SharePoint Jumpstart #1 Creating a SharePoint Strategy

SharePoint Search & IA Jumpstart Series June 4, 2009 Call 1: Creating a SharePoint Strategy Hosted by Earley & Associates in partnership with Consejo, Inc.

About the JumpStart call series
Began educational call series in 2005
Past topics have included Taxonomy and Metadata, Content Management, Search, Semantic Technologies
Have had several thousand attendees over the years. Today’s call has over 600 registrants
Calls will be recorded and available for download
Be sure to fill in evaluation to let us know what additional topics you would like to learn about

Community of Practice Calls
Taxonomy Group url: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP
Search Group url: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SearchCoP
Upcoming calls:
July 1, 2009 – Conducting a Search Audit
August 5, 2009 – DITA
September 2, 2009 – Taxonomy Usability Testing
October 7, 2009 – Developing an Ontology
November 4, 2009 – Applications for Topic Maps
December 2, 2009 – Taxonomy Management

Housekeeping
Calls last from 60 – 90 minutes
Email questions during the call to [email_address] . Questions will be taken at the end of the session
You can also skype Rebecca.M.Allen or SethEarley
Questions will be queued through the operator. Press *1 to ask a question.
If you are on twitter, you can follow the discussion and make comments using the hash tag #spjs

Call 1: Creating a SharePoint Strategy
Seth Earley, Earley & Associates
Information Strategy and SharePoint
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch
Evaluating SharePoint in the Enterprise

SharePoint Search & IA Series: Calls 2 – 4
Call 2: Making Basic SharePoint Search Work
Thursday, June 11 th
Shawn Shell, Consejo, Inc.
Sadie Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates
Call 3: Navigation, Metadata, & Faceted Search: Approaches & Tools
Lars Farstrup, Farstrup Software
Paul Wlodarczyk, Earley & Associates
Call 4: SharePoint IA vs. The Real World
Toby Conrad & Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic
Jeff Carr & Michael Shulha, Earley & Associates

Agenda
Context for SharePoint IA and Search issues
Goals and expectations
Types of content strategy
Why do we need a SharePoint strategy?
Classes of SharePoint applications
Information management strategy approach
Steps to developing a SharePoint strategy
SharePoint in the Enterprise

Context - SharePoint Search and IA issues
Our work in information architecture has exposed us to many different technical environments and a range of user needs
We have found that customers have in some cases had difficulty implementing recommendations due to challenges with process and technology
SharePoint has a particular set of challenges that we have seen in multiple environments related to search and findability

Expectations
Series will have a focus on information architecture and search
This session will explore the role of strategy related to improving short and long term findability
We will cover classes of functionality at a high level
Governance is an extensive topic that we cover separately in Call 4

Expectations
After this call series you should be able to:
Understand how to better leverage SharePoint to meet business needs in your organization
How to better align strategy with implementation
Specifically understand the role of information architecture and taxonomy in findability
Be familiar with constraints and workarounds for improving search and overall findability of information in SharePoint

Seth Earley, Founder & CEO
Co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from IBM Press
14 years experience building content and knowledge management systems, 20+ years experience in technology
Chair, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Science and Technology Council Metadata Project Committee
Founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum
Former adjunct professor at Northeastern University
Currently working with enterprises to develop knowledge and content management systems, taxonomy and metadata governance strategies
Founder of Taxonomy Community of Practice – host monthly conference calls of case studies on taxonomy derivation and application. http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP
Co-founder Search Community of Practice:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SearchCoP

What kind of “strategy”?
Business
Alignment with business objectives
Editorial
What kinds of content will we have and how will this achieve our goals
Technical
Technology selection and development
Deployment
Populating content repositories and enabling collaboration
Management
Long term maintenance and governance
Today we will be focusing on business alignment and some technical/architectural issues. The rest of the series will address technical issues as they relate to search and findability. Of course, the context is SharePoint, however many of these principles apply to any content management technology.

