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SharePoint Governance: To get started, it’s important to have the right conversations!
Just like pretty much everything else when it comes to successful technology solutions, the focus of governance planning for SharePoint needs to start with the business outcomes you are trying to enable. Understanding your business outcome goals are the first step to figuring out how to even think about governance for SharePoint. Once you understand the vision and outcome goals for your solution, you can define your governance plan to help you achieve them. Read more
Practice Safe Search: 10 Essential SharePoint 2013 Search Hints
A recent Nielsen Norman Alertbox post talked about how most "users are incredibly bad at finding and researching things on the web." The article mentions that most users have learned to limit their use of search on intranets because intranet search is so poorly implemented. I have also found this to be true. SharePoint 2013's search engine allows search designers to truly optimize the search experience for users, provided that sufficient time is allocated to designing and implementing search. Read more
SharePoint 2010 vs. 2013 Feature Comparison Summary for Business Users
Recently, I was asked to document a summary list of the key differences between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 from the perspective of the business user. Clearly, the modern UI of SharePoint 2013 provides an engaging user experience, but that won’t be enough to explain to your users about how their day-to-day experiences with SharePoint might be improved with an upgrade to 2013. Read more
10 Key Things You Need to Know About SharePoint 2013 Community Sites
The new Community site template in SharePoint 2013 provides some really cool capabilities to promote and encourage collaboration for organizational communities. I considered two alternate titles for this blog post: "Member, member - who is a Member?" and "Will the real Member please stand up?" The reason is because one of the key nuances for SharePoint 2013 Community sites is that Members in Community Sites are not the same as Members in Team Sites - and you need to understand the difference if you want to avoid the "security cliff" in Community sites. Read more
How do I ask you? Let me count the ways – Multiple ways to have conversations in SharePoint 2013
For the past four months, I've spent a lot of time focused on conversations and communities. I have a client in the early adopter program for SharePoint 2013 and we've been piloting a replacement for their current listservs with SharePoint 2013 community sites. Read more
Let’s Play! Using Gamification to Encourage KM and Collaboration
Games were an interesting theme at KM World 2012 this week. Read more
SharePoint and Office 2013 Release to Manufacturing: Let the Conferences Begin!
Yesterday, October 11, 2012, was a big day for the Microsoft Office engineering team as the Office 2013 suite, which includes SharePoint 2013, was released to manufacturing. General availability will not be until the first quarter of 2013, but some customers and IT professionals and developers with TechNet or MSDN subscriptions will be able to get access in mid-November. Read more
Upgrading to the iPhone 5? Eight Simple Steps to Make the Upgrade Easier
I was one of the "lucky" people to score a new iPhone 5 on the first day but if you weren't, then you might actually be even more lucky - because it took me more than four hours to activate my phone due to the millions of other people trying to do it at the same time. The upgrade process was more or less seamless once I could activate the phone with Apple, but I learned a few lessons that might be helpful to others - especially if you have any old voice mail messages that you want to preserve before you upgrade to your new phone. Read more
So, you want to be in the movies? Or just use them on your intranet? Check out Video Nation
Virtually every company I work with these days wants to be able to share video content on their intranet. The reasons are broad - messages from the CEO, introducing new intranet features, training, and sharing best practices, experiences, and "culture stories." The equipment is ubiquitous - almost everyone has a pretty decent video camera in their cell phone. Read more
10 Essential SharePoint Search Hints
I'm on a mission - I want to make sure that all SharePoint guidance (or the other G-word, governance) plans include training about a key information literacy skill: the ability to execute an effective online search. Improving "findability" is a key outcome goal for most SharePoint deployments. We often talk about metadata as the key to improving findability. But, to paraphrase a common expression, it's not just about having all your fish tagged so that they can be found, it's still about teaching people how to fish. Read more
Designing SharePoint Solutions: Start with the business problem and look backwards!
