday.

Trying to be politically correct here as much as possible, a 15 day SharePoint Deployment Services engagement, for which EPC Group shies away from as we tend to not see the value in it for our Enterprise clients, was not going to resolve this Enterprise Content Management (ECM) initiative and there was several months of hard work ahead for not only the company but for which ever firm they selected to trust and engage with on this undertaking. To my surprise the CIO called me and said he had 5 quotes on his desk that ranged from $56,000 to $310,000. Lets just say for conversation sake, the SOW I developed was not on the cheaper side as myself and my team who worked on this proposal with me for sevearl days understood the level of effort, has gone back into Project Server and pulled out 3 similar project plans to verify tasks, etc. and in no way was any firm in the world going to accomplish this initiative for $56,000 or anything near that number. Its important the client understand what the SharePoint firm is delivering, what is the engagement model, what type of project management are they expecting, how much face to face knowledge transfer should they expect, etc... (As I could go on and on but i believe this is a point that many in the SharePoint arena to not like to address).

Note: Not a whole lot can be accomplished in a 15 day initiative, especially if you are looking for knowledge transfer, which I believe is the absolutely key to long-term SharePoint success.

The Clients Perspective

I don't envy the client situation when going out to select a SharePoint Consulting partner to take on this task and there can be the route for which they do their own due diligence and come up with a list of 3 or 4 of the top firms in the US with 300 or 400+ or more of these projects under their belt or depending on the organization, put out an RFP and let the masses try and prove their prowess or expertise. Personally I don't have huge preference when working with clients to win their business based on my firm EPC Group's past performance and reputation and I am probably speaking for several other SharePoint firms out there but I would also caution clients to truly look into who they are receiving quotes from...

When selecting a SharePoint Consulting firm\partner, consider the proposal’s numbers (cost) vs. the quality and experience of the delivery team. With the 20 or so firms that have been founded in the past 24-36 months which I track (along with the other firms in the US), many of them are trying to underbid the project to win it to build a past performance or reference base, but in many cases firms who have been in the SharePoint consulting arena for 10 years end up getting a follow-up call from the client asking for a health check and assessment as well as a quote for a new initiative as they found out they need to throw-out the past few months of work and start over due to the disaster they have just experienced.

This is sometimes due to the SharePoint roadmap that was never developed, the experience level of the consultants, possibly the "1099 subcontracted for this job consultants" this original firm hired when signing up for a Dice.com account shortly after winning the project to hire a few "Senior SharePoint Consultants" that did not live up to the SharePoint Senior Architects \ Consultants for which they were “billed” at and pitched during the sales and project scoping process.

The Other "Big Vendors" in the Room

SharePoint is the most powerful and flexible enterprise solution who has taken on the past 800 pound giants and in its forth release (SharePoint 2010) as made EMC, OpenText, and others “call a bit of uncle, or there have been some board meetings in which the saying, “If you can’t beat em’, joint em’..” or "we have to open up our APIs to be SharePoint (seamlessly) friendly" just may have been uttered (my personal opinion of course).

Doing Due Diligence for Yourself and Your Firm When Selecting a Consulting Firm

It is critical that you look at not only certifications, experience, any beta testing or TAP program experience from those that were there at the pre-release, authoring of SharePoint publications, real-world experience, and those that talk about making mistakes and learning from them. Sometimes it important to not talk about SharePoint at all but listen to the business problem and ensure the consultants do not have blinders on and make it everything in the project just about SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint....

1. What defines a Senior SharePoint Architect \ Consultant vs. a consultant who has been subcontracted to work on 1 or 2 deployments?

2. Remember that just because a consulting firm may have the product vendor "or something similar" in their name, that doesn’t mean they necessarily know what they are doing or have the rock stars at the table to successfully complete your project (yes, even if they want to bid twice as much as the others who proposed a statement of work or hourly rate, etc.).

State of SharePoint

A large number SharePoint firms have been founded in the past 2-3 years (as I mentioned above) and at least 5 seasoned firm I know of have been purchased in the past 18-24 months by larger firms. I have been asked at conferences, "what about outsourcing SharePoint development and using a few information architects to control the face time"? Outsourcing SharePoint development overseas doesn’t not work on a large scale unless you have months and months to near 'fingerprint in stone' every single possible detail (business and functional requirement). If a change is needed, it will take several weeks to turn around, update, and receive it back to implement in your dev farm to test. You must ensure all your development environments are synchronized. Your developers must have experience in 2007 as well as 2010 to ensure you understand the issues in upgrading because SharePoint 15 is coming out sometime in 2014. (Note: we may get a sneak peak from the SharePoint product team in the very near future).

The External "Cloud" versus your own Internal "Private" Cloud

In my opinion, and with concerns of the recent outages of several of the large clouds, companies who must connect to external business data or have developed custom applications in house (web parts, workflows, master pages, using the BCS, etc.) are not going to jump on the bandwagon of an external cloud in the near future (especially with the negative press of day or two long outages) but rather implement and “Internal or Private Cloud” (no matter how many other expert bloggers may work for or own Cloud Computing organizations, again this is my opinion from sitting with prominent CIOs from the private and government sector). I believe there is value to the cloud for SMB type businesses but Fortune 500\1000 and major Government organizations need 24/7, 365 uptime and the ability to manage custom code, connect to external data sources, federate security seamlessly, and a whole lot more, and do it yesterday.

SharePoint Trainers vs. Consultants
Trainers who blog are not always experts in, “in the trenches” consulting and you may get a robotic or rehearsed answer; ensure the blogs and experts you follow are actual consultants who have sat in “war rooms” hours on end to whiteboard and solve real world problems where there are budgetary and political considerations as well as timelines, resources, and peoples jobs from the client on the line.

3rd Party Vendors \ ISVs

There are a large number of SharePoint 3rd party solutions (ISVs) who offer amazing solutions that can help you to lower your internal maintenance costs and almost act like another full-time employee (FTE) for your firm. On the other hand, ensure you are only buying what you need as some ISVs have moved to the model of bundling up their entire suite of products that not only cause a massive footprint on your servers but also cause you to possibly spend budget that you do not need to spend.

A Recent Area of Concern - Internal Politics and SharePoint 2010's Massive Functionality

Internal politics can absolutely be the death of a project and the firm you select must be able to tell you the hard truth about this and you should take it in stride. I have witnessed the application (SharePoint) teams literally fighting tooth and nail with the development, legal, or legacy solutions (Portal, ECM, etc.) and vice versa. SharePoint Server 2010 has an unbelievable amount of functionality (i.e. ECM\ERM, Portal, Collaboration, Social\Professional Networking, Business Intelligence, etc.). It is bound to cause political issues and find some people concerned about job security with their legacy systems.

SharePoint Licensing

Microsoft is adding 20,000 new users a day or 7+ million new users a year (for the past 5 years) so resolving issues and understanding SharePoint’s capabilities to provide ROI to your firm is in your best interest.

The-SharePoint 2010 "Magical Mystery Tour"

2011-09-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

By Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net - September 08, 2011

The Perceptions vs. Reality of I.T. and New Technologies

When discussing with a client who is considering or beginning the process of rolling out SharePoint 2010, I sometimes feel like a broken record in saying, “yes, it can accomplish that” or “it can be implemented to replace this or that system” but in reality these are all true statements. I read an interesting article the other day regarding Facebook and its comparison to corporate technologies and SharePoint in particular.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 (2 full SharePoint releases ago) had My Site (social) capabilities but it was before its time and management, legal, compliance, and CIOs were rightfully concerned and doing their due diligence in seeing how this new feature, along with others, such as blogs and wikis would positively or negatively affect their organization. Many of these organizations with these concerns thou also relied on file shares and antiquated HTML or custom .asp Intranets and good enough was better than the risk perceived.

There are some organizations that have taken SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010’s (social) professional networking capabilities (My Sites) and practically stood them on their head in doing some real work (i.e. allocating budget and resources) with huge ROI. SharePoint 2010’s capabilities bring your staff together to increase productivity, provide knowledge bases, open discussion areas to larger groups, while providing this in a secure environment is beyond powerful.

What is the difference between someone sending out an inappropriate email to a person or group of people or someone posting something possibly inappropriate on their My Site? Yes, they are both against company policy and should be removed and the issue dealt with accordingly.

My advice and urging is for organizations to step outside their comfort zone and invest in using SharePoint’s features (as you probably already own the licenses) and look at its Web Content Management, Document Management, Business Intelligence, Intranet, and Professional Networking capabilities.

There is no doubt that organizations have pulled back the reins on investing time and effort on the utilization of a new technology and have turned their focus on their existing technologies, keeping the status quo, and staying in between the lines. I had a conversation with an organization’s Director of I.T. last month and he told me, “If you compare what we used to spend (effort and budget) on innovation 8 to 10 years ago compared to now, it’s completely night and day.” He went on to say, “Our organization spends 10% of what it used to on innovation and it seems to be some fear of the unknown that is driving this.”

The I.T. Department within organizations is not the anti-sales department but an enabler to help you and your staff increase productivity, decrease wasted time on searching or finding content, protecting the organization from litigation, and making sure you have the tools to make your job easier.

Scenarios to Consider

This could be an area of conversation that could go on for hours, but I wanted to give a list of a few examples of what clients have approached EPC Group with in the past 4 months to kickoff this scenarios topic.

1.We have a LiveLink system and our users can’t stand to use the LiveLink interface and they love SharePoint’s easy to use interface so they end up just storing documents in SharePoint and that is not “our system of record.” Can we front-end LiveLink with SharePoint until our OpenText license expires?

2.We have a massive file share system where I am sure there are a ton of duplication as well as applications, large files, possible databases, and data that we are not sure what to do with… how can we migrate this successfully into SharePoint?

3.We want to roll-out SharePoint 2010 to a few departments and integrate it via Single Sign-on with the major LOB systems in those departments. How best can we do this without affecting future upgrades or patches that Microsoft releases on SharePoint 2010?

4.We want to implement SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise as our ECM solution but do not know where to start or have a retention schedule, what should we do?

5.We have to be 508 compliant in SharePoint, what solutions are out there and how do we do this the right way the first time as there is no room for error?

6.We want to upgrade SharePoint 2007 to 2010 but have done major customization and also have developed custom .NET KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in 2007 and want to now use PerformancePoint, what is the best approach?

7.Should we use some external cloud service or should we implement our own solution in-house? What are the pros and cons of that long term?

I sincerely enjoy my interactions with clients looking to implement SharePoint 2010 and there are best practices and past performance projects to show to all 7 questions above and SharePoint 2010 can meet all of these needs.

The major issues with a lot of the areas of concern tend to be political or a lack of ownership within the organization to drop the hammer and say this is the way it’s going to be. SharePoint initiatives are most successful with executive sponsorship or that visionary\maverick who is willing to drive and embrace change.

Items That Are Coming Down the Pipe – Like it or Not

To maintain a competitive advantage, most companies are going to have to embrace new technology and start getting prepared for Tablets, Mobile Device access, and truly implementing a records retention policy along with a system of record (ECM/ERM) that is fully searchable and high performing. Microsoft has purchased Skype and one can only wonder what they have up their sleeves with this as well as developed their new Lync Unified Communication solution.

Facebook, Netflix, self-check outs, on-demand cable shows, iTunes, and others things have changed the culture of what people, being your user base, expect. Your company may or may not have the budget right now to purchase new licenses or revamp your technology until 2012 or later but there are still options out there to prepare such as SharePoint Foundation 2010, Skype, getting off your file shares, and implementing strategies.

These strategies should consist of your organization’s IT Roadmap (including SharePoint) as well as an Enterprise Governance Strategy (including SharePoint and how you are going to deal with Mobility).

The last item I wanted to touch on is eDiscovery, as we live in a litigious world and being prepared and making that investment to be prepared may turn out to save you a great deal in the future. That equates to implementing a records management strategy in your organization and identifying “what is a record.” Also think about how best email is being managed and what are your technical options around streamlining your organizations technology.

A "Phase 0" Approach to SharePoint 2010

2011-08-15T20:07:00.000-07:00

By EPC Group - August 15, 2011

An approach that I have seen work well for a large number of organizations either implementing a new SharePoint 2010 enterprise implementation or possibly upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 is to complete a “Phase 0” initiative prior to rolling out a full blown Phase 1 project.

“Phase 0” is a term for a project that helps the organization take a deep look at themselves to develop a "SharePoint 2010 roadmap” and should be very forward looking into an organization’s I.T. strategy. SharePoint 2010 is a Platform that can support an unparalleled number of both business needs and your staff’s functionality requirements in terms of an application.

As part of my job as EPC Group’s CEO is to sit down with CIO’s, I.T. Directors, Legal and Compliance Department heads, and business owners to find out what exactly their current “state” is and what technology it is that they have implemented, how well it is working for their organization, and to discuss how SharePoint can assist them in providing real Return on Investment (ROI) for their organization.

I like to really step back from the technology (that being SharePoint) and just look at what the business is trying to accomplish and how I.T. is supporting their organization’s (really their end-user or clients) needs. This conversation and project methodology can take a million different twists and turns at the beginning, but it really comes down to how best I.T. can utilize their available budget and time constraints.

What applications, licensing, hardware, staff, and biggest business concern (or squeaky wheel) needs to be addressed. But this all has to be done the right way by developing a 24-36 month roadmap to take into consideration the ever changing technology or mobile world we have all been accustom too in this “we expect the information now” mindset.

A CIO or I.T. Director may be focused on an enterprise strategy where a “Legal and Compliance” department may be looking at records and how best to focus on implementing or enforcing a records retention schedule to lower its possible litigation exposure and simply get the organization’s “records” in order.

That begs the question, what is a record and is everyone on the same page about the importance of that record? Is I.T. currently focused on implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM or ERM) solution or rather to develop a “Portal” type solution to enhance the organizations collaboration between staff members? Is there a concern regarding the licensing model \ purchases (a possible existing Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, or Internet solution) that is currently being utilized to meet a specific need or possilby being discussed and is a possible political landmine? (These need to be addressed).

