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How to Jump Start Your Governance – Part 2

Originally published on EndUserSharePoint.com

In a previous article, I identified one of the most common questions surrounding the process of implementing a governance mode in the enterprise: How do you begin?

Because SharePoint tends to be a user-driven technology, many companies find themselves in a position of having to retroactively apply metadata rules, refine (or, if they haven’t done so already, define) their taxonomy, and roll out some kind of governance model in an effort to take back control of a quickly expanding (like a wildfire!) SharePoint environment. In the article, I recommended some basic but critical first steps to implementing a governance model:

1. Create an internal SharePoint user group. Gather a group of those who run SharePoint, who are interested in learning about SharePoint, and those who know your business. Meet weekly, monthly – whatever makes sense as you start to put together your plans. Bounce ideas off one another, share responsibilities, but most important of all – incorporate the various perspectives into your plan so that your governance model better matches the culture of your group and company.
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities. Outline the necessary functions to deploy and govern. Figure out what you need at the enterprise, organizational, and site level. Put a process in place (like OARP) to help the decision-making process.
3. Outline your taxonomy, communicate it, and iterate. The point here is to get started. Don’t wait for perfection – outline what you know, roll it out, and let your users refine it as they go. It’s an iterative process that needs ongoing management, so just do your best and let the process work.

Sounds easy, right? It’s all common sense, right? And yet many companies struggle with these concepts. Following on the theme of common sense, I’d like to provide some additional guidance and best practices around jumpstarting your SharePoint governance.

My intent here is not to prescribe a process or outline specific steps, but to give you some ideas, get you thinking, and hopefully add good things to what may already be in motion. Consider the following:

• Have a plan. That’s right – a plan! Listen to the experts, comb through the relevant articles, consider those best practices, and develop a plan based on your organizational and project needs. Help your management team and end users to understand the full scope of the project – that it’s not just about a technical implementation, but that it is also a business process change.
• Understand any regulatory or compliance concerns. Are there any rules or procedures having to do with legal or financial guidelines that may dictate how you setup and/or manage your SharePoint environment? Do you need to maintain audit trails? Reporting? Workflows? Metrics? These items would fall into the scoping and sizing of your project during the planning phase. 
• Be aware of how your metadata, content types, and social media components are to be managed. What is the actual process involved with managing these things? Who owns it? What is the change process? Are you going to try and maintain SLAs? This might be overkill for small businesses, but is critical for larger businesses. A major impact to end user adoption is a long turn-around time for system changes. Some of these activities are simplified within SharePoint 2010 through Managed Metadata Service and Enterprise Term Stores, which allow you to create top-level taxonomy for your entire organization, with sites consuming this taxonomy as a service. Then each site can create its own taxonomy – which other sites may or may not consume as a service. But just remember, SharePoint 2010 does not decrease the need for governance. If anything, the ability for end users to apply their own metadata  will create more work for site and site collection admins, if metadata is to be managed properly.(Microsoft refers to top-down as a ‘taxonomy,’ and a bottom-up or user-define as a ‘folksonomy’) SharePoint 2010 has made strong advances in managing taxonomy and metadata for the enterprise, but it still requires upfront and ongoing work to ensure you have the latest, greatest data.
• Create a governance site. Make your policies visible. When people ask questions, point them to an ever-expanding FAQ list (Use SharePoint! Don’t create yet another document). Update the site regularly. Make it functional, not just a one-time dumping ground for rarely used process documentation. And be sure to constantly refresh your governance site. This should not be a static site, but a working platform from which you manage your process, take suggestions, and change as needed.
• Enlist your portal users and content authors. This goes beyond my advice for creating a user group, and relates to all end users. Give them a voice in the process. Get regular feedback from your business units and content authors. To capture this data, use search metrics, discussion threads, and polls. Once again, capturing data at regular intervals should be part of your initial project planning, as this will also provide a mechanism for reporting back to management on the progress – and success – of your SharePoint deployment. 
• Migrate your content, leverage your metadata. Depending on where you are with your SharePoint environment – just rolling it out, or in the process of revamping/cleaning up your existing system – you may have different tasks in front of you. There are a number of approaches to upgrade or migration, either manually or using third-party tools. Whatever the approach, be sure to follow your newly-defined taxonomy. You’ve taken all that time to outline your taxonomy and complex metadata structure, it’s only fitting that you actually use it. Update as you go, propagate your changes, and keep the feedback loop with your end users running.
• Learn and evolve – Nothing is set in stone. Portals evolve – and so will the taxonomy. You’ll rarely get it right on the first try, but you’ll lose time and productivity the longer you sit idle, so the key is to take action and iterate, iterate, iterate. 

