Then look no further than Office 365 from Microsoft! An online, all-in-one service that’s now available in South Africa from R42 per user per month.  Go the USA site to get all the specs and licensing options available; and then register for a 90 day free trial on the South African site.

It is easy to sign up, but you may need a bit of help getting it set up 100%.  Once that’s done though, you’re on you way.

It’s also available for enterprises ready to move into the cloud.

In case you don’t know, IW is a South African SharePoint user group currently in its 5th year.  We host events monthly in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and about to kick off the group in Durbs.

Our team leads in Durban are Andre Chapman, Emile Swanepoel and Mike Atkins. Welcome to the fold guys!

The first event ever will take place on 6 March 2012 at Bytes People Solutions training venue in 45 Cutting Road, Durbs.  Thanks for adopting the event Bytes. The session will be about Performance Point: Building Dashboards / Scorecards in Sharepoint 2007 with the obligatory drinks and snacks afterwards.

Registration for the event will open in first week of February on the IW site – save the date so long Durbanites.

For our Jhb crowd, our next event is on 14 February, (and yes we know, it’s Valentines Day ❤).  Nedbank, Outsurance and Vodacom are going to share their SharePoint “tails” with us.  It’s a combined IW / SBW session again.

Registration is open!

May you dance the night away ….

And not end up do anything that results in this ….

May you make lots of new friends in 2012 ….

Be grateful for the little things ….

And get some rest.

Thanks for rocking my world this year!  Much love from a very hot South Africa!

Share2011 in Sydney, Australia.  The Eventful Group wanted to know (very honestly) what I thought about it, so here it is.

Getting into Australia

The flight wasn’t comfortable.  Like all cattle class flights, they’re designed to increase the fat profits of the airline execs, not care about the clients who use the service. But from the time the wheels touched the ground, till the time I stood outside the airport – 20 minutes.  I have never been through customs that fast in any country nor received my luggage as fast, ever.  Super efficient! LAX could learn a thing or two Sydney.

Getting to the hotel

That took 3 hours, but the ferry trip included fantastic views of the Opera House and bridge, as well as a massive ocean liner that departed that day.

And was well worth the trip to Manly when you get to wake up to this every day!

The Eventful Group

I have never been so spoilt in my life!  The Eventful Group treated me like a goddess every single minute of every single day.  From a sea facing room, welcome letter, to special personalised gifts – including biltong!  To bringing me water in the middle of a session when I had a coughing fit, to arranging my wifi access, to checking on me 10 times a day to see if I needed anything, to dinner … you name it.  Nothing was too much trouble and I wanted for nothing.  Every single staff member made the effort to introduce themselves and chat to us.

The Conference

Seamless, flawless, efficient, well run, attention to detail, special, organised, professional, personal, fun, informative, energetic, unique …. need to whip Thesaurus to find the rest of the words to describe it.

People tend to think that I’m eternally optimistic and that nothing gets me down, ever.  The truth is though, that I’ve been extremely disillusioned with the industry lately and thinking about getting out a lot.  The less-than-great experiences I had at some conferences this year hasn’t helped.  Share2011 was going to be my deciding factor whether I would stay or would I get out; because I just didn’t know why I was doing any of this anymore.

Share2011 has completely restored my faith, energy and motivation in SharePoint, the industry, conferences, people and experiences.  It’s about the users of SharePoint, it always has been. It’s about listening to their challenges and figuring out a way to gently help them.  It’s about a very broad eco-system we all play a part in, and aligning yourself with the right people in that eco-system.  It made me re-focus on what my role is in that system, because I was getting way off track.

The Share Conference series is a much needed breath of fresh air in a stale, complacent society of conferences.  The calibre of sessions and speakers was far superior to any conference I have attended in the past 2 years. Brilliant insights in all of them.  No geek speak in any of them. Every speaker engaging, informed, fun.  (More about the sessions in part 2).

South Africa has it made in 2012.  We have Teched for the techies, and Share for the business people.  We don’t need any more than that.

I am extremely proud to be associated with the Share concept and the professional manner in which The Eventful Group conduct business.  Greg Healy, you can be very proud of your team.

Lets Collaborate supports Share 1000% and will do whatever necessary to make sure  their events are a success.  Thank you Jamie, Ali, Vanessa, Gus in Team Australia!  As well as the countless other team members that attended. Team South Africa – see you real soon!

These things all vary in complexity, so make sure manage expectation when explaining them.  They are also dependent on the 2010 version you have, ie: Foundation, Standard or Enterprise.  Here’s a feature comparison for SharePoint 2010 including experience levels required to help your users understand it better. (Stored under Documents from LC – Information).

I decided to take up this challenge.  Here are random mission statements compliments of Google.  You decide – do 8 words still get the point across?  Or do we lose something in the translation :

“This company leverages SharePoint to facilitate the sharing of information across geographical locations and to encourage staff to share ideas and thoughts on keeping our company a cutting edge supplier. We welcome innovative thinking in using SharePoint to streamline business processes to reduce the time to market on our products”.

Faster products, shared ideas, change through innovative thinking.

“To leverage the tools and resources that SharePoint technologies provide using existing infrastructure technologies such as Active Directory, Exchange, Microsoft Office, and other tools such as Performance Point and Project Server services.  Enable the tools necessary to rapidly respond to business needs, enrich collaborative interaction by empowering the user the ability to share, create, and connect with University constituents and federated partners more effectively.”

Combining technologies allows users to collaborate effectively everywhere.

“This project seeks to implement SharePoint as an enterprise collaboration environment. Because SharePoint will fulfill a mission-critical role at the Organization, it must be conceived, deployed, and operated according to best practices, corporate policies, regulatory constraints, and in concert with other Organization initiatives.”

Aligning SharePoint to company initiatives and corporate governance.

“Our mission is to deliver superior, leading edge, SharePoint solutions that enable our customers to solve real business problems pragmatically and cost-effectively.”

Empowering customers through automated, cost-effective SharePoint solutions.

“The steering committee will provide a unified, centrally governed approach to the SharePoint environment. This team has the overriding authority for all architectural, design and development decisions, including all policies and procedures created for the SharePoint environment. It will strongly influence foundational and framework-related issues, as well as decisions regarding security and retention considerations for the deployment.”

Steering SharePoint into the future with total ownership.

Try it with yours and see how you do.

A lot of time is spent trying to figure out how to get people to use SharePoint. But what happens if you actually succeed?  What will you do if you get every single person in the company to use SharePoint, to actively start creating content?  Are you ready for that?

If you’re battling to figure out how to manage SharePoint, try working backwards.

Pretend that you have 100% adoption – what will that look like?