Microsoft SharePoint is being utilized in most every major organization (in varying capacities) from Wells Fargo to Viacom (MTV) to the Department of State and at the Pentagon. It’s being used in varying capacities at pharmaceutical companies, most every branch of the U.S. Government, the world’s top financial institutions, and even at your local YMCA chapter. It’s becoming as common as Microsoft Word.

SharePoint needs a roadmap and a solid governance strategy as well as a support model and a configuration \ customization policy. You will need a training strategy (including train-the-trainer and power users) and to really look at where the organization is going in email (records) management as well as automating paper-based processes into workflows.

What is that big “quick win” you’re looking for in SharePoint? What is the ROI analysis you’re looking to provide? If you already have SharePoint implemented you may be looking at performance, redundancy in farms, what in the world a “cloud” solution could do for you and the many add-ins (3rd party SharePoint solutions) and security concerns you may need to address.

If you’re looking at replacing your existing document management system, Internet solutions, Intranet solution, or file shares with SharePoint or adding mobile capabilities to your organization you may be asking an entire different set of questions.

This is why a “Phase 0” project can be so valuable but even if your organization is in Phase 1 or Phase 2 of an existing enterprise implementation, it’s never too late to ask these questions and level-set on your roadmap or “pop the hood” to do a health check and assessment (or ROI check) on what you currently have going.

Written by the EPC Group team of experts.

Navigating the "World of SharePoint 2010” and All It Encompasses

2011-07-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

Posted on EPC Group's AIIM.ORG Expert Blog - July 26, 2011 - 12:24 PM

By Errin OConnor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is one of the most popular software programs \ platforms in history and with it has come a community with a near cult following as well as a large number of extremely powerful products that can integrate with it and continue to allow it to be tailored to your organization’s specific business needs.

For a CIO or IT Director new to the world of SharePoint I can’t imagine the questions they must may have as the blogosphere \ web can provide them with a fantastic amount of free information (correct and unbelievably incorrect), but it is key to consider the source. Is this person that authored the article 2 years into SharePoint and on their 1st or 2nd deployment or an administrator within their company in a very specific environment meant to meet a specific need of their organization or a true SharePoint expert or just an SharePoint trainer speaking in theory.

Playing devil’s advocate, and not to say I am the top expert out there on SharePoint, but I know of myself and a handful of others in the U.S. who have been working with SharePoint since its 2001 release (in the Tahoe days).

It pains me to read 17 articles on governance that all have a different opinion but what are their experiences? (Client’s \ Sources, etc.) What set of external circumstances did this “governance project” have in terms of political landmines, possibly the business or I.T. having issues with the development department(s) or even the parent company who “owns” the top level SharePoint farm but a division or partner firm wanting to stand-up their own specific SharePoint farm to meet requirements or a timeline that the parent company cannot meet.

Business does not always play nice with I.T. and vice versa.

System Architecture – Environment

You can absolutely virtualize your entire SharePoint environment, including your SQL Server(s). EPC Group has completed 75+ SharePoint 2010 projects with absolutely no virtualization issues. This has been a long standing questions regarding, “Should we keep the front-end web servers virtual and make the SQL boxes physical?” You can absolutely virtualize the entire farm with no issues.

Third-Party Tools and SharePoint ISVs

Over the past 8 or 9 years I have had the sincere pleasure of working with some of the top SharePoint ISVs out there and over the years some of come and gone but they key players are still there such as:

1.Idera
2.Metalogix
3.AvePoint
4.Axceler
5.Colligo
6.HiSoftware
7.Tzunami
8.WebPartGallery
9.Bamboo Solutions
10.Quest
11.KnowledgeLake
12.And many others I do not have room to mention but are very reputable

From an I.T. Director or SharePoint decision maker’s standpoint, what product is right for your firm?

Are you looking for a disaster recovery solution, a Performance Monitoring, Security tools, Migration solutions, SharePoint \ Email tools, 508 compliance solutions, Web parts, a tool to take out the trash and clean the kitchen sink?

In all fairness there are so many ISVs with high integrity that really want to do what is right for the client and then there are others that are transactional and want to sell you the entire suite, all the support you can buy, and put fear in you that the sky may be falling unless you purchase their product.

It is critical that you develop our initial business requirements as well as your SharePoint roadmap to take into consideration the true needs of your business and then look at the support staff you have available.

Could one of these powerful third-party tools almost act as another full-time employee (FTE) and offer substantial ROI? In many cases, I have personally seen this be the case but do your homework, demo, test, and ask the tough questions.

SharePoint Conferences

Prior to reading this section you may want to have an Advil or Tylenol bottle close at hand. I have had the pleasure of speaking at most every type of SharePoint conference in the U.S. and a few in Canada and I can tell you that all of these conference have the very best intentions in mind; Sharing information to the attendees so they can take it back to their place of work and perform at a high level or provide this knowledge to co-workers, etc.

Having spoken at over 100 conferences in the past 2 years I see a pattern developing recently thou that is starting to take the “fire” or interest out of some of the conferences.

That issue is repetitive information and the same topics being shared time and time again. Titles that start with things like:

•Best Practices
•Real-World
•From the Trenches - ok that was mine :)
•Lessons Learned

Note: These are all great but its time someone kick the conferences up a notch and provide case studies, bring their clients, show massive amounts of screen shots, and talk about the failures and how they were overcome and how you had to sit down with the client and have the hard conversation to get through an issue and keep the project going.

Taking the same exact Technology type sessions from one coast to the other will work for a short time but it will not sustain longevity and attendees will indeed stop attending.

EPC Group.net is current engaged on several SharePoint projects that are 24+ months long (80K plus users) and with any project there are going to be small issues (and sometimes large ones) that must be ironed out and there must be constant, granular communications and conversations from both the consulting side and the client side (a marriage of sorts or at least a long term dating relationship) to make a project that is so high profile successful that everyone in the company has access to it as jobs may be on the line.

SharePoint is unique in that sense; we are not installing some one-off solution that only one department will use every now and then. This is a platform, an ecosystem for which is core to the business. There is so much Return on Investment (ROI) in a SharePoint 2010 initiative it is almost comical but sometimes it takes pioneers from within and a power user \ super user concept to get people to realize it or take a chance on innovation with this supercharged platform.

SharePoint 2010 - A Learning Management System (LMS) for Government\DoD, Private Sector\Fortune 1000, and Educational Institutions

2011-07-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

From EPC Group's AIIM.ORG - SharePoint Expert Blog

By Errin OConnor, Founder & CEO at EPC Group.net (July 18, 2011-12:18 PM)

Your organization more than likely already owns SharePoint licenses and may be using it for collaboration, the Intranet, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) \ Enterprise Records Management (ERM) solution, or to meet a variety of other business requirements. One area where SharePoint is being extremely underutilized by a majority of organizations is as a Learning Management System (LMS) or Enterprise training solution.

We all live in a time where information is almost instantaneous and mobile advancements in the world are only helping to increase our expectations of “information at our fingertips” 24/7. In looking at how organizations conduct training or certification classes or provide educational materials to their end-users \ students \ staff, there are a variety of existing methods such as classroom training, distant learning, or computer-based online training (CBT).

The “brick and mortar” training is slowly becoming a thing of the past as organizations \ institutes of all types are trying to cut back on airline and travel expenses, the loss of having their staff gone for days on end, or not having 24/7 access to the materials to allow for their already busy day-to-day schedule.

There are existing popular LMS systems that exist such as Blackboard, recently acquired by an investor group,and others but if you can achieve with SharePoint 2010:

•Courseware administration and development
•Course enrollment
•Assessments or quizzes for student \ class placement
•24/7 secured online training (and by the way you probably already own the licenses to SharePoint)
•The development of learning paths, tracking of student progress, and customizable (audience driven) courseware
•Grade tracking
•Integration with Plagiarism Prevention Tools
•Executive Dashboards \ Business Intelligence via seamless integration with Microsoft PerformancePoint 2010

The most powerful element, in my opinion, that other LMS systems do not always offer, is the tracking of a student or staff member’s training \ achievements \ certifications, etc. for the entire lifecycle of their training while they are in the organization \ institution.

If you not only take the above information into consideration, but the fact that Microsoft has acquired Skype, you can also offer real-time video chat and training to enhance the student(s) experience in a 100% integrated LMS SharePoint platform with Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, etc. as well as it having the ability to sit atop a SharePoint ECM solution with industry leading external (extranet) access from anywhere in the world.

SharePoint’s multimedia capabilities (Digital Asset Management) and metadata (content type) tagging will allow your training staff to offer an enhanced experience to the student(s) and collaborate across multiple departments (worldwide) in the development, version tracking, and ultimate final approval of the courseware for the organization.

SharePoint is being used by a large number of educational institutes and organizations \ government institutes as their primary or secondary LMS \ Courseware Management System. The following list is just a small sampling of its use and diversity as this platform:

• Branches of the U.S. ARMY
• Portions of Harvard
• Purdue University
• Portions of the University of Phoenix
• Kansas State University
• University of New Orleans
• University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC)
• Rhode Island Public School Districts
• Worcester State University

With a SharePoint Learning Management System (LMS), there is going to be some configuration and\or custom development which can easily be managed to scale for size or performance but if your organization \ institute already owns and is using the software, a SharePoint LMS is yet another huge way SharePoint can produce real measurable and tangible Return on Investment (ROI).

SharePoint 2010, Mobility, Browser Compatibility, Compliance, and its Continued Dominance in the Marketplace

2011-07-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

From EPC Group's AIIM.ORG - SharePoint Expert Blog

Like a stock trader who has purchased a “put” on a stock in hopes the stock value will decrease, I continue to see articles and blogs every now and then asking questions and making statements on doubts about how long SharePoint can remain dominant or how it will adopt to the ever changing mobile world. Also these folks question how SharePoint 2010 can meet compliance and eDiscovery challenges or replace Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, or other ECM\ERM systems.

My theory on these writers or speakers who have these opinions (or hopeful “stock puts”) is that they do only that… write and speak but really don’t ever set foot into a client’s conference room or have more of a vested interest in LiveLink, OpenText, etc. succeeding, and don’t spend 5 days a week over months working with a client on their initial business requirements, political challenges, functional and compliance requirements, development best practices, roadmap, and governance challenges that the organization faces or will face. It’s one thing to speak in theory or abstract but a whole different world when you have a timeline, budget, and a client who is investing a great deal on a high profile project that will affect most everyone in the organization.

Mobility and SharePoint 2010

When implementing your SharePoint 2010 environment, which should be a Hybrid Platform to meet many of your organizations challenges over the years to come, mobility is something that must be in your organizations roadmap.

It is critical to gather your organization’s mobile requirements, such as:

•Is the organizations staff accessing Intranet\ECM content and will they need a specific tailored experience?
•What type of content do they want delivered to their mobile device?
•What devices (and version of the devices) is the organization going to allow (govern) users to have to access SharePoint? (I.e. Just BlackBerrys and iPhones or other devices as well?)

Note: This includes the browser compatibility governance the organization will allow.

•Are there specific business units or departments that would benefit from having business intelligence, analytics, and reports available at their fingertips wherever they are in the world and would that provide true ROI to the business?
•How will the organizations requirements around mobile affect our existing SharePoint roadmap or the existing configuration \ deployment we have in place and how can we adapt to stay ahead of the mobile curve
SharePoint 2010’s Mobile Browser Compatibility

SharePoint also supports a wide variety of mobile browsers, which includes:

•IE Mobile on Windows Mobile 5/6 and newer versions
•Safari4 and newer versions on the iPhone (3/4) and iPad (1/2)
•BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions
•Nokia S60
•Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions
•NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions
•Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions
Governing Mobile Devices \ Browser Support

Another little known fact is that you can govern the specific devices that can access your SharePoint experience and actually redirect the user to a specific template based upon SharePoint recognizing the mobile device’s browser and sending them to the specific template for optimal user experience.

I am guessing the detractors of SharePoint 2010’s mobile capabilities have not actually sat down with multiple clients and gathered the requirements, developed, implemented, and successfully rolled out either custom or tailored mobile applications to Fortune 1000 or large government organizations.

Technical Note: “In SharePoint 2010, the USERAGENT recognize for accessing mobile browser to redirect to a mobile view is managed by the file “compat.browser” within the server’s IIS directory that manages device profiles (If the web application port is, for example, 80, the file path will be "\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\App_Browsers\compat.browser"). With a text editor, the file can be modified to change redirect behavior. The IsMobileDevice attribute of that mobile browser when set to FALSE will cause SharePoint to bypass the mobile view for that browser.”

This means you can govern the exact mobile devices as well as the pages these users will see to ensure an optimal mobile experience.

The PC is Not Dead, but We Are Headed Back to the “Dummy Terminal” Days (Somewhat)

We are years away from seeing major organizations completely get away from a desktop or laptop machine being used as a primary means of accessing the web browser to do their day to day tasks and activities. With that said, limiting the space on the users machine and forcing them to save their documents\content into SharePoint with the proper metadata (content types) tagging is upon us. Also, in the email world as PSTs are becoming a thing of the past, and we will also see the increase of users having increased (shorter) retention scheduled on their email to force them to either delete the email as it is not relevant or to move\archive it to SharePoint for storage as a record.

Note: There will always be exceptions when a user has a project or activity that may take years to complete and the email must be maintained for years to come but viewing email as well as social \ professional networking content as a record is definitely here today.

There have been 40+ enterprise projects that myself and my firm at EPC Group have implemented using SharePoint 2010 were the clients requirements were that SharePoint content must be compatible not only using Internet Explorer (IE) but also Safari (for MAC users) as well as Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. This was accomplished and you can, after a little configuration and testing, get almost the exact same experience on these browsers. There are some things natively that the users will not have the exact same experience with on these different browsers but that is where ensuring your mobile business and functional requirements are aligned properly to ensure project success and client satisfaction.

Compliance in SharePoint 2010

Your organization’s SharePoint 2010’s Enterprise Content Management Strategy should include information regarding:

•Personally Identifiable Information (PII)- PII is broadly defined as information that can be traced back to a specific individual. Employees must distinguish between Protected PII and Publicly Releasable PII. All information identifiable to a specific individual is protected PII unless listed as publicly releasable PII.