Hopefully this guidance is useful, and helps you to take action. My advice on how to move forward remains the same: keep your governance model simple, let your processes grow and develop organically, and keep your end users in the loop. If they understand the governance model, they’ll use it. If you are transparent about the process, and can quickly respond to user requests and changing business needs because you’ve kept it simple, they’ll trust it. And if they’re using the application and trusting the change process, your management team is more likely to view your overall SharePoint efforts as a success.

Good luck.

SharePoint Saturday – Hello California!

Just wanted to post something quickly to push people toward these two events that I am helping to bring to fruition: SharePoint Saturday East Bay and SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles, both taking place in September. These are free events for SharePoint newbies and seasoned developers alike, and I welcome everyone to register and attend.

What is SharePoint Saturday? SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative and lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-oriented topics. SharePoint Saturday is always FREE, open to the public, and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint.

Sponsorships are just about filled up in Northern California, but wide open (as of this posting) in Southern California.  Registration is now open for both, and we’re still looking for speakers in LA. Details below:

SharePoint Saturday East Bay (website)
San Ramon Marriott, 2600 Bishop Drive, San Ramon (info)
Register here
Facebook fan page, Twitter tag
Sponsorship form (still looking for raffle sponsors!)

SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles (website)
Hilton LAX, 5711 West Century Blvd, Los Angeles (info)
Register here
Twitter tag
Sponsorship form, Speakers form

Managing Your Metadata

Published through EndUserSharePoint.com

When setting up your new SharePoint environment, one of the questions you’ll need to answer is centralized or de-centralized? Do you want to tightly control your environment, as you do with your external-facing portal, or do you want to enable the full capability of SharePoint and allow people to collaborate, ad hoc, as they see fit? Or maybe you want to do something in-between?

Unfortunately, the same question pops up again around managing your metadata, regardless of your environment management decisions. You can have a locked-down, controlled site creation model within your organization, and people can still “run amuck” with how they assign (or don’t assign) metadata.

To help with your planning, let’s review some of the pros and cons to both centralized and decentralized models:

Centralized

In a centralized model, the site architecture is centrally controlled, and metadata is always applied to content – usually as required fields when uploading or modifying content. Site Columns and Content Types are created at the site collection root, and lists get “bundles” of columns.

There are a number of advantages to this model:

• It improves consistency
• It reduces metadata duplication
• Because everything is controlled, it’s generally easy to update
• It’s easy to support and train on
• It allows document-level DIP, Workflow, Information Policies, and document templates

The downsides to metadata management in a centralized model include:

• It requires a lot of planning to ensure you get it right up front, as well as make the right ongoing, global changes
• It requires upfront work. It’s a much more complex deployment
• It’s difficult to manage across site collections and portals, as you need to work with various teams and organizations to find consensus on enterprise designs and templates
• From an end user perspective, they have less ownership over their environment and have to wait longer for changes, making adoption slower and decreasing “stickiness”

Decentralized

In a decentralized model, the site architecture is ad-hoc, with teams and individuals able to create sites and pages as needed. Metadata may not be well-defined, or applied to content at all. Columns are created on lists, and are combined in an ad-hoc basis on each list.

The advantages to this model are:

• It requires no metadata planning
• It requires little upfront effort – deploy SharePoint, and let people self-manage how (and if) they assign metadata
• It works across site collections and portals

The downsides to this model include:

• A lack of consistency across your environment
• It increases metadata duplication
• It’s difficult to update
• It’s hard to support and train on
• It only allows list-level Workflow, Information Policies and document templates
• It is difficult to reverse

There is no “right answer” to how you manage your metadata policies. However, few companies will find themselves at the far ends of this range, but somewhere in-between. The important step is to define your policies up front – decide how you want to manage your environment and metadata, publish those policies so that people understand them, and then be consistent. Your end user will appreciate it, measurable through increased adoption of your SharePoint environment and overall usability.