Do you have people and processes in place to support the deluge of queries that will come in? Enough space on the platform?  Dormancy policies in place?  What if you decide to upgrade to a new version of SharePoint?  Or need to do maintenance and take it down?  Do you have the communication channels in place to get to the entire user base effectively?  What happens if your users get smarter than you on SharePoint?  What’s your strategy around that?  What if the whole platform falls over? How fast can you get it back up, how will you explain this to business and regain the trust in the platform that will be destroyed in one second?

If you answer these questions you might get a different perspective on managing SharePoint.

In the first phase you need to document the desired changes, but the second phase on how to manage change is where it really counts.  These are the ones that you can apply to SharePoint.

1. Planning – isn’t the global SharePoint community constantly going on about this? Change management plans and models need to be in place.  Plan, plan, plan.
2. Buy-in – real change won’t happen without executive / stakeholder support.
3. Metrics – how will you know you’ve succeeded?  Define what success means to you.
4. Playbook – documented guidelines and parameters for people to achieve success. Governance right?  Just don’t overdo it, you want people to actually make a change.
5. Training – creating a program for everyone to perform as expected. If you want people to use SharePoint to become more social, you need to teach them the functionality that will allow them to do that.
6. Communication – this is my favourite topic as my regulars will know.  If you want people to change, you need to communicate how and why they need to.  Constantly and effectively.
7. Workflow – introduction of new processes for collaboration and decision trees.  Automate your SharePoint governance so people can request sites, support and log problems.
8. Recognition and rewards – if your staff adopt SharePoint in the way you want them to and start influencing others to do the same – shout it from the rooftops.  Recognise leadership and do something about it.  People need to feel good about doing something before they’ll do it.
9. Implementation – roll out the change management program through an inspired event supported by internal champions who inspire at every level. This is your SharePoint evangelists – invaluable in any large organisation wanting to adopt SharePoint.
10. Help – people won’t “just” know how to use SharePoint, put measures in place to support them all along the learning process.  This never goes away, so make sure you plan for it.

Phase 3 is reinforcing that change on an ongoing basis – assess, measure, engage, plan and celebrate.

Change is a good thing and everybody can change.

These are the self-contained chapters in the book:

• Paul Beck - SharePoint Server-based Data Storage and Data Access
• Veronique Palmer - SharePoint Adoption
• Jasper Oosterveld - Social SharePoint
• Symon Garfield - The Art of SharePoint Success
• Giles Hamson - Creating Dashboards using Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer and other related technologies
• Suzanne George - SharePoint 2010 Automated Code Deployment
• Rene Modery - Exploring Different Options for Implementing SharePoint Solutions
• Conrad Grobler - SharePoint Security and Authentication Notes
• Ashraf Islam - InfoPath 2010 – What is new?
• John Stover - Governance in SharePoint
• Justin Meadows - SharePoint Test Environments
• Mark Macrae - Building Business Intelligence Solutions with SharePoint 2010
• John Timney - Structuring a SharePoint 2010 Practice

SharePoint Saturday Cape Town has been very kindly adopted by Sanlam.  We’re looking for a similar venue in Joburg and someone to adopt us.

What we need is a main room that can hold around 200 people, then 5 break-away rooms that can hold around 40 people each where we have the sessions (business, developer, IT Pro, voice of the customer and vendors). We can possibly consolidate some of the tracks and reduce the rooms to 3  but it would be nice to have a full house. Seeing as labs were so popular in Cpt, we might try that in Jhb too, in that case we’ll need another room full of PC’s to set up shop.

We also need a speaker room for the show stars to practice their skills in peace, and then a main area where we can put up vendor stands.  The number one request from this year’s event was “more vendors”, so that’s great news for all the partners out there.  That same area can double as a food serving area if possible, but if not, then we need a place to server graze too.

It would help if this venue was in a main centre like Sandton, Fourways, Centurion etc as we have international speakers coming out, as well as regional speakers and we need accommodation and facilities close by – and don’t forget SharePint! A great hang-out to mingle after the event is standard operating practice.

We have found one or two venues, but they are horrendously expensive and huge sponsorship money needs to be raised to cover those costs.  SharePoint Saturday is a free event for delegates.  Then we found the ultimate venue in the Southern Sun Grayston, but they are closing down now, such a pity.

This will be an annual event and the next one is planned for May 2012.

Can you help?

If so, please contact me.  We really need your help in finding the perfect venue.

Check out this cool blog on why attending SharePoint Saturdays is great!

Uhm, what?

“Store and share documents and knowledge on your intranet”.

Oooohhhhh……

How are you communicating?  Ever heard of the Flesch Reading Ease Test? In the business world you want your Reading Ease score to be between 60 and 70.  It basically measures how easy a document is to understand.

The first paragraph scores :

Second paragraph scores :

Wanna know how your documents rate?  Activate the setting in Word and find out.

Then run a Spelling and Grammar test.

And at the end you will be given the stats and scores.

Cut the BS, people can see straight through it anyway.  Just tell it like it is.  And if you ever catch me waffling again, karate chop me!

Excerpt from Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, (brilliant book).

Ouch!  Truth hurts huh.  Definitely no James Bond stuff happening in there. Regardless of all the strides we’ve made in technology, it still just comes down to this doesn’t it.  It was so honest it just made me start laughing.

It’s time to make business fun again – bring James Bond, Disney and Marvel Comics back to business.  We spend so much time at work, why does it have to be so serious all the time? It’s all just a game after all.  Let your inner Super Hero out and start thinking up ways to make mundane tasks fun.  The whole office will thank you for it and you’ll feel like a teenager again.

Can you think up a good way to make the opening excerpt fun?

The best idea will win ShareMaster of the Month! (Street cred, you know you want it!).

A ticket to the Share2012 conference was up for grabs at my Teched session – and this is what transpired.  (Also posted to LCTV).

I’ll be prowling your halls with my video camera in tow, so don’t be surprised if somewhere, somehow, I pounce on you and make you famous!

The sessions were great and obviously the best session was by Vanessa Raath and myself on SharePoint Roles and Salaries, we had standing room only! Check us out with our fan girl Lize from University of Stellenbosch.  I haven’t forgotten about your shirt babe.

There were happy faces all day and plenty of networking going on.

SharePint ended up all over Cape Town, but the smart money stayed at Eastwoods where the cool crowd was! Sorry for the rest of you.

I won an Xbox during the keynote – but didn’t qualify cos I was a speaker.  Aw. Second time I’ve won one and second time I didn’t get it.  Sigh.  Maybe third time lucky.

