Here’s a copy of my presentation for the SharePoint Summit 2013 in Toronto. I spoke about tips and tricks for evaluating and managing cloud services with SharePoint, including some common gotchas and considerations.
Because it was such a wide-ranging topic I tried to anchor it with the story of StoneShare’s own journey to the cloud. I like to keep my presentations “real world”
I hope this is of value to someone – please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn if you have any questions about it.
I’ll be speaking at the Toronto SharePoint Summit 2013 again this year. My topic is “A No-Hype Approach to Choosing and Using Cloud Services with SharePoint”.
I’ll be doing a really-practical deep-dive into SharePoint and related cloud services. I’ll talk about best practices, issues, opportunities and risks for using cloud-hosted business and infrastructure services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Yammer, CloudShare, and other popular offerings, with SharePoint. I am putting together a lot of real-world examples and facts that we have found at StoneShare. It’s going to be wide-ranging and cover compliance issues, branding and user experience, popular service offerings, integration and platform decisions, up-front and hidden costs, and business and IT benefits. Phew!
The good folks at Toronto SharePoint Summit also want to get the word out – so if you are interested in attending the conference, come to SharePoint Summit 2013 – Toronto.
Here’s a blurb on the event:
This year in Toronto, there is an exceptional speaker lineup with some of the top industry known SharePoint influencers and MVPs including Andrew Connell as the keynote speaker.
Benefits for your organization include:
- Learning about the SharePoint 2013 platform and its new features
- Understanding the power and potential of SharePoint
- Discovering and exploring the options for deploying SharePoint in the Cloud
- Improving your understanding of information architecture
- Understanding key SharePoint modules and how they can support solving your business problems
- Cases studies of companies that have implemented SharePoint solutions
- Discovering the best development approaches when dealing with SharePoint
You can register here. Hope to see you there!
Next Friday September 30 I will be co-presenting a live webinar on SharePoint Data Governance with Microsoft and our partners Titus. I will be speaking to some real world examples of handling SharePoint security and regulatory compliance challenges using SharePoint and Titus Metadata Security.
The amount of data - and sensitive data - is growing within SharePoint environments every day, but is your organization set up to keep it all secure?
Date: September 30, 2011
Time: 12:00pm EST
Speakers:
Dr. Soheil Saadat
Principal Program Manager
Microsoft
Nick Kellett
Microsoft MVP & CTO
StoneShare
Antonio Maio
Senior Product Manager
TITUS
You can find out more information on our StoneShare.com website here:
There is a great SharePoint maturity model created by Sadie Van Buren we use to help educate our clients and anticipate their growing use of our products and solutions.
It's easy to use - just examine the particular section you are considering, and depending on the answers to the statements in the section you can determined where the organization fits. Generally organizations have different maturity in different areas of SharePoint.In my new role as Chief Technical Officer at StoneShare Inc., a Canadian SharePoint solutions firm, I am currently working on SharePoint 2010 migration options, and will be presenting a seminar on migration at several different events over the next month.
This topic will be focused on administrators and business users who want to understand migration paths and how best to prepare for a 2010 move.
I will do a live demo of an in-place SharePoint 2010 Upgrade - not for the faint of heart :) - and discuss the various options, useful tools, what sort of planning is required, and actual technical steps to get a great migration result.
I’ll be publishing my slides once the seminar is complete. Here’s an overview of the demonstration:
Considering migrating your current SharePoint environment to SharePoint 2010? Worried about what’s involved and how to manage it? Don’t let it become a headache! This presentation will discuss some common sense business and technical approaches to take away the pain, and help you deliver your SharePoint 2010 migration project on time and on budget.
Topics Covered:
I will be presenting at the following events:
This is part of a four-part series of seminars on SharePoint 2010 that SetFocus is putting on.
When: Thursday, March 18 at 1 – 4 PM PST
Where: Online webinar. You can register for free here:http://www.setfocus.net/marketing/spseminarseries.aspx
This is the monthly SharePoint user group – it is definitely open for more than just Federal SharePoint Users to attend!
When: Tuesday, March 30 at 5 – 7 PM PST
Where: Ottawa at the Microsoft Office on 100 Queen Street
When: April 12 to 14
Where: Centre Mont-Royale, Montreal
Register online now for this great SharePoint conference in one of the world’s great cities.
http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/index_e.htm
There’s really a lot to discuss and I’m looking forward to the seminars. I’m also crossing my fingers the live upgrade goes as planned each time :)
We enjoyed another great year of Mindsharp's SharePoint Best Practices Conference in San Diego. Thanks to Mark Elgersma, Ben Curry, and Bill English as the chief organizers, although I know there are lots of other Mindsharp folks who worked hard to pull this off.