What Drives Social Media in SharePoint?

From EndUserSharePoint.com

Ask a crowd of people whether they believe social computing is important within the enterprise, and you usually see  -- at best -- an even split of yes and no answers. More often than not, the majority of people answer no. As I present on the topic at various conferences and SharePoint Saturday events, most people attend my session not because they believe social computing is critical to their business, but because they want to understand why they should care.

With so many people ambivalent to social computing, why is it that one of the top technology trends is the expansion of social computing features across enterprise applications? One problem with perception is that people tend to focus on the consumer social media applications without considering the underlying application of the technologies that power them, and how those features and capabilities might improve the enterprise.

So why should you care about social media in SharePoint? Well, let’s take a look at some of the problems you may be experiencing within your environment:

• You’ve spent months migrating content into your shiny, new SharePoint environment. You’ve moved your information silos from your old, proprietary portal or file shares to SharePoint. NOW WHAT???
• You were sold on the idea of search, but you can’t find anything.
• You can’t tell who owns what.
• You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old, or what has changed.
• You realize that all of your data is now disconnected.

How do you solve these problems? The answer is managed metadata, thoughtful taxonomy, and a solid governance model. The answer is to roll out social computing tools within SharePoint to improve search and provide additional methods for surfacing data within your environment. Think of it as a software stack:

Metadata powers both structured (taxonomy) and unstructured (ad hoc) collaboration, which is then filtered by the various social media tools, which is an extension of search, which makes your team site, portal, and content relevant to end users. Across all of these pieces is your governance model, ensuring all of the moving parts are working together.

 

Metadata is the key to making social media work inside the enterprise. It makes social media work within SharePoint, it makes your content visible to end users, and it powers search. Metadata makes your environment useable, linkable, relevant. Metadata is the building block of social media within SharePoint.

When thinking through your own social media strategy, its important that you recognize this connection between social computing, metadata, and search. It will help you to sell your team and management chain on the powerful impact of social media in the enterprise, and, more importantly, help you realize the full potential of your SharePoint investments.

On The Road

The last several months has been a blur at echoTechnology as we’ve been designing, building, and preparing for the launch of our latest product, Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010. I’m genuinely excited about this release because I’ve been working on it with Garry, Sergio and the team since my first day with the company, and it’s great to finally move out from behind the curtain and talk to people about our vision for the space. On top of that, we were acquired by a great company – Axceler, which has an award-winning administration product (ControlPoint).

Where am I these next couple months? Well, today I am sitting in hot, humid Ybor City, right next to Tampa, Florida, participating in SharePoint Saturday Tampa this weekend. I’ll once again be talking about Enabling Social Media through Metadata and Taxonomy.

After a short stop in Salt Lake City and a long drive home to Seattle (sad story about an out of state car breakdown), I’ll be back in the office preparing for Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington DC early next month. The newly-expanded Axceler team will be launching our refreshed partner channel, looking to create and extend some of our partner relationships, as well as get a closer look at Microsoft’s FY2011 plans.

In August, I’ll be back in the VA area for the Best Practices conference, giving demos and working the Axceler booth.

In September, I am co-chairing the inaugural SharePoint Saturday East Bay event in San Ramon, CA (9/11), as well as the first SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles event to be held near LAX (9/18, site almost live). In-between these great activities, I am coordinating a couple SharePoint User Group panel events in Silicon Valley, Sacramento, and Orange County with some of the other speakers and MVPs who are attending both SPS events. Should be a fun-filled week with incredible networking. Really looking forward to it. After California, my plan is to attend SharePoint Saturday Boston on 9/25. Waiting for a confirmation that the event is happening on this date -- if not, I’ll definitely drive north to attend SharePoint Saturday Vancouver.

In October, I may be heading back out to Boston for the SharePoint Tech Conference (SPTechConBoston), and in November there’s talk about attending TechEd EMEA over in Germany. I can’t yet see that far into the future, but I’m hoping to present at the latter, and at the very least, we’ll be sending over some of our team.

