SharePoint Best Practices or Bad Practices?!

I like Adam Bruenz post here which is entitled ’When-Best-Practices-Aren’t-Best-Practices’, which provides a interesting and thought provoking view, and is a topic that is increasingly prevalent on many blogs in the SharePoint community – SharePoint Best Practices.

In short, you should not implement ‘Best Practice’ methods even if they have the mighty Microsoft name to them, until you have weighed up the pro’s and con’s of it.

Just because so called leading bloggers say you should do it a certain way means you have to, you don’t. But you should understand why they say they are the best way to do a certain task or take a particular approach.

Remember, they may not have worked in your industry or you may not have the same level of resource or skills levels needed to support such approaches or importantly they might not have experienced your type of organisational ‘cultural challenges’ when defining the best practices.

In SharePoint world, its rarely as straight forward as it seems. So do your homework first!

Regards,

Andrew Walmsley

Practice Manager/Director

WorkShares.

SharePoint Project Managers – Past, Present and Future.

Introduction

Winning and delivering a successful SharePoint project is something that takes time to master, but even then will present experienced SharePoint Project Managers(PMs) with a few surprises along the way. As discussed in the previous article, delivering successful projects can and will be challenging.

This article continues on this theme, but looks not at the challenges PMs face, but presents a view on the background your PMs will need  to help ensure SharePoint projects are successful in the future. This is particularly key for system integrators but also your medium to large business that have these skills in house.

Where we have been & where we are now

Historically, Project Managers delivered traditional client/server infrastructure based solutions such as Exchange, Notes, Novell, Active Directory, or desktop migrations and required a somewhat different skill set to that of Software Development Project Managers, whom delivered bespoke ASP or .Net, Java applications and such like. There are others arguably to a lesser degree in terms of their roles and technical exposure, hence I would described PMs backgrounds of the past and to a large extent present, as having one of the following traits:

1. Infrastructure – Your typical Infrastructure PMs are likely to be former consultants whom have worked on such projects or have a track record in IT Support
2. Software Development – Your typical ‘Software Dev PMs’ are probably a former developer/analyst who have moved into this role and to some extent may still ‘cut the code’ as well
3. Existing Consultant or Developer – Those whom still provide core consultant or developer roles, but mix in some PM type skills
4. Business – Little or no technical ‘hands on’ skills, but may have manage several business driven projects within the business.

Where we will PMs need to be in the future?

It’s well documented by others and in summary here, that the SharePoint product features are vast and the skills needed by a team (yes, notice I didn’t mentioned an individual here!) to design, deploy and support a SharePoint environment (medium to large businesses) are significant and will not be held within one individual, (those whom purport to say they do should be escorted off the premises and are simply not credible!).

So its with this view in mind, that I think SharePoint Project Managers of the future will potentially need a blend of all the above traits mentioned, but realistically that person does not exist.

I think in future SharePoint PMs will need to have a background in BOTH 1 and 2 above. If they are from either one area, be prepared for some mistakes as they get to grips with the different challenges that they will not have experienced previously in their other roles. This will be in areas such as budgeting, large farm deployments, release management, migration, accessibility, web design, and deployment.

Those whom sit within 3 will I think continue to struggle (to the projects detriment) to handle such a multi-faceted role as the project scope and duration gets to big for them and will need to make a decision where their career/ambitions lie in terms of the role they wish to focus upon. The simple reason being is that SharePoint is too big now to keep up with in overall in detail, let alone what it will be like in the next release.

Those in area 4, well, it’s going to be a very very steep learning curve and an expensive one! Arguably businesses should not put important projects into the hands of such individuals and is asking for trouble. Though I hasten to add such resources are still valuable and can be used on SharePoint projects. Especially when you are defining your launch activities, user adoption and overall governance. Such experience, awareness and knowledge about key sponsors, cultural challenges and business processes is a critical element of your planning.

Regards,

Andrew Walmsley

Practice Manager/Director

WorkShares

www.workshares.co.uk

Successful SharePoint Projects, Myth or Reality?

I wrote an article and published it over on the recently launched ‘SharePoint Magazine by Arno Nel.

With the growing interest in deploying SharePoint (MOSS and WSS) across all manor of businesses and organisations, the article looks at the general topic areas they should look into to avoid disappointment and ensure their investment reaps the expected rewards.

Drawing upon 7 or so years in winning and managing SharePoint projects into medium to large businesses, hopefully you will find it a useful ‘heads up’.