•If government, Controlled Unclassified Information– "Controlled Unclassified Information" is a categorical designation, formerly referred to as Sensitive but Unclassified, that refers to unclassified information that is (i) pertinent to the national interests of the United States or to the important interests of entities outside the Federal Government, and (ii) under law or policy requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, special handling safeguards, or prescribed limits on exchange or dissemination. [1]
[1]White House Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, Designation and Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), May 7, 2008

•508 Compliance - Section 508 requires that federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. GSA has been charged with the task of educating federal employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation. Using this web site, federal employees and the public can access resources for understanding and implementing the requirements of Section 508 as they apply to the development, procurement, maintenance, or use of electronic and information technology products and services, including software applications and operating systems, web-based internet and intranet information systems, telecommunications products, video and multimedia products, self-contained closed products and desktop and portable computers.

Note: For additional information: http://www.section508.gov/
SharePoint’s Continued Dominance

As I mentioned in a previous post, what other system can allow you to implement a Hybrid Platform with one licensing model, one common skillset for your support staff, and browser, mobile, and Microsoft Office compatibility with Social \ Professional Networking capability all built in? There is not one out there and that is why Documentum, LiveLink, FileNet, and many others are more and more wanting to “play nice” with SharePoint and offer more integration capabilities so that they have some option of even getting in the door or not being replaced.

Microsoft Office 15, rumored to be planned and in initial development in Redmond,will include SharePoint 15 (with a rumored release of sometime in mid to late 2014) which will continue to build on SharePoint’s already industry \ quadrant leading Enterprise Content Management, Social \ Professional Networking, mobility, collaboration, etc. to continue to be the market leader and “The Platform \ Ecosystem” for which organizations will turn to for at least the next decade.

Developing a Hybrid SharePoint 2010 ERM \ ECM Platform (SPaas)

2011-07-03T20:06:00.000-07:00

Developing a Hybrid SharePoint 2010 ERM \ ECM Platform (SPaas)

Posted from EPC Group's CEO - AIIM.ORG BLOG - Link Here

In developing any Enterprise Records Management (ERM) or (ECM) Platform, the key to long-term success is your organizations ability to develop a roadmap that takes into consideration the hybrid types of business and functional requirements that the systems user base will encounter in the many months and years to follow its launch.

I am focusing on SharePoint 2010, but its key to take a step back and not just focus on the technology, SharePoint, but what the true needs of the organization are and how best an implementation can not only improve the work lives of the staff but to provide Return on Investment (ROI) to the organization.

This ROI can be measured in terms of productivity, limitation of legal and litigious exposure of "old" records no longer required by the approved retention schedule, improve search, or even decommissioning several other systems with the licensing, support, and O&M costs associated with those "other" systems.

There are so many organizations midstream in their initiatives that are not taking into consideration a “core set of metadata \ content types” but also the need for mobile compatibility and the development of a roadmap that takes into account the functional or business needs that may come into play 24 months down the road.

A SharePoint Platform as a Service (SPaaS) with a hybrid approach will allow you to avoid so many pitfalls and the need to re-architect or modify the system in the future. What should be in this SharePoint Platform as a Service?

Good starting points for services to include are as follows: (Note: Think in terms of a Hybrid SharePoint Ecosystem)

•Records Management Service
•Workflow (Reusable) Service
•Business Intelligence \ Reporting Service (Dashboards, Scorecards, etc.)
•Collaboration Service
•Intranet Service
•Extranet Service
•A possible Internet facing SharePoint Service
•Mobile “Edge Device” Service
•Learning Management System Service (Training)
•Application Development Service
•Corporate Communication Service
•File Share Replacement Service
•Social, or I prefer, a Professional Networking Service (My Sites, etc.)
•Scanning Service (OCR) (Paperless \ Green Initiatives)
SharePoint 2010 can accomplish all of these elements, but it is absolutely crucial for you and your project team to be forward thinking and not scared to face these items that will inevitably come up in a meeting in the next 24 months so why not be prepared.

The lack of, and\or, how to govern these items can be a major factor in many organizations not moving forward on several of the items I have listed above but I will address that in a future post.

To touch on one, the mobile world is here so if you are not developing your solution to be compatible or to be able to adapt to mobile technology in the future, you may be creating a whole new project for yourself in the future. These elements are true whether you are talking about a major government institution, a Fortune 500 company, or a 500 user SharePoint rollout.

In my posts to follow, I will drill down on strategies that will help you accomplish these challenges and help to ensure your SharePoint initiative is a success not only in phase 1 but in phase 5 or phase 6.

False starts in early phases can alienate your user base and stifle future phases or major ROI elements of SharePoint so get your hybrid SharePoint Platform as a Service (24-36 month) roadmap together as soon as possible.

EPC Group to Participate in SP TechCon 2011 Boston

2011-05-31T10:47:00.000-07:00

Houston, TX – EPC Group, one of the nation's largest Microsoft Solution Providers, announced today that it will participate in SP TechCon 2011 Boston, June 1-3, 2011. SP TechCon 2011 Boston is one of the largest SharePoint gatherings in the nation. Three of EPC Group’s SharePoint experts will lead workshops and technical classes at the conference.

Errin O’Connor, Founder and CEO of EPC Group, will bring his technical expertise to the conference by leading a half day workshop on Wed., June 1st, from 8:30AM-12:00PM, entitled “Implementing SharePoint as a Service Within Enterprise Organizations.” O’Connor will share the challenges and benefits for enterprise organization experience when trying to access information in SharePoint quickly and easily through the SaaS platform.

Anthony Guevara, CIO and Senior SharePoint Architect, will be leading a technical class Fri., June 3rd, from 10:00AM-11:45AM : “Governance for Globally Dispersed SharePoint.” In this session, Guevara will focus on successful governance around globally dispersed intranets, the Internet and collaboration, and discuss the keys to dealing with disputes and cultural differences.

Dehun Benton, Information Worker Practice Manager and Senior SharePoint Architect, will also be leading another technical class Fri., June 3rd, from 3:45PM-5:00PM: “Determining if SharePoint Foundation is Right For You.” Benton will concentrate on several factors and functionalities that come into play when determining what the correct solution for an organization is as well as explain the differences between SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

Attendees of SP TechCon 2011 can choose from more than 80 Classes and Workshops to take part, listen to specialists in the industry, and learn more about ways to enhance their own SharePoint deployments or implementations.

About EPC Group

EPC Group is one of the nation's leading SharePoint consulting firms having implemented some of the largest SharePoint deployments over the past ten years. EPC Group recently celebrated their 10 year Anniversary along with reaching an impressive number of over 640 SharePoint engagements. EPC Group patented their SharePoint Center of Excellence (COE) Methodologies developed from years of experience to ensure that each project they undertake is a success.

Nation's Leading SharePoint Integration Firm Releases World Class Project Server Methodologies

2011-05-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, May 11, 2011 -- EPC Group, one of the nation's largest Microsoft Gold Partner Solution Providers, announced today the launch of the EPC Group Project Server Acceleration methodology. Errin O'Connor, Founder and CEO of EPC Group, cited the reason for the choice was based upon the growth of Enterprise Project Management (EPM) demand that EPC Group has experienced over the last year and the great success they have seen in its Microsoft Project Server implementations. O'Connor stated, "A little known fact is that EPC Group started out as a Project Server implementation firm back in 1999/2000 and we discovered something called Tahoe\STS 1.0 (Version 1 of SharePoint) and our methodologies started to hatch. 11 years later, SharePoint 2010 and Project Server 2010 are two of EPC Group's largest offerings."

By leveraging the power of both Microsoft Project Server and SharePoint Server 2010 for a combined EPM solution, an organization can advance collaboration and communications across teams effectively, control internal data throughout the project lifecycle, ensure resources are allocated economically, and allow information to be shared and not replicated.

O'Connor said, "EPC Group has experienced tremendous growth in demand for our Microsoft Project Server services, approximately double each year over the past five years. Our clients are beginning to understand the efficiency and collaborative power of this technology and want to harness the benefits for their organizations. Clients have been coming to us increasingly for the Project Server knowledge base our team possesses."

Anthony Guevara, CIO of EPC Group, said, "One organization that comes to mind when speaking about Enterprise Project Management is a large financial services company based in Illinois, which had SharePoint Server 2007 in place, that came to us with lack of consistent project, portfolio and resource management processes, ill-informed decision makers resulting from mismanagement of information, and teams that were not cooperating effectively. They needed to somehow integrate an EPM system into their environment and form a better governance model for both technologies Microsoft SharePoint Server and Project Server."

Guevara continued, "After our implementation of Project Server, our client was able to more easily manage their enterprise content across departments and teams, make more informed decisions, and to collaborate with greater ease of time and productivity. This is the type of results that we enjoy seeing from our clients for the benefit of their customers; thus, why we are thrilled with the launch of the EPC Group Project Server Acceleration methodology."

About EPC Group

EPC Group is one of the nation's leading Microsoft Gold Solution Providers having implemented some of the largest SharePoint deployments over the past ten years. EPC Group recently celebrated their 12 year Anniversary along with unsurpassed numbers of SharePoint implementations with an impressive 640 successful SharePoint engagements. Experience combined with prevailing methodologies has positioned EPC Group as a top SharePoint Integrator. EPC Group delivers patented SharePoint Center of Excellence (COE) Methodologies developed from years of experience to ensure that each project they undertake is a success by leveraging the power of Microsoft Technologies.

Project Server 2010: Timesheet Functionality Simplified

2011-03-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Written by Brian Wiedower. Published in SPTechWeb on March 23, 2011.

In many organizations, SharePoint is used with Project Server 2010, as managers try to get a handle of how projects are running and whether more resources are required.

The use of Timesheets in Project Server 2007 provides the necessary level of resource-assignment progress reporting that project managers and resource managers require to more accurately stay on top of resource utilization and project status. The Timesheet feature introduced in Project Server 2007 enables resources to report on their progress against project tasks, and also report non-project work to give a complete view of a resource’s work week. However, there are several challenges that exist for those using Timesheets that are addressed in Project Server 2010.

One challenge that organizations encounter is that the submission process requires a resource to complete multiple steps to submit his or her task updates. No matter the level of training that’s provided to resources, inevitably a resource will fail to complete all the necessary steps. Timesheet submission reports will show that the resource has submitted his or her timesheet, and a project manager may have updates from many resources, but they may not realize that they are missing updates from that one resource. The omission may not be discovered until after maintenance has been completed on project schedules, if it is discovered at all.

A resolution utilized by many is the CodePlex AutoStatus service. The service detects the submission of a timesheet and performs the import step and remaining steps for the resource, thus removing the requirement for a resource to remember to perform those steps. This solution does require the service to be configured and installed, and it has proven to hit performance issues for organizations with thousands of resources all submitting timesheets on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings.

While the AutoStatus service has been the answer for many to ensure resource progress reporting is completed successfully each week, a scenario that can occur still must be addressed by those using the service. A resource reports progress against a task, and the update is accepted by the Project Manager, but then it is discovered that the update was made to the wrong task. The resource makes the update to his or her Timesheet by removing his or her updates from the originally submitted task and applies them to the correct task. When the timesheet is submitted, the AutoStatus service detects the submission and will complete the submission process as before.

However, the service is typically customized to filter out task updates that have nor progressed for some time to help with the number of approval updates Project Managers receive and have to review, so the hours from the original task are not sent to be processed and will remain in the project schedule. The resource must go to his or her My Tasks page, select the original task from his or her task list, and submit it for processing.

If you are still with me, you can see where the use of Timesheets in Project Server 2007 for progress reporting can be a challenge. Thankfully, in Project Server 2010, this is all simplified and addressed by one configuration option: Single Entry Mode.

For those needing the Timesheet functionality in their progress reporting process, the Single Entry Mode feature invokes the system to perform all the necessary submission steps after a timesheet is submitted by a resource. Additionally, the scenario of zeroing out progress reported to a task incorrectly is handled with no additional work from the resource other than correcting the hours in their timesheet and resubmitting it.

So, this is great news for those organizations moving to or starting up with Project Server 2010 and planning on utilizing the many benefits Timesheet functionality provides.

Brian Wiedower is a consultant with Houston, Texas-based EPC Group.

The Governance Plan: The Key to a Successful SharePoint Platform

2011-03-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

Written by Anthony Guevara. Published on SPTechWeb.com.

March 2, 2011 — IT alignment is at or near the top of every corporation’s list of goals, but successfully realizing appropriate alignment requires a structured, proven framework. Building a comprehensive strategic Governance Plan that is aligned with the organization’s business strategy is essential to ensuring the success of your SharePoint deployment. For any organization seeking to achieve maximum performance, the role of IT has never been more vital.

A Governance Plan is an oft-overlooked process when implementing a SharePoint environment. Without appropriate governance, it is easy to deploy a solution that will become unstable, unsupportable and non-scaleable. It is also an easy way to ensure poor performance and a poor user experience, which results in a low adoption rate.

The Governance Plan is a guidebook that outlines the administration, maintenance and support of the SharePoint environment. It describes how SharePoint will be managed, defines roles and responsibilities, and helps establish rules for appropriate usage.

An item that should top any list to define in the Governance Plan is the roles and responsibilities of the Governance team. This will ensure that you get a holistic view of all of the individual components that must be governed, but also how the system itself will be utilized. This is important in order to define a Governance Plan that has the appropriate balance of policies and rules, but is flexible enough to provide a platform that users will actually use.

The most important role to define is the executive sponsorship. Being able to create a robust governance plan is not good enough. Being able to implement the plan with the appropriate executive support is vital. This will ensure that policies defined will be followed, users will be given appropriate time to learn, and the communication strategy will be endorsed by key executives. With user adoption in mind, this is important so that the users do not feel that it is IT against the user community, but a change in business processes that will make it easier to get to business-critical information and help make day-to-day work easier to accomplish.

