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Social Networking and SharePoint 2007

May 27, 2008

On May 14, 2008, CIO.com published an article about Understanding Microsoft SharePoint in a Web 2.0 World.

Obviously, Social networking is a significant goal of Web 2.0 and has received a lot of attention over the recent past with the hope of improving worker productivity by making available enhanced online access to people, skills, knowledge and other resources. As Wikipedia says, “Social Networking has revolutionized the way we communicate and share information with one another in today’s society”. Social networking software typically allow users to build an online profile through which they can share information about themselves and thus leads to the building of online communities with shared interests and/or activities.

SharePoint 2007 uses the concept of individual, customizable user profiles to provide users with a means of publishing information about themselves. These user profiles can combine information from the organizational directory service such as LDAP or a Human Resource application.

SharePoint provides individual sites (My Sites) for each user that provides personnel information as well as private and public views of content. Visitors to an individual’s My Site can see contact information, presence information, and organizational hierarchy information. My Sites also enables users to display information about their skills, colleagues and other social information.

SharePoint uses the notion of Colleagues, where colleagues can be friends or co-workers or members of the same team, who are related to an individual by means of their profile. The list of colleagues is built by mining multiple sources of information and is directly influenced by the organizational hierarchy. A user can also manually add or remove colleagues from their colleagues web part.

The colleague tracker web part can track changes to the profiles of a users colleagues, for example tracking such things as changes to a blog, new or modified documents, and changes to user profile properties, etc.

The Memberships web part let users see the lists and sites that they are members of.

The In Common With web part shows a visitor summary information relating to memberships, colleagues and managers that the visitor has in common with the owner of that My Site.

The Organization Hierarchy web part on My Profile page shows the user’s manager, peers (others who report to the user’s manager) and any direct reports of that user.

In association with Office Communications Server and Exchange Server, presence information is made available that indicates online instant messaging status, Out of Office messages and contact information.

The People Search function allows users to find people or skills by means of a search interface that returns search results based on social distance (an ordering of results based on colleague relationships i.e. first your colleagues will appear, then their colleagues and then everyone else).

Microsoft has also provided several Role Based Templates for My Sites to cater to the unique needs and requirements of different roles in an organization.

For more information, see the following white paper from Microsoft: Managing Social Networking with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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Some SharePoint competitors in the Enterprise 2.0 space…

May 19, 2008

There’s been a lot of buzz over the past couple of months around companies who are pitching their products against SharePoint. Just the fact that companies are targeting SharePoint tells you that it is the product to beat. For instance, have you read about the offerings from Google and IBM?

Here’a a link to a ZDNet article saying Google takes on Microsoft SharePoint with Google Sites. And here’s another one asking: Is Google Sites going to be a SharePoint killer?

Both articles conclude that for all the hype surrounding Google Sites and Google Apps, apparently they still have a long way to go to catch up to SharePoint. Also, given that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is available for free with Windows Server 2003, users do not need to pay any licensing fees to use the basic collaboration platform available with SharePoint. And by the way, did you know that Office Live Small Business (which provides everything you need to take your small business online, including a free website, free email, free online business applications, etc.) and Office Live Workspaces (an online place to save, access, and share documents and files), are built on SharePoint products?

IBM recently announced how they’d like to “liberate” your apps from SharePoint. Also look at another article around the same topic. IBM acknowledges the “viral adoption of SharePoint” in the enterprise, almost like Lotus Notes back in the 90s. And it’s interesting to note that the man behind the success of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie, isn’t with IBM or Lotus, but is the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft! Hmmm… And I know of at least 2 major corporations with a huge presence in Cincinnati, OH, that have decided to move away from Lotus Notes to SharePoint! I guess we have to wait and see if Quickr is able to stem this flow…

Evans Data Corporation’s recently surveyed over 400 developers for its May 2008 report on “Web 2.0 Developer Programs - 2008 Rankings”. Some folks might be surprised to hear that Google came in at second place. So who came in first? Apparently, “the strength of Microsoft’s Windows Live offerings for Tools and SDKs and Web Services allow them to finish first overall”.

