Last week, I had a chance to get a demo of a cool product for designing and maintaining taxonomies for SharePoint sites called MetaVis Architect. The tool is designed for information architects – people who have the responsibility for designing an information taxonomy for a SharePoint site. Read more
Anyone with “contribute” or “member” privileges for any page of your SharePoint site can be a web content producer. That’s really a great thing, but writing for the web is not the same as writing for print, especially when it comes to Announcements. Here are a few tips for creating great SharePoint Announcements. Read more
For the past month, my laptop (Dell XPS M1210) has been having audio issues - beeping at me when the sound is muted, unable to play You Tube videos or DVDs but able to play songs in iTunes. Windows Media Player message said that "no audio device was installed," which, of course, wasn't true. After hours trying to upgrade drivers, change settings, assign defaults, uninstalling programs I thought might have caused a driver conflict and basically giving up, I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 2 this morning and to my great surprise and delight, everything works perfectly once again! Read more
This week, I had a conversation with a client about creating an “Ask Management” question and answer forum and we debated the appropriateness of using a SharePoint discussion board “out of the box.” The primary question: would the fact that any user could post a response, thereby creating a much broader conversation, but without necessarily only “authoritative” responses, achieve the desired outcome – an open exchange with business leadership and increased “transparency?” Read more
On June 26, 2009, I’m going to give a talk on Governance Planning for SharePoint Solutions at the Washington D.C. SharePoint Users Conference . This event is a great opportunity to learn from and exchange best practices with the DC-area SharePoint community so please join me there if you are in the area. If not, there are some great virtual ways to connect with the growing SharePoint community. Read more
This week, we had a situation where the client had a sign-up sheet for a volunteer activity that she wanted to post to her SharePoint intranet site. Participants needed to edit the document to indicate the tools that they would bring to the service activity. She posted the document to a site where most users had read-only access and then, to ensure that the users could update the sign-up list, she added her entire audience to the Members group on the site without realizing that this didn’t just give them permission to edit the sign-up sheet, but to edit any document or list on the site! Read more
I first wrote about the topic of whether corporate executives should have an internal blog back in February of 2007. I wish I’d seen the Dilbert cartoon on Debbie Weil’s blog back then, but I found it last week so I am sharing it here. It makes my point pretty succinctly: to be useful, an executive blog needs to be authentic. Read more
Back in February, I wrote a post about offering my opinion about why I thought SharePoint investments can be smart – in any economy. Today’s blog post by the Microsoft SharePoint End User Content team provides a link to multiple case studies of real examples of a variety of customers “saving money” by using SharePoint. Read more
In my consulting practice, I’ve found that Meeting Workspaces are one of the least understood (and therefore, least used) features of SharePoint. When users are introduced to them, however, they often become a favorite feature that can help drive solution success, especially when you add a few modifications to the “out of the box” template. Here are some of the most successful practices I’ve seen. Read more
In a strange coincidence, I heard the same end user frustration expressed at two different clients this week. One variation of the complaint: “I just don’t get it – how come when I update the view it doesn’t show up on the home page?” The other: “Why don’t may Announcements expire?” The solutions are pretty simple (see below), but the root cause is my concern: turning over full control privileges without providing sufficient training. Read more
Very happy news for those of us who really never liked the "MOSS" acronym for SharePoint -- Microsoft has announced that the next release of SharePoint, previously known as SharePoint 14, will be called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Read more
We recently had a death in our family on a Wednesday and I had to fly two children home from college quickly for a funeral. Even with airfares incredibly low, I was unable to find any reasonable fares online. I knew that some airlines offer “bereavement fares” and since American Airlines flies direct to DCA from both Boston (son at MIT) and St. Louis (daughter at Wash U), I made one call and received both amazing and sensitive customer service with reasonably affordable flights. Read more
Here we are, still debating the value of a computer science degree - this was a discussion topic even when I graduated from college 30 years ago. The answer, of course, is: it depends. Read more
Planning is the key to a successful SharePoint implementation. Here are three of the more challenging “bears” that you will encounter as you deploy your solution and some suggestion for how to get them “just right.” Read more
Today I would like to rave about the collaboration of two of my favorite gadgets: my iPod Touch and my Amazon Kindle. Read more
This week, we found another oSharePoint mystery at a client site: missing metadata for “referenced” templates in content types. Here’s the scenario: we have several document templates that we want to make available in the standard site for new IT projects. The document templates are for planning, reporting, and requirements traceability (all good practices). The templates are available to project managers at the main project management office (PMO) site but we also want them available to users when they press the “new” button inside a project document library. Read more
If collaboration solutions were a smart investment in 2008, they are even smarter in the recession of 2009. Well architected SharePoint solutions are likely to be one of the smartest investments companies can make to survive and thrive in this challenging economy. Here are a few ideas to help justify or accelerate your SharePoint solution investment and ensure that your investment shows a quick and sustainable return.
Why SharePoint now? Read more
The SharePoint My Site allows users to create a “personal portal” in the corporate SharePoint environment. Some organizations expect users to use the My Site to replace their private C: drives – the My Site is backed up and therefore, content won’t be lost, and optionally, users can share their personal content with colleagues very easily, increasing knowledge transfer and decreasing the requirement to e-mail content back and forth within the organization. Read more
In February 2001, Tom Stewart wrote a great essay in Fortune with the title of this post. I read another article today with a similar title: Corporate Karaoke: How to keep a presentation alive without PowerPoint. I thought about Tom’s article earlier this week when I was sitting at a conference getting ready to give my talk about po Read more
For several years, I’ve been using Visio with custom templates designed to represent every possible web part in MOSS 2007. I spent a lot of time maintaining them for my own use but I will share them with clients as part of a design engagement. They work pretty well and are very comprehensive. This week, I’ve been testing a really cool and fun tool that, while not specifically for SharePoint, creates a much more engaging result than Visio – Balsamiq Mockups. Read more
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Hanley is an independent consultant and president of her own firm, Susan Hanley LLC, where she specializes in the design and development of portal solutions and knowledge management consulting.
She is co-author of Essential SharePoint 2007: Delivering High-Impact Collaboration. Read a free chapter of the book.
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