To round out the rest of the roles, it is important to select individuals who are familiar with day-to-day operations in their particular groups and have the ability to help make decisions as it pertains to features, functionality and changes required to implement the new technology. These roles will represent the user community and help define the overall plan.

Anthony Guevara is senior solution architect and CIO at SharePoint consulting company EPC Group.

SharePoint 2010 Reality Series

2011-02-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

SharePoint 2010 Reality Series: Join Errin O’Connor, EPC Group Founder, Chief SharePoint Architect and author of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out and Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 Inside Out by Microsoft Press, as he leads and shares his experiences working with SharePoint 2010 with the most complex organizations across the globe. The EPC Group SharePoint Reality Series focuses on real topics and knowledge that applies to organizations considering SharePoint 2010, migrating to SharePoint 2010 or weighing the functionality and capabilities of implementation within their organization. Errin and other members of the EPC Group Team of Experts will share their real world experience they have gained by participating in over 600 SharePoint projects over the past 10 years.

SharePoint 2010 Reality Series Events:

SharePoint in the Now! You have heard the buzz about SharePoint 2010, now learn how it applies to your organization’s goals and requirements. Join Errin O’Connor in a deep dive session focused on the core functionality of SharePoint 2010 in the enterprise. O’Connor will center on live projects and engagements that have enterprises across the globe curious about SharePoint 2010 drawing off of his unrivaled expertise to answer your questions live.

Panelists: Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO, and Miranda Price, VP of Marketing & Business Development

Register Here!

Version Control: Considering SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint 2010? In this session, Errin O’Connor and the EPC Group experts will focus on the core differences allowing your organization to gain the knowledge and confidence you need to know you are making the right decision. O’Connor will share proven achievements and strategies for implementing the ideal version to ensure your organization achieves set goals while keeping costs low.

Panelists: Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO, and Miranda Price, VP of Marketing & Business Development

Register Here!

My Sites, Your Sites, Who's Sites? With all of the attractive social capabilities that SharePoint 2010 brings, how do you control the new toys you are putting into your organization’s hands? During this session a top EPC Group expert will tell you. Learn how enterprises across the globe are managing these challenges and implementing governance while utilizing the latest and greatest of social functionality.

Panelists: Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO; Miranda Price, VP of Marketing & Business Development; Anthony Guevara, CIO; Dehun Benton, Information Worker Practice Manager

Register Here!

How Do I Get There? Being a recognized leader in SharePoint 2010 has its down falls. Well…. Not really. EPC Group is doing great things with SharePoint 2010 migrations across the globe in impressive organizations with extremely complex environments. Hear strategies and best practices around migrations and upgrades to SharePoint 2010 by Errin O’Connor and leading EPC Group experts.

Panelists: Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO; Miranda Price, VP of Marketing & Business Development; Anthony Guevara, CIO; Dehun Benton, Information Worker Practice Manager

Register Here!

Maximize Your Investment! You have made the decision that SharePoint is ideal for your organization’s needs. In this session Errin O’Connor will focus on ensuring that you will have no doubts by focusing on SLA and charge back models for implementing SharePoint 2010.

Panelists: Errin O'Connor, Founder & CEO, and Miranda Price, VP of Marketing & Business Development

Register Here!

Rapid Fire!! You run the show! During this session you will be able to ask our experienced team members all of the SharePoint questions that you have been holding onto. Consider this an ideal time to utilize top SharePoint resources on a one on one basis. Make sure and send your questions into: Mprice@epcgroup.net . You will then be notified that your question was accepted and confirmed for our Rapid Fire.

Stopping the Constant Advice Insanity: How to Actually Do Governance Right

2011-01-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

Written by Errin O'Connor. Published in SPTechReport on January 26, 2011.

I get a Google alert every day on the news articles posted about Microsoft SharePoint for that day, and without a doubt I will see three or four “Best Practices Governance” or “How to Accomplish Governance”-type articles pop up from many different sources and organizations. I have personally been involved in more than 160 SharePoint projects, and I can tell you that SharePoint governance is something your organization must be prepared to not only take on but also to enforce.

When you're implementing an enterprise Microsoft initiative, everything has a governance item related to it, and the more complex your organization, the more confusing this may become. There are, though, principles and core pillars that you can ingrain in your organization that will ensure SharePoint will be a long-lasting platform for content management and collaboration, and for your Intranet/extranet and workflow requirements.

A properly implemented enterprise SharePoint 2010 deployment can stand up to any solution from companies such as EMC with Documentum and eRoom, and OpenText with Livelink (and save a few million in my client's budget along the way). I am convinced these companies' sales team and mass-marketing campaigns regarding SharePoint and its lack of this or lack of that have concerned and possibly jaded some people regarding Microsoft SharePoint, but really, enough is enough.

It starts with governance, and governance is everything. This means governing your hardware (servers), data centers, content databases, backup and restore strategies, site collections/content database strategies, training, site hierarchy, branding, available templates, charge back models, permission strategies, auditing, and end-user agreements, and holding users and their managers accountable. In the government world of SharePoint, you can add items such as 508 compliance standards, level 1 or top-secret data, or the need for specific configurations to protect sensitive data. In the medical world, throw in HIPAA compliance, FDA Part 11, PHI data, possible integration with Cerner or Epic, and many other factors.

Start with a SharePoint health check and assessment prior to taking on a governance effort, as well to ensure (if you already have a SharePoint implementation prior to implementing a governance initiative) that you can identify and correct things prior to moving forward.
SharePoint customizations need governance, and that includes SharePoint Designer for light to medium development or customization (Tier 1 and Tier 2), and then moving on to true development in SharePoint with Visual Studio 2010 (Tier 3), and how best to manage that code and bring it properly into your organization's environment.

Governance is a bit of a sweet science, but I spend every day having the privilege to work with some of the largest private-sector and government institutions in the U.S. I can tell you it's not about developing a small governance checklist and starting small on one site collection and testing the waters. It's about getting buy-in from IT Management. The ROI for a truly governed Microsoft SharePoint 2010 environment—which can be your ECM/records management, intranet/extranet, or workflow/BPM solution—is something that will not only increase, but the productivity gains can also set your organization apart from your competitors.

SharePoint can not only compete with but replace all other ECM platforms available. It's just about implementing it right the first time.

Errin O'Connor is one of the leading SharePoint architects and evangelists in the United States. He is the founder of EPC Group, a leading SharePoint consulting firm, and is the author of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out (Microsoft Press) and SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out (Microsoft Press / O'Reilly).

SharePoint TechCon 2011: San Francisco

2011-01-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

Come join EPC Group, a Platinum Sponsor, at SharePoint TechCon 2011 in San Francisco from February 7-9, 2011! We will be at Booth 1001 to discuss all your SharePoint needs, goals, and questions.

Hear Errin O' Connor, our CEO & Chief SharePoint Architect, deliver two Technical Classes:

Technical Class 206: Bringing Ad Hoc SharePoint Deployments Under Control

The larger the organization or the greater buy-in and user adoption your organization has for SharePoint, the greater the possibility your organization's SharePoint implementation can become decentralized and possibly very "siloed" across different business units and departments. Whether you have 200 users, 5,000 users, or 50,000 users, this becomes a major issue for many different reasons. When you do not have a governance strategy in place to control SharePoint requests such as new sites, ad hoc development of solutions, business units finding an available server and just installing SharePoint Foundation, WSS 3.0, or even SharePoint Server 2010... your organization can become the "wild wild west" of SharePoint. This is something that can be avoided with proper strategies and guidance from the powers to be within your organization and I will discuss my experiences in this from organizations of all sizes as well as from different verticals.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Intermediate
AUDIENCE: Business Analyst, IT Admin
SHAREPOINT VERSION: All

Technical Class 708: SharePoint Foundation 2010: From the Inside Out

From the author of Microsoft Press’s new book on SharePoint Foundation 2010, Errin O’Connor will take you into a deep dive of real-world, in-progress projects from companies of all sizes. Errin will discuss the differences between SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, and he may leave you surprised to find out how “getting your feet wet” with SharePoint Foundation 2010 prior to upgrading your MOSS deployment to SharePoint Server 2010 may save your organization some serious time and provide you with a true ROI. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is 10 times more powerful than WSS 3.0, and with the BCS, SharePoint Designer, Office 2010, and some other governance and best practices tips thrown in, it will be a major player in the intranet, project-based, and application development platform space for many years to come.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Intermediate
AUDIENCE: Architect, IT Admin, Business User, Developer
SHAREPOINT VERSION: SharePoint Foundation 2010

SharePoint the Reality Series 5 ? The SharePoint maturity model

2010-12-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

Errin O'Connor is cited discussing steps in the SharePoint Maturity Model. Written by Marc Solomon, Published on WorkflowManagement.us.

In the adoption of SharePoint, a four-stage maturity model is a great way to determine where knowledge gaps exist, what facets require additional education and how to help people expand their use of SharePoint. According to Lee Reed, a senior SharePoint strategy consultant with Northridge, departments will not progress in lockstep, which elevates the importance of the maturity model as a benchmarking tool for evaluating progress and showcasing the best practices of adoption leaders. The point, counsels Reed, is to include some “stretch goals” within each maturity level to encourage greater use of the platform.

“What is curious,” says Hugo Esperanca, SharePoint solutions architect and partner at Collaboris, “is that all companies adopting SharePoint seem to go through the same evolution path.” A maturity model helps to prioritize the right functions and how to phase them in to fit your business requirements. The goal is not to accessorize every feature.

Yet many enterprises are distracted by the shiny-toy factor. They focus on new product features instead of their own business priorities in which SharePoint solves their specific business problems. Success is not measured by how many features are turned on but what issues get addressed. To Russ Edelman of Corridor Consulting, that means automating key processes, reducing risks, simplifying cross-unit complexities and finding information more rapidly.

Stage 1—stepping back

Errin O’Connor of EPC Group (epcgroup.net) traces all SharePoint deployment roadmaps to one starting point: What’s the organization trying to achieve? Most are smatterings that reflect both wide opportunities and sponsor indecision. O’Connor believes it’s more instructive to point the question inward than to pivot on all the possible answers to where SharePoint can lead, including:

* intranet,
* enterprise content management,
* extranet,
* business process automation, and
* Web 2.0.

Chances are it’s either “all” or at least “some” of the above. Hence, O’Connor favors a phased in or hybrid approach that treats SharePoint as a platform that can accommodate an ever-evolving set of business needs. To Edelman, the roadmap is a timetable for testing readiness, developing consensus and translating intent into commitment. Those translations are adjustments to the roadmap that will later trigger the more detailed program and project plans.

For example, a Stage One deployment may roadmap the release of a firmwide intranet. Support for that goal hinges on anticipating future phases. Otherwise, half-baked site hierarchies and navigation schemas will need to be re-architected in future stages. According to Reed, documents are beginning to migrate from network drives, are stored in one location and are searchable. Some initial list creation occurs as task lists, team calendars, project timelines and Excel imports.

A word of caution to our pre-deployment readers: Stage 1 tends to be a learn-as-we-go proposition with many unsuspected detours masquerading as mission-critical decisions. For example, rollouts are often tripped up by the need to recreate their prior environments from scratch rather than reassembling them through a common toolkit and methodology. Call it the temptation to over-engineer. Call it the need to avoid a nightmare scenario: millions of documents with no permission structure or hierarchy.

As we saw in the second part of this SharePoint series, one best practice in Stage 1 is the emphasis that Children’s Hospital Boston (childrenshospital.org) puts on the critical role that training plays in building both SharePoint skills and the awareness of what it can do.

Stage 2—encore performance

Where Stage 1 is about finding the intranet on ramp, Stage 2 is about the ECM infrastructure. To O’Connor, that means building out the core metadata foundation and content types—the guidelines for applying it and ultimately managing the explosion of unstructured information waiting to be reckoned with in nearly any ECM.

That reckoning is driven by an unprecedented explosion in unstructured information. If content is distributed haphazardly, then SharePoint is where content goes to R-O-T (redundant, outdated and trivial). Here’s where a centralized approach to information management is critical to laying the groundwork. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to pin the success of your unfolding maturity model to a consistent, firm and well-communicated metadata foundation. That makes SharePoint not just a storage medium but the gateway into enterprise resource planning (ERP) and legacy databases, or what Edelman calls “the defacto portal to unstructured and structured information.”

The other key fork in the road between Stages 1 and 2 is that the architectural team is beginning to identify (if not master) the finer points of creating repeatable backups and restoring them to production. According to Esperanca, Stage 2 companies have found that SharePoint content and configuration can be moved across environments using backup and restore. As such they have a repeatable deployment process.

Stage 3—open innovation

According to Reed, “The first time someone says to you, ‘I wish people external to our company could access SharePoint,’ you know you’re on your way to Stage 3.”

When an enterprise reaches Stage 3, SharePoint is addressing its business requirements. By now, it’s the definitive data source for unstructured information, and function-specific workflows are being triggered by a blend of custom programming and out-of-the-box capabilities.

That describes the use of on-demand extranet sites developed by Fenwick & West for their legal clients (and covered in the fourth article in this series). The SharePoint plumbing is now extending out to the rest of the MS office portfolio through RSS feeds, inbound e-mail addresses, Excel imports, content type templates and departmental analytics via the Business Data Catalog (BDC), including links to backend systems. With executive dashboards and reporting guidelines come metrics for how well the solution supports intended process or other business improvements.

Even from a purely internal perspective those processes are designed with the capabilities of SharePoint in mind. One telltale sign: business units that require SharePoint delivery to honor helpdesk tickets, expense reports and custom reporting for outside members. We saw another winning example of this in the third article in this series, in which accounting giant Grant Thornton now ties site creation to its backend time and billing system—key to instilling discipline around the collaboration of its account teams.