Ben Curry, Michael Noel and Zlatan Dzinic all graced our shores again – they’re becoming a regular fixture at our events!  It’s awesome!

If you go next year, I can highly recommend staying at Zevenwacht – a wine farm close to Sanlam.  Talk about staying in style!  Wow!  I swear that bathroom is bigger than my house.

Here’s a little clip of the day.  Looking forward to the next one.  The ante has been upped! I’ll need to call in the troops to better it!

Our Team Sites Have Sprawled Out of Control! Ok, But So What?

One of the things that IT and intranet departments complain about is site sprawl.  Does this have to be a problem?  With the correct measures in place, would it really be such an issue? What has SharePoint been positioned for at your company?  This session covers the situation many companies find themselves in, what measures need to be in place, and how to manage team sites long term.

We Aren’t Activating MySites in Our Company

We are living in a world that is evolving at a breakneck speed.  The concept of social networking is still a scary one for a lot of companies.  Having internet / social savvy staff can improve the rate of innovation in your company.  Allowing for sociability encourages people to share more, especially with the younger generation.  Staff turnover has some of the highest costs in a company, retaining staff is beneficial for many reasons. Find out about global social trends / stats; how My Sites can add value in these arenas, and how you could manage them.

The combined Partner Summit / Teched didn’t seem to impact anything, although some people felt the dynamic had changed.  Did it?  Couldn’t tell, the parties still carried on till 4am…

The exhibition hall is the best I have ever seen at any conference anywhere! AMAZING JOB  to whoever thought that up.  Just love Micropolis – do that again!!!  Love the plants, turn it into a jungle!

Vendors went all out this year, complete with climbing wall (Didata) and iBar (BCX).  That iBar is the coolest thing ever, no idea where I’d put it, but I want one!

Thanks to Mimecast, I spent half of Teched accosting people to take their photos to win a trip on a fighter jet – but was ousted at the last second!  I’ll catch you next year Timo!  Thanks to Craig Nicolson for trying to help me win at the end … (and then he wins one of the prizes instead of me!?  Sigh).  Endless entertainment.  MonsterSlayer was a winner.

Speakers don’t get conference bags (?) but we did get a weird and unusual gift! It’s an eco-friendly pot! It also makes a fantastic cushion for 6 year olds who refuse to sit on a chair without it now.  Bye bye pot.

 The weather did not play along and we got rained out every day until the last day – whereupon the sun came out.  No surprise that 7 people ended up with flu this week.

Found out that some of our community members have skills we didn’t even know about! Francois Compion has serious piano skills.

Was very pleased to see a little piece of legacy at the conference!  SPSJHB lives on!

IW team leads old and current hanging out!  (Rob Maclean, Michael O’Donovan).

And of course plenty of silliness, fun and games at the parties.

That didn’t end well for everybody……

Good times, good times…

Well done to Pam and company for a well oiled event!

The whole experience was made magical by having the right company throughout.  Thank you to Vanessa Raath, Francois Pienaar, Alistair Pugin, Graham Butler, Zlatan Dzinic, Stephen Zwarts, Marius Botha, Michael O’Donovan, Craig Nicolson, Francois Compion, Johan Myburgh, Ben Curry, Greg Fibiger, Rob Maclean, Gary de Beer and Andrew Thorton-Smith for all the laughs and smiles and having my back at every turn.  You rock!

See you next year for sure!

More photos on Facebook

Listen to the recording.

Register now and get the early bird specials.

Watch the keynote.  See the photos from the event and Emirates business class. People will do anything to win a ticket to Disneyland.  Check out the freeze mob.

Save the date for SPC12 in Vegas : 12 – 15 November 2012.

Did I just LOVE it?  No.  Did I hate it?  No.  It was just ok.  Best part – catching up with old friends and meeting new Twitter and conference friends.  Someone had it right, it was a giant reunion party with a SharePoint theme.

I live in a sectional title complex where the body corporate leaves a lot to be desired.  They never communicate with the home owners on anything – you simply wake up one morning to find all the trees on the perimeter cut down and your unit is next.

Needless to say, whatever I had planned for the day came to a grinding halt and there was a lot of screaming and shouting and tears instead.  We are surrounded by indigenous trees that are 10 years old now. With no input, no consultation and clearly no expertise, our trees are busy being cut down and “trimmed” as we speak.  Their explanation “it’s common ground, we have every right”.  I’ve spent the last 5 hours shadowing the team, supervising the trees around mine and my immediate neighbours’ units.

Here’s the kicker – the woman who is arranging this “trim”, doesn’t live in the complex full time, anywhere near my unit, nor is she a gardening expert.  She wants all the trees round and shaped because she thinks it looks nice.  You don’t shape indigenous trees, they are not rose bushes!  And in an African style complex!?  How I want the trees around my front door has got nothing to do with her!  She doesn’t live there, I do.  Not only that, but every single tree is covered in new spring shoots, buds and flowers and they are busy being hacked to pieces.  Completely the wrong timing for cutting trees.  Does this woman know that, or care? No.  She makes the garden service cut the dietes into neat round bushes – that should tell you all you need to know about her.

I had to argue with her for over an hour before she relented.  Thankfully the tree-feller agreed with me and helped. If this chick had her way, no-one would have any privacy anymore because the trees that shielded units from each other would be flattened.  Thank God I was home today – pity the poor other home owners when they get home at 5pm this afternoon to find their trees half the size of what they were.  R1500 worth of plants got flattened by the falling branches in my garden.

And why?  Because apparently they have suddenly become a fire hazard.  There has never been an incident of that nature in this complex or neighbourhood ever. The fire brigade comes annually to check the hoses and they had no problem with the trees. Oh, then because a tree might fall over – they are all relatively young, not one of them is near that stage.   Then they decide that the perimeter fence was being affected by the trees.  Funny that now that all the trees have been trimmed off or completely cut to the ground on the road side, there is still a problem with the perimeter fence.  The electricians are now here. I’ve been living here 5 years – how many times have they communicated in all that time? Eleven. And not about the trees.

Then she says to me, “but you’ll have more light”.  I didn’t move here for the light, I moved here for the trees!  Don’t make decisions on my behalf when you have no idea what my requirements and preferences are!

Eventually after much consoling by the tree-feller, and letting me personally decide which branches will be cut, let me watch and help, things calmed down. The workers have gone out of their way to make me laugh and ask me about every little branch.  Where is the body corporate chick?  Left hours ago.

What does this have to do with SharePoint governance?  Everything!  How are you managing the platform and communicating to your business?