This week, my friends from Microsoft invited me to participate in a customer meeting at one of the Microsoft Technology Centers. The challenge: helping a large global organization new to SharePoint understand the information architecture and design trade-offs for deploying SharePoint to support distributed teams. The overwhelming theme was the following: if you want to make the best possible design decisions, start with the business problem and work backwards. Read more
Iron SharePoint at the SharePoint Summit: What can you do and learn in 3 days?
Last week, we wrapped up an incredible Iron SharePoint competition at the SharePoint Summit in Toronto. I had the honor of serving as a judge for the second time and though we selected a well-deserved overall winner - the G-Niuses from GSoft Group, every one of the warrior teams did an amazing job worthy of major kudos. Read more
SharePoint Governance (again) – is it time for a new “G” word or just an expanded definition?
Simple Naming Conventions that Improve End User Experience in SharePoint Sites
Inspired by a great blog post by Veronique Palmer about removing %20's from your SharePoint URL's, I've decided to document some additional naming convention best practices that improve the user experience for SharePoint end users and power users alike. The tips are grouped by permissions because not every user has the power to apply these best practices.
If you don't want to read all the details, here are my recommended naming conventions in three sentences: Read more
Where are the SharePoint solutions in Nielsen Norman Group's “10 Best Intranets” for 2012?
Earlier this month, Nielsen Norman Group released their annual list of the 10 best intranets. In recent years, at least half of the winners featured solutions built on SharePoint. This year, the Intranet Design Annual 2012 includes only 3 intranets based on SharePoint, though an additional two companies use SharePoint for team collaboration. So, what's going on? Read more
Sharing SharePoint at SHARE 2012 Atlanta
In April, I'll be in Atlanta to speak at and participate in the first SHARE conference in the US. Share is the only conference I've seen that is exclusively designed to showcase how business users solve business problems with SharePoint - and so I'm particularly excited to be part of the first US version of this conference following successful events in South Africa and Australia. Read more
SharePoint User Adoption Strategy: Team Member “Service Level Agreement”
User adoption of SharePoint solutions is a challenge for many organizations (and consultants). I've done conference presentations on the topic and Michael Sampson wrote an entire book (which is excellent, by the way). I often talk about what I guess I'd call "macro" adoption strategies - larger scale, company-wide initiatives. Recently, I've been working with clients on more "micro" strategies - specific strategies for individual teams that are almost like service level agreements (SLAs) for team members. Read more
One conference, one person, multiple identities – my SharePoint 2011 Conference experience
I had a unique opportunity to participate in the Microsoft SharePoint conference this past week. I presented two sessions (on Measuring the Value of SharePoint Investments and a Practical Approach to SharePoint 2010 Governance) but, thanks to this blog, I was also invited to the conference as a representative of the press - which meant I got to go to a few extra events and participate in a few one-on-one meetings that were just as interesting as the sessions I went to as an attendee. Basically, I spent the past 4 days as a "Certs" - both a candy and a breath mint! What follows are some of the most interesting insights and experiences I had. Read more
5 reasons why I'm excited to be going to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim #SPC11
In just about a week, I will be headed, along with several thousand other enthusiasts, to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, CA. If you aren't planning to go, here are some of the reasons you might want to join me. Read more
5 Lessons I’ve Learned About How to Create Memorable and Useful SharePoint Governance Plans
I feel like I've worked on a gazillion SharePoint governance plans - or at least half that many - and each time, I think the latest one is the best one. I've definitely learned that the 80-page governance plan document is just that - a document. It doesn't actually help govern a SharePoint deployment, much less provide any type of guidance to SharePoint users. Here are 5 of the lessons I've learned about creating useful and memorable governance plans. Read more
- About Essential SharePoint
Susan Hanley is an independent consultant and president of her own firm, Susan Hanley LLC, where she specializes in helping organizations build effective portal and collaboration solutions using SharePoint as the primary platform.
She is co-author of Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning. Read a free chapter of the book.
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