Building the Right Road Map

2010-11-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

Written by Errin O'Connor, Published on Oct. 27, 2010 in the SD Times

Many organizations are either in the process of upgrading to SharePoint 2010, preparing to upgrade, or in the process of developing their “internal road map” for the future due to all the available functionality in SharePoint 2010. In the past couple weeks, I have had conversations around such topics as:

• Our organization has SharePoint 2007, but we also have LiveLink and want to move away from it to 2010. Where do we start?
• My healthcare organization has a ton of PII-related data in SharePoint 2007, and we want to clean it out before moving to 2010. How do we do that?
• SharePoint Designer 2010 blurs the lines of the Information Worker and the Development team, so what do we do about workflows? Should we go with SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, Visio 2010 or another third-party solution?
• How do we start to develop our enterprise content types? We have a retention schedule, but it has 600 fields in it. How does that translate into SharePoint?
• We have had eRoom for five years and want to migrate to SharePoint 2010, but we want to change the navigational hierarchy and clean up our data prior to the move.
• Our organization has SharePoint 2003 and Project Server 2007. How do we properly implement new SharePoint 2010 sites?
• We have a ton of SQL Reporting Service reports built with SharePoint 2007, but our executives want reporting with dashboards and KPIs. How best should we implement PerformancePoint 2010?
• We have Tier 1 and Tier 2 teams, but where does development fit into the equation? How do we set up a support model and what are the true roles and responsibilities we should implement for SharePoint 2010?

These are just a few of the issues facing organizations today. Your IT (SharePoint and Information Architecture Strategy) road map is key. So many organizations out there planned to move off their file shares into SharePoint 2007 but never did... Why is that? Well, there are all sorts of reasons why, but I can tell you from speaking to clients every day that this is going to end up happening all over the country in the next 12–24 months.

Can we finally put the file shares to rest? I believe we can, but again, a road map is key. A spring cleaning of your file shares this fall and winter needs to happen, and the internal political struggles over who owns what content need to work themselves out.

Governance is something that just can’t be ignored when it comes to SharePoint. You are probably tired of reading monthly articles and takes on SharePoint governance, why it’s so important, and why the lack of it is so concerning. I am here to tell you governance in SharePoint is all encompassing. Governance doesn’t just cover items like how large your file upload size limits are or what quota sizes you’re going to allow into your SharePoint sites.

SharePoint Governance also covers:

• Your support teams (Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3)
• SharePoint development and the related best practices
• Migration playbooks/strategies for getting away from file shares or other document management systems such as Documentum, LiveLink, eRoom, DocuShare, etc.
• My Site policies
• Content Type strategies
• Branding, or “look and feel”
• Integration with other systems
• Reporting, KPIs and dashboards
• Strategies for Power Users, and how to train the trainer

So building the right road map and support team for SharePoint is something that you must develop as soon as possible, and it should also fall under the umbrella of governance. Not just SharePoint governance, though, but your overall IT governance.

SharePoint 2010 is becoming the ecosystem it was promised. Whether it’s a large federal government institution, a Fortune 500 financial corporation or manufacturer, or a startup with 50 people trying to share documents and content, SharePoint has morphed from the “world’s largest Swiss Army knife” to something a whole lot more with SharePoint 2010’s release.

Develop your organization’s IT strategy and road map to not only include what you want to accomplish in 6–12 months but also in 24–36 months. Even if you’re not migrating completely off your file shares this year, but plan on doing it sometime next year, put a placeholder for it in your plan. Also, put placeholders in your road map for getting off all of “these other systems” and consolidate into SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 is so powerful that it can cause a lot of internal policy and political discussions, and raise concerns about internal IT changes, but that is a good thing, and it’s only going to continue to grow and snowball once SharePoint 2010 is implemented. So prepare for it and develop a road map with placeholders for future projects, even if they are a few years down the road.

Errin O’Connor is one of the leading SharePoint architects and evangelists in the U.S., and is the founder and chief executive officer for EPC Group, a leading SharePoint consulting firm.

Three of EPC Group's Own are Experts in Residence for SecretsofSharePoint.com

2010-10-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

SecretsofSharePoint.com, an online community for SharePoint administrators, developers, and users, features Errin O'Connor, Dehun Benton, and Miranda Price as Experts in Residence. EPC Group is a sponsor of the online community.

Errin O’Connor

Errin O’Connor is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer for EPC Group. Errin focuses his efforts on implementing Microsoft Technologies in organizations throughout the country. Errin manages EPC Group’s corporate strategy as well as architects the proven methodologies around collaboration, enterprise content management, and custom application development that have set EPC Group apart from its competitors.

Topics of Expertise:

Fortune 500 and Large-scale Enterprise Architecture and Design
Leading Microsoft SharePoint Expert
Microsoft Information Worker Solutions
Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solutions
Microsoft Advanced Infrastructure Solutions
Microsoft Business Process and Integration Solutions
Microsoft Network Infrastructure Solutions
Microsoft Secure Networking Solutions
Microsoft Data Management Solutions
Microsoft Custom Development Solutions
Microsoft Operating and Server Systems
Server and Network Virtualization
Microsoft Press Author and Noted Speaker

Errin answers questions about:

SharePoint Governance Best Practices

Dehun Benton

Dehun Benton has been designing and implementing Microsoft Solutions and networked based solutions for major organizations for several years. His experience includes Software Development, Microsoft Technologies, Business and Technical Analysis, IT Project Management, and Operating Systems Management.

Topics of Expertise:

Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solutions
Microsoft Custom Development Solutions
Microsoft Operating and Server Systems
Microsoft Sharepoint Solutions

Miranda Price

Miranda Price is Vice President of Business Development & Marketing at EPC Group. She is responsible for strategic planning and organizational implementation of sales and marketing activities. Miranda leads EPC Group’s corporate vision as well as strategy, overall sales and marketing efforts, development of strategic relationships, and alliance profitability.

Over the past 10 years, Miranda has enjoyed various roles in direct software sales and executive leadership positions allowing her to develop, grow and lead successful sales territories, teams and organizations. Miranda has a degree in Marketing & Brand Development with a strong focus on Consumer Buying Behavior. She carries extended sales certifications, leadership and technology competencies allowing her to foster and grow client and employee satisfaction. Miranda focuses on developing, delivering and managing quality solutions for all EPC Group clients. She holds high standards for all engagements and closely manages the business needs of all clients. Miranda places a tremendous amount of focus on leveraging the power of SharePoint to solve critical business needs and return on investment to foster organizational success and growth.

Topics of Expertise:

Microsoft SharePoint Solutions
Microsoft Project Server
Microsoft Operating and Server Systems
SharePoint Systems Integration
Corporate Change Management
Client Engagement Management
Partner Profitability and Management
Brand Development and Marketing
Government Sales and Account Management
Healthcare Sales and Account Management
SharePoint Disaster Recovery

Check out SecretsofSharePoint.com's Experts in Residence site to learn more.

Continental Airlines Turns to SharePoint to Avoid Flight Delays

2010-10-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

Written by Errin O'Connor
Published in the September/October 2010 issue of Intranets: Enterprise Strategies & Solutions Newsletter

In April 2010, the U.S. Department of Transportation put new regulations into effect regarding long tarmac delays. The Airline Passenger Bill of Rights says that delays of any type that go on for more than 3 hours can result in extensive fines per passenger. It lays out specific processes that must be handled at each hour of a long delay, such as access to food and water or even returning an aircraft to the gate and allowing passengers to deplane.

For Continental Airlines, transforming this regulation into a workable reality means ensuring that dozens of internal departments and individuals can quickly and easily communicate with any of a number of outside vendors at any given point. If a plane sits for too long without getting the appropriate food and beverage service, or if a delay lasts too long and the crew have to offer an option to return a plane to the gate, operations personnel on the ground need to know who to call in catering or at the airport to make arrangements.

Previously, such communications were handled by telephone and email. If a plane were delayed in Boston, for example, an operations agent at Logan International Airport would call someone at Continental’s operations center to relay information. The operations center in Houston would then create regular lists from this ad hoc information to keep the team updated. Meanwhile, if the plane needed something, such as a shift change or a return to the gate, it was up to the people on the ground to figure out what needed to be done and who to call, often using hard copy information stored in files around the local offices.

With the passage of the Airline Passenger Bill of Rights, Continental automated the process so people on the ground could get the information they need, and the central operations center remained updated on the status of any plane at any moment anywhere at 135 domestic airports.

Denise Wilson, senior manager of technology in Continental’s enterprise engineering group in Houston, was tasked with building a single system that incorporated an intranet containing all the necessary documents and information with a front-end dashboard to keep the operations center completely up to date. “For example, the flight operations department needed to know at which hour of a delay to call the catering vendor at the airport, or when and how to send out a service crew. With so many different departments working together, we need to be able to quickly find all information and also archive our response to the delay for legal purposes,” says Wilson. In short, her department needed to organize an enormous amount of electronic clutter in a short amount of time and on a budget.

“Previously, all the information was in emails or phone calls, so the operations people needed to sift through email to find the information and data they needed,” says Wilson. “We still use email for alerting, but instead of sending information there, we send a link back to the information, such as weather, diversions, or aircraft substitutions.”

Wilson chose to build the system on SharePoint because, based on her experience, she believed that once properly implemented, anyone, technically savvy or not, could easily populate and use the application. “Prior to undertaking this project, we had been rolling out SharePoint for our overall enterprise content management efforts,” Wilson says. “The senior director of the System Operations Coordination Center (SOCC) and executives in Continental Technology immediately saw the potential for using this as part of our flight delay response program, mostly because it’s user-friendly and operations directors wouldn’t need much training to configure an internal site for their own needs.”

Wilson chose to work with EPC Group to help Continental Airlines establish its initial enterprise content management (ECM) efforts, including building the platform and laying out the governance regulations. By creating a standardized and manageable site, the operations team within Continental was able to then create the intranet sites they needed in order to succeed.

PRE-DEPLOYMENT PROCESS
The overall goal for its flight-delay dashboard was to create an easy-to-use, flexible system that would be used by the people who needed it most. The dashboard itself is a series of lists that provide useful, updated information, so the value lies in the information behind that which resides in the core data repository.

“Before we built the SharePoint application, EPC Group coached us on how to determine what would work best for our needs. They provided us with the most important questions to ask our would-be users and worked with our business units to understand how we use our data,” says Wilson. “We started with a full audit of the information within the Continental Airlines group. That included documents in every department, from food services to corporate finance to HR to purchasing. In all, we analyzed several terabytes of information in millions of files.”

GOVERNANCE
It’s not enough to simply build a SharePoint application. In order to keep it running smoothly and efficiently, governing rules must apply. The success of an implementation such as this one depends on how the users take to the technology and whether it actually makes their life easier or becomes a nuisance.

Thus, EPC Group counseled Continental to take a more user-centric approach to its SharePoint implementation. While some consider a SharePoint installation a technical process that falls under the domain of the
IT department, the most successful deployments occur when all stakeholders and users are considered in the process.

Continental’s governance process can be broken into just a few key points:
• Encouraging usage at the corporate level
• Structuring the overall organizational SharePoint growth
• Structuring search and navigation to increase accessibility
• Encouraging user accountability and upkeep
• Maintaining content and site standards

Putting the rules in place is one thing; getting people to actually follow those rules and use the tool is quite another. In all, Continental had an initial goal of attracting 3,000 users to SharePoint. To achieve this, Continental focused on identifying 50 core power-users who would be key to getting the SharePoint implementation up and running. These people were trained on how to use the software; they were also those who would become internal evangelists to help get others on board.

Once the overall SharePoint implementation was up and running, Continental was able to use the platform to create a variety of portal types. In the case of the long tarmac delay program, the process started with an employee in the IT department creating a 16-page Microsoft InfoPath form that was then distributed to 135 airport general managers within the Continental universe. The process from inception to distribution took about 2 weeks, a time that included multiple iterations and a small group of beta testers. It took just another 3 days for the managers to fill the information and get it into the system.

To meet its objectives of unifying access to a large amount of information, Continental needed more than organized information storage. As Wilson notes, “Content management is extremely important, especially in time-sensitive situations. However, it’s not enough to simply store data, but it must be easily accessible.” To that end, Continental needed a structured search functionality across the organization to narrow searches and reduce the amount of time it takes to locate information. With a few technical back-end solutions combined with minimal user training, employees can quickly narrow down searches from thousands of responses to just a few.

Today, Continental relies on the native SharePoint search, but also created a system in which people tag the appropriate data on its way into the system. Some metadata is pre-populated automatically, such as the three-letter site code as well as the division and default retention policy. Each time a user creates a new document, they’re asked to select what type of document, such as contract or presentation, and that additional metadata gets added to the pre-populated information. These few actions in the creation or revision of a document lets employees know when a document can be safely deleted—freeing up storage space and also keeping the legal department happy.

THE REWARDS
The primary benefit of the system is regular access to real-time information. So while a plane is sitting on the ground in Boston, a person can look out the window, enter information into the system, and actions can happen in Houston and around the country. This ensures that customers are taken care of no matter the flight situation. While Continental can control its planes, it can’t control the weather and can’t control what happens at the airport level. Fast access to information can make all of customer service work better.

As an additional benefit, people have shaved several hours of work off of their day. Where they previously sifted through email to create lists of flight delays and information, all that is now handled automatically, leaving them time to get into action plans rather than just becoming list makers. In addition to helping the company avoid costly fines, Wilson says, “We believe that we’ve gained enough productivity from not having to create reports manually that the system has already paid for itself.”

SharePoint TechCon Platinum Sponsor

2010-10-19T14:36:00.000-07:00

We've arrived..... In Boston that is for SharePoint Technology Conference 2010! We are thrilled to meet out friends and clients while spreading the world of SharePoint 2010.

Come meet our experts at booth 405 to win incredible prizes!

