Upload
hayden-mccall
View
336
Download
1
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
58 Quarter Two 2012
Information overload. It defines the age we live in. Distraction, clutter, and search angst are daily productivity killers causing headaches and wasting hours.
Believe the disciples, and Microsoft’s SharePoint is on the cusp of greatness, bringing order to clutter, collaboration to fragmentation and timeliness to information and decision making. But listen to the unconverted and it’s badly designed, slow and another marketing snow job holding together the Microsoft stack.
Your IT department probably already has the product, so iStart canvassed a couple of experts on implementing SharePoint to help you decide if it is a fit for wider use within your business…
Getting the point
Tools // Information Management // Microsoft SharePoint
59Quarter Two 2012
What is SharePoint?SharePoint is a software platform built by Microsoft with the primary aim to
make it easier for people to work together. SharePoint lets users set up web
sites to share ideas and information with others, and collaboratively manage
documents and content. SharePoint search and metadata allows users to eas-
ily find and locate documents and information from across the organisation.
SharePoint’s Business Intelligence capability makes it easy for users to publish
reports, set-up dashboards and drill into information enabling better decision
making. SharePoint is also adopted by a number of organisations for their public
web presence.
Microsoft has taken a very unique approach to enterprise content manage-
ment as opposed to other vendors. SharePoint as a platform can support any
enterprise content management challenge. SharePoint changes the way busi-
ness uses content management from ‘how does this technology make me do
my business?’ to ‘how do you want to work?’. This is a dramatic change for a
number of organisations who have become used to having their business pro-
cesses driven by their chosen technologies.
Content, Information, Document and Knowledge Management - where does it fit?
SharePoint is the platform that underpins your enterprise content manage-
ment challenges. SharePoint can provide management of well defined and
structured content management such as records management and it can also
cope with the challenge of unstructured content such as blogs and wikis.
SharePoint not only manages concrete artefacts such as documents, pro-
cedures and how-to-guides, but also the softer ‘tacit’ knowledge that exists
within an organisation, encouraging collaboration between people. SharePoint
contains personal spaces where users can manage their organisational profile,
record their likes and dislikes, areas of interest etc. Keyword search is tailored to
not only return documents but also links to people within the organisation that
could help you. This is based on things such as your profile information, role,
areas of interest and the documents you have been working on. All of which
helps people collaborate better.
Why SharePoint over a 'best of breed' solution?In the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) space SharePoint is growing
its perception as a ‘best of breed’ solution. Looking at the latest Gartner Magic
Quadrant SharePoint sits alongside IBM and Oracle in the leader’s quadrant.
The ‘Unified Platform’ is SharePoint’s point of difference over other solutions.
In the past an organisation’s ECM requirements required them to deal with
multiple vendors and differing platforms. For instance the public website was
on a different platform to the document management system, which was again
separate to the Intranet platform – all of which creates a headache for enterprise
search. This approach often led to higher licensing and support costs, and often
lower user adoption due to inconsistent and unfamiliar user interfaces.
While SharePoint may not be ‘best of breed’ at all these tasks individually, as
a whole it is a much more compelling solution. For organisations that use Office
applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, SharePoint offers the
best integrated experience allowing organisations to gain the most from their
existing technology investments.
There is a rich set of features that can be applied to most business problems,
but if your business problem can’t be solved by out of the box features then you
can usually find a solution from the ecosystem of partners that build add-on
solutions.
What kinds of business requirements or circumstances lead to recommending SharePoint over other packaged solutions?
There a number of circumstances but often the following will be among the
key reasons:
1. Organisations wanting to streamline investment in a single platform
2. Requirements for a core collaboration tool for projects or improved team work
3. Where an intranet portal is combined with document or records management
4. To provide an extranet for customer and supplier communications and col-
laboration
5. For a content management system for a glossy public website.
Where several requirements exist, IT departments can build forward focused
roadmaps to plan the delivery of projects with a clear understanding of costs
and on-going benefits over a number of years.
SharePoint also delivers value where an organisation has already invested in
the Microsoft Office suite. SharePoint easily demonstrates how it can be used to
gain further productivity enhancements, say through reduced training effort or
consistent user experience. This leads to higher levels of adoption.