If you don’t have the expertise to run something, you can’t just walk in one day and start switching stuff off because there might be a problem sometime in the future when you have absolutely no history to substantiate this fear. Not when business has been using the platform for years with no problem.  Especially not without communicating it to the people it will directly affect. And especially not without investigating the true problem before just revoking people’s access with no warning.  Just like we have individual units in my complex with unique needs, so do your business units.  And while it’s true some tenants don’t do anything in the garden, I am absolutely passionate about it and spend a fortune on it making sure only indigenous stuff gets planted that will perfectly suit each zone, just like a number of other people here.

How do I feel about the tree felling company, even though they are the ones doing the cutting?  Despite wanting to kill the lot of them this morning, I actually like them now, alot. They took the time to listen to me, actually hear what I was saying, take it into consideration, engaged me in the process and found a middle ground were we could both be happy.

How do I feel about the body corporate and that chick?  I hate them with a passion and I just want to sell my place and move because I actually can’t their mismanagement anymore.

If you own SharePoint in your company, be very careful what you do on the platform and what you say to your business users.  It matters.  Get your story straight, get the right expertise in if you don’t have it in-house.  And don’t alienate the people that take the most care of the platform by making blanket, baseless decisions that directly affect them.  Because if you do, your users will hate you with just as much passion.  And then nobody wins.

Not on Twitter? There are 3 blogs for you on how to get signed up!  It only takes a few minutes so you have plenty of time before the action starts next Sunday.

• Part 1 : How to Use Twitter
• Part 2 : Using Tweetdeck
• Part 3 : So What’s the Point? (the hashtag for the conference is #SPC11)

There are 23 live bloggers at Dave Coleman’s blog which will showcase hot news from the sessions as they happen.  (I’ll be blogging there and here all the way).

If you’re on Facebook, the conference has a fan page which is pumping with info and fun.

I will be doing 2 sessions – one Express Session on 5 Things You Need To Know About Managing Permissions (Wednesday at 12:20); and a Woman in IT Panel discussion with Perficient, (Monday, 10:30).

All the photos will be uploaded to Facebook!  Interested in seeing where we will be when?  Check out the event map!

There are 6 people attending from South Africa, and we will be doing a conference roll up at IW an SBW in November. See you there.

2010

2007

However, only the Site Owner has rights to view these reports.  Why not give your Site Members and Visitors rights to see them too?  It could encourage healthy competition for people who want to be at the top of the list, especially to the Top Visitors section.  You could run competitions that give recognition of some sort to the person who is top of the list three months in a row for example.  It will also bring awareness to the team of what pages are used the most so they can maintain them better.

To grant Members or Visitors access to these reports, you need to change the Permission Levels.  You need to be a Site Owner to do this.  Make sure you have some understanding of SharePoint permissions before you play in this space!  If you don’t know how to get to this screen, then you should not be playing with permissions.

2010

2007

Add the View Usage  item permission level to the Read and Contribute permission levels.

2010

2007

Insert the link to the usage / analytics to a funky image on your landing page and you’re good to go.  Anyone who clicks on the usage stats link on your landing page will be able to see the activity.

In SharePoint 2007 you need to add a reminder for yourself in Outlook to extract the reports on the last day of every month. Take a screen dump and drop them into a Word or PowerPoint doc and date them. In SharePoint 2010 you can automate that and schedule them to be emailed to you.

Tracking progress will allow to monitor if you’re on the right track.  It’s also good for any performance reporting you may be subject to.  Get stats from the first day you launch your team site, then monitor it monthly.  You will pick up great trends, show how you’ve progressed and allow you to adapt your site to do more of what works.  If you get a sudden spike in usage, go check back in your Outlook calendar to see if anything special happened that week.  If there was, do more of that because it motivated people to come to your site.

As a result, you will be able to motivate your progress on SharePoint by saying in the first month you had X percentage usage and adoption, but after 6 months it’s grown by X percent.  It’s good for those increase letters!

If you are in SharePoint, (or just IT for that matter), or running your own business and in SharePoint, you will know all to well about never having enough time to do anything. There are incessant deadlines, little sleep and a sense of being constantly overwhelmed.  I read this book to help me with time management – but never saw the message in that book coming.  You think you simply just have too much to do?  Sorry to say, but you don’t – you just can’t ever finish anything and you just don’t feel like doing any of it.  Yes, it was a surprise to me too.  I couldn’t put this book down.

I read 100 Ways next only because I enjoyed Time Warrior so much, but they are a perfect compliment for each other.  The psychology behind your unending workload is eloquently supported by solid ideas in getting going.

It will take some time for this to sink in properly … which just makes everything he says in his book true because it doesn’t have to “take time”, but I’ve put some things into practice already and it is definitely making a difference.

Veronique likes this.

In 2007 we’ve been using the Content Editor Web Part to make the site look pretty.  After you’ve upgraded, you will see this when you click on Site Actions – Edit Page.  It’s not what you’ve been taught in your training right.

A new, standard SharePoint 2010 team site is based on wiki functionality, (Site Pages), but it needs to be activated when you’ve migrated from SharePoint 2007. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, it is your choice, but it sure is easier to edit in 2010. Plus you have the benefit of built in versioning on your changes, unlike with the Content Editor Web Parts.

When you activate the Wiki Home Page, the current page settings will be wiped out and you need to rebuild them.  The only thing you need to sort out is the Content Editor Web Parts; all your lists and libraries will still be there in the background.

To make it easier, copy all the text from the Content Editor Web Parts and drop them into a Word document so long.  You don’t need to be in edit mode to do this, you can just copy and paste right off the screen.  Take a screen dump of your current page as well for easy access and so you can recreate it if necessary.

Now you’re ready to activate the 2010 home page. Click on Site Actions – Site Settings and Manage Site Features.

Activate the Wiki Page Home Page option at the bottom.

Now go back to your landing page by clicking on Home, or the navigation drop down on top, or the site name.

You will see the default 2010 look and feel.  Just click Home twice or refresh the page if you don’t see it immediately.  Notice how your entire landing page has been removed though, so it’s time to rebuild.

You can edit the page and paste the information from your Content Editor Web Parts where you need it.  All the lists and libraries will still be there.  To insert them, click the edit page icon, or Site Actions – Edit Page, delete the default content and paste / recreate your own.

Click Insert – Web Part and insert the ones you want.

When you’re done editing, click Save and Close.

Site saved and ready to go.

• You can see instantly if you have a 2007 or 2010 set up in SharePoint 2010. Look at the top of the ribbon. If you see an edit icon, you have 2010 site pages.  If not, it’s on the 2007 way of doing things.

• You can switch between Site Page mode and Web Part page mode at any time by activating and deactivating the feature.
• Any new site you create will have the default 2010 Site Page functionality.

