echo4sharepoint

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!

Getting the Most out of the Sub Sites Web Part

One of the free tools available on the echoTechnology website is the Sub Sites Web Part. But what does it do, exactly? Well, simply put, it’s a web part that shows you all sub sites under the current level in a tree view control, similar to a site map. The results are security trimmed, of course, so that you only see those sites for which you have permissions.

Here you can see a preview of the web part. By default, it shows the tree view control collapsed, and you can select the nodes to navigate to the appropriate site.

Download a copy today. Enjoy!