It’s an action-packed summer, to be sure.

echoTechnology Acquired by Axceler, Launching Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010

A couple key press releases went out this morning, in case you missed them, including news that echoTechnology has been acquired by Axceler, based out of Boston, MA. The full press release can be found here

Axceler Acquires echoTechnology To Offer Industry-Leading SharePoint Migration

Combination of ControlPoint and echo Positions Company As the Leading  Provider of SharePoint Administration and Migration Solutions As Enterprises Get Ready to Upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2010

WOBURN, MA – June 1, 2010 – Axceler, the leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced its acquisition of echoTechnology, the technology leader in SharePoint migration. With the acquisition, Axceler’s software solutions now address two of the most critical areas of SharePoint management —administration and migration — required as customers move to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. SharePoint migration is a natural extension of Axceler’s product portfolio. Both software companies are privately held and terms were not disclosed.

In addition, we have announced the impending release of our Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, a next-generation migration solution that goes above and beyond other tools in its ability to give the user flexibility and control over their migration to the SharePoint 2010 platform. The full press release is available here

Axceler Announces Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010

Comprehensive New Migration Product Provides Intelligent Facilities For Upgrading To the Latest Version of Microsoft SharePoint

WOBURN, MA – June 1, 2010 – Axceler, the leader in administration software for Microsoft SharePoint, today announced the release of Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010, the first new product to be introduced as a result of its acquisition of echoTechnology (please see separate release). Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 offers comprehensive risk-based control when moving to the latest SharePoint platform. Davinci Migrator reduces the risks, lowers the overall cost and shortens the time it takes to complete a SharePoint 2010 migration. By helping administrators with the discovery and planning of their migrations, Davinci Migrator delivers a unique feature set to the SharePoint market by reducing the number of failed migration iterations and shortening project schedules.
Among the innovative features of Davinci Migrator are:

• Real-time collection of important configuration data, useful for discovering and planning migrations with known-risk profiles and timing;
• A robust configuration querying capability using full, industry standard SQL and an integrated Query-By-Example (QBE) interface;
• Detailed pre-migration analysis and rules engine, allowing users to follow best practices, identify issues during planning, rank them by severity, and recommend actions before moving forward;
• Support for both granular and entire-site migrations from SharePoint 2003 and 2007 to the new SharePoint 2010 platform;
• A powerful migration engine, built for both speed and for control, capable of consolidating from multiple platforms;
• An optimized architecture for large content databases and complex enterprise configurations that have many SharePoint administrators per farm; and,
• Support for migrating in waves, based on user-defined timetables, priorities and severity of issues found, which reduces team and resource impact.

It’s an exciting time to be a part of the Axceler team, and we’re especially enthusiastic about showing our customers all of the unique features within the Davinci Migrator at TechEd next week in New Orleans. If you’re planning to attend, be sure to stop by our booth (Booth 400). Or follow me on Twitter for all of the latest news @buckleyplanet

What is a “Granular” Migration?

Among SharePoint migration vendors, you will often hear their tools described as “granular,” but what does the term really mean? Why is granular control more important than drag-and-drop when it comes to migrations? How granular do you need to go?

For most platforms, granular means that the tool allows you to filter through your SharePoint environment, selecting only those components - sites, lists, content, solutions - that you want to migrate. Not all tools provide the same level of granularity. The right migration solution should provide visibility, support iterative activities, and give you complete control:

• Visibility. You should be able to easily navigate your environment, discover your sites and content based on permissions, and apply the necessary filters and rules. While migrating, your tool should provide a view into what is happening so that, should something go wrong, you can quickly identify changes to be made and update.
• Iterations. Migrations are phased activities. They are rarely successful the first time through due to their complexity. Your tool should support an iterative process, allowing you to test, improve, and test again without forcing you back through a complicated UI each phase.
• Control. Ultimately, your tool should give you complete control of your migration. Move what you want and need, when you want to move it, and allow you see what is happening along the way. Control is about planning, and intended results.

echo is the leader in granular migrations, giving our users more visibility into the process, the ability to iterate as many times as you need (no volume-based pricing), and most importantly, giving you complete control over your SharePoint migrations. Let us show you how.

Sign up now for one of our online demonstrations, and see what echo can do for your environment.