User adoption is all about people – that’s why it’s called “user” adoption,  not server adoption. How you get people to use SharePoint, help them understand why they should, make them feel good about using it, show them easy things to do, help them when they get stuck – is all about people.  It only gets worse once you succeed at all this, you need to manage and support it too.

Culture can be a very big stumbling block to your adoption plan.  If you have a company full of empire builders, silos and knowledge hiding;  you are going to have your hands full getting them to use a collaborate / social technology of any kind. No technology or Knowledge Management strategy is going to help here. There has to be an attitude change right from the top first.   Pity the poor, unsuspecting IT person who has been tasked with making SharePoint successful in the company that doesn’t know this.  And how would they?  It’s not what they do after all.

Regardless of what you’ve positioned it for, the decision to use SharePoint has far reaching consequences to all corners of the business if you want it to succeed. Mr and Mrs Executive, are you ready for those changes?

1. Favourites

These links are tied to the hardware – the computer you are working on. If you add a site as a favourite in a training centre using their computers for example, you won’t have those links when you go back to your own computer.

2. My Links 

Links added here are tied to your user ID.  That means that if you go to another building or region and log in to SharePoint at someone else’s workstation, you will still have all your links available regardless of what site you are on.  They may or may not be visible to other people depending on how you set them up. Links added here will also be syndicated to your My Site profile page.

3. Team Links

These links are tied to the team site and are visible to everyone who has access to that site. They are links you wish to share with everyone in the team.  You can have multiple sets of links, one for research maybe, tutorials, industry standards, etc.  These links will unfortunately not open in a new window, therefore teach people to right-click and open in a new window so they don’t lose where they came from.  If you need your links to open in a new tab by default, delete the Links web part and add the Content Editor Web Part instead.  Links added there have a setting option to open in a new window.

Make sure you add your links in the correct place or you may not have access to them.

They’re doing this because the My Links functionality from SharePoint 2007 has been removed, (why oh why…).  This is what it looks like in SharePoint 2010.

And what it looked like in SharePoint 2007.

Go to your My Site, My Profile page.  Click Site Actions and Edit Page.

Click on Add a Web Part in one of the zones.  There is a default Links web part under Recommended Items, click Add.

The Links webpart will be inserted.  To exit edit mode, click on the My Site or My Profile links above.  There is no Save Page option like there is on the team sites.

You can now add links to the sites you use the most. Open a new browser and navigate to those sites, copy the URL (the web address at the top of the browser), then click Add a Link in your My Site, complete the details as required.

Now you can seamlessly navigate between your My Site and your team sites, and have your links available should you log on remotely from someone else’s workstation, (which won’t be an option if you’ve just saved them as favourites in your browser).

With a list of the hot topics to address your every business need as well as a money back guarantee – you can’t lose.  Diarise 27, 28, 29 February 2012 now, it will be held in the Sandton Sun, Johannesburg.  The top international and local speakers in their field will be speaking, there’s real world stories from local and international clients, 12 extra workshops, people to help you connect with other people and all round awesomeness!

The Share Conferences are unique in the SharePoint industry, with a 100% focus on business professionals.  Any techies wanting to up their game and make themselves stand out from other techies should attend, a whole new world will open up for you.  The sessions are all non-technical and the content of every session is carefully vetted to make sure it is of the best quality.

Hope to see you all at this very exciting event that I am sure is going to sell out!

If you’re going to be in Australia in November, then come to Share2011 - I’m speaking!

Then she discovered Endusersharepoint, (now Nothingbutsharepoint), and started commenting on a bunch of posts.  She soon attracted the attention of Mark Miller who pursued her relentlessly till she wrote him a post.  Kerri is now a permanent fixture on Nothingbutsharepoint, one of the top contributors, and was even a moderator on Stump the Panel.

Despite considerable challenges in her workplace she managed to tranform their world. The article that put Kerri firmly in the ShareMaster of the Month Award was this one on Leading Change.  It’s a thing of beauty and explains a major success of one of her departments who have flourished under her guidance.

Well done Kerri!  You have amazing insight on how to convince people to adopt SharePoint, how to use the technology to the best of its ability without any code, and to gain real business benefit from your solutions.  More importantly, your ability to share your knowledge in easy to understand terms has made a huge difference to the many people that read your posts.  You are one of those rare SharePoint business skills who just gets it. Thank you for sharing your special insights and help people win the adoption battle.  That’s why you are a ShareMaster!

Do you have a story you’d like to share?  Find out more about ShareMaster.

Mark Bowden, Winning Body Language.

Should you share your knowledge?

How will your SharePoint business run tomorrow?  How is it running today?  Do you have an 80% + adoption rate with people using best practices and all the functionality – or is it just as another dumping ground? Do you have good governance in place, a support team, efficient training, you’re communicating regularly to your user base? No?

Over and over again we hear how Exco won’t put anymore money into SharePoint because the 2007 version was a failure. There was little or no ROI shown so they don’t see the need to invest in 2010.  ”There was no adoption, people aren’t using it, so why must we throw more money at it”.

This is such a catch-22 situation on so many levels.

The reason why SharePoint was bought in the first place is seldom for the right ones. There is seldom an actual business need addressed.  At times licenses are free on the Enterprise Agreement so there’s even less strategy involved.  There are very seldom the right skills internally to manage a platform like SharePoint.  IT Departments everywhere continue to treat SharePoint like any other software when it is absolutely not!  Business is seldom engaged and so restricted on what they can do they don’t touch it. As a result, everything falls down.

Then a new version comes out, the salesmen do their jobs and in a flash the answer to all your problems is SharePoint 2010.  And so an upgrade is scheduled.

But refer back to the poster now.  What are you going to do differently with SharePoint 2010?  If you follow the same path you did in SharePoint 2007 without any changes to your strategy – what makes you think 2010 will succeed? It won’t.  It will just get worse, SharePoint is more powerful than ever before.

You need to do things differently – and invariably, those things cost money.  But neglect to budget and plan for changes and you will be right back where you started 2 years from now, just in time for the next version to come out.

And then it’s back to square one.

It is a bitter pill to swallow for the people with the cheque books, I get that, really; and it’s even harder for the people who have to write that motivation for the extra investment. There are people out there that really get it, you have one of them in your business right now.  That person coming to you trying so hard to convince you they can make it work is exactly the type of person you need to do just that.

The extra investment has to be weighed up against writing off the platform and the investment made to date.  It will not succeed without the right backing.