Hear our CEO & Chief SharePoint Architect deliver two Technical Classes:

Technical Class 403: SharePoint Foundation 2010: From the Inside Out

From the author of Microsoft Press’s new book on SharePoint Foundation 2010, Errin O’Connor will take you into a deep dive of real-world, in-progress projects from companies of all sizes. Errin will discuss the differences between SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, and he may leave you surprised to find out how “getting your feet wet” with SharePoint Foundation 2010 prior to upgrading your MOSS deployment to SharePoint Server 2010 may save your organization some serious time and provide you with a true ROI. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is 10 times more powerful than WSS 3.0, and with the BCS, SharePoint Designer, Office 2010, and some other governance and best practices tips thrown in, it will be a major player in the intranet, project-based, and application development platform space for many years to come.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Intermediate
AUDIENCE: Architect, IT Admin, Business User, Developer
PLATFORM: SharePoint Foundation 2010

Technical Class 706: Fortune 500 and Large-Scale Government Deployments

Errin O’Connor has led some of the largest deployments in the history of Microsoft SharePoint, and he is currently working on several deployments with 200,000 to 400,000 users with terabytes and even (yes, it's true) petabytes of data. Errin’s firm, EPC Group, has developed a patented methodology around its SharePoint Center of Excellence approach to SharePoint that will ensure that Fortune 500-size companies, or massive government, DoD, or multinational organizations, do things right the first time and take Errin’s time-tested approach to working on these behemoth projects. He uses multi-language, secure data, HIPPA and 508 Compliance, integration with Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP. Whether it's working with SharePoint deployments on rigs via satellite phone connections to store Coast Guard compliance documents, or working on some of the more-treasured national institutes, Errin encourages you to bring your questions to this session and bring up questions you thought you may never get answered.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Advanced
AUDIENCE: Architect
PLATFORM: MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010

ERRIN O'CONNOR
Errin is the founder and CEO of EPC Group, and the author of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out, published by Microsoft Press. He has completed more than 93 individual SharePoint implementations and has worked with some of the largest organizations in the United States.

Internal SharePoint Marketing -- Tipping the Balance towards Power Users

2010-10-02T13:57:00.000-07:00

Of all the interviews conducted for an ongoing SharePoint Reality Series in KMWorld, one of the simplest and most compelling ingredients of a successful deployment is put forth by EPC Group's Errin O'Connor, and his notion of power users. It’s not the extra licensing, the extra server farm, or frankly a 3rd party outfit like Errin’s that spells the difference. It’s the folks in your enterprise that connect the business goals of their team to a platform for delivering them. Sound a bit abstract? How’s this for incentive: they map their own job skills and career assets to their knowledge of SharePoint.

That’s why deployment teams should resist the temptation to provide introductory SharePoint training and opt instead for coaching power users and their teams – the more grounded in their day-to-day grunt work, the better. Power users self-identify as stakeholders. They're accountable but they're not stuck on precedent or tethered to the orthodoxy of an outmoded approvals process. Governance is not administrivia any more than innovation is free-form experimentation. There’s a balance between discipline and exploration. There’s also a duality between the power user’s role as SharePoint consumer and producer – someone on the hook for scaling the productivity gains of a wider adoption.

Power users straddle the line between trying anything once and building on what works. They don't answer to a central command or a rogue band of enterprise insurgents. They answer to results -- the most pragmatic of change agents.

O'Connor cites a full blown document management initiative at Continental Airlines, where the original goal was to get 50 power users to support 3,000 end-users at HQ in Houston. "These people all have day jobs," says O'Connor. They're not theorists or programmers but see SharePoint as an extension of the broader business goals that require an ECM platform like SharePoint to succeed: “How can I put you in a portal today?” is the used car salesman line that O'Connor invokes for describing Continental's playing of the power user card.

One internal marketing vehicle he recommends is to create internal SharePoint training sites. These are not introductions for generalists but just-in-time learning materials targeted to specific build approaches, workflow models, security, and architectural designs that help power users to leverage the webpart galleries,coding repositories and best internal practices that have been leveraged by their cross-functional peers. O'Connor encourages clients like Continental to download learning tools like Camtasia Studio and generate five minute training videos:

1.How do I enable inbound email to a library?
2.How do I set up a new list?
3.How do I add folks to my workspace, etc…?

These task-specific lessons are too granular for Microsoft to address but take on a more genuine team-building benefit for users familiar with the processes and players exemplified in these training demos. Think of it as ShareTube for your project leads. Whatever way happens to work O'Connor puts his finger on the Key to successful SharePoint rollouts: empower your technical business users. "These are natural SharePoint proponents and will see through what they start."

O’Connor likes to use a retail metaphor to describe enterprise adoption. In the SharePoint economy the system administrators are the mall managers while the store owner is the power user. It’s those shopkeepers that manage inventory and make sure content is relevant – they police the store.

Global and local champions – like any KM or document management initiative – need to keep the snowball rolling down the hill. Project leaders need to identify or seek out power users. In the absence of a formal rollout, they need to reward power users with incentive plans for their teams to utilize SharePoint – and reinforce that through internal marketing.

From a more central perspective those pockets of power users form a collective picture of what no single CXO or unit head can speak to with any real gravity or conviction -- that's the fundamental question: what are we using SharePoint for -- not the roadmap, but the reality. This can be a trick (and anxiety-laden) question because:

•SharePoint orchestrations are inherently complex, and
•No single group is leading the way

What O'Connor likes to call the world’s largest Swiss army knife can take an enterprise in any number of directions. The larger point that gets lost is that with so much functionality, a power user support mechanism is critical for defining and ultimately driving how current projects can map to looming priorities. For an enterprise that’s already embraced MOSS, there’s no better indication of how and where to pool enterprise resources.

October is coming fast... Make sure and join us at Booth 405 in Boston at the SharePoint Tech Conference

2010-09-20T11:15:00.001-07:00

SharePoint Saturday NYC

2010-08-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

For those of you that were not able to make it.... HUGE SUCCESS!

Our own Errin O'Connor keynoting the event to a packed room leaving the crowd impressed with this approach and knowledge on SP2010.

Make sure and check out our pics from the show!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/epcgroup/

Best Practices for Managing Accessibility and Privacy Compliance within Colleges and Universities

2010-07-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, July 22nd, join two of the leading SharePoint solutions providers as they share time tested experience on managing compliance and privacy specifically for Higher Education. EPC Group and HiSoftware will share best practices and real world experience on managing content compliance around Section 508 and privacy. Hear case studies highlighting how other universities have tackled compliance challenges within their organizations.

You will learn how to:

* Prevent Future Problems by hearing Real Life Experience and Challenges
* Implement Best Practices to Properly Manage and Prevent Compliance Issues
* Identify accessibility (Section 508) and privacy risks
* Automate and enforce regulatory guidelines and standards to stay ahead of compliance challenges before they become an issue

Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/725370929

Spotlight on 2010: Healthcare Institutions Going Full Steam Ahead with SharePoint 2010

2010-07-08T17:26:00.000-07:00

Since SharePoint 2010’s launch, healthcare organizations from all over the country have expressed interest in all facets of its functionality. The EPC Group has been working not only with government healthcare institutes but also many prestigious hospital systems from all over the United States.

Electronic Medical Records are being pushed by the U.S. government as a way to get hospitals across the U.S. off paper charts, graphs and the 1990s way that paper-based documents were managed. I still shake my head that in 2010 my doctor still has to call his nurse in to pull up my chart, or have it sitting in the plastic holder outside the waiting room when they call me in.

Epic and Cerner, the two major players in the healthcare software arena, definitely don’t want a firm like mine to “crack the code” or develop the API to seamlessly bring in HIPAA-compliant data into SharePoint; trust me, we have been trying. Only the hospitals and government institutions that own versions of these tools will let us “dig in their sandbox” to develop Web services in APIs with either MOSS 2007 or SharePoint 2010 and the BCS (with custom code).

Why shouldn’t SharePoint 2010 take over Epic’s MyChart capabilities, and have the healthcare organization’s document management, intranet and Internet-facing managed with SharePoint’s seamless (easy to use and affordable) interface?

I think we are getting ready to see it happen, and I have been working with my firm and with other institutes to try to build these solutions, but I can assure you that CIOs of some of the biggest healthcare institutes in the world are very interested in this, and I am predicting this will happen in the next few years.

For more information on this topic (as it is a passion of mine), please feel free to e-mail me at errino@epcgroup.net as I am getting ready to release a white paper through this newsletter on this topic in the months to come.

Errin O’Connor is the Founder and CEO of EPC Group. He is currently in the process of writing "Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010—Inside Out" for Microsoft Press/O’Reilly Media.

What is SharePoint 2010? Vision and Reality

2010-06-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

What is SharePoint 2010? Vision and Reality

Most of our readers have a pretty clear idea of what SharePoint (news, site) is. However, many people misperceive its core functions. And Microsoft's product websites — with their broad ambitions — aren't always clear enough for new-comers. So for the confused amongst us, here's a concise response to the simple question: What is SharePoint?

What's In a Name? A lot.
Names are important and in some cases that goes for software too. In the content, document and collaboration industry it seems that everything needs to fit into perfect categories, so that we can better understand features and capabilities and be able to run side-by-side comparisons. Some vendors define new categories in their desire to set themselves apart. Some of these are deserved, others are marketing tricks.

How should you categorize SharePoint? That seems to depend on whether you are talking about SharePoint 2007 (see our SharePoint 2007 review) or SharePoint 2010 (see our SharePoint 2010 review). It also depends on who you ask and what your needs are.

For starters, the name SharePoint is a solid clue — this software product is first about sharing information and secondly about finding and collaborating on information at a specific place.

The Six Pillars of SharePoint, New and Old
Microsoft has released several generations of SharePoint, but you only need to be concerned with SharePoint 2007, which has been around for roughly 3 years now, and SharePoint 2010, which was officially released in May 2010.

In the pie diagrams below you see that Microsoft divided both SharePoint 2007 and 2010 into 6 different core functional areas, and that these core concepts have evolved from the 2007 to the 2010 version.

SharePoint 2007 and 2010 — Core Functional Area Comparison

In SharePoint 2007, the six functional areas include:

1.Collaboration
2.Portal
3.Search
4.Content management
5.Business forms
6.Business intelligence
This release of the product included the first forays into both web content management and connectivity with back-end business systems. However, for the majority of users, SharePoint 2007 was really used as a glorified file sharing service, with a bit of collaboration added on.

SharePoint 2010 aims to change this — to really move towards Microsoft's dream of SharePoint as an enterprise platform for many different information applications and information worker uses.

The 2010 release offers a number of improvements over the 2007 product, including user interface improvements, greater social capabilities, deeper business intelligence, advanced records and document management and better integration with with other systems.

SharePoint 2010: An Ambitious Enterprise Platform
In the following six sections I quickly walk you through the key parts of SharePoint 2010. As you read on, keep in mind that customers are in no way obliged to use all of these things. Some companies will use five or six of the core areas, some might only use one.

Regardless, to understand what SharePoint really is, you need to understand the highly ambitious agenda Microsoft has for the product. It is this: To become the single point for all information aggregation, search and collaboration in your organization.

That's a lofty goal. Let's look closer.

1. Sites: Building and Managing Internal and External Websites
While there have been a number of improvements related to web content management (WCM) in SharePoint 2010, CMSWire readers know that it's a stretch to call it a full-fledged web content management system. Nevertheless, Microsoft has stated that they believe SharePoint is a good platform to support your WCM needs, whether it's for an intranet, extranet or an Internet.

In short, SharePoint 2010 comes with native Web CMS functionality. Regardless of how you use SharePoint, you will likely use some of this functionality, at least for internal collaboration websites. Broader uses could include running your entire intranet on SharePoint, or running your public-facing website(s) on SharePoint. However, these are decisions you'll have to make based on thorough analyses. There very well might be other products in the market that will better meet your needs.

With that said, there are sensible people who are enthusiastic about SharePoint 2010's Web CMS capabilities. For example, Tom Resing, a Microsoft Certified Master in SharePoint, had this to say about SharePoint 2010:

"SharePoint is software from Microsoft designed to make publishing on the web as easy as using Word, Excel, Access + PowerPoint."

He went on to say that he's proving it by putting his own website on SharePoint as part of the "SharePoint WCM revolution".

Other people are more tepid on SharePoint 2010 as a Web CMS solution. Errin O'Connor, the CEO of the EPC Group, also believes SharePoint can be used for web content management, but that Microsoft really needs to sort out the licensing before we'll see it used more broadly for public-facing websites.

The 2010 release does bring a number of WCM improvements:

•A more intuitive content authoring/editing experience, with a similar look and feel to MS Office
•Better support for websites that need to be available in multiple languages
•Better organizing and categorizing of content
•Compliance with Web Standards like XHTML and WCAG 2.0 AA to ensure a wider range of users and devices can view your website
•Improved search, particularly via FAST Search, including more relevant results and more ways to view the results
•Integration of Web Analytics to see how your website is performing
•Personalization via Audience targeting
•Cross browser Support — view your site on most of the popular browsers today
Here is an example of a multi-national company which decided to run their website on SharePoint 2010:

An Example of a Public Website Powered by SharePoint 2010 (KraftFoods.com)

For more information on SharePoint 2010, see our recent article WCM is Better in SharePoint 2010 - Is it Enough?

2. Communities: Creating a Social Collaboration Environment
If you are on Facebook it's probably to keep in touch with friends and family, and stay mildly horrified by the lives of your old high school classmates. If you are on Twitter, it's about jabbering with friends and tracking topics or people of interest. We'll side step the online stalking dating aspects of these things for the moment.

Social capabilities like Facebook and Twitter are becoming normal for many of us, and for the youngest generation of workers, status updates and micro messaging have long been part of la vie quotidienne.

Now all this social media stuff is moving into the workplace, as part and parcel of the typical information worker's desktop. It all boils down to providing a modern approach to working together, collaborating and sharing knowledge.

So these capabilities need to be a component of every piece of software we use. SharePoint 2010 works towards this goal by supporting:

•The ability to create detailed user profiles (think employee Facebook pages)
•Use of modern tools for sharing and collaboration including blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and activity streams
•The creation of special interest groups (Communities) to share knowledge or work on projects (these often map directly to your company's org chart)
•Interactivity and engagement via commenting and discussions around content items, and social tagging/bookmarking of content
•The creation of separate personal spaces or dashboards called MySites where you can keep track of your own content, and the work you are doing in certain communities, projects and more

SharePoint 2010 — Rich User Profiles, Similar to Employee Facebook Pages

The most successful people in organizations rely on the talents and knowledge of other people to help them get their jobs done. Social tools like those listed above help people find the right resources — people, information and conversations — so they aren't always starting from scratch.