SharePoint Saturday DC Snapshot

I’m sitting here at Gate D29 at the Dulles International airport, reflecting on this past weekend and the SharePoint Saturday DC event (#SPSDC). Great venue, excellent planning by @meetdux, @usher and team, and close to 1,000 participants. Amazing!

I also want to thank @usher and @gvaro for unwittingly becomes the punch line to a couple last-minute jokes in my presentation on Enabling Social Media in SharePoint 2010 through Metadata (now available through SlideShare below), and to @ruveng for stepping up to help demo managed metadata service (MMS) when I was unable to connect to my environment. Overall, great response and feedback. Hope people enjoyed the session.

SPSDC2010 buckley share

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

Taxonomy for Sale

On a swing through Oregon in March, Joel Oleson and I presented to the Portland SharePoint User’s Group on topics surrounding social computing, metadata and taxonomy within SharePoint, and someone asked a great question: why can’t you just purchase a pre-defined taxonomy?

One of the most important aspects of a successful SharePoint deployment is a well-defined taxonomy and metadata library. Taking the time to define your metadata and content types, build out your taxonomy, and set in place a governance model will ensure that your users will be able to find their content (granted they are assigning the metadata!). But defining, building, and governing your system takes a lot of effort – both at startup and as an ongoing activity. So why can’t someone just purchase a canned taxonomy and vast lists of keywords from a consultant to jumpstart their work?

While I’m sure there are consultants who offer this kind of service, providing guidance and expertise on process and best practices, is that really the right thing to do? (I’m not knocking these consultants by any means, just talking about what is right for your business) They cannot offer more than generic taxonomies based on broad industry knowledge, or around competitive product and service verticals. How useful is this information, really? How much time will you spend trying to match this generic taxonomy to the nuances of your business, instead of outlining your own business taxonomy and expanding on what is unique about you?

I go through these questions as part of my presentation on the topic at user groups and SharePoint Saturdays (tomorrow, at #SPSDC). The hard work must be done by those who know your business – you and your team. Of course, there will be plenty of consultants who will be happy to charge you to embed themselves, offering to learn everything about your business and then build out your system. You might get to deployment more quickly this way if you don’t already have the SharePoint expertise within your organization. But what happens when the consultant leaves post-deployment? Where is the expertise to maintain and update what was built to keep your system relevant?

I came across a great quote in the Harvard Business Review by Dan Ariely in ‘Why Businesses Don’t Experiment’ (April 2010, Page 34):

“Companies (and people) are notoriously bad at making trade-offs. There’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides. When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking.”

The net-net: you need to do the hard work of planning out your taxonomy. Get help, sure, but don’t think you can hand it off to someone else. But if you do decide to farm it out, ping me and I’ll send you my consulting rates ;-)

echoTechnology May Events

The month of May kicks off with a major event: Release To Market of the SharePoint 2010 platform!

The echoTechnology team is celebrating this event by sponsoring the SharePoint 2010 Community Launch event at the Nectar Lounge, Wednesday May 12th, from 4 to 10pm. Free food, music, and networking at a great venue! It’s free, and you can register here. Drinks, food, and music provided by Decibel Festival. Music by DJ Alex Ruder [KEXP] and Chris Govella, as well as J-Justice [Sun Tzu Sound / TRUST]. Hosted by Erica Toelle, Joel Oleson, Owen Allen, and our very own Christian Buckley. You can follow the conversation via Twitter using #SPCLSEA

Later this week will be SharePoint Saturday Washington DC and what is looking to be the largest FREE SharePoint event to date. There’s still time to register and attend, with over 80 speakers and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 attendees. echoTechnology will also be onsite with our partners at Axceler, and giving away a Zune HD during the raffle. Christian will be presenting once again on “Metadata Management in a Social Media World: Enabling Social Media through Metadata.” He’ll also be floating around the event in-between sessions wearing one of the “Booth Babes” t-shirts, so be sure to look for him and say hello.

Finally, on Thursday the 20th at 6pm, Christian will be presenting at the Sacramento SharePoint Users Group at the Maidu Center on metadata, governance, and enabling social media in SharePoint 2010. You can find more information on the event here. We hope to see you there!