Why create a strategy?
“ We’re just going to put it out there and see what happens…” (company IT organization with SharePoint)
OK, Try that…
Let each part of the organization:
Make infrastructure choices
Develop information architecture
Create own taxonomies
Build own workflows
Create individual governance and maintenance policies

The result…

Been down that road before
Early collaboration tools encouraged user adoption with little if any intervention from IT organization
This resulted in “information shanty towns” - disconnected repositories, abandoned workspaces, unstable infrastructure, brittle integration, out of date and duplicated content
SharePoint’s broad capabilities combined with widespread deployment magnifies this problem

SharePoint In Your Organization
“ Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a rich server application for the enterprise that facilitates collaboration, provides full content management features , implements business processes , and provides access to [structured] information essential to organizational goals and processes. It provides an integrated platform to plan, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across and beyond the enterprise.”
Microsoft
Let’s spend a few minutes parsing this out and examining the ramifications for SharePoint deployment

Key SharePoint terms
Collaboration – typically refers to an unstructured process for communicating and solving problems. Ad hoc in nature.
A collaboration platform or environment is an easy to set up, self managed method for sharing information, contributing ideas and synthesizing an output
Content management – A mechanism capturing, organizing, accessing and reusing content. More structured in nature.
Content can be defined broadly as data, documents, digital assets, records, web content and learning objects
It’s important to make the distinction between collaboration – a knowledge creation process and content management – a knowledge access and reuse process. The difference is not trivial and many deployments fail when organizations do not make this distinction.

Key SharePoint terms
Business processes – refers to structured processes for moving information through the organization.
Simple examples of business processes in this context might include workflow approval processes for a purchase order or expense report
Structured information – data contained in transactional and business intelligence systems
Integrated platform – one environment that handles many types of content
(documents, content for a web site or intranet, data, business processes, etc)
We are going to define each of the pillars of SharePoint functionality and outline high level considerations

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) has many capabilities Configuration of each application class requires decisions about site organization, governance, process, content types, metadata, and taxonomy.

Application class: Collaboration
Who is collaborating?
How much control will workgroups have?
Will there be standard structures to follow?
What is the process for commissioning and decommissioning sites?
Who will have administrative rights?
How will valuable content be harvested?
What is the lifecycle of collaborative content?
When organizations decide to provide collaboration capabilities to users, they tend to consider this as a self managed process. As collaborative workspaces proliferate, users realize they can no longer find high value content.

Application class: Portals
Portals – Portal is an ambiguous term. SharePoint provides access to many types of structured and unstructured information and allows for aggregation and “integration at the glass”
What applications will be surfaced for users?
How will sites be personalized?
What type of architecture will be applied?
How will security be managed?

Application class: Enterprise search
Enterprise search – we’ll deal with search challenges in the next session. Some basic questions include determining how search will leverage metadata, facets, hierarchy, various unstructured sources, overcoming gaps in functionality, use of third party tools, etc
Effective search needs to be considered from a holistic perspective – it is at the intersection of content strategy, metadata, taxonomy and information architecture

Application class: CM/DM/RM
Content Management – What processes are being supported? Who are the content owners? How will you define content structure? How will you manage content lifecycles? Does SharePoint truly meet the requirements of the organization from a web content management or intranet perspective?
Records Management – SharePoint is not considered a records management platform however there are companies that build RM modules on top of SharePoint. This entails custom development and configuration.
Document Management – What is the process for ensuring the site does not become a dumping ground? How will document lifecycles be managed? What organizing principles will be applied to documents?

Application class: Business Processes and Business Intelligence
Business process – InfoPath is an application to create xml based data entry forms to handle various workflow tasks. Is forms based workflow part of your initial project mandate?
Forms based workflow is distinct from content or document workflow (which is part of the content/document/records management application class)
Business intelligence – Is this going to add value to the organization? Make BI tools more accessible? Improve utilization of structured information sources? Building dashboards and integrating data sources is a significant undertaking