UPDATE: Just heard back from Ben - the primary conference organizers were Bill English, Paul Stork, Paul Schaeflein, Todd Bleeker, Steve Buchannan, Pamela James, Brian Alderman, Ben Curry, and Mark Elgersma. Thanks again guys!
Given the grim economy it was noticeable how many people showed up - over 350 attendees I believe in addition to all the vendors and organizers.
I attended with echoTechnology's Director of Sales, Sean O'Reilly. He's a real hoot - a bit of a legend on the conference circuit. We arrived on the Sunday. Since Sean and I are now using demo laptops and have the exhibit booth process nailed down after numerous conferences, it only took us about 15 minutes to setup the booth before we could unwind.
That night the BPC kicked off unofficially with a Super Bowl party in Ben Curry's suite. It was great to watch the game with various attendees and exhibitors.
Joel Oleson gave a funny keynote on Monday morning, talking about the 10 steps to success. He argued that SharePoint is plastic and so just because you can do something with it, doesn't mean you should. Some of his analogies included Robot Barbie and headless chickens. Also there was a disapproving mother ("IT") and finger-painting baby who got paint all over the wall ("the business").
One quote he mentioned from Gartner says that by 2010 less than 35% of WSS sites will put effective governance in place!
In between exhibit hours and meetings, I was able to attend only one seminar, given by Francis Cheung of Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Group. This was a really neat explanation of best practices for programming against SharePoint.
What was interesting was Francis showed how object oriented patterns like the Repository pattern could be used to abstract out SharePoint-specific resources like list names, loggers, and so on. Francis also pointed out the need to create strongly typed business entities for SharePoint, rather than straight calls against SP objects.
This provides an additional layer of abstraction that allows mocking and unit testing. The idea is that for code testing purposes you should be able to swap in mock interfaces without relying on SharePoint being available. For instance you should be able to run unit tests against SharePoint code without the SQL database even being available.
These entities also make it easier to work with presenters/controllers without worrying about looking up Site or List GUIDs, or provide an easy way to do CRUD operations.
Microsoft currently has a patterns and practices guidance available at www.microsoft.com/spg. From the guidance doc:
This guidance discusses the following:
- Architectural decisions about patterns, feature factoring, and packaging.
- Design tradeoffs for common decisions many developers encounter, such as when to use SharePoint lists or a database to store information.
- Implementation examples that are demonstrated in the Training Management application and in the QuickStarts.
- How to design for testability, create unit tests, and run continuous integration.
- How to set up different environments including the development, build, test, staging, and production environments.
- How to manage the application life cycle through development, test, deployment, and upgrading.
- Team-based intranet application development.
This approach is actually a standard approach to custom code development but SharePoint has tended to blur the lines a little bit. What is very interesting is that more and more of the BPC seminars were about programming and unit testing. People were even talking about Test Driven Development (TDD) against SharePoint!
What this indicates is that organizations are starting to treat SharePoint seriously as a development platform. This has always held potential but required a steep learning curve. For example, at the Best Practices Conference last year there was very little on these sorts of developer-centric practices. This year it was all about programming against SharePoint in the traditional way - using unit tests, mocking, web smoke tests, and OO patterns.
There hasn't been a killer app for SharePoint yet but it's coming.
On Wednesday morning I gave a presentation on helpful tips for centrally managing a portal. I showed a governance site collection I have been working on and talked about how it can be used to make it intuitive and easy to run a portal.
I'm including my powerpoint presentation here.
There are no screenshots of the governance site collection yet although I am uploading a couple as part of this post.
Hope this helps!
Tomorrow I'm heading off to San Diego for the Best Practices Conference. I thought the last one was fantastic and I hope this will be just as good.
Last year's BPC had a great mix of people with all kinds of good tips and advice on SharePoint, ranging from really in-depth IT operations-style tricks to more end-user focused adoption and support techniques. There was a real buzz of enthusiasm for SharePoint that you don't often see at conferences.
This year Joel Oleson will be making the keynote and I'm looking forward to hearing his speech. As well, there are over 40 speakers (including many MVPs), 27 sponsors, and hundreds of attendees.