Regards,

Andrew Walmsley

Director

WorkShares

www.workshares.co.uk

Choosing the right SharePoint resources

In addition to this article I wrote recently, SharePoint Consultant/Developer Required….No!, I also responded to a posting on the ever popular LinkedIn site called ‘What skills are you looking for when hiring/recruiting a SharePoint Consultant?’.

Since receiving positive comments from others following this posting, it has be referred to in others work, including that of the white paper by Julie Pfahl, of Syntapa.

An interesting and although not exhaustive piece of research, nevertheless does highlight some important considerations businesses need to work through as part of their resource planning for a SharePoint based project.

Regards,

Andrew Walmsley

Director

WorkShares

Need offline capability with SharePoint Content?

If you use Microsoft’s SharePoint Services, you’ll be pleased to hear there are simple and affordable ways of taking your content offline, perhaps for your remote workers.

A much unheard of, but in my view powerful collaborative feature is that of Outlook 2007’s capability to  take anything in a SharePoint list or document library  (they are for all intents and purposes one in the same) offline and sync up upon your return to the office.

Simply pull the drop down ‘Actions’ option from the list or library concerned, select ‘Connect to Outlook’ and follow the instructions:

You will be asked basically to confirm your request:

And after syncing, your documents will be located inside Outlook for you to take away, update and or just read.

You do need to be using Windows SharePoint Services version 3.0 AND Outlook 2007 for this to work, but is I think I great partnership for people whom work away from the office a lot.

Other tools out there are available at different prices/functionality including Colligio’s ‘free’ reader only product – nice for just viewing content offline.

WSS V3 Search just got better!

One of the limitations with Windows SharePoint Services search is that the search at the top of your site it is limited to the site collection in terms of the data it is able to retrieve. This is frustrating if you have designed and deployed best practice methods for managing multiple site collections to better manage your data, recovery and content segregation.

What this meant to some users whom deployed several site collections is that they had to go to each ‘top level site’ and search from there to get results or purchase a 3rd party tool. It also didn’t search other storage repositories, web sites, file shares, etc.

Well no more, with the release of Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express (SSE): More details here from Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/serverproducts/searchserverexpress/default.aspx

Oh, and by the way, it is FREE!

There are limitations with the express product, one of which is that it can only be installed on 1 machine, hence not scalable for farm deployments, and recommend you review the detailed planning considerations/upgrade paths before you deploy as adding such powerful indexing/search capabilities will create large index files that need to be managed and considered as part of your environment.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb891933.aspx

Regards,

WorkShares Team.

Technorati Tags: wss,sharepoint,search.

SharePoint Consultant/Developer Required….No!

At WorkShares and with my wider work with others, I often get enquires from recruitment agencies either pushing the CV of an ‘experienced SharePoint Developer/Consultant’ they have or asking if they can provide me with an exclusive contract to supply such resources to my business. Similarly, a quick review of the job sites out there also advertise such roles and confirms my suspicions.

I am unsure whether this is because businesses are demanding such roles due to budget constraints or is it more likely that agencies are advising that the two roles can/should be combined and this is what they need…

The former I can understand, the latter is nothing short of bad advice/bad practice and speaks of a complete lack of understanding about the skill sets required and demands placed upon the different roles that should make up a SharePoint project team.

Recruiters  have no, I repeat, NO real world experience of the skills and experience need to  design, build implement and support SharePoint projects. So why trust them when they push critical roles combined into one person on a project that is typically high profile within businesses? On what basis can you trust their advice?

Bluntly, they get paid put bodies on seats, which just so happens to be a SharePoint project but could easily be an Exchange migration or network upgrade project. To them, it seems to matter little in terms of the way they are recruited. Simplistic, ‘ticks in boxes’ is a term often that springs to mind when I think about the methods I am sure many agencies employ to source and push CVs to businesses. Though it has to be said a smaller minority are somewhat more sophisticated in their approach to vetting and promote individuals.

This is still however a growing concern for someone like me whom has been involved with SharePoint since 2001 when the product was first released and have since been involved in over 130 SharePoint projects to date. Microsoft SharePoint related deployments are growing, but the availability of good resources and critically the quality of the approach to resourcing of such projects seem to be in decline and isn’t meeting the demands needed by such projects.

For example. If you’re about to attempt a house build, you wouldn’t in your dreams get a brick layer to do the electrics, or a plumber to architect the plans for the house! You would end up with a disaster on your hands, with poor quality build, budget overruns and a project delivered late which completely misses it’s objectives and expectations from the business users. You would end up with a house with no windows, core supporting architecture made of MDF wood, 6 bathrooms, 1 bedroom, no lounge and a roof which leaked and electrics/plumbing which were not built as you ran out of money!