Different content, different tools, different mechanisms for access
The message is that “content” varies in structure, format, value
Application classes generally handle different types of content (though search and portal are really access layers to other application classes)
SharePoint spans the range of functionality from very unstructured/chaotic applications to highly structured/controlled applications
Though not yet mature for things like Records Management, add on modules can provide that capability
Microsoft Groove will be SharePoint Workspace 2010 – this is at the far end of collaboration and user control (see blog post: http://sethearley.wordpress.com )
Key point: User controlled does not mean unmanaged/ungoverned

Different technology classes are appropriate depending upon degree of collaboration and creation vs. structured access More Structured Email Instant Messages Wikis Blogging/ Micro blogging Discussions Collaborative Workspaces Content/ Document Management Workflow/ Business processes Business Intelligence Records Management Knowledge Creation Knowledge Access/Reuse Chaotic Processes Controlled Processes Less Structured User initiated/ controlled IT initiated/ controlled

Relative value of content Lower Cost Higher Cost Message text External News Reports Discussion postings Interim deliverables Engineering document repositories Success Stories Benchmarks Approved Methods Best Practices Tagging/Organizing Processes Social tagging (“folksonomy”) Structured tagging (taxonomy) Unfiltered Reviewed/Vetted/Approved Lower Value (More difficult to access) Higher Value (Easier to access)

Developing an Information Strategy
SharePoint has capabilities that can touch most of the organization’s information streams
An information strategy outlines current information flows, business objectives, priorities, scope and resource allocation
Broader than SharePoint strategy – includes bigger picture information flows – including upstream and downstream systems
Determines the role of SharePoint in the department or across the enterprise
Be sure to spell out linkages between project and enterprise goals.
An overall information strategy, though not critical to SharePoint deployment, will help to bound project scope

Increase customer satisfaction Expand offerings Develop new markets Customer Support Customer acquisition Engineering Library Knowledge base Marketing Collateral Alignment, linkage, measurement Product Development Grow top line revenue Content supports processes Working here (tools, technology, IA, search, etc) Measuring here (micro level - effects) Measuring here (macro level - outcomes) CEO- “Show me how this project will increase our revenue?” Copyright © 2009 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved. Organizational Strategy Business Unit Objectives Business Processes Processes enable objectives L I N K A G E Content Sources Objectives align with strategy

Problem focus
What business problem are you solving?
How will SharePoint improve the ability to accomplish work?
What are the work tasks that need to be supported/enabled?
How can information be structured to be readily accessed and consumed by target audiences?
Key concept: Start with a single perspective (audience, process or problem) and then expand.

Defining a SharePoint Strategy
With this range of functionality, “just putting it out there” will not allow the organization to realize full benefits and will be counterproductive
Strategy is a moving target: what is appropriate for a less mature organization is not appropriate for a more mature organization
Strategy needs to be continually redefined in order to keep up with the needs of the business
Initially, strategy is defined at a very high level – further iterations allow details of implementation to be adapted to each business area

Requirements Gathering
Bring together stakeholder group representatives, from executive level ( strategic business objectives ) to administration ( tactical execution ).
Capture ideas and blue sky wish list then start moving from the abstract to the tactical, or from:
Improve market share through cross business unit synergies Present solutions to agricultural industry prospects that repurpose technologies from power substation mobile monitoring solutions Strategic Goal Tactical Requirement big picture what detailed how You are guided by the what in order to build the how

Steps to developing a SharePoint strategy
Create high level charter and identify owners
Define processes and functions to be supported
Identify audiences, perspectives, goals and tasks
Survey specific applications used in the context of work tasks
Audit content sources and determine organizing principles
Create use cases based on user tasks
Determine feature requirements: what technical functions and features are needed to address problem areas
Evaluate options including cost of custom development, add on modules, third party tools
You may not need all of this detail – level of detail will be determined by expected outcome. Some of these steps border on functional and technical requirements (for instance detailed use cases).

1. Typical Project Charter
Project owner
Project manager
Background and context
Business need and benefits
Project objectives
Definitions
In scope
Out of scope
Deliverables
Schedule and cost considerations
Success criteria
There are plenty of examples of SharePoint project charters available on the web. Don’t copy too much boilerplate – this diminishes impact. Look for main points moist relevant to your circumstances.

