Susan Hanley's blog

It was a dark and stormy night, … well, not really, but in the spirit (pun totally intended) of the upcoming Halloween holiday, I thought I would share a really perplexing SharePoint mystery and my somewhat unsatisfying solution.
 

Read more

Sometimes, it just works that someone else writes something you wish you could … This week, I’d like to share a really thought provoking blog post from Andrew Gent.  (Thanks to Stan Garfield for sharing the link.)  In his blog posting on September 30, 2008 called “The Alternatives to Collaboration,” Andrew starts with a description of three behaviors people use to work with others: collaborating, conspiring, and competing.  He talks about what type of people (in general) trend towards each approach and how to engage people who seem to prefer one particular method.  It’s a thoroughly thought provoking analysis and I’m sure you will find a useful take-away.  Read the full post at: Andrew Gent's Blog.

I am writing this on the plane returning from KM World 2008.  I was at the very first KM World conference, which I’m pretty sure was in October 1998, back when you could go to a conference on Knowledge Management pretty much every month of the year if you wanted to, so it was pretty cool to see how strong this event has remained for the past 10 years.  I enjoyed re-connecting with colleagues I’ve known for a very long time.  One of the most interesting features of this year’s conference on Knowledge Management was the focus and interest in SharePoint.

There were enough presentations specifically on SharePoint that it was featured in the conference program.  In addition, on Friday, there was all-day SharePoint seminar, another indication of the incredible interest in this product.  I was given one of the worst possible time slots in which to deliver my talk, “Secrets of Successful Portal (SharePoint) Implementations” (which is posted on my web site, along with supplemental notes and examples), at the very end of a very long first day, just before the free beer.  One thing I’ve learned about conferences is that you don’t want to be the only thing keeping people from the beer!  Moreover, I flew to San Jose from Washington on a 6 am flight and by the time I gave my talk, it was actually 7:15 pm on my body clock and I was pretty exhausted.  I was shocked when close to 100 people showed up and when I challenged the group to ask me a lot of questions so that I’d stay awake and they would stay engaged, they exceeded my expectations and we had a lively dialogue, which was much more fun for me than “death by PowerPoint” (not that I would ever do that, of course).

Read more

This week, I read a really great white paper from Microsoft called “How to Get the Most Value from Social Computing for Business with Microsoft.”  The author provides a nice overview of social computing and then describes how existing features of SharePoint support each of the various elements.  It may not be the definitive answer to the “I want Facebook for the enterprise” question, but it does a good job providing insights into how to leverage existing technology to achieve the outcomes that executives really want when they ask for “Facebook for just us.”

Neither is acceptable if you ask me!  This week, I had an opportunity to attend an AIIM seminar in Washington, D.C. with the intriguing title, “Is SharePoint Enough? Automating Document Centric Processes.”  From the detailed description, my expectation was that I would learn about image capture hardware and software technologies that complement SharePoint.  This is relevant for one of my current engagements so it seemed like a worthwhile investment of my time.  For the most part, I saw really cool hardware and listened to interesting case study presentations.  The one exception was one where the “performance” by the presenter/vendor reminded me of some of the outrageous and fairly nasty attacks one might see in a political campaign.

Read more

This week, I’ve been doing something I don’t normally do – building the SharePoint sites that I typically design.  As I was configuring web parts, I noticed something that I’d never thought about before – when a user hovers over the title of a web part, the default “help” message that is displayed can be very confusing and should be something that you think about as part of your site design .   For lists and libraries, the help message for the web part is picked up from the Description entered for the list.  If you enter a meaningful description when you create the list or library, it will automatically be displayed in the hover message in the web part.  If you want a different “hover” message, you can edit the Description in the web part (found in the Description fi

Read more

Two weeks ago, exactly two days before my birthday, I checked in to the Omni Severin hotel in Indianapolis, one of two hotels I frequently use during my weekly business trips to Indy.  Recently, I’d been staying at the Embassy Suites to beef up my Hilton Honors status but since it was sold out, I was back at my other regular hotel.  When I picked up my key, I noticed that the room was on the Penthouse level, but I’ve stayed up there before and the rooms were exactly the same as other floors so I didn’t think much about it.  That is, until I got off the elevator and saw that my room had a name – the City View Suite.

Read more

Following up on the advice of someone who replied to my iPhone 3G post, I added the iPod touch to my birthday wish list – all of the fun of the iPhone 3G without the risk of actually depending on the device to do anything critical – like provide mobile access to my e-mail, calendar, and contacts no matter where I am.  On Friday of last week, I got my wish and spent the weekend playing with the new iPod Touch – the fun apps from the iPhone but no expectations about successfully managing my calendar or contacts, which are still happily synchronizing with my BlackBerry Pearl.  That is, until I applied the latest upgrades to iTunes and the iPhone/iPod touch software.