Other times SharePoint plays a role for smaller organisations wanting to bet-
ter organise and increase efficiency, so an Intranet or Document management
solution might be implemented as a starting point.
SharePoint is also frequently a fit on Microsoft Dynamics projects such as AX
ERP, CRM and NAV financials. The roadmap for these products will only see this
grow.
The licensing model for SharePoint means organisations can ‘dip their
toe’ into SharePoint using the free ‘Foundation’ version and then upgrade to
Standard or Enterprise once they understand how it could work for their busi-
ness.
What types of projects deliver the low hanging fruit for SharePoint - where should initial efforts be focused?
The initial step for an organisation undertaking a SharePoint implementa- ››
60 Quarter Two 2012
tion or looking to realise value from an existing implementation should be to
undertake a road-mapping exercise. SharePoint is so feature-rich that there are a
number of areas an organisation can derive value from. A clear roadmap should
make it obvious where the low hanging fruit lies. A lot of organisations make the
first step by adopting SharePoint as an Intranet platform. SharePoint encourages
collaboration and immediate efficiencies are realised through the breaking down
of silos within the organisation.
For others it may be document management or the creation of ‘Project or
Customer Workspaces’ to enable greater sharing with customers or suppliers.
There are a number of projects that can yield maximum returns with little
effort. Depending on the pain points the organisation is dealing with you could
consider any one of the following projects as an initial entry point into a longer
term SharePoint deployment:
1. The Intranet: For a lot of organisations their current intranet is out of date
and bares little resemblance to their current business practices or organisational
structure. Each department should receive a site so they can publish content
and announcements with the whole organisation. This is also an ideal way of
introducing the various business users to the new SharePoint technologies in a
way that does not seem too overwhelming for them.
2. The DMS: Gone are the days of having 38 large white ring binders with
every policy & procedure printed and bound. The quick solution here is to pub-
lish all the policies and procedures into SharePoint to create an online policy
centre that enables employees to browse the latest electronic copies of the doc-
uments as well as rich keyword searching. This level of searchability is usually an
instant hit with business users because they don’t need to know what policies
cover which areas, they can simply query the DMS with keywords.
3. Collaboration: Collaborative sites can be created quickly and easily to facili-
tate collaboration on documents or projects or even areas of interest. Business
users can collaborate in a semi-structured environment and hopefully get the
corporate knowledge out of their inboxes and into their SharePoint team sites
where it can be searched and managed through version control and routine
backups.
What are the skill sets that are required in a project team? (under the...‘people, processes and then technology’ approach)
The key to a successful deployment is a team with the following skills:
1. The ‘Intranet Committee’: Form a group made up of key stakeholders from
each and every division. These committee members need to understand what
success looks like, and have the power to make decisions from a business per-
spective and also have the power to change people’s position descriptions.
2. ‘Champions’: The SharePoint Champions are the key to success for any
project. Selected from key business areas to represent their teams they bring
their requirements to the project team, and act as a conduit back to the busi-
ness. They act as advocates when they return to the business to ‘Champion’ the
SharePoint cause. They help the project team gain traction with business users
and help identify the ‘low hanging fruit’. Get them energised and engaged early
on in the project with a series of ‘Show & Tells’ around the SharePoint feature
sets.
3. SharePoint Admin: Someone needs to take ownership of the overall
SharePoint Project. The SharePoint Administration role should be filled by some-
one with a good understanding of SharePoint and how it can be configured and
managed.
4. SharePoint Developers: These days there is so much functionality available
‘out of the box’ that I think it is a mistake to have a developer on the project. The
‘build vs buy’ debate has shifted dramatically with marketplaces allowing you
to buy add-ons at the click of a button. Any development can usually be out-
sourced, but watch out for customisations that will come back and haunt you
when you try and upgrade to the next version.