2. Processes and Functions
Content by itself is not very useful
Content applied to solving a problem is useful
How do we measure the ability to solve a problem?
What is the nature of the problem?
What allows the problem to be solved?
What impedes the ability of a user to solve a problem?
How does the supported process align with bigger picture goals of the organization?
Achieving alignment with processes and strategic goals is essential to getting and retaining organizational attention and resources

3. Audiences, perspectives, goals and tasks
Who are the target users for the specific process?
How can you characterize your audiences?
What do they need to accomplish?
How much experience do they have with your content, applications, offerings?
Segment audiences according to need, demographic, role, intent

3. Audiences, perspectives, goals and tasks

4. Application survey

5. Audit content sources
Content audit
What are the in scope repositories?
How relevant is existing content? What content is missing? Will new content be developed?
What kinds of applications? (Databases, document libraries, web pages, business intelligence applications, etc.)
What content is needed to support the user?
What other sources do individuals use to accomplish their tasks?
Who are the owners? Can you influence content lifecycles (such as application of metadata)
What is the state of content metadata?
Are there inherent organizing principles that can be leveraged? (Process, context, content structure, source, folder hierarchy, etc)

5. Audit content sources

6. Create use cases
Use cases can be formal (with trigger, pre condition, post condition, normal flow, alternative flow, exceptions, comments, etc)
Or can be less formal and simply describe functionality at a high level

7. Requirements & technology
Don’t take too narrow a focus
Project team may only have small purview, but think more globally to avoid reworking it later
Consider upstream and downstream processes
Think adaptable, extensible and scalable
Turn it into a roadmap: implement over time
Even a high level roadmap is better than “just putting it out there”

7. Requirements & technology
Align technology with known issues and challenges
Can also develop matrix to prioritize functionality and rank level of effort for implementation

8. Evaluate options
Determine what’s possible versus what’s practical
Its is critical that requirements gathering is done in conjunction with MOSS expertise
An expert can provide sanity checks and ensure that requirements development are aligned with budgets and organizational maturity
Customizations are always possible, but may be cost prohibitive or may not be practical in light of other supporting processes

Summary
SharePoint is an application platform with a broad range of capabilities for managing structured and unstructured information, enabling collaboration and managing documents and web content
Installing it and “seeing what happens” will lead to fragmented information silos and the inability to find critical information.
Once you let it out, it is very difficult to get things back under control
Empowering users does not mean letting chaos reign
Building an effective strategy means understanding the appropriate use of each class of technology and aligning with specific user roles, tasks and needs

Evaluating SharePoint in the Enterprise

Independent
We never work for vendors. Period.
Detailed
Industry veterans with technical backgrounds.
Detailed customer research.
Head-to-head vendor comparisons .
Practical
Specific advice. Best-practice approaches. The Real Story.

What does it mean to “evaluate” SharePoint? Which SharePoint services work better than others? How does SharePoint stack up against its competition? As a departmental solution, how will it scale across our enterprise? How should we put “fences” around SharePoint in our enterprise? Which add-on modules are right for our organization?

Agenda
An Architectural Overview
SharePoint Services / Collaboration
Customizing & Extending SharePoint
The SharePoint Ecosystem

SharePoint Today: a Stack of Technologies

Key Take-Aways
Persistent Tension between “free” and “fee” versions
Understand what’s in what, and your real costs
SharePoint is a key part of Microsoft’s Office strategy
SharePoint represents a stack of technologies
You need to understand more than just WSS and MOSS
Multiple products make up the SharePoint family
Evaluate carefully what you need and what you don’t
MOSS and related licensing can get very expensive for larger enterprises and/or those exposing services externally
But several key variables will affect pricing, including your relationship with Microsoft

SharePoint Architecture: Base Systems

SharePoint & .NET
Under-reported and under-appreciated dimension of SharePoint: built solidly on (almost) latest .NET platform
Aligns Redmond’s middleware with the huge army of global MS developers
This is huge : for developers and SharePoint
This accounts for much of the excitement around SharePoint 2007
Just be cautious of developer/integrator enthusiasm…
Double-edged sword:
SharePoint now much more extensible
Even simple extensions and customizations require solid .NET expertise