So it seems that SharePoint is not something an organization would want to ignore or take lightly - plus, serious web 2.0 developers need to more closely look at Microsoft’s offering in this area.

 

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So why are people flocking to SharePoint 2007?

May 12, 2008

By flocking, I mean that “the vast majority of enterprises — 96% — are considering, planning on, in the process of, or have already completed deploying at least some part of Microsoft Office System server software. And most of those — 87% — plan to implement or upgrade to Microsoft Office System server software within the next 12 months”  and that’s from Forrester (see the free Forrester research document titled “Topic Overview: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”, by Kyle McNabb and Rob Koplowitz, dated April 24, 2008)!

It’s easy to see why SharePoint 2007 is such a strong contender in the enterprise collaboration space, when you realize that it combines messaging, social computing, real time collaboration and virtual team workspaces.

I am currently working on developing a plan and strategy for collaboration for a client and it’s all about leveraging the power of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (SharePoint 2007) to increase employee productivity and connect seamlessly to people, knowledge and data to help employees make better informed decisions so that they can serve their customers more effectively.

SharePoint 2007 provides blogs and wikis as site templates so that you can easily create those as needed. The People Finder can help you locate people based on different directory level attributes and the neat thing is you can find people based on skills or expertise that they have specified in their user profiles. People and group lists are readily accessible depending on user privileges and presence information is available as well. Real Time Presence and Communication is enabled wherever the real-time presence smart tag icon displays. In conjunction with Live Meeting 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, this makes for a very powerful collaboration tool.

In the messaging space, the tight integration between Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 allows you to take offline an entire library so you can work disconnected from the network. Also your SharePoint tasks can display right alongside your Outlook tasks. Alerts that you set up on your SharePoint site automatically send you email notifications. Discussion boards are email enabled so users can save their email as part of a threaded discussion. Also, lists and libraries can be email enabled so as to allow users to email a document directly into a library. There is an RSS viewer web part with which you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Furthermore, every list and library in SharePoint 2007 is RSS enabled, so you can subscribe to the contents of a list or library via RSS.

When it comes to virtual team workspaces, SharePoint 2007 provides several different site templates out of the box. Apart from this, Microsoft has released 40 site templates that cater to commonly used functionality such as vacation scheduling, contacts list management, etc. Furthermore, it is very easy to create a custom site template – once you configure your site to work just the way you want, you can easily save that as a site template so you can now reuse that as needed. These virtual team workspaces provide a repository for lists of items, libraries of documents, announcements, online calendars, surveys, task and issue lists, project tasks list with Gantt chart functionality, and task coordination using simple workflows. Lists and libraries can enforce security at the item level and they also provide versioning, explicit check in/check out, content approval before publishing, etc.  These team workspaces can be also be secured at an individual or group level. SharePoint 2007 makes it possible to easily create no-code, declarative, sequential workflows based on business rules using the SharePoint Designer 2007 tool. Combine SharePoint 2007 with Groove 2007 for collaborating across organizational boundaries, whether connected or offline and now you have an even more compelling scenario of use.

So all in all, it makes sense that the adoption of SharePoint 2007 is so pervasive!

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Collaboration and Search

May 5, 2008

We collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal, sharing knowledge and ideas and creating content in the process. Often times in a business, people are collaborating around a certain issue that needs addressing or improvement or maybe brain-storming ideas to come up with a new solution or collaborating around a certain task. Typically, as people collaborate, content gets created in the form of an email or a document or a discussion thread or a virtual workspace or a wiki or other similar mechanism. While the collaboration activity is at its peak, it’s probably easier to keep track of this content. However, the further removed one is from the actual activity, the harder it becomes to know or remember where something might be found. And ultimately for the business, all of this content could be considered assets that need to be easily and quickly retrieved.