Read more

I have to admit, I am sort of intrigued by this concept (but not necessarily in a good way) but I wonder if this is just another way to avoid people connections for the generation growing up on Facebook, Xbox Live, and text messages.  On August 2, Matt Richtel in the New York Times wrote about Slydial, a service that allows you to essentially go directly to voice mail when you make a phone call.  It’s almost like sending an e-mail over the phone – no human interaction and the person can retrieve it whenever they want.

Read more

Last summer, I wrote a blog post about e-mail overload and I shared some ideas I’d collected about how to stop swimming in e-mail.  Recently, Jonathan Spira, CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex, wrote a great article about this topic in his weekly Basex:TechWatch newsletter.  I asked Jonathan if his regular articles were posted as blog entries that I could link to but at least for now, they are not.  However, Jonathan has given me permission to reprint his excellent commentary below.  The Basex: TechWatch is a great summary of what is going on in the collaboration, portal, knowledge and content management space and Jonathan’s introductory commentary is always thought provoking.  I encourage interested readers to subscribe to Basex:Tec

Read more

Thanks to SharePoint rock star Keith Mayer of BrightPlanIT for helping to find an end-user friendly way to add some fun to a SharePoint team site (and Daniel Cohen-Dumani of Portal Solutions for helping me fix a problem in step 3 that is corrected below).  We’re working in an environment where some of the SharePoint web parts (like the Data Filter) are blocked and a team wanted to show “this month’s birthdays” on the home page of their site.  We needed to find an approach that would not involve any “custom code” and could be implemented by an end user.

Here is the approach:

Read more

Judging by the amount of traffic (and comments) on my post regarding my iPhone 3G experience, I guess I may have hit on a topic about which no one is neutral!  Some of the comments have been funny, some very helpful, and some just plain nasty.  I’ve enjoyed the first two types and I’m choosing to ignore the third.  Here’s a summary and some feedback:

Read more

I have no excuses – I should have known better than to let my gadget envy get the better of me.  But, with all the new way cool features added to the iPhone 3G and the fact that my existing AT&T plan allowed me to upgrade at $199, I decided to join the other crazies in line last Saturday afternoon and spend 2 hours to get my hands on a new iPhone 3G.  I’ve spent more than 20 hours since then trying to get it to do what I needed it to do (i.e., synchronize with Outlook, stay charged up for more than a day, not die when I touch a button, etc.) and then I spent another 3 hours yesterday trying to return it.  For more about why I now feel like a moron, read on…

Why did I give up?

Read more

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my number one recommended summer reading book – Groundswell, by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, should be the first book you read this summer if you are interested in the collaboration space.  It’s about as current as it gets.  However, if you are interested in a really good foundation for understanding knowledge management, here are some other great books you should consider for your summer book bag.

Read more

I highly recommend this post from Sadie Van Buren’s blog.  Sadie is a SharePoint consultant at Knowledge Management Associates.  She’s got some really helpful insights on topics that I’ve also covered in this space (though her insights are often better than mine!) and some additional technical insights and links that are very interesting.

Read more

Every magazine I’ve read this month includes a list of recommended summer reading.  I was recently asked to recommend a reading list for Knowledge Management by a colleague and I had planned to post it this week, but one book I’ve read recently deserves a mention of its own so I’m going to recommend this book first and then follow up with a broader list of background reading.  Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (published by Harvard Business Press) is a must read for anyone who wants to get a good understanding of “social technologies” and what they mean for your business. 

Read more

I’ve been having a really interesting discussion via e-mail this week with John Cox and he’s been posting the dialogue to his blog post: iPhone opens up enterprise SharePoint sites.  Consultant Steve Bell has found that he has been able to get full WSS access on sites he is developing for a client from the Safari browser on his iPhone.  He writes about this on his blog and shows a really cool picture of a fully rendered WSS site on his iPhone. 

Read more

One of the most confusing end user areas in SharePoint is site and content security. There are so many places where security can be applied and no easy way to show, in one report, which user or group has access to which securable object in a site collection. Moreover, the concept of security groups, while critical to security success, can be very confusing to end users - especially when you need to combine Active Directory groups with SharePoint groups.

