Susan Hanley's blog

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. 

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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:

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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. 

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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.  

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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

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“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. 

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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?  ...

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One of the biggest challenges new SharePoint users have to overcome is breaking their information storage paradigms and understanding the concepts of metadata versus physical folders.  One of my clients has found a terrific 5 minute video on You Tube that does a fantastic job of setting the stage for the new information paradigm introduced in SharePoint and really, on the web itself.  We’ve been playing the video to kick off every design review session with end users.  Check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM.

Using Meeting Workspaces to organize all the information need to support recurring (and one time) meetings is one of my favorite features of SharePoint.  However, while the concept of a meeting workspace is usually very appealing to users, when they actually try to use them in practice, I haven’t always found a lot of success, particularly for companies where Outlook isn’t their e-mail client.  Part of the issue has been developing a good framework for where the workspaces should “live” in the navigational hierarchy of a portal or team site.  I thought I’d share a solution we’re about to deploy at one of my clients that users seem to really like.

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Looks like  the topic of becoming friends with your children in Facebook has “legs.”  Today’s Washington Post has a cover story by Lori Aratani on this very topic.  There is at least one Facebook group called “No Parents on Facebook” so I guess there is more to come on this subject (and my daughter is clearly not alone in her desire to keep parents out of “her” territory).  Here’s a link to the article in the Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030801034.html.

At the SharePoint Conference yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of two new tools that help engage end users and promote SharePoint adoption:

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Microsoft just announced that they will offer SharePoint in an online subscription-based model for companies with fewer than 5,000 users.  I haven’t seen how this will be priced yet, but this is a really terrific boost for small businesses or departments within larger enterprises who want to leverage SharePoint capabilities quickly and easily.  I strongly caution that Microsoft’s statement that you can go from " zero to SharePoint in 60 seconds" is basically absurd (see http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/03/0

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There is a nice collection of links recently posted on the “official blog of the SharePoint product group” -http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2008/02/22/deploying-microsoft-office-sharepoint-server-2007-geographically.aspx.  I was particularly interested in the article recommending a design for a global information architecture and governance.  The article is good, but really doesn’t address the especially challenging issues of managing a global metadata architecture across multiple site collections since Content Types and Site Columns cannot be shared

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I really enjoyed Jakob Nielsen’s Alert Box post yesterday (I admit it, he’s a much more reliable blogger than I am!).  [http://www.useit.com/alertbox/application-mistakes.html]  The primary topic was the Top 10 Application Design Mistakes but one point really struck home – his view that no developer “should be allowed to work on an application unless they've spent a day observing a few end users.”  I couldn’t agree more.  Nielsen goes on to say that “requirements specifications are always wrong.”  Here, I think he doesn’t go far enough.  I would argue

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I’ve had some interesting follow up conversations regarding the issues covered in my last post.  I spent some time checking in with some of my executive recruiter friends.  I wanted to verify whether the professional recruiters I knew actually used Facebook and/or My Space to check references for (or find)  potential candidates.  Interestingly enough, while everyone I spoke to said that they knew about the sites and thought they might check them in the future, no one actually used them yet. 

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The Wall Street Journal had several articles about how recruiters are using the internet to uncover “digital dirt” about applicants by looking at their My Space pages and about the issues associated with accepting a Facebook “friend” request from your boss that resulted in some interesting conversation at the Hanley dinner table.  (A “friend” request in Facebook creates a link between you and your friend and makes it possible for you to see more information about that person).  Over Winter break, all three of my children were home - a high school sophomore, a college junior, and a first year graduate student – and I brought up these articles one night.

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This week, I had an opportunity to speak at a conference for association executives in Washington, D.C. I talked about the importance of portal strategy - thinking about your business objectives, metrics, communications and training plan, information architecture and governance model - and why it's critical to do this before you get too far along in your deployment. The discussion, even though they had me as the very last time slot - right before the beer on a Friday afternoon - was very engaging, One of the more interesting questions I got was, "Is the development of an effective strategy, communications plan, training plan, governance plan, etc.

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I’ve written about this topic before, but it’s once again on my mind as I am working with clients with multiple (in some cases greater than 5) layers of documents stored in a virtually unusable folder hierarchies who want to migrate to SharePoint.  With no guidance, users will naturally migrate their existing hierarchies of folders in to SharePoint and, if all the folders have nice long names, it’s going to be very easy to hit the 255 character maximum length for a URL within SharePoint.

So, what do designers need to do?

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One of the biggest challenges with a large scale deployment of SharePoint is figuring out an effective communications and training plan.  This includes teaching people how to use the sites that you create for them and in a large organization, it also includes teaching folks across the organization about how SharePoint can enable their business.

Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned on this topic:

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Here’s a great resource for SharePoint tips: http://www.officesharepointpro.com.  (This site used to be called MSD2D.)  This is a great site to find and post answers to SharePoint questions, but the search could definitely be improved.  If you want to search for the answer to a question, don’t use the search bar on the Home page – you need to navigate to the Forums tab and enter your search question in the search bar on that page.  Not particularly user friendly, but if you navigate first, the search will work.

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