Last year I presented some ideas on how to centrally manage metadata in a farm. Once again I'll have a chance to speak on a similar topic. This time my presentation is called "Best Practices For Centrally Governing Your Portal and Taxonomy" - pretty straightforward title I know :) It'll expand on last year's work - I've got a demonstration of an actual governance site collection and ideas on how to manage things centrally including key SharePoint items like content types and lookup lists. I'll post the slides in various places after the event.
On a side note, I've been on the road a lot recently and my blog postings have been less frequent. With a bit of luck I'll be able to attend some sessions and blog on the speakers this week. Either way I hope to have some more "meaty" SharePoint posts in the near future. I don't want this blog to look like a travel diary!
Thanks for reading as always,
Nick
While preparing for my SharePoint Best Practices Conference presentation on centralized taxonomy, I made a sample governance site to help with my demonstrations. Afterwards I received feedback from people asking for concrete examples on how to do this. So here goes:
I'm calling this the Governance Site because it's less confusing for the end users, but in SharePoint terms it's really a site collection. Here are some suggestions on how to set it up:
1. Use a dedicated site collection. By making a dedicated site collection you retain maximum flexibility. You can lock down the site collection security for sensitive governance documentation or make most content publicly available. You can deploy custom content types, site templates, and list templates, as well as manage features separately from the rest of your portal. You can manage Information Management policies and retention policies more easily. You also retain the ability to move the governance portal to other content databases, and can make complete backups of all your governance content.
2. Create a new managed path for the governance site in Central Administration. Under Managed Paths, create an explicit inclusion for the keyword "Governance".
2. Now create the governance site collection. With the Managed Path you just created, users will probably navigate to it using the URL http://[your portal address]/governance . The Site Template that you will probably use when creating this site collection is either the Blank Template, the Team Template, the Document Center, or (probably best of all) the Collaborative Portal - because this will give you news and a site directory right out of the box.
3. Add a new global navigation link on your governance portal, pointing to the home portal. This allows your users to navigate back to the home portal from the governance site collection.
4. Add a new global navigation link on your home portal, pointing to the new governance site. This allows your users to navigate to the governance site right from the home portal.
5. Ensure your Shared Service Provider search settings will crawl the governance site collection, although this should be happening by default.
6. Modify the governance site collection to suit your business. See below for tips on what to include / layout.
7. Keep your content types, custom site columns, workflows, Master Pages, and other SharePoint resources in this governance site. Centralizing them here effectively means they become your "Gold Standard" for any portal modifications. Your administrators should refer to them when making changes elsewhere. Your challenge is to ensure that work done elsewhere is consistent with the governance site.
I'm including screenshots of the work I did. This is intended to help as a guideline.
Obviously this first page has to make it crystal clear to users what the governance site is for, and how to use it.
News and Announcements are important to indicate progress on the portal. A little introduction by way of a content editor web part would be useful to. Whatever you do, make sure this stuff is up-to-date - if you don't keep the governance site content fresh and useful, users will wonder what hope there is for the real portal.
I suggest putting a Roadmap on the front of it to show them where SharePoint has come from and where it is going in your organization. That way they understand this is a process and successes have already been achieved.
I like Roadmaps because people get very excited about the SharePoint possibilities. Having a Roadmap allows the governance team to take requests and good ideas from the business, organize them into little projects, and slot them into a proposed timeline. This encourages the business to see the SharePoint portal as an evolving, enabling process that they are involved in. It also acknowledges the reality of limited technical resources, time, and budget, and the need to make hard decisions about what will be done, and when. Best of all, it's quite transparent!
This road map is simply a Project Tasks List called "Portal roadmap", created on the root of the site collection. Then I added the task list as a web part in Gantt view.
I would suggest including at least 5 subsites. These are:
1. Communication
2. Policies and Procedures
3. Support
4. Training
5. Taxonomy
These are the five main things your governance team will probably be working with. You can use any template you like, although in this case I used Team Sites. The Fantastic 40 might be useful for some of these sites - especially the Support or Training sites.
The Communication site is simply a central place to spread the word about the SharePoint portal. It could be very top-down, push communication via news items or updated content. More collaborative communication would probably involve wikis, blogs, or discussion threads. If you have an existing communication process or software you could link to it from here. Tying the SharePoint portal into your existing processes and content is an important way to make SharePoint seem less threatening, more empowering, and more inevitable :)
Not shown here is a feedback mechanism. This could be a discussion thread or embedded poll that asks users to comment on the governance site and suggest ways to improve it.