SharePoint has unbelievable capabilities that can offer business professionals endless ways to streamline their paperwork, communicate and share better.  But it takes a change in culture, someone actively driving it every single day to succeed, ongoing education and support of all the roleplayers – and unfortunately that takes money.

The alternative is fail again.  So what changes do you need to make?  If you don’t know, call in the troops and get help.  There is plenty available.

Everything you do in the public domain matters – what you say, what you wear, how you act.  Everything.  There’s an old saying that says don’t dress for the position you’re in, dress for the position you want.  Who would you hire?

You never know when your situation is going to change.  You might need / decide to change jobs.  Just about all companies Google potential employees and contractors now.  If your first hits come up with some drunken photo of you on the floor, or you slagging your boss; it’s going to seriously hamper your chances of getting that job.  You may be a client now, you may become a supplier in future, or vice versa.

What you say and do matters, always.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, My Sites – it’s all social networking.  And there is one major rule – if you don’t want to see it on a billboard across the highway, don’t hit the Enter key.

Billboard – Highway!

It can haunt you for a long long time.  Be aware and build your brand with care.

Update all your profiles regularly.  You wouldn’t skip brushing your teeth for 6 months, why would you skip updating your profiles?

People will or won’t associate with you based on what you are projecting.  What is your message about yourself?

How are you communicating to your business professionals?

Are you telling them you will block email attachments – but then tell them they can’t store documents over 5MB on SharePoint?

Are you telling them you want the company to become more social and interactive – but then block My Sites, Tags and Notes?

Are you telling them they have to use SharePoint for everything – but then fail to budget for or give training?

Are you telling them they have to take ownership of their information – but then refuse to give them Site Owner access?

Are you telling them they have to follow proper channels for any changes – but are then unable to supply a documented procedure for them to follow?

Decide what you have positioned your portal for, make sure you have structures in place and communicate effectively. Don’t contradict your message, you will alienate your business.  Lack of communication is one of the biggest factors in failed SharePoint user adoption.

There is a global shortage of GOOD SharePoint skills of all kinds.  There is so much scope with this product that just about any business and technical skills can be applied and used effectively.  None of what you have been doing up to this point is a waste.  It all just prepares you for future challenges you decide to try. When it comes to technology, it is never too late.  It changes so fast and so often that just about everyone is constantly playing catch-up.

There are thousands of companies across the globe with SharePoint, and there are millions and millions of people using it.  Even if every single SharePoint supplier had to merge into one company, we still wouldn’t be able to service all the work that is out there.  SharePoint is just too big, too prolific, and too complex.  There is more than enough sunshine for everybody. So what options do you have:

Got technical flair?  

Look at Architect, IT Pro, Developer, Search Specialist, Technical Trainer, Helpdesk Support. Architects design the topology and scalability of the farm, (amongst many other things).  IT Pros work on the servers; installing, configuring, maintaining them.  Developers write code to automate business processes, build web parts, etc.  Search Specialists architect the search services to make you can retrieve stuff, (and without search, SharePoint is pretty much useless).  Technical trainers help you improve your skills in any of these other specialisations. Helpdesks are needed in every implementation, some queries require technical troubleshooting.

Got creative flair?

Branders make sites look pretty without messing up other functionality.  Make sure you understand how SharePoint fits together technically though, or you might end up breaking 6 other things for the sake of a pretty picture.

Got management flair?

SharePoint Project Managers and Platform Owners are crucial for the success of an implementation.  You need a good understanding of what SharePoint can give you out of box so you can manage scope and requirements.

Got business flair?

Site Owners who are willing to take ownership of their content and manage their sites properly are in demand!  As SharePoint reaches further and further into business, the Site Owners become more and more important.  Site Collection Administrators need to be properly trained and empowered but can make all the difference to the overall adoption rate and use of best practices in managing content.

Got people flair? 

A SharePoint Evangelist is the magic ingredient to a truly successful SharePoint adoption plan.  You will spend all day every day talking to business and IT people and help them join the dots and expand their knowledge and network.  An End User Trainer needs good people skills and understands business.  A Social Media Specialist can take the company into the future.  Become a Community Team Lead, join a user group or start your own one. It’s all about community after all.  It’s your chance to give back.  User Adoption Specialists are as rare as hen’s teeth.  SharePoint is not about technology, it’s about people.  If you understand this, then maybe User Adoption Specialisation is for you.

Got admin / analytical flair?

Are you super organised?  Maybe taxonomy is something you’ll be good at.  All companies battle with figuring out what metadata to use, when and where. Analysing file shares so you can convert subfolders into metadata is a much sort after skill in business units, learn this and never be bored again.  Business Analysts are invaluable in documenting processes that can be built on SharePoint.

Got presentation flair?

Get really good at what you do and you could end up on the speaker circuit and travel the world in the process.  Stay abreast of PowerPoint best practices and speaking skills if you want to be invited back.

—————

These aren’t the only things you can do, there are plenty other opportunities open to you. Do some research, figure out what SharePoint can do, decide what blows your hair back, and just go for it.  SharePoint offers many ways to re-invent yourself.  You don’t have to leave your company to do that.  In most large organisations there are plenty of opportunities available – you just need to drive it and want it enough.  Stop making excuses and change your stars.

Be aware that you can’t be all things to all people.  Find your niche and excel in it. Build a network that can support you on things you are not strong in.  Find a mentor and learn from them if you don’t have access to good trainers in your area.  There are hundreds of unbelievably kind SharePoint specialists around the world that are constantly online that could help you.

Need to know how to become some of these people?  Check out the I Wanna Be section on IW.  Or download examples of job descriptions on Lets Collaborate so you can motivate for that position.  Keep an eye out for an upcoming book on SharePoint careers by Shadeed Eleazer.  See also Michael Pisarek’s post on SharePoint Business Architects.

————————

For me, SharePoint list functionality offers endless opportunities. This is what we built :

Tracking Solution

We developed a tracking solution where we are able to track who has an application at any point in time by using lists, list views and versioning. This then automatically time stamps who has completed what at what stage. By further introducing columns where the time completed is inputted, we were then able to automatically track which applications had exceeded our service levels, and action them immediately, and also address any training or staff need. This has enabled us to address service issues that we did not know were there previously and therefore improved our overall service to our clients.  This also provided automated volumes completed counts, pending counts, and received counts, which could then enable us to plan, manage and control in terms of capacity management like we never had before. This also enabled better performance management because the tracking solution provides real time management enabling managers to see how many transactions were completed by each staff per day, per hour. This has enabled our management team to make better informed decisions and also reduced instances where certain things were hidden from management to avoid being taken to task, as the data cannot be manipulated.