My advice to recruiters is that you have a responsibility to advise your clients of the correct mix of skills they require and to not try and push such critical roles combined into one. It’s in your interest to do this because a successful project will lead to more business…the wrong resource on a project will lead to a less successful project and arguably this will reflect on your organisation from providing the resource.

My advice to organisations about to embark on SharePoint project is to form your team carefully, budget appropriately and manage expectations with the business from day 1. If you seek external resources via recruitment agencies, choose them careful and to challenge them about such combined roles. Those that push Developer/Consultant combination CVs will bring an incredibly high risk to your project deliverables and you should plan, plan and plan again the design and importantly the resourcing of your projects carefully.

Regards,

Andrew Walmsley

Managing Director

WorkShares Limited

Technorati Tags: Moss,wss,workshares,sharepoint,linkedIn

SharePoint Project Management Solution at Kingston Communications – Case Study

WorkShares assisted Kingston Communications with the delivery of a Project Management Workspace Solution, to help them better manage their large programme of work underway within the organisation, affecting several of its businesses in the UK.

The solution utilised the Microsoft® SharePoint® collaborative platform, via a hosted arrangement from Mistral Internet (owned by Kingston Communications). WorkShares provided the design & build consultancy and included knowledge transfer & training prior to making the service live.

Based around their bespoke deployment of the PRINCE 2 methodology, the reusable nature of the solution allows Kingston Communications to provide a central ‘Programme’ workspace in which to then manage the projects, each with its own workspace, but also utilising a consistent set of features and functions.

For the complete case study click on the below link.

Kingston Communications Case Study

Regards,

WorkShares Team.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,wss,project management

What is SharePoint?

Technorati Tags: moss,wss,sharepoint

What is SharePoint?

A question which still comes up from time to time, even though the product(s) have been around now for some time! I thought I would re-post this to help those new to the SharePoint world….:-)

Microsoft® SharePoint® is an enterprise information platform that can be configured to host Intranets, Extranets and more recently Internet sites.  Split into two separate but interrelated products:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (referred to as MOSS)

The main components of SharePoint 2007 are collaboration, portals, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.

Windows SharePoint Services (referred to as WSS)

The main components of WSS are document management, lightweight content management, search, task management and other lists, shared calendars, document workspaces, meeting sub-sites, surveys and discussion board features allowing people & teams to connect and collaborate. 

Original product was release by Microsoft in 2001 and has since had two additional releases in 2003 and more recently in 2007.

An enterprise portal is typically composed of both MOSS and WSS. WSS is typically used by small teams, projects and smaller companies.  MOSS is designed for individuals, teams and projects within a medium to large company wide enterprise portals.

SharePoint® is Microsoft’s fastest selling product aimed at providing a rich platform to manage an organisation’s documents and other information that is historically held in disparate storage such as file shares,email servers and other areas such as those stored with Lotus Notes databases. SharePoint simplifies collaboration and increases efficiency in the workplace by providing a single repository, utilising shared workspaces for users to coordinate schedules, organise documents, collaborate on projects and share information, making the creation, storage and retrieval  easier, more effective and more convenient.

Hosted SharePoint Case Studies Released

WorkShares has gained a lot of experience of working with many well known organisations across the UK, from small businesses, start-ups, to larger enterprises; all of whom have had a common need to provide collaborative solutions for their staff, suppliers or clients alike.

We have provided a few case study samples of our work below as examples of the scope and scale of work we are involved with and hope you find them useful.

WorkShares assisted C J Coleman with a project to introduce an extranet type web presence for its a specialist group of clients across the UK. The solution utilised Microsoft® Windows SharePoint® Services, via a hosted service arrangement from Mistral Internet.  WorkShares provided the design & build consultancy and included knowledge transfer & training, prior to making the service live in March 2007.

The reusable nature of the solution will allow C J Coleman to maximise their investment in the hosted SharePoint platform and provide not only a collaborative platform for its this initial group of clients but also a platform they can re-use for other client markets in the future.

For the complete case study click on the below link.

C J Coleman Case Study

WorkShares provided Capita Business Services with a combined Project Management Office & Shared Workspace solution to help manage their multi-million pound Business Transformation Programme of work with a key local government client.

Utilising Microsoft’s latest SharePoint® technology, the solution provides Capita Business Services and its client, the London Borough of Harrow, with access to a collaborative areas for the creation, storage and retrieval of key documents and information.

WorkShares provided SharePoint advice, design & build consultancy on the solution, which is hosted on a robust, dedicated server environment.

For the complete case study click on the below link.

Capita Business Services Case Study

WorkShares Team