Intelligence Among Us

I attended the Tech Days event in Toronto this week and wanted to share my thoughts on the Communication and Collaboration track.  This track was focused on SharePoint during day one.

This was my first time attending this event and I was fairly disappointed with it.  This is not to say that I didn’t get any value from it – I did.  But MS tried to do to much in too short a time with too diverse an audience.  The intial informal survey of the audience indicated that there was a mix between SharePoint Admins, developers, those who had little experience with the platform and those that weren’t running it and wanted to learn more.

The initial session was titled Deploying MOSS in a virtualized world.  The speaker was very knowledgable.  The topics covered ranged from SharePoint topologies,  server relationships and roles, interesting facts on the mechanics of search indexing and querying, options for installing SharePoint, application log errors, information SQL Server aliasing, backup and DR options as well as some information about Hyper-V virtualization.  All this in an hour and a half!  Regardless, I talked to the presenter afterwards and got some excellent information about the mechanics of search indexing and moving your query services to your WFE.  This is something I have been considering for some time.

The next session was held by Eli Robillard, a long time SharePoint MVP that I have worked with in the past.  His level of knowledge is quite frankly incredible.  He spoke about versioning  and upgrade of SharePoint based solutions.  It was interesting but very, very detailed but I wasn’t clear on why it was not part of a development related track.  For the non-developer audience, which was most of the room, he might as well have been speaking Mandarin.  This is no way a knock on Eli, he is a wonderful presenter. 

The following session was Comprehensive Security for MOSS 2007.  This was interesting but the coverage was too broad in my view.  There was good information about service accounts, permission levels, zones, authentication providers, FBA etc.  I found this quite useful.  The presenter then moved into standard SharePoint security.  I couldn’t quite grasp how someone that didn’t understand SharePoint OOB security would possibly benefit from a presentation the more administrative and technical aspects of security required to run the MOSS platform.

So overall I was disappointed but did come away with some information that I can use.  My advice to Microsoft is firstly to narrow the focus of the presentations.  Cover fewer topics more effectively.  Making the registration process more proactive in understanding the audience would be useful as well.  Personally I don’t think taking a show of hands to see who is a SharePoint admin at the beginning of the day is the appropriate time to get an understanding of your audience.

Will I go next year?  No.  However I’m glad I experienced it this year.   By the way – the breakfast was great, the lunch was awful.

Everyone with an intermediate level of knowledge with SharePoint knows that there are 3 ways to create workflows that act on SharePoint lists/libraries.  In ascending order of complexity and flexibility they are:  OOTB SharePoint workflows, SharePoint designer workflows and custom developed Visual Studio workflows.

Imagine the folllowing scenario with which I have been faced.  Working with a user to implement a mission-critical business process that is focused on the steps required to acknoweldge and act on changes to customer requirements.  The workflow is developed, tested and rolled out – in production.  Everyone is happy.

A few months later a request for a change to the process is made which necessitates a change to the workflow that has 50 workflows currently in process.  How do we test that exactly?  Good question and there is no easy answer.

Since a SharePoint workflow is associated with a list based on a GUID that is environment specific you can’t do it without some ridiculous (in my view) manual steps that are outlined very nicely at my favourite SharePoint site – End User SharePoint.  http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2008/12/08/why-can%e2%80%99t-i-easily-port-sharepoint-designer-workflow-solutions-from-one-list-to-another-part-1/. 

In my view this is a deal-breaker for using SP workflow for automating business critical processes.  I’ll be attending the SP 2009 conference next month and will be eager to see if and how this has been addressed.  In the meantime if anyone has any experience with dealing with this issue I’m interested in hearing your feedback.

As those of you who read this blog periodically know, I work for a large, global manufacturing company.  As part of the rebranding effort of our MOSS 2007 implementation many of our senior executives have started blogging.  This provides another medium for them to converse with the peeps as it were. At the outset their intention was to create a two way dialog with our employees and take some intial steps to embrace the world of Enterprise 2.0.  I would say that while it has been somewhat successful, but it has not met expectations.  I have some ideas as to why and some solutions but am very interested in the feedback of those who have enjoyed a successful blogging initiative.

This great article by Joel Olsen triggered gave me some excellent food for thought to ponder this situation: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0cd1a63d%2D183c%2D4fc2%2D8320%2Dba5369008acb&ID=253

Here are some of the issues that I see as an obstacle to success.