SharePoint Architecture: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Sample Document Library

Site Constructs: Sites
Sites
Single collaborative space: container for set of lists/libraries
Important Security and Taxonomic boundary
Navigable destination in a “Site Collection”
OOTB Sites

Site Constructs: Site Collections
Site Collections: Just that!
Collaboration Portal
Publishing Portal
WSS Site

SharePoint Architecture: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Key MOSS Concepts: Building and Extending
Functional capabilities -- we’ll deal with in Module 3:
Enhanced Search, Business Data Catalog, Excel Services, Forms Services
New: licenses to Microsoft Performance Point (business intelligence)
Shared Services: Farm-level services
User import/management
Search engine configuration
Basic Usage reporting ( Basic is operative term)
Profile-based site surfacing to individual users
“ My Site”
Both profile and personal(izable) home page
Deal with a bit later

Agenda

SharePoint’s “Six Pillars” (Assume MOSS)… … Are really nine
For each service we’ll look at:
Scenario Fit
Pro’s and Con’s
Customer Tier Fit

“ What Kind of Collaboration?”

Tight Integration with Office

Not-so-tight Integration with Outlook / Exchange

SharePoint’s Wiki
Pros:
Easy to create
Contains basic wiki functionality
Based on standard SharePoint “lists”
Can be embedded into any other SharePoint site
Cons:
Missing some standard features, including hierarchical organization, cross-wiki linking, master templates, discussion services, print-friendly output.
Typically replaced by 3 rd -party tools

Collaboration Pros & Cons
Selected Pros
Flagship service
Unusually deep Office integration
Presentation Library is differentiator
People can create own team sites
Selected Cons
Different, overlapping products
Uneven Exchange / Outlook integration
Very poor native social computing services
Less oriented towards project management
Lacking compliance focus

Collaboration Fit

Agenda

Defining Some Terms EASIER HARDER “ You break it, you own it.”

Skill Sets Typically Required for SharePoint Customization

Templatized Components, Multiple Sites

Agenda

SharePoint Ecosystem

Third-Party Modules
Many customers end up licensing at least one
Microsoft lists them at solutionfinder.microsoft.com
However, many are not listed there, and Redmond does not vouch for them
Important caveats
Test performance, reliability, and security features carefully
Contrast software with “consulting-ware”
Remember: It’s not just another module, but another vendor
Many partners fervently hope that MS will buy them, but Redmond typically recreates rather than acquires
This can be very inconvenient for you down the road when Microsoft upgrades SharePoint

Thank you…and Follow-up www.cmswatch.com [email_address] Twitter: @cmswatch SharePoint Courses: cmswatch.com/Education Contact info@cmswatch to subscribe

Earley & Associates SharePoint Services (in Partnership with Consejo)
SharePoint Assessment
SharePoint Strategy
SharePoint Design (Information Architecture, Workflow, UI)
SharePoint Implementation
SharePoint Integration with Enterprise Search
We help organizations succeed from an enterprise-wide perspective, ensuring findability of content through effective document tagging, metadata management, and search http://www.earley.com/SharePointServices.asp

SharePoint Search & IA Series: Calls 2 – 4
Call 2: Making Basic SharePoint Search Work
Shawn Shell, Consejo, Inc.
Sadie Van Buren, Knowledge Management Associates
Call 3: Navigation, Metadata, & Faceted Search: Approaches & Tools
Lars Farstrup, Farstrup Software
Paul Wlodarczyk, Earley & Associates
Call 4: SharePoint IA vs. The Real World
Toby Conrad & Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic
Jeff Carr & Michael Shulha, Earley & Associates

Please fill out the survey that should be in your inbox.
Let us know what topics you are interested in and how we can improve the series.
Seth Earley [email_address] www.earley.com 781-820-8080

SharePoint Jumpstart #1 Creating a SharePoint Strategy

by Earley on Jun 17, 2009

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SharePoint Jumpstart #1 Creating a SharePoint Strategy — Presentation Transcript