The Policies and Procedures could be a Document Center. It is simply a central place for users to find all governance documents. You should store them here and then link to them from all the other sites, using the Link To A Document content type that is available from SharePoint out of the box. This will cut down on redundancy.
The Support site should have a support matrix, showing users what levels of support are available for various sites, applications, and problems. This could range from self-help to IT support. There should be contact information for help desks and IT staff if available.
This is a good place to store videos and cheat sheets for users to help themselves. SharePoint add-ons such as the SharePoint Learning Kit could go well here. Effort place here will cut down dramatically on support costs!
Training could also use the SharePoint Learning Kit, and could be a good place to identify what courses are available (internally and externally) and request training. I worked with a financial client who would not let users onto the SharePoint portal until they'd passed a small online course. Each manager had a KPI and was responsible for ensuring their staff took the course, passed it, and followed its teachings when using the portal. This helped lower support costs, the staff were very satisfied with the portal, and they used it more.
The Taxonomy site is a place to document the metadata and site structure you will be using to organize the home portal. This site will be more technical but is an important resource for your administrators, developers, and content authors.
Document your content types and site columns, when and where they should be used, and explain how SharePoint uses them (advanced search, property searches, content query web parts).
If you have an organization Thesaurus, document or link to it here.
This is what it could look like:
There's a lot of native SharePoint functionality that you might wish to use on your governance site collection.
Auditing on the site collection: You may want to know who is looking at what.
Workflow: The Governance site is an excellent candidate for light-weight Out-of-Box or custom workflow. Workflow can help triage support and training requests, and handle publishing approval for governance policies and procedures.
Search Scopes and Best Bets: If ever there was a place to serve up highly targeted search results, the governance site is it!
Search use metrics. You have to turn this on in your Shared Service Provider(s). Pay very close attention to what people are searching for and finding (or not finding) on the governance site and use this to modify your governance approach.
Audience Targeting: Consider audience targeting content on the governance site to prevent information overload. Broadly speaking your governance site audiences might include:
1) Governance Team members
2) IT Operations, Farm Administrators and /or Site Collection Administrators
4) Site Owners (Probably business owners and power users)
5) Content Authors and Champions
6) Everyone Else
Key Performance Indicators - if you have the Enterprise license of MOSS then Key Performance Indicator functionality can be useful to give people a heads up of roughly how portal adoption is going. One thing you can do is create a custom list with some tracking metrics and then put a KPI on that list. You can update the list manually each week to show the latest usage trends.
Metrics are very important as they can indicate whether your governance effort is leading to success.
Information Management Policies - especially if you are applying records management practices to the governance content.
I really hope that helps. If you do create a governance site, try to keep it up-to-date and make it the central place for people to visit. I would love to hear your comments on what you did, what works for you, what tips you have and what add-ons you found to help you manage your SharePoint portals.
Good luck in your governance efforts - it will definitely be time well spent!
P.S.: Sorry this post is a couple of weeks late, Julie :)
Well, I just finished my preso, which seemed to go very well (luckily!).
Basically my session covered best practices for taxonomy in SharePoint, including things you need to do (or not do) to make your lives easier when managing your portal's content.
It also covered ways you can leverage your metadata using Content Query Web Parts, property searches, and advanced searches.
Mindsharp will probably be making the presentation available on their SharePoint Best Practices website shortly. In the meantime I've uploaded the presentation in PDF format here:
As always I'd love to hear back from you about what your best practices are. My email's in the PDF, you can contact me via LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholaskellett) or you can comment on the blog.
The conference is over today, and we've really enjoyed it. We had lots of great conversations in seminar rooms, around the lunch table, and around the bar. It was neat to meet so many people who are enthusiastic about SharePoint, trying to do the right things with it, and willing to share their knowledge. I'll be blogging a bit more in the next few days, to try to transmit what I've learned.
Finally, congratulations to Mark Elgersma, Ben Curry, Bill English, and all the other Mindsharp folks who worked so hard to pull this off!
I'm in the middle of writing the first of several white papers for echoTechnology. echoTechnology is keen to provide prescriptive guidance when clients are making sweeping portal changes using its echo for SharePoint product, and this is part of that ongoing effort.