1. Corporate Culture – ours is an organizationally decentralized company.  While we have made great strides in improving communication and collaboration over the past 1o years some of that institutional memory lingers.
2. Lack of Governance – clear governance needs to be defined on acceptable blogging and commenting policies.  This will provide clarity to people about expectations and give them some certainty on how to ensure their comment is published.
3. User Profile Data – While this isn’t necessarily related to blogging it is critical in order to extend MOSS from a communication and collaboration tool to a platform for connecting people.  This shift in my view will drive people to the portal as part of their day to day activities and increase the opportunity for users to read and interact with blogs.  This is difficult in a decentralized organization like ours because the responsibility for populating AD with accurate information lies with the individual manufacturing facilities.
4. Latency – I see this as a major issue.  When people take the time to post a comment it needs to be reviewed and approved within a reasonable period of time.   Currently when they post it “disappears” into the ether and will only show up once approved.  There then is a further delay in waiting for a response.  We are looking at implementing a simple “Thumbs Up” mechanism so people can immediately give feedback on content.  We discussed a ranking system or even having a Thumbs Down option but have decided at this point in the evolution of our Enterprise 2.0 initiative that we want to encourage positive feedback and leave more comprehensive and potentially negative feedback for the comment mechanism.
5. Metrics – the only way you can know if any initiative is successful is to define measurements and success criteria and then….wait for it…measure them.  The problem with OTB SharePoint usage statistics is that they absolutely do not provide you with enough information to make informed judgments about whether what you are doing is working.  In our situation our executives typically post new blogs on Mondays. 
   1. We initially created a graph for each blog showing number of hits and distinct users for the last 30 days.  This was helpful in the sense that it showed us both usage trends over time and confirmed that there was a spike in traffic 1-2 days after the blog was posted.
   2. We then linked the SharePoint usage data to our main application database to show how many distinct users per month from each manufacturing facility  were visiting the blogs.  Interesting, but not overly useful.
   3. We are now looking at metrics that will require some proactivity on the part of the blog admins but should prove more useful.  Breaking down the metrics by week to coincide more closely with the posting cycle.  And then doing some research to understand the effectiveness of the blog?  If a blogger highlights a certain facility for great work they did, the traffic from that facility should increase if the message is getting across.  Or if a blog is posted focused on a specific major customer of ours the ideal outcome would be that all facilities dealing with or hoping to win business from that customer would be drawn to the blog post.  If not, there is a problem.  But you can’t know if you don’t measure it.
   4. Average length of time to approve and respond to a blog comment.  In my view there should be an SLA around this.  I personally would not want to have a conversation with someone that took a week to respond.
   5. As I highlighted in a previous blog entry we have wired up a DVWP to a SQL query to highlight blog comments and their current status to make it easier for approvers to see if there are any new entries that need review.  We have also encouraged them to set up alerts on their Comments lists.
   6. A quick tip that many people don’t know is that by appending “_layouts/usagedetails.aspx” to the end of your site URL you are able to see different usage metrics.  You wil be able to see for example a list of users by day that have accessed your site.  This can be helpful in understanding who is accessing your blogs and when and will allow you to get a sense of who is reading each post.  Again – it’s not perfectly accurate but tied with the other metrics you can start to get a good picture of who is conuming the content.
   7. SharePoint Designer also has some usage reporting that you can use.  If you open a site and select the Site > Reports >Usage option you can see the reports that you can take a look at.
6. Exposing Content – we have a site called Blog Central and each blog is a subsite of that.  We currently roll up the latest blog entries using the CQWP.  The issue with that is the fact that the Blog Central site is still a click away from the home page.  We are looking at a revamp of our homepage to leverage the CQWP and JQuery to in order to maximize the use of space and allow users to more easily see what is new.  We are also looking at rolling up the comments to a more prominent central location in order to highlight the fact that there is dialogue taking place.  Currently comments are only accessible by looking at the bottom of specific blog posts which makes it cumbersome for the users.

I hope you find this information helpful and most importantly I am interested in any feedback on your own experiences.

I was recently presented with the following scenario:  As part of the creation of a SharePoint dashboard, my business users are interested in seeing the number of blog comments and their current status by blog.

Our blogs are contained as subsites of a site called Blog Central which reside in a site collection called “Public.”  The dashboard resides in a separate site collection.  Our site collections contain individual content databases.

As a former developer, my initial response is to find an out of the box solution wherever possible. 

1. A content query web part wouldn’t suffice as its scope is limited to the current site collection
2. Adding a new data connection in SP Designer to hook up to a dataview web part (DVWP) won’t work because the lists and libraries (not the web services) are also limited to the current site collection. These can be combined to recursively roll up content in the current site collection however.

I ended up querying the content database directly and presenting that through the DVWP.  So, in SP Designer I created a new Database Connection. 

Browsing to the content database for the Public site collection I wrote the following query in order to retrieve the correct data:

SELECT     Webs.Title,
                    CASE UserData.tp_ModerationStatus
                                   WHEN 0 THEN ‘Approved’ 
                                   WHEN 1 THEN ‘Rejected’ 
                                    WHEN 2 THEN ‘Pending’
                     END AS Status,                        
                      COUNT(*) AS Total 

FROM       AllLists INNER JOIN                       
                    Webs ON AllLists.tp_WebId = Webs.Id INNER JOIN 
                     UserData ON AllLists.tp_ID = UserData.tp_ListId 

WHERE     (AllLists.tp_Title = ‘comments’) AND
                      (Webs.FullUrl LIKE ‘%blogcentral%’) 

GROUP BY UserData.tp_ModerationStatus, Webs.Title 

ORDER BY Webs.Title, UserData.tp_ModerationStatus

I then conditionally formatted the DVWP to show different colours based on status and done.  

If there is a better way to do this, using CAML or some other method,  please let me know and I will share it.