Overall, a user-centric approach is important in SharePoint solutions, so impor-
tant skills are in user experience design. This ensures the solution will connect
and engage with the target audiences. There is also an emphasis on manage-
ment consulting skills to get clear understanding of the business challenges that
are being addressed. Wrapped around this, strong project management and
methodology is a must, as well as understanding change management, and
the governance planning required around SharePoint implementations. People
experienced with previous SharePoint implementations are a very valuable asset
in any team.
What do you get 'out-of-the-box' with SharePoint?SharePoint is feature-packed right out of the box. Users can get started by
setting up sites and workspaces, lists and libraries, all from predefined templates.
Corporate Taxonomy and Metadata. Workflow. Content publishing and approval.
Personal spaces and Search. There is a lot included without any additional setup.
SharePoint out-of-the-box…1. Web Content Management
2. Document Management
3. Collaboration
4. Intranet, Extranet and Internet capabilities
5. Enterprise Search
6. Electronic Forms
7. Lightweight Records Management
8. Approval Workflows
9. User Details Searching (aka Corporate White Pages)
Tools // Information Management // Microsoft Sharepoint
61Quarter Two 2012
Is SharePoint performance typically quite slow to upload/search/update documents?
This may have been a perception in the past but is not the case today. With
proper scoping and capacity planning SharePoint performs as well as any mod-
ern ECM solution.
What does a bare minimum infrastructure look like?The bare minimum infrastructure required for SharePoint 2010 is a ‘single
server farm’ this will typically consist of a single 64 bit Windows Server (2008
R2), with SQL Server (2008 R2), and SharePoint (2010) installed, usually with
8+ Gb of RAM. This is sufficient as a development environment or for a small
organisation. From here SharePoint can scale to meet the requirements of
almost all organisations, this can be achieved by the addition of standalone
SQL Servers and the addition of SharePoint servers to handle increased web
requests and loads and also to support disaster recovery and redundancy.
Does SharePoint work with non-Microsoft applications or repositories?
A number of integration solutions exist or can be created via web service
integration. Some off the shelf integration scenarios are with Lotus Notes and
SAP. Microsoft has released DUET which enables enterprises to integrate their
on premise SAP deployments with their SharePoint deployment. SharePoint
also has a service called ‘Business Connectivity Services’ (BCS) which enables
SharePoint to access key information from your corporate line of business appli-
cations. This information can be used as metadata and also makes the informa-
tion searchable. So for example, you could tag contracts with the customer
ID from your corporate CRM system. Then when you search for a specific
Customer ID you are able to find the customer’s contract, as well as pull up their
CRM records.
Does SharePoint 'plug in' to Outlook/Exchange server?SharePoint has out-of-the-box integration with Outlook/Exchange, allowing
users to set up ‘team’ calendars in SharePoint and have them appear in Outlook.
With a small configuration ‘contacts’ can be managed in a SharePoint list and
have them show up natively in Outlook.
‘OnePlaceMail’ from Scinaptic.com allows richer integration for the storage
and tagging of emails in SharePoint document libraries and this has added
greatly to the user adoption of solutions.
In plain English, can you outline what it would take to set up a 3-step approval process, upload a draft document, update and approve it via an intranet page. How much effort from scratch?
SharePoint has an out-of the-box approval workflow that can solve the sce-
nario above, easily creating tasks and emailing the owners at each stage.
Configuring such an approval process can be done in about 20 minutes. The
first step is creating a column on your library that reflects the 3 steps you have
decided to use. You then activate the site feature which adds the workflow to
your site. You then add the workflow to the library and as you add the workflow
you select the column that you created in the first step.
For more complex workflow SharePoint can be customised at 3 levels. Firstly
a business analyst can use Visio to work with the business to create the overall
flow, this can then pass to a SharePoint consultant that can craft this into a
workflow that runs in SharePoint. Finally, discrete steps or ‘actions’ within the
workflow can be passed to a SharePoint developer to complete; such as creat-
ing the code to update an external system.
For advanced business process management requirements third party tools
such as K2 are sometimes used.
For DM, does every document need to be manually up-load-ed and the right meta-data applied in order to find it again? (and any ways around that)
Document migration can be a major barrier for organisations looking to ››
DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY ALL ThE FEATURES AND DON’T EXPECT ThE TEChNOLOGY TO MAKE YOU DO ThINGS A CERTAIN WAY.