The goal of this particular white paper, on best practices for managing SharePoint metadata, is to help provide a series of specific DO's and DON'T's to help SharePoint Administrators when they are deploying and managing content types and site columns in their SharePoint farms.
I've come up with the following so far:
The specific Best Practices in SharePoint I recommend at the moment are:
Because these are best practices recommendations, I would love to have your help:
Feel free to comment, and thanks in advance!
[1] “How To Drive Document Management Adoption”; Kyle McNabb; Forrester, 2006-09-07; p 4.
[2] “Tip - SharePoint 2007 Escaped Column Names”, David Hunter, “Thinking out aloud - Dave Hunter's SharePoint Blog” ; 2008-04-06; http://www.davehunter.co.uk/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=f0e16a1a-6fa9-4130-bcab-baeb97ccc4ff&ID=95
[3] "Chopped Column Names in Sharepoint”; Michael Markel; Blog; 2007-09-20; http://www.michaelmarkel.com/2007/09/chopped-column-names-in-sharepoint.html
The SharePoint technology stack covers such deep waters that "best practices" are a constant buzzword these days. After the release of SharePoint 2007 everybody was scrambling to learn the platform, but now that it is better understood, people are ready to figure out not just HOW to do something in SharePoint, but increasingly WHAT and WHY.
Given this, I thought I would mention a few new best practices resources.
To begin with, Mindsharp's doing a lot of work in this area.
There's a SharePoint Best Practices conference in Washington this September, sponsored by Microsoft Press and Mindsharp. It runs from Monday September 15 to Wednesday September 17, and includes breakout and cabana sessions.
Although the sessions are not nailed down yet, some of them include things like:
They'll be led by SharePoint MVPs and authors and should provide some real "lessons from the field" for SharePoint deployments.
Cost to attend is $995 USD. More information can be found on their website at http://www.sharepointbestpractices.com/
Related to this is another Mindsharp effort - the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices book. From the blurb on the back:
Achieve your IT objectives with proven, best-practice guidance on using SharePoint solutions.
Get field-tested best practices and proven techniques for designing, deploying, operating, and optimizing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. [...] this guide is written by leading SharePoint MVPs and Microsoft SharePoint team members who’ve worked extensively with real-world deployments and customers. You’ll find out how to deploy the software, design your environment, manage content, analyze and view data, perform disaster recovery, monitor performance, and more. You'll learn how to create SharePoint sites that help your organization collaborate, take advantage of business insights, and improve productivity—with practical insights from the experts.
Bill English and Ben Curry wrote the bulk of the book, but as Ben points out they had
tons of help from rock stars like Kathy Hughes (MVP), Paul Schaeflein, Daniel Webster (SharePoint Guru), Mark Ferraz (IA and Security), Paul Stork, Jim Curry, and Mark Schneider (PMP).
When I left Dimension Data to move back to Canada, my team was kind enough to chip in and get me an Amazon gift certificate - and I've already used it to get this book. I should have it next week (I'm away from my house currently) and look forward to reading it and learning a lot in the process.
There is a brand new organization called the International SharePoint Professionals Association that aims to be the umbrella organization for all SharePoint workers.
The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole – by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.
Although it isn't Best Practices per se, I'm mentioning this here because the organization aims to provide "support and guidance" for the SharePoint community. If it does this well, I'm tipping this could become a powerful incubator for creating and spreading best practice knowledge.
Bob Fox has the announcement on his blog. He's also got a list of regional evangelists on that post.
David Marsh had a great comment on my previous blog entry. I'm reposting it in its entirety because I think it is a great tip for anyone trying to manage their photos on their file system.
I did some considerable research to find the best approach for tagging Photos and videos. One concern I had was tagging photos and storing those tags in a propriety format that I would not be able to see my tags on a photo in the future and secondly ensuring that whatever program I used was using current industry standards for tagging. So with that in mind I found out that the XMP format from Adobe is becoming the defacto standard for storing metadata about photos and Microsoft have also adopted this format. The problem with most programs out there is they maintain keywords and tags in a separate database to the actual files. (Picasa does this). That is bad because if I copy all my photos to another computer or have them backed up somewhere else, without the database I have no tags. The XMP format embeds the keywords and tags in the files themselves so they are fully portable and the keywords are never lost and are program independent. So I looked at some of the Adobe photo cataloguing applications but finally chose Microsoft Expression Media 2 because of its great support for tagging photos and then embedding them in the files and also the simple extensible scripting mechanism they have for allowing you to rename and tag your photos in bulk based on the date the photo was taken, or the file name or any other piece of metadata you can think off. Very powerful, and I know my photos are storing all my keywords and tags in XMP format within the photos themselves and it is a standard that will guarantee I can read the tags on computers in 10 years or so. I think the best option at the moment.