It is the integration of these capabilities with other functionality within SharePoint that points to its ability to deliver a full platform of capabilities.

3. Content: Managing Your Documents, Information and Records
In the 2010 release Microsoft greatly improved the functionality for creating and managing business documents. Organizations typically have two types of content: documents and information used to complete tasks and activities, and records. Records differ from the previous category in that they are documents and information that must be frozen and stored for compliance and/or regulatory purposes.

SharePoint 2010 provides the tools to help you work with both:

•Manage all of your organization's documents and other information including controlling who can read and update them
•Categorize them for easier search and retrieval
•Mark them as official records and lock them down from further changes
As part of Content functionality in SharePoint, you have direct integration with your MS Office environment, so you can work on your documents in a familiar environment.

SharePoint 2010 — In place Records Management with Disposition

Microsoft has greatly improved the usability of both document and records management within SharePoint 2010. They have evolved the platform from document storage system to a truely collaborative working environment.

4. Search: The Google for Your Organization's Private Info
It doesn't matter how large or small your organization is, when you need certain information or documents, you want it now. Rarely does that happen. Information is typically scattered around and often your internal search engines are not very effective at finding it.

In short, Google often makes your IT department look bad. That's why a strong search facility is critical to the success of a product like SharePoint — Google has raised our expectations and made search look easy.

SharePoint 2010 has two levels of search: the built in functionality which is greatly improved from SharePoint 2007 and FAST Search, offering additional functionality. Out of the box SharePoint search includes the ability to:

•Search for information and people, including particular expertise
•Index content and data stored outside of your SharePoint database
•Use your Windows 7 desktop search to find information within SharePoint
•Refine search results based on taxonomy and metadata (how content is organized and classified)
The addition of FAST Search bring enhancements, including:

•View thumbnails and previews of content within the result set
•Refine results based on user profile or audience
•The ability to refine search results with filters like Site, Author, Result Type and more

SharePoint 2010 Search Results Using FAST Search

5. Insights: Digging for Business Intelligence
A key goal in any business is staying ahead of the competition. Increasingly, the class of software called Business Intelligence plays an important role here. Business intelligence software is all about helping you make decisions and find problems.

There was a time when you needed a special role in your organization for someone to do all this data gathering and analysis. But times have changed and SharePoint 2010 provides a number of tools that put this capability in the hands of the average employee.

With this release you can:

•Use tools like Excel to gather and analyze data that is stored in SharePoint
•Use SharePoint's native Excel Services engine to crunch data and build web-based reports
•Pull together information from different systems and present it in SharePoint
•Create dashboards, scorecards, and other views — making key performance indicators widely accessible to information workers and process managers

SharePoint Business Intelligence Dashboard Using Native Excel Services

The key to remember is that everyone in your organization can have a hand in how well your business does — if you provide them with the information and tools to do it.

6. Composites: Integrating Your Business Systems
Another big improvement for SharePoint 2010 relates to its ability talk to — pushing and pulling data — your other business systems. Instead of having to work in multiple systems, you can create composite applications — mashups, if you like that term — on the SharePoint platform that pull together various data and content from different systems, including SharePoint content, to provide a single location for an employee to work.

SharePoint 2010's Business Connectivity Services (BCS) — Tying Information Together

Using SharePoint you can create web-based forms that update SharePoint databases or update external databases. These forms can even feed into Word or Excel documents — the disparate data can become a composite right inside your MS Office applications, or in your browser.

Data integrations are key for management dashboards and project management, but also for employees who may not need full access to the business application. It's important to note that SharePoint 2010 can both view and update external data via its Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

SharePoint 2010 — Business Connectivity Services

One thing we've all learned about enterprise collaboration tools is that for them to succeed, they need to be integrated with the productivity tools we already use on a daily basis. By tying SharePoint closely to things like MS Office 2010 applications and with email clients like Outlook, Microsoft is working to improve the probability of employee adoption of these new tools.

SharePoint As A Cloud Platform
In the era of the cloud, we're obliged to mention Microsoft's Software-as-a-Service (a.k.a. the cloud) strategy. Along with the on-premise version of SharePoint 2010, Microsoft will also be upgrading their cloud based version, known as Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS).

A number of improvements are expected, including:

•Completely customize the look and feel of your hosted SharePoint site
•Connect SharePoint data into your external apps via its web services
•BCS (business connectivity services), formerly BDC, will be available to connect external busienss applications
•Create applications that exist on the desktop and connect to the server for SharePoint Online
With the increased growth in the use of the cloud for applications like SharePoint, BPOS may be a way for you to get up and running quickly at a cost that would be much less then implementing SharePoint on premise.

Enterprise Collaboration — Vision, Tools and Reality
Microsoft has referred to SharePoint 2010 as a business collaboration platform, a kind of one stop shop for all your information worker needs. It is nice to think that you could come to work in the morning and only have to open the browser and merrily work away in perfect collaborative harmony with your most capable coworkers.

This is the vision of Enterprise 2.0 and the one Microsoft seeks to enable via their SharePoint platform and tools.

Understanding Microsoft's vision and SharePoint's capabilities is important. This article helps there. Moving your organization towards a more engaged and collaborative daily routine is a much more complicated task. Towards that end you might want to read our article: Architecting Participation with Enterprise Social Media. Tools without vision and vision without reality, neither combination will go far.

Spotlight on 2010: It's 'Go' Time

2010-05-27T07:39:00.000-07:00

As the great General George S. Patton once said, “Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.” Now how best can one interpret this as we are handed a CD or download a copy off MSDN of one of the most powerful and versatile pieces of software released to date?

OK, maybe it’s not quite that dramatic, but SharePoint 2010 is here and organizations are piloting it and beginning to implement it. My firm, EPC Group, is currently engaged in several SharePoint 2010 implementations, and it really is an amazing piece of software. There are several truths that still apply, though, when implementing this juggernaut in your organization. At EPC Group, we make sure we stress these, regardless of a 2010 or 2007 implementation.

So, what makes for a successful SharePoint initiative?

•Proper upfront planning (The System & Information Architecture)
•Looking at the big picture and developing a SharePoint Roadmap for your organization (A Roadmap for six months, 12 months and 18 months)
•Executive Sponsorship/Executive Buy-in
•Enterprise SharePoint Governance: planning and enforcement
•Development of a rock-solid environment with a corresponding disaster recovery plan so you do not ever lose your users’ confidence or their content
•Developing a core set of Metadata/Content Type standards in the initial stages of your initiatives
•Finding and achieving quick wins to “wow” your users
I started implementing SharePoint almost 10 years ago (wow, how fast time flies), and I find these seven bullet points still stand true. But with SharePoint 2010 (either SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010), there are whole lists of new bullet points and implementation methodologies that must be followed.

With SharePoint 2010, just a few new items we must contend with (i.e. govern) are:

• The Ribbon: It offers new functionality in the SharePoint 2010 user interface. The Ribbon serves as the primary command surface that you can use to interact with objects inside of SharePoint Foundation. In earlier product versions, commands were accessed across multiple surfaces and located in varying menus.

• User Interface (UI) Improvements:

•Master Pages: In SharePoint 2010, application pages now reference the site master page. Content and application pages now contain the same content placeholders in SharePoint 2010.
•Cascading Style Sheets: The cascading style sheets in SharePoint 2010 have been revamped. The CSS has been divided into multiple files to enable more targeted customization scenarios and to improve page-loading performance.
• Windows PowerShell for SharePoint: A new command-line tool and supporting scripting language from Microsoft complements Cmd.exe in the Windows administration context.

• Silverlight Integration and the Fluid Application Model: A built-in, extensible, Silverlight Web Part specifically designed to host Silverlight applications. Closely related to the new Web Part is the Fluid Application Model (FAM) that enables secure, cross-domain integration between external applications and SharePoint Foundation deployments.

• Workflow Improvements

•New Workflow Activities
•Pluggable Workflow Services
•Workflow Events
• Alerts Enhancements: SharePoint 2010 takes advantage of the new mobile messaging framework to enhance its Alerts feature. The mobile messaging framework is itself extensible, so you can create your SharePoint Foundation solutions that incorporate SMS messages that are sent to mobile telephones.

• ECM Improvements: Managing millions of documents, eDiscovery capabilities, and the whole kitchen sink.

• Business Connectivity Services (formerly the Business Data Catalog): Provides read/write access to external data from line-of-business systems, Web services, databases, and other external systems within SharePoint 2010.

So with all of this new functionality, it is absolutely critical to address your organization’s governance strategy, your global content types, your power users, and your long-term document management strategy, because SharePoint 2010 really can do just about anything other than take out the trash and wash the car.

To finish off with one more quote, Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Why do they call it a 'building'? It looks like they're finished. Why isn't it a 'built'?"

Just implementing SharePoint 2010 out of the box and letting your users start to utilize it without these proper strategies and methodologies is not advised.

SharePoint 2010 is here, it’s powerful, it offers massive ROI to your organization, and many CIOs, IT Directors, and business leaders are going to have to start making tough decisions around things like:

• How do we migrate away from our older existing ECM platform (like Documentum, LiveLink, eRoom, etc.) and into SharePoint 2010?
• Where do we draw the line on My Site Collaboration and social networking?
• What really is our organization’s retention schedule?
• How are we going to finally get off file shares?
• Our e-mail .pst’s need to go, how can SharePoint and the Office 2010 suite help me here to lower the litigation and risk of .pst's, etc.?
• How do we finally get all of our different SharePoint implementations under one centralized umbrella instead of several dispersed implementations?

It’s an exciting time and SharePoint 2010’s ROI is huge—it’s just a matter of doing it right the first time. So ask the tough questions of yourself and your organization around some of the topics mentioned above if you're thinking about either upgrading or pursuing a new SharePoint 2010 implementation.

Errin O’Connor is the principal at The EPC Group, a Houston-based SharePoint consulting firm specializing in large-scale and government deployments.

Proven Governance Strategies for HealthCare Organizations

2010-05-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

EPC Group aids Continenal Airlines in Tracking Delayed Flights in SharePoint

2010-05-19T07:22:00.001-07:00

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid182_gci1512750,00.html

When new regulations regarding long tarmac delays went into effect recently, Continental Airlines Inc. was ready to react with a SharePoint installation that puts various aspects of flight operations -- aircraft status, pilots, crews and customer care -- on the same page.

"If they're waiting to take off, operations needs to know how to manage the situation," said Denise Wilson, senior manager of technology in Continental's enterprise engineering group in Houston. "Passengers on that flight need to connect downline with other aircraft. There's a lot of coordination that goes on, and [Microsoft Office] SharePoint is really helping us bring all those disparate pieces together."

Continental's Airport Services group came to Wilson after the Department of Transportation announced the new delay rules on Dec. 21, 2009, saying they needed to have a tool up quickly. The rules, which went into effect April 29, prevent airlines from holding passengers for more than three hours on an idling plane. A violation carries steep penalties of as much as $27,500 per passenger. "There was not a long time frame to make this [SharePoint installation] happen," Wilson said.

With help from EPC Group Inc., an integrator based in Houston, Wilson's staff created a standardized, user-friendly SharePoint collaboration presence, including an InfoPath form that allowed 135 general managers at Continental's domestic airports to fill out a 16-page online form without any training. The form includes the names and numbers of airport workers, from the airport authority to the person who drives the stairs to planes waiting on the tarmac.

"The general managers needed to specify what they would do with a one-hour delay, a two-hour delay, at two-and-a-half hours," Wilson said. "Questions like, 'Who would bring the pretzels?' and 'Who would deliver the diapers and Handi Wipes?'" she said. "The airline business is very complex."

The InfoPath form was in production well ahead of April 29; and last week, Wilson rolled out a custom SharePoint collaboration portal that features a dashboard for Continental's centralized system operations center. People in the system-ops center can use the dashboard to find information quickly and coordinate with pilots, crews and dispatchers in response to delays from weather or erupting volcanoes.

EPC Group helped Continental develop a framework for the portal to support content management and e-discovery, the legal process of finding documents under subpoena for a court case. This was the fundamental driver for the portal, enabling Continental employees to store and retrieve presentations, images, contracts and so forth, Wilson said. EPC Group helped the airline come up with a standard structure across the organization to narrow searches, reducing the amount of time it takes to find information.

For example, if Wilson were to search the portal for SharePoint documents, she would get 8,448 results. If she limited the search to the "engineering work order" document type, she would get 22 results. "You can find what you need from your department or another department quickly and easily," she said. "It's a huge savings in time. Metrics show that people spend a large part of their day just looking for things."

The general managers had to specify what they would do with a one-hour, a two-hour delay, at two-and-a-half hours: 'Who would bring the pretzels?' and 'Who would deliver the diapers and Handi Wipes?'
Denise Wilson
senior manager of technology, Continental Airlines Inc.

Like most people, Craig Roth doesn't like being trapped in an airplane on a tarmac. "I'm glad they're tracking delays," said Roth, who is vice president and service director for collaboration and content strategies at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah. "I've often wondered, as I'm stuck on the runway for hours, why they can't collaborate better -- or at least tell us what's going on."

Speaking in his professional capacity, Roth said airlines didn't need to wait for the new regulations to implement document management and collaboration software. Lots of packages give businesses a better shot at letting the right hand knowing what the left hand is up to. Oracle Corp.'s WebCenter (formerly known as the Plumtree Collaboration Portal), for example, overlaps with some of SharePoint's functions, but is more of a native portal with standardization. IBM's Lotus Notes, the granddaddy of collaboration software, is mainly client/server-based, with Web access, whereas SharePoint is a Web-based application. Roth also noted the Webster Community Portal as a possible alternative.

"Then there are whole new categories of social software that would count -- blogs and wikis," Roth said. "To track airplanes, you could set up a wiki and have people post to it. If it's more complex, certainly you could code without the in-between layer of SharePoint. If I was an app-dev person, I'd maybe want to do a mashup with some coding and available options."