Collaboration by its very nature creates a lot of unstructured content. Given that there isn’t a pre-defined structure, how does one go about quickly locating relevant information? It’s quite possible that the one who is looking for something might not even know where the information might reside. Is it on a file system or in a virtual team workspace or in a discussion thread or in a wiki? Also, it’s quite possible that the unstructured content that is created was actually pertaining to some structured content out in a database or a line-of-business application. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to search and reference that information as well?

IDC estimates that information workers spend on average 48% of their time searching for and analyzing information, (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively) which costs an organization $28,000 per worker per year (see “The Hidden Costs of Information Work”, IDC April 2006)

As mentioned last week, I’m going to look at some of the capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (referred to in the future as SharePoint 2007) which make it such a strong contender in the Enterprise 2.0 space. With SharePoint 2007, you are able to search both structured and unstructured data and quickly find the information you might be looking for. You can search content on your file shares, your internet and intranet web sites, IBM Lotus Notes repositories, Microsoft Exchange Public folders, and of course, SharePoint sites. You can also find information stored in databases and backend Line of Business systems, such as ERP and CRM. Not only this, but you can also search for people in your organization and identify those who might have the required expertise to get a job done. The best part about SharePoint search is that it returns security-trimmed results, so that a user only gets to see what they’ve been previously authorized to see. The search experience in SharePoint 2007 is highly customizable as well so that one can display best bets, eliminate noise words, and customize the display of search results and do so much more. Another highly useful feature is that there is really no preset document limit unlike other well-known search products.

An Enterprise Search feature pack is expected soon which is going to further enhance the Search experience with SharePoint and incorporate some of the powerful functionality found in Microsoft Search Server 2008, which Forrester Research has labeled as a Disruptor in Enterprise Search (see Microsoft: Latest Disruptor in Enterprise Search). Also, with Microsoft’s acquisition of FAST earlier this year (see Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology, 2007), which Microsoft plans to integrate into SharePoint Search, it’s going to make the already powerful SharePoint search experience even more so. It’s worth noting too that other software vendors have also recognized the power of SharePoint Search and are integrating their products with SharePoint to leverage its powerful search functionality (for example, look at this news article about an open source collaboration vendor integrating with SharePoint for its Search functionality).

So with SharePoint 2007, you can pretty much assume that you will be able to search and retrieve the content you’re looking for. For more details, look at Enterprise Search from Microsoft.

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Of Web 2.0 and SharePoint 2007

April 28, 2008

            Web 2.0 made a big bang in 2007 advocating and offering new avenues for information worker collaboration to increase their productivity. Forrester Research expects that “adoption of social networking solutions for business” will “accelerate dramatically in 2008 with many firms looking for internal social networking solutions”.

            Web 2.0 in the enterprise is now here and companies, big and small, are having to figure out how best to deal with it. Technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS, instant messaging, surveys, team workspaces, web conferencing, mashups and the like have grown immensely in popularity. In many cases, employees have figured out for themselves how to accomplish their work more efficiently using such technologies without formal offerings or support from their companies, and so it has now become imperative that businesses and especially their IT departments seriously consider how they are going to support this growing need for social computing in their organizations.

            One of the primary contenders in the enterprise web 2.0 space is SharePoint 2007 from Microsoft. In the short period of a year since it was first released, SharePoint 2007 has generated over $1 billion in sales for Microsoft and has become their fastest selling server product ever. Industry analysts such as G. Oliver Young of Forrester Research say that “Microsoft’s SharePoint will continue to steamroll the market” in the enterprise Web 2.0 space (see Forrester Research’s “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” by G. Oliver Young, January 25, 2008). He also says that “for SharePoint, 2008 will be another banner year.” Forrester also expects that the IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first.

            For Lucrum, SharePoint 2007 is currently a cornerstone of our collaboration strategy. In subsequent blogs, I plan to spell out in greater detail those aspects of SharePoint 2007 that make it such a strong contender in the enterprise web 2.0 space. Of course, one cannot assume that SharePoint is the holy grail of social computing and it is what everyone needs - depending on the customer’s needs and environment, it’s possible that other tools might be better suited for them.

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