Here are some more insights into the topic:
Jon Udell at Strategies for Internet Citizens http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/02/14/truth-files-microformats-and-xmp/
and Geoff Coupe's Blog:
http://gcoupe.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!6AA39937A982345B!4417.entry
The general consensus is that keeping the metadata with the file is the preferred approach, which makes perfect sense and is in keeping with the rest of my SharePoint-based Information Management plan.
David recommends Microsoft Expression Media 2. It also has an archive feature - the ability to backup to any mounted drive. This would work well with my JungleDisk mounted drive.
The software is $200 but I'm committed to getting organized so I'm willing to pay (a fair bit) for that if it saves me time down the road. More information on Microsoft Expression Media 2 is on the official website here:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/features/Default.aspx?key=media
There is a trial version available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CD359E7D-FD27-4901-BAFF-6D564CFBD700&displaylang=en
For some reason it doesn't mention how long the trial lasts for. I'll download it today and see.
Has anyone else used Expression Media yet, and if so what do you think of it? If not, what other software would you use to do the job?
I'm in the process of cleaning up my files, as I mentioned last week. It's going a little better than I expected.
To filter duplicate files I'm using a free tool, Easy Duplicate Finder which is available at http://www.easyduplicatefinder.com/download.html.
It does a good job of matching possible duplicates using file size, file type, and file name checking. It doesn't apply any logic to removing them, which is a good thing - I'm forced to check each possible dupe as I go and delete (or not!).
The tricky bit is figuring out which folder structure I should be using in the Hub folder...going forward I will be hosting most of this information in the cloud so I can apply labels and metadata at that point, and surface these files in all sorts of funky ways, but right now I still need a place for my files to live.
I'm committed to the whole Single Source of Truth practice and so I'm forcing myself to use Windows Desktop Search, Vista folder bookmarks, and a central desktop folder root.
It's been a real question of discipline - I often find myself reverting to bad practices and trying to copy the same file in multiple places if I can't quite decide where it should go. Over the last couple of days I've started getting a little better at placing any particular file in a single place and adding shortcuts and bookmarks to it.
Then I foolishly decided to let iTunes manage the folder.
For some reason no matter what I do iTunes duplicates the files 2 to 4 times. As near as I can tell, it is doing this because it thinks the song could belong to multiple albums for that artist....Whatever the case, I am left with iTunes havoc and I am still puzzling out how to remove duplication in this folder without deleting original songs.
Thanks iTunes! Maybe it's not worth the bother.
Metadata is much more important for photos than for music files, because I can use them in many more ways (image editing, personal scrapbooks, social networking sites, websites).
Because an image can be used in many different places, it isn't easy to choose a single folder for a photo to live in. I've started experimenting with bulk insert into Picassa or similar so I can tag 'em. Also pondering adding del.icio.us to the Information Management plan since I am in the whole Cloud frame of mind.
How do you manage photos on your desktop, especially with metadata? Are there photo management tools you couldn't live without?
After 10 years of rampant, unsupervised personal computer use I've copied and pasted myself into a corner. I no longer have much idea where the good copy of anything is.
I aim to fix that.
It seems like a daunting task. My short term efforts have been to keep buying new external hard drives and copying files onto that. Needless to say that's compounded the mess since I am now trying to figure out which is the Latest Version. So much for Single Source of Truth!
In many ways my problem is a perfect mirror to the sort of enterprise problems that SharePoint hopes to solve. It only makes sense that I make SharePoint a part of the solution. It has the added benefit that I am at least practicing what I preach; I will be eating my own dog food.
I thought I would track my cleanup efforts and hopefully get some help from other people who have gone down this road before. Feedback on what you did / are doing / will do is very very welcome!
At the end of this process, I want to have achieved the following:
So here's the new plan:
This is the HARD part....plowing through the files making sure I don't have duplicates. iTunes has already alerted me to the fact that my Music folder contains up to 4 copies of the same song! Dagnabit.