Continental's Wilson said she did look at several leading document management products, but found they were not as flexible as SharePoint -- and very expensive, too. Moreover, Continental has internal .Net expertise and partners with Microsoft, so a SharePoint installation was "a cost-effective solution for us," she said. "The ROI is huge. We've done this on a shoestring compared to other Fortune 500 companies in Houston," she added. Without revealing how much the implementation cost, she added that Continental is "pulling numbers to build other applications like we did for system operations on top of the portal -- for groups in operations, as well as marketing and reservations."

Cost-effective document management

Continental's business is built on four cornerstone goals: Fly to Win (have a successful operation); Make Reliability a Reality (get the passengers there on time, with their stuff); Working Together (as a team with dignity and respect); and Fund the Future (save money where you can). The SharePoint implementation is a Working Together and Fund the Future program, according to Wilson.

When she rolled out the portal, "The project sponsor told me there were "oohs and aahs, high-fives," Wilson said. "Airport Services liked it so much that we got a request to extend it internationally." The system is so user-friendly that Continental's senior director of system operations, who manages 200 people, can configure it to his needs.

In the project's next phase, in partnership with EPC and other application development groups within Continental, Wilson plans to configure a connection between legacy flight operations in Continental's mainframe and SharePoint. The system currently is internal, located on Continental's wide area network and intranet. Asked whether the airline would ever take SharePoint into the cloud, Wilson said, "We're just now investigating the possibilities and how that would work for us -- cost and feature comparisons. Historically, we have hosted our systems internally. It would be a significant change."

SharePoint 2010 is here!

2010-05-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

That means.... so is our new 2010 book.

Check it out!

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780735627246/

Putting applications into the cloud not so clear-cut a process

2010-05-18T16:53:00.000-07:00

The enabling technologies of cloud computing -- the Internet, service-oriented architecture and virtualization -- have orbited IT for years, but experts say a convergence has reached escape velocity: The time is right for applications in the cloud. But how do CIOs choose which applications to deploy?

Cloud storage: Five best practices for moving to the cloud

Enterprise CIOs should identify the lowest-risk, lowest-value areas for initial forays into the cloud, according to Julio Gomez, co-founder of Innovation Councils LLC, a Concord, Mass. organization that brings together CIOs in various industries to discuss emerging technologies. "Council members are understandably reluctant to put sensitive customer data out in the cloud," he said. "But email archiving? Or even nonstrategic software development? There are many areas with clear ROI arguments that can be considered for testing in the short term."

Experts recommend that enterprises begin their cloud experience with non-mission-critical applications that take advantage of the cloud's "elasticity" to rapidly provision and deprovision resources. The cloud is ideal for such temporary needs as testing and development, for example, or for scientific simulations that need to run for a couple of weeks, then scale down.

The cloud also works well for cyclical demands, such as sales spikes in retail environments around holidays. It's a reasonable alternative to building new space for infrastructure expansion, a reliable strategy for disaster recovery and a sound spot for old emails. In fact, production email may be the cloud's killer app, with many enterprises moving mailboxes to Google Inc.'s Gmail.

Project-based applications also are a natural fit, according to Errin O'Connor, founder and CEO of EPC Group Inc. in Houston, a systems integrator that has spent the last decade implementing Microsoft's SharePoint Web collaboration application for such clients as Northrop Grumman Corp., Continental Airlines Inc., Chevron Corp. and the U.S. Navy.

"Say a project is six months long, and you need an area for users to collaborate on documents -- that's where the cloud shines," O'Connor said. "For example, an oil and gas company had a huge project to spin up between two organizations, with well drawings, project schedules and task lists. They couldn't just go to IT and say, 'hey, guys, we need a site set up for 7,000 users by Tuesday,'" he said. "But they could call a cloud provider."

The cloud is great for external access by distributed workgroups, O'Connor said, but the external security model of the cloud offering must be robust. "There are a number of different security models that work, but it's most important to match those models to both the internal functional requirements and the specific cloud offerings," he said. EPC Group built its own external security model for SharePoint that allows administrators to open specific and targeted content to external users without putting internal and secure data at risk. Users can register for external access, change their existing password and maintain their individual account information.

Inconvenient truths

Perhaps it makes sense to determine which applications not to move into the cloud. Experts agree that databases, with their high I/O requirements, are better left in a standing server. Also, if an application server is operating at 80% capacity, it might as well be left alone. Most servers, however, are operating at 10% to 15% capacity, a tremendous waste of compute power and capital expense, according to McKinsey & Co., a global consultancy based in New York.

The cloud is not going to replace everything; it's not good for everything. IT is very pragmatic. There are still mainframes.
Carl Meadows
senior product manager, The Planet

Another inconvenient truth is latency. Before moving an application to the cloud, consider whether it requires microsecond response time. "You're not going to get that over the Internet; it just takes too long," said Michael Salsburg, chief architect for Unisys Cloud Computing in Blue Bell, Pa. "You're going from microsecond speeds on a LAN to milliseconds on the Internet. WAN latency can increase by 500 times," he said. With the wind at your back, you can transfer about a terabyte a day to a server in the cloud; if you have tons of terabytes, you're better off putting them on disks and shipping them, he added.

Other truths will indicate whether putting particular applications in the cloud makes sense. Carl Meadows, senior product manager for The Planet, a Houston-based website hosting company with a free public cloud in beta, suggests that CIOs ponder these questions:

Does the application need to be highly available? "When it comes to IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service], you are buying a virtual instance that exists somewhere. High availability and global distribution is on you; it's not solved just by going to the cloud," Meadows said. CIOs should consider acceptable downtime: You can pay for high availability or recognize that it's an internal application that needs to be very available.
What elements of a workload can be scaled out? "If you can clone a workload and drop another image in, that's where orchestration on cloud services shines," Meadows said. You can also offload services to better tune a workload, like moving mail off servers.
What is the demand volatility? With a production workload in the cloud, you're trying to automate peaks; you need to determine the frequency of change, and pay for the most basic unit to support that. Hourly payment structures are great for project workloads and spiky activity, Meadows said, but with a steady-state application, you don't need an hourly rate.
What are the integration requirements? Does the workload need to integrate with an internal LAN? Is it an extension of a workload or a new workload?

"There's a common misconception that the cloud is going to replace all in-house datacenters in the next few years," Meadows said. "The cloud is not going to replace everything; it's not good for everything. IT is very pragmatic. There are still mainframes."

Unisys' Salsburg advises that enterprises align applications with the appropriate cloud: public, for nonsensitive, low-CPU apps, such as storage of old emails; private, for highly sensitive data like financials; and hybrid, for customer-centric applications that use a Web front end tied to back-end data. Workload requirements, such as transactions per second, storage requests, network traffic, among others, need to be evaluated as well.

Fierce Content Management with Errin O'Connor

2010-05-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Founder and Chief Executive Officer for EPC Group, a SharePoint integrator, where he manages corporate strategy. In fact, O'Connor has written a new book due out later this year called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010. He previously authored Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out.

We asked O'Connor about the new release and why SharePoint has proven to be so popular in the enterprise.

FCM: What are the biggest changes in SharePoint 2010?

EO: The biggest and most exciting changes in SharePoint 2010 are around increasing SharePoint’s Enterprise Content Management capabilities. A large number of organizations with existing LiveLink or Documentum implementations also use SharePoint 2007 as a collaboration platform. Users tend to find SharePoint much more user friendly than their existing document management systems.

These organizations had concerns around the customizations that were required in Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) to enable true records management, retention and the corresponding custom workflow development to match their existing systems. SharePoint Server 2010 offers a more powerful document management system than LiveLink or Documentum as well as an arsenal of other tools with business intelligence capabilities, seamless integration with other external data sources, enterprise metadata capabilities, powerful eDiscovery and professional networking.

What is so amazing about this is that a large number of these organizations already own licenses for SharePoint and can literally save millions of dollars a year by migrating away from their existing ECM solutions as well as other systems such as eRoom, WebSphere or even their existing Internet platform to have a single system that can be supported by a cross-functional staff.

The ROI in SharePoint 2010 with an enterprise governance model, support and run-time model, and single sign-on interface across the organization with true ECM, eDiscovery, BI, and supercharged collaborative features is something no other system can currently match.

FCM: Do you think Microsoft has done enough to address the major criticisms around governance?

EO: I have been working with more than 100 of EPC Group’s clients in the past four to five years on developing SharePoint governance and I believe the phrase, “Don’t blame it on SharePoint” should be acknowledged when it comes to organizations without a strong governance model.

This is due to the lack of proper planning prior to or during the deployment and not putting enough emphasis on SharePoint Governance but if there is one thing I can preach to the masses regarding governance and SharePoint is around the need for “Run Time” or “Operational” governance.

You need to know how to drive the SharePoint ship, maintain the SharePoint ship, dock the SharePoint ship, etc. Many organizations implemented SharePoint as an Intranet platform first without implementing site provisioning and enterprise metadata/Content Type Governance or identifying the Power Users who would support and champion the deployment and that, in my opinion, is why SharePoint has experienced criticisms around governance.

FCM: Why is SharePoint so popular?

EO: SharePoint’s popularity starts with its ease of use. This can be a double-edged sword though if organizations do not have a Site Provisioning plan in place. That being said, SharePoint is so popular because a user can request and get a site within an hour and be up and using it right away.

With a proper training model or simple things like the creation of a SharePoint training site with a collection of short three to five minute videos on “how to use SharePoint,” organizations can ensure their users are trained and quickly up to speed. With SharePoint 2010 and the Office 2010 suite, SharePoint is going to get even more popular. Can you imagine how powerful it’s going to be for users to create workflows in Visio 2010 and be able to then load them into SharePoint? With the addition of Silverlight, more powerful My Site capabilities, and the BCS (the upgrade to the BDC) this platform is in a class of its own.

FCM: What becomes of partners when SharePoint upgrades and begins to fill in some of the holes?

EO: My firm EPC Group has worked on more than 500 SharePoint implementations since SharePoint 2001 was first released and we have found that the more successful a SharePoint implementation is within an organization and the more we can empower our customers, we actually end up engaging in more projects with the client and end up building many more long-term relationships. My approach is not a “one and done”-type model where an installation is done and some gaps are filled but rather looking at the organization’s overall roadmap and helping them prepare a “platform” so that SharePoint can be relevant in their organization for many years to come. I find that the more successful the implementation is and the more buy-in, quick wins, and “wowed” customers we have to show real ROI, the client continues to engage EPC Group in many future phases.

FCM: How important are partners to SharePoint's success?

EO: I believe partners are critical to the success of SharePoint. Of course I am a SharePoint consultant and most would think I have a one-sided view on this. But people like me, and the dedicated folks at my firm, spend day-in and day-out “in the trenches” to understand the real business and functional requirements of the organization we are working with. Once a SharePoint implementation goes off the tracks, it’s twice as expensive to get it back in the right direction. These missteps could also cost you user support and give SharePoint a bad name within the organization. So the strategies that we have developed around SharePoint governance, site provisioning, power users, enterprise content types, tying in an organization’s retention schedule to the content types, etc. can save millions of dollars in litigation, increase user productivity and delivery real ROI.

New Government Contract Vehicles..

2010-05-09T12:54:00.000-07:00

EPC Group has finalized our ability to further our work with government organizations by offering 8(a) Stars, GSA, Minority Owned and Women Owned Business Contracting Vehicles. We are thrilled to continue servicing our government clients and look forward to working with new organizations continuing our goal of long term partnerships with our clients.

SharePoint 2010 is almost here....

2010-04-28T20:40:00.000-07:00

This is Errin O'Connor, Founder and Chief SharePoint Architect at EPC. We've been hard at work on SharePoint Foundation 2010 Inside Out by Microsoft Press and can't believe the time has almost come.

Check out my author page: http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1172-how-to-save-content-from-office-documents-into-sharepoint-2010/

Follow our events, share feedback and ask questions.

We hope you enjoy our publication and we wish you all SharePoint success!!

How to Save Content from Office Documents into SharePoint 2010

2010-03-29T07:25:00.000-07:00

Our first exceprt from the forthcoming "Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010 Inside Out" by Errin O'Connor and the EPC Group Team of Experts.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Windows 7 offer several ways to save content directly into SharePoint. The File Open and File Save As dialog boxes are the most popular and well-known options for saving content, and they will continue to be the most popular methods to save content directly into SharePoint. To save content directly into SharePoint, follow these steps:

1. In any Microsoft Office program, choose Open or Save As from the File menu.
2. There are several options for locating the SharePoint site in which you would like to save your content.

•In Windows 7, type or paste the site’s URL into the File Location box in the Microsoft Office application’s Save As window.

•Click Computer and then double-click a SharePoint site that was saved as a network location.

•In Windows XP, click My Network Places in the Save As dialog box to view the saved network places of any SharePoint sites.

3. The Save As dialog box should switch into Web view, displaying the Site’s Content. All the site’s document libraries will be displayed in addition to all related sites and workspaces.
4. Double-click the library that you would like to open and browse to the appropriate location within the library to save your file. In this example, the file is being saved at the top level of the document library. The user is able to view the other files that exist within the library.
5. If you originally chose File Open, you would follow the same procedure as in steps 1 through 4.

•If you chose Save As and want to overwrite an existing file, double-click that file. Otherwise, type in the file name you would like assign to the file and then click the Save button.

Saving documents directly from Microsoft Office to SharePoint is a best practice for information workers because doing so allows for one copy to be stored within a document library or SharePoint site. This builds on the “one version of the truth” concept for content because you are not saving it to your computer and then later uploading it to SharePoint.

Proven Governance Strategies from the Trenches Webinar....

2010-03-28T15:13:00.001-07:00

Did you attend our webinar on March 25th? Let us know your thoughts!!! Share future topics, questions and feedback. We love to hear from our attendees.

Events@epcgroup.net

Click on the banner to access the full video presentation.

Hello SharePoint Friends....

2010-03-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks for joining EPC Group as we travel across the U.S. delivering the SharePoint word. Keep your eyes and ears open for local events, webinars and tradeshows in your area. As 2010 comes along... our team of experts will be delivering vital bits and pieces of information to aid your organization in SharePoint success going into 2010!