Project Planning and Controls

Using the project planning tools, we were able to create a dashboard where the status of all projects, and who they were allocated to was available in one view to the manager who could then immediately address anything that was running behind. Alerts were also created, to ensure that the manager was advised as soon as any changes/ updates were made, which kept her informed once a week.  She could see who was actively and continuously updating project requirements and who wasn’t. This has changed behaviour, in that the entire team is much more focused, and delivery orientated because of the tools used to drive behaviour.

MIS (Volumes / Defect Analysis)

We use SharePoint to track our volumes where we input volumes and defect measurements once a month, and the model automatically calculates capacity requirements per month, percentages and any other requirements, as is required from time to time. We also protect this through versioning, permissions and alerts so that no deletions / additions can be made to the model without prior approval which has created a forced uniformity in how we measure different regions. We have now reached 80% data integrity as a result whereas before we had none.

Alignment to our Performance Measures

When planning our site, we aligned it to our performance measures so we know at any point in time how we are performing against the required targets, where we still need to focus, and where we are doing well. Ensuring that there is focus through SharePoint has ensured that there is no scramble just before performance rating time to try and achieve all the requirements.  We use permissions, versioning and alerts to ensure that control of data, documents and metadata is maintained at all times.

Customer Information Database

We required a tool that enabled us to follow an approval process (2 x people approving a transaction) prior to the client data / information being visible to all. We used content approval for this, together with the list functionality, views and permission restrictions. This has enabled good data integrity, and also ensured that no data could be amended, prior to following the 2 x approval process again.

That is why I am a ShareMaster!

————————

Well done Michelle, I am very proud of you!  You are a shining example of how a business professional has embraced a tool to address data integrity, time management and reporting issues in your department.  Keep up the good work and enjoy lunch!

Do you have a story you’d like to share?  Find out more about ShareMaster.

Representatives from Microsoft South Africa and the USA have confirmed that their assumption is far from accurate, and that on the contrary, even more money has been put into the development of the next version (SharePoint 15), which has features that are going to blow our minds!  People in the know around the world have also given feedback to agree with Microsoft.  SharePoint is not going anywhere!

It never ceases to amaze me how some people in the SharePoint community purposely write blogs to upset people just to drive traffic to their sites.  Please try to remember that there are millions of people around the world that take what gets said in blogs at face value because they are too new to know any better.  We have a responsibility to write the best quality blogs to the best of our ability, researching our subject to make sure it is accurate.  We should be building people up, helping, encouraging, guiding – not writing foolish statements that undermine thousands of SharePoint community people, clients and vendors around the world that are doing the very best they can to make a difference on this product and succeed with it’s use.

Epic fail Bamboo.

They have gone through the same challenges that just about every other company has faced in managing SharePoint.

Download a whitepaper that explains how they handled it.

Thank you Microsoft, this is awesome!

SharePoint.  Billions of sites made up of documents, information and millions of users.  It’s this huge, immeasurable overwhelming concept that leaves you full of apprehension.  You dream of travelling across town to escape.  When you look at the night sky, blurry computer eyes obscure your vision, so you can’t see the stars.  You can’t move off the couch because you’re too tired.  You read the smalls to find a new job.

There are millions of SharePoint stars out there – beginners, specialists, experts, end users, power users, developers, salesmen, IT pros, knowledge managers, taxonomy specialists, business intelligence gurus, architects, branders, project managers……  It’s an eco-system of business and technical professionals moving in perpetual motion around the SharePoint sun, evolving over years and years.

The challenge we face is how to bring that sense of wonderment to the galaxy of SharePoint.

It takes a star to bring out the adventurer in working professionals to encourage them to try new ways of thinking and working.  To take them to new worlds without leaving their desks.  To turn them into avid virtual travellers.

You are that star.

Be the light that shines the way.

It is thanks to my magnificent clients who give me endless repeat business, sing my praises and make me think out the box every day.

It is thanks to the awesome local and global SharePoint community for supporting and encouraging me, and helping me get clarity on issues.

It is thanks to my wonderful friends and family who patiently sit by and and love and forgive me while I cancel so many things cos I have to work.

I’ve got a little gift coming to my nearest and dearest, so watch this space. Unfortunately due to an insane schedule this year, I wasn’t able to arrange another party.  Guess I’ll have to make up for that at Christmas!

150 blogs, countless forum posts, 4.3GB’s worth of emails, 81 written compliments, 733 users trained, 1 completed mentorship program, only SharePoint business MVP in Africa, 36 flights, 9 conferences, attended 21 user groups, about 3500 hours, a video channel, arranged one SharePoint Saturday, 5 websites, 9 user manuals, 12 courses, hundreds of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ friends, 21 pages of Google results on Veronique Palmer.

What next?  Stick around and find out!  Here’s to the next 5 years – may we continue to have this incredible and blessed journey together.

At your service, as always,

>V<

When you delete these items, they do not automatically delete from Outlook.  So people could be replying to a thread later on, or adding items, not realising that the whole list has been deleted.

But if the item is still in the Recycle Bin and you restore it, the replies posted from Outlook while the list was deleted will syndicate to SharePoint when you refresh the page.

Communicate all changes.

(This is true for both SharePoint 2007 and 2010, the screen dumps above are from SharePoint 2010 though).

Thanks to Darralyn in Durban for asking the obvious question!

Introducing the ShareMaster Award!  Lets Collaborate is looking for excellence in making a difference in the workplace and sharing knowledge.  Are you that person?

• Have you streamlined a business process lately?
• Reduced the number of emails that have to go out?
• Won the SharePoint user adoption battle?
• Saved the company money by making technology work for you?
• Mentored a new employee so they get on their feet quicker?
• Written a brilliant research paper and shared it creatively?
• Did you create a site of terminology your department uses that has helped clear up confusion?
• Started a trend that has become the accepted way of working now?
• Made a social or corporate event fun by using technology to organise it?
• Have you reduced the amount of duplication of information in your department?

Tell me how you did any of this or anything else you can think of in the last year.  Tell me where you work and what you do. Tell me how many people it helped, how SharePoint helped you achieve that; and win the ShareMaster of Month Award!  The Lets Collaborate Seal of Approval!

You will get a certificate and your story published on my website and blog so other business users can learn from your genius.  (If you live in South Africa, you will also get a lunch voucher to a restaurant of your choice for two).

In December we will decide who the ShareMaster of the Year is – the submissions during the year will be listed for you to vote on.  The winner will get a fabulous hamper from Lets Collaborate as well as a certificate for ShareMaster of the Year!  Are you ShareMaster 2011?  (If you live outside of South Africa, your hamper will be shipped to you).

Share, it’s the right thing to do.