I'm currently investigating utilities that search for duplicate files, such as DoubleKiller and Easy Duplicate Finder (thanks to Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-free-windows-file-wranglers-330037.php)
For the moment I have created a new folder, called "Hub", on the Hub computer's external drive. I am manually copying the folders over and cleaning them up as I go. I will leave Photos and Music to the end in order to cling to sanity for as long as possible.
From now on, all work gets done from the Hub folder. If I need to access something and it isn't in the Hub folder yet, I will use that as the excuse to clean it up and move it. This is the "Go Forward" strategy for content migration.
Thoughts? Feedback? Sympathetic handshakes? Mocking laughter?
Every week, as part of my work with echoTechnology, I deliver a one hour online demonstration of some of echo for SharePoint's capabilities. It's very high-level and accessible and revolves around creating some tasks and showing how SharePoint can be updated easily and frequently.
The tasks I currently demonstrate include: loading content from a SharePoint 2003 portal and a file share, applying content type metadata, changing the master page and theme, adding some custom web parts, and enabling a custom workflow. All of these changes are deployed to several sites in two different SharePoint farms at the same time.
From the invite:
At the online demonstration you will discover how echo for SharePoint 2007:
- Easily replicates changes to SharePoint in bulk
- Automates change management procedures
- Tests and deploys changes portal wide
- Replicates to remote portals
- Rapidly loads and tags documents
- Delivers cost effective maintenance of SharePoint
- Provides a longer lasting more relevant portal for your business
The webinars are every Thursday at 1pm PST. Sign up online at the echo website: http://www.echotechnology.com/registration/Events.aspx?PID=8&EVTID=1&TimeZone=240
If you're a SharePoint Administrator you should definitely check it out. Hope to see you there!
This is the final set of notes from Tech Ed Orlando 2008. This presentation was given by Joel Oleson and Shane Young (and am I missing a presenter?).
Governance uses people, process ,technology, and policies to define a service, resolve ambiguity, and mitigate conflict within an organization.
Or:
People, Process, Technology, Policy!
1) Executive Sponsor
2) Governance Plan: Clear Goals, Vision, Mission, and Metrics: Reduce TCO, encourage standards & consistency, provide service and solution.
3) Skilled Teams:
Tip: Try to avoid having Jack of All Trades manage the portal. Even 2 half positions is better than 1 FTR (full time resource).
SharePoint specialist skills:
Forrester organization defines these roles:
4) Training and Resources:
Site collection admin training – champs, pros, gurus (1 day).
Train key IT pros, dev, and designers – up to 1 week + offer certification incentive.
TIP: Brown bag and informal internal training for end users to help learn business processes.
Service offering site – should have online resources.
End User Training Kit for SharePoint should be available to everybody.
5) Service Definition and Model: Tiered model for site collections, sites, web apps, and farms. Options for things like quotas, user self-provisioning, archiving, listing in site directories, help disk provisioning etc, expiration of documents.
6) Information Architecture
7) Standards & Policies
8) Change, Configuration, and Release Management Processes (ITIL/ MOF) . Policies for release management, configuration management, operations monitoring, security and patch management
9) Culture and adoption. Enterprise search = easy win. Gravity: people gravitate to where their data resides. Don’t cut corners.
10) KISS
This is the penultimate in my series of Tech Ed Orlando session notes. It covers a session on governance practices given by Shane Young and Jason Medero.
Governance always has to involve the end users.
Use search reporting to decide what content to add / manage. It will illustrate what is being searched for and what can’t be found
Operations Management:
Branding: Consistent Look and feel
Communication Strategy: Who, What, Where, When, How
Users are like water – they follow the path of least resistance
Dev, Testing, Staging, Prod
Shane says 95% of customers do everything in Production
MOSS allows checking in pages and content
Shane advises customers to use the Dev, Testing, Lifecycle only for custom code
Need a plan for how changes are made
He never lets any custom code into the portal unless it is deployed via a solution
This was the second in a two-part series given by Joel Oleson, Shane Young, and Mike Watson. The session was highly technical in nature and consisted of some very valuable and very specific do's and don'ts for advanced SharePoint administration.
Tip: Add command line environment variable shortcut pointing to the Office 12 Hive location on your server, since you will have to go there a lot
Tip: Put similar sites together (based on content sizes and # of users). This can help manage functionality and configurations.
Best Practice: Separate My Sites from portals so they can be moved and managed separately.