Read more

One challenge that large enterprises have with SharePoint deployments is deciding how much control to put in the hands of end users when it comes to creating and managing MOSS 2007 sites. Some organizations tightly lock down control - which completely defeats the value proposition for SharePoint, effectively creating a full employment act for IT. Others, once sites (or site collections) are created by IT, let users have complete and total control - which sounds very empowering, but has some implications that need to be well understood. I definitely prefer the latter approach, but here are a few insights that can help make this approach feasible.

Read more

My home network crashed twice this week, leaving me without internet connectivity for short periods of time while I diagnosed and repaired the problems.  It has made me more aware of how much of my world is dependent on persistent connectivity.  I’m not an “internet explorer” – I tend to learn about services and solutions from three primary sources: my son Brian, a phD student at MIT, Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, and David Pogue of the New York Times. 

Read more

Last week, I had a chance to take a high level look at one of the software tools that can be used to automate the migration of file shares, SPS 2003, and other content into document libraries in MOSS 2007 – Metalogix.  Rasool Rayani, founder and principal, gave me personal demo, generously allowing me to completely direct the conversation so that I could research some issues for a couple current clients.  It has some impressive capabilities, but using at tool does not free you from all the work involved in content migration. 

Read more

This week, it seems like I’ve seen more than the usual number of articles about Windows Vista – not to mention a new “country western song” variation of the MAC vs.

Read more

According to the statistics on my blog site, I’ve been writing this blog for a little more than a year (one year and 2 weeks, to be exact).  I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the joys and sorrows of writing a blog in this forum.

On the plus side, it’s nice to write a blog in a forum that gives you instant credibility and where someone actually promotes you.

Read more

I saw this on a bumper sticker this morning and it really made me laugh.  My “company” is three years old this week and when I started the practice, my friend Rob told me that I would never again want to hear the four-letter word B-O-S-S.  While I often miss the camaraderie and learning (and tech support) that I used to have when I worked at AMS and then Dell, I do enjoy always getting the “employee of the month” parking space that comes with being an independent consultant.  I’ve built a network of colleagues and clients who make me feel like I’m part of a much larger enterprise so I haven’t really experienced much of the downsides - yet. 

Read more

I have several clients who are in the process of moving their existing intranet content to SharePoint.  In one case, they are moving html pages and Notes databases and in another, they are moving all html pages.  I was asked to provide some recommendations on what should be stored as content (page) vs. what should be turned into a document and stored in a document library in a SharePoint site that whose primary purpose is communications or publishing (as opposed to collaboration).  Here are some recommended practices:

Read more

There is a great article in the April 21, 2008 issue of Information Week magazine that talks about how organizations need to think about “irresistible” Web 2.0 collaboration tools and their impact on IT.  (Holy Web 2.0 – Cat Herding Nightmare by Andrew Conry-Murray) It’s really good reading for anyone responsible or involved in corporate IT because, as the author states: “Fact is, users will find ways to make their working lives more convenient – with or without the input of IT. 

Read more

Several of the really interesting discussions I had at last week’s SharePoint Summit in Montreal were about encouraging user adoption of new SharePoint collaboration sites.  I shared a few of my favorite techniques, some of which I’ve written about before and will summarize below, but I need to give credit to a very clever approach developed by Todd Bleeker of Mindsharp.  Todd’s got a web part that “snows” on your site.  It’s really cool and the snowflake image can be changed to pretty much anything you want to make it more aligned with your business.  

Read more

This week, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote talk at the SharePoint Summit 2008 in Montreal, Canada.  More than half the presentations were in French, including some of the ones that were supposed to be in English.  I actually studied for a winter term at the University of Montreal many, many years ago and I’ve been to France recently, but that really didn’t help me understand more than about 20% of the presentations that weren’t in English.  However, I was delighted to learn that in a room of close to 300 techies, there were a surprising number of people who are convinced, as I am that the biggest challenges with SharePoint deployments are in the change management f

Read more

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”  This could not be truer than when working with a business team to design their SharePoint site.  Today, I had the privilege of working with a client business team that had defined an outstanding set of business processes for managing their collaboration content.  But, they were struggling with defining the best approach for managing their content, which has both internal and external users and some requirement for security and many competing requirements for sorting and classifying metadata. 

Read more

After a week of fantastic spring break skiing at Whistler in British Columbia, I returned to work and was reminded that training alone is not enough to help users successfully build their own SharePoint collaboration sites.  It’s a bit like my friend Drew describes learning to snowboard, which he says is “easy to learn but difficult to master.”  I’m now convinced that SharePoint has this same characteristic – easy to learn but very difficult to master.  Why?  ...

Read more