62 Quarter Two 2012
move to another system or platform. SharePoint out-of-the-box has the ability to
upload multiple documents, and an Excel-style view to bulk load metadata.
SharePoint also contains functionality called ‘Content Organiser’ which uses
information and metadata about a document to ‘file and save’ into the correct
document library, without the user having to know where the library exists in the
taxonomy.
For large scale document migration tasks 3rd party tools such as DocAve
from AvePoint has connectors from a number of well-known ECM platforms to
easily migrate content directly into SharePoint, without manually uploading.
A common technique that I use is to perform a bulk upload using Windows
Explorer View and then using the DataSheet View to do a bulk tag. So for
example if you upload content from the IT Policies folder you know ‘department’
needs to be set to ‘IT’ and ‘document type’ to ‘Policy’.
If you have a lot of content to upload and tag then there are a number of
migration utilities that will allow you to do bulk uploads of content and specify
the metadata on the way up. There are also some interesting tools coming out
that will auto tag and classify your content as you upload it to the server such as
datafacet.com or pingar.com.
Are there plug-ins that you would recommend for any SharePoint implementation?
SharePoint is supported by a large vendor/partner community that create a
number of plug-ins to extend SharePoint functionality. There are a number of 3rd
party add-ins that can be used, but this is very dependent on the problem.
RecordPoint is a great plug-in for anyone concerned with compliance, records
management or public records. RecordPoint enables SharePoint to be set up
and configured in a way users naturally work, this may be project focused and
cross discipline. This is often different to the way a record manager sees the
world. In the background RecordPoint classifies the records and provides the
views needed by the record manager but doesn’t affect the way users interact
with SharePoint. Again, this leads to much higher adoption and better ROI.
OnePlaceMail is another plug-in we use regularly for increased SharePoint and
Outlook/Exchange integration.
We have already touched on a few of the common add-ons. Depending on
the gap you are trying to fill there are a number of add-ons to recommend:
1. Create your own no-code web parts with the DataView Web Part which is
found in SharePoint Designer 2010.
2. Outlook SharePoint Integration: OnePlaceMail from Scinaptic is an
Australian-made product. You can run it for free for up to 25 users.
3. Workflow: Nintex Workflow 2010 enables ‘drag and drop’ workflow creation.
Another great Aussie product!
4. iPhone or iPad integration: SharePlus or Filamente enable you to take
SharePoint content with you on your favourite iDevice.
What are the key things you would recommend to a business embarking on an information management project?
There are several factors:
1. have clear goals: have a well-defined goal before you start. Don’t get dis-
tracted by all the features and don’t expect the technology to make you do
things a certain way.
2. Avoid the Big Bang: Don’t aim to deliver the ‘all singing, all dancing’ project.
Keep it simple and don’t be afraid of a phased rollout.
3. Quick wins: Target the low hanging fruit. The business (and sponsors) will
see value and generate excitement and enthusiasm for the project.
4. Avoid Analysis Paralysis: You will discover a lot of things that can be done
with SharePoint and it’s important not to over analyse things. Keep the project
goals in focus and plan to deploy the other features in later stages of the project.
5. Understand the technology: Take your time to explore the product. As part
of your project have a ‘play environment’ to see what will work best for your
project and organisation without the fear of breaking something.
6. Long Term Management: Factor in a ‘business as usual’ strategy to ensure
the system is managed and updated on a day to day basis.
Our thanks to Rob Stewart, SharePoint solutions specialist for Intergen
(www.intergen.co.nz) and James Milne, founder and lead consultant for Myriad
Technologies (www.myriadtech.com.au) for their contributions.
Tools // Information Management // Microsoft Sharepoint
TAKE YOUR TIME TO EXPLORE ThE PRODUCT. AS PART OF YOUR PROjECT hAVE A ‘PLAY ENVIRONMENT’ TO SEE WhAT WILL WORK BEST FOR YOUR PROjECT AND ORGANISATION WIThOUT ThE FEAR OF BREAKING SOMEThING.