Best Practice: Large site collections should be dedicated to a single database.
Tip: Application pools:
No best practice for how many Content Databases is the right number. This is more of a management issue for the business's IT staff.
Tip: Don’t put too much content into one site collection. Try to keep DB sizes under 100 gig – rough rule of thumb
Best Practice: Database Maintenance Plan: In SQL Server, do not use default growth plan, don’t autogrow in production, and plan sizes ahead of time
Disaster Recovery can be done via Stsadm, SQL Backups, Log shipping, remote snapshots
Best Practice: When Moving Config databases: use preparetomove, then detach and reattach (otherwise you get GUID problems!)
You have to have a policy for how this happens. It HAS to use features and solutions or it doesn’t make it on the server!
Best Practice: Use Code Access Security (CAS) when coding
Best Practice: Test for memory performance and disposal of objects
Best Practice: Test adding and removing solution to the farm
Tip: To see which solutions are running – go to admin/solutionstatus.aspx
Best Practice: Deploy Solutions off peak hours, because all deployments will recycle the app pool which will dump user sessions. Also be present so you can test it!
Server:
Site Collections:
Database:
Microsoft IT ran several sessions on the topic of SharePoint governance. The ones I attended were Microsoft IT: Building Applications and Reusable Code on SharePoint, and Microsoft IT: How Microsoft Plans, Governs, and Operates Custom Applications and Portals within Microsoft. Both were hosted by David Johnson and Sean Squires. David and Sean did a great job sharing their practical experience and knowledge, and cultivating an open dialogue between themselves and the audience.
It was quite fascinating seeing how Microsoft "eats its own dogfood". However the resources they bring to bear make following their example a little problematic. Microsoft IT use literally dozens of SharePoint farms, which from a licensing perspective alone would be prohibitive for any other organization.
MS has several MOSS environments and many farms:
Vanilla SharePoint farms: staff can collaborate and use SharePoint Designer to tweak, but no custom code. Also includes My Sites. Most people use this.
Dedicated farms: Custom code deployed, no ability to use SharePoint Designer, supported by SLAs. They are currently trialing Enterprise Agreement-style process for helping Microsoft business units renew their portal use. They have to adhere to these agreed-upon standards or they can't use a dedicated farm.
Platinum – 7 major portals, specific customization and LOB applications, plus much more governance.
Created a diagram of information landscape and "pillars" - a catalog of existing code which allows reuse across the organization
Solution Catalog – list of custom solutions and samples
TIP: Don’t use MOSS as a relational database!
Best Practice: Standard application architecture - design for reusable components and in layers
Best Practice: All external UI labels and messages are stored in resource files (.resx) and SharePoint lists - this allows rapid UI changes without recompiling / redeploying. Configuration done via lists
TIP: XSL is critical to parse and present XML. Related to this, any custom UI uses token-based HTML templates
TIP: Make heavy use of Content Query webpart. There is a newer version of this with some changes to make it easier to modify
Security – typically use AD groups rather than SharePoint group. This is consistent with Microsoft's existing AD groups. Also when using SharePoint Groups, adding and removing users automatically causes a full recrawl. MSIT do create separate AD groups for publishers and creators
Vanilla SharePoint is basically a utility environment – employees can run wild subject only to quotas
MSIT – didn’t want to over-govern due to their highly technical staff
However this sometimes leads to “Runaway success”/runaway portals
Cleaning up a runaway portal becomes a matter of business negotiation
They are building new reports to at least assess what’s going on
To fix portal sprawl they are trying to migrate them back to vanilla environments, using scripts to do cleanup.
SharePoint Designer cleanup is much harder
Best Practice: You should organize portal on employee needs rather than org chart which often changes
Microsoft has to upgrade early in the development cycle of the next generation of SharePoint, so vanilla environments help with migration
Dogfooding – Microsoft IT adopt 3 “9”’s for availability (99.9%) and no more than that, because they adopt Service Packs and new versions early
MSIT are still trying to arrive at MOSS best practices themselves – they feel they are still in their infancy in terms of governance
Biggest Governance and IA challenge is breaking down organizational boundaries
Create a central place for governance
Create a central area for task checklists, best practices, and criteria for development
Best Practice: Create a “Playbook” of solution / configuration options – so business groups can look at this before they engage. This helps align them to existing solutions and the way SharePoint works.
Create scenarios – during consulting phase – to try to prove value of out of box functionality.
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