Applications are open!  Awards will be issued on the last day of every month, so submit your story at least one week before that please.

Who will win the first one ever?  It could be you…

Diairise it now…

Download the PDF cheatsheet

It’s stored on Lets Collaborate, under the Resource Centre, Documents by Lets Collaborate.

Two lovely big downloads full of useful tools.

Check it out right now!

The science of tagging and retrieving information is a huge subject.   Search for taxonomy and metadata and you’ll get over 186million hits combined – way worse than SharePoint at a mere 70million. There are so many words that could mean the same thing it’s no wonder people get confused.

Lets take it down a level and focus just on your one project, the latest one you’re working on.

What type of documents are you working with?  There will be Word, PowerPoint, Excel and emails; and those are used to make minutes, agendas, project plans, status reports, budgets and communications.  Your project is being done by a certain team in a certain time frame right?  You are only sending those documents to the team members, not to every single person in the company.  How about where you keep those documents? They’re either on your C:drive or on a fileshare, and busy being sent around via email.  Then what happens when a document is updated?  It gets sent around again and it’s hard to determine who has the correct version of the document.  Not only that, but it’s also difficult to find the latest version of the document in the subfolder because the newest one isn’t on top of the list, so you need to either re-sort the documents, or scroll through all of them to find the latest one.

So how can metadata resolve any of this?  Well metadata is information about information.  Let’s look at a fileshare example:

Here we have a MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) Job Aid. Apart from picking up that it’s a Risk Template by the name, we also know it’s an Excel document because of the icon.  But we also know it’s in an earlier version of Excel, what size it is, when it was last modified, that it belongs in the Job Aids Manage section of the Graphics component of Framework.  Information about information.

All those subfolders and information you see above, are metadata.  You’ve been using it for years and you didn’t even realise it!

What SharePoint does, is take that information, display it to you smarter and make it easier to work with.

First you need to extract that metadata by clicking on every subfolder and making a list of what you see.

Put them in Excel so you can copy and paste them, and sort them alphabetically first.

Now you can build your document library with this metadata, upload and tag the docs; see the version, and send people a direct link.

Then create views based on those columns.

By doing this we have gotten rid of 14 subfolders!  We have one point of truth to upload, activated versioning so it’s always the right version, and created different views so we can report on different things. I can just send a link to the library or applicable view to bring down the email bandwidth.

Is it easy to use?  Yes.

Does it make me feel good?  Yes, because it’s easier to work now, less frustration in finding and storing stuff.

Do I see the point? Yes.

Considering each of us spends 16% of our day every day looking for information; if we could drop that percentage even by a little, we would save millions in lost man hours annually.  Metadata can help you do that.

Do you see the point now?

My Top 7 Document Management Tips

1. Use full names in your document name and the date format YYYY-MM-DD for perfect ordering.
2. Standardise your naming conventions – don’t have 3 things that mean the same thing.
3. If you insist on using subfolders, never number them, and never go more than one level deep.  You create a system only you can understand.
4. Make your metadata re-usable where possible, (Site Columns, lookups, Content Types, Managed Metadata).
5. ALWAYS put in a strong description when creating libraries and lists so your site remains user friendly.
6. Use versioning on important, dynamic documents.
7. Don’t manage by exception, manage by the rule.  Go up a level if it gets to crowded; ie: technical spec, functional spec, test spec … just make the tag Spec instead.

The first three from the beginners series have been completed and uploaded to LCTV.    They will also all be listed under the Resource Centre.

Create a Document Library

Create Columns in a Libary

Create Views in a Library

There are still plenty of misconceptions about SharePoint in the world.  The subject line of this blog is one of them.

Merely installing SharePoint does not make for a successful implementation.  How will you get users to use it? How will you manage it?

Issues of why you bought SharePoint in the first place, governance, liaison between IT and business, ownership, user adoption, change management, end user training, information architecture, understanding what works and what doesn’t, collaboration, process automation, social networking, content / document management, access control, managing and maintaining the infrastructure and planning for the next version are all things that need to be addressed successfully before you can consider your implementation successful.

They all form part of the user adoption / governance / change management / return on investment process which you won’t hear about in a sales pitch.

If you are failing at user adoption, it’s very likely being caused by factors like politics; and a lack of vision, ownership, communication, budget, dedicated staff and experience.

Don’t be fooled.  SharePoint is a brilliant product, but you need plenty more investment over and above what you spent on licensing and hardware to realise proper ROI.  And it can take a good couple of years if not longer depending on the size of the company.

To understand more on this, read  SharePoint is a Car. It is just as relevant today as it was then. The point being, this is a team sport and a long term project.  You can’t do it alone, nor on the cheap.

How do you want your “fleet” to look – like this?

Or like this?

Don’t under-estimate the time, money and staff it takes to successfully adopt SharePoint in large companies.  If you don’t address the issues raised above, you will just end up with a very expensive paperweight in your server room … (or under someone’s desk).

But do it right, and you can change the way you operate forever.

Filed under: SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010, User Adoption ]]> http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/weve-installed-sharepoint-we-have-a-successful-platform-right-wrong/feed/ 0 Veronique Palmer Lack of SharePoint Governance Benefit of SharePoint Governance http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/how-sharepoint-document-management-and-social-networking-are-trending-around-the-world/ http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/how-sharepoint-document-management-and-social-networking-are-trending-around-the-world/#comments Sat, 28 May 2011 19:28:17 +0000 veroniquepalmer http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/?p=2585 Continue reading →]]> Google has many handy tools to figure out your market.  Google Correlate is a new tool in their box of tricks. So I decided to have a look at the Correlate and Google Trends results on SharePoint.  South Africa may be a small country at the bottom of Africa, but we are in the top 3 search results in Trends for SharePoint, SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010!  Don’t under-estimate us… (Go right to the bottom to see our breakdown).  Interesting to see who the top 3 countries are actually.  And also amazing to see the pick up in activity for SharePoint over the years.

Correlation Results

SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010,

Social Networking, Document Management

Trends Results

SharePoint, SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010

Drilldown into SharePoint in South Africa

I’ll bet all those Randburg searches are from my house! … But I’m amazed that Northcliff is top of the log here.  What’s going there that we need to know about I wonder…  Love the fact that that all our major centres are embracing SharePoint.  We have a great adoption rate in South Africa!

This is a tricky question for a lot of people and there are so many things that can affect the answer.  Let’s take it from the view point that you work fulltime for the company, still new-ish to SharePoint and/or have no dev or IT pro experience.

Get Help When :

• You are migrating from one version to another.
• You need to architect and install SharePoint for a large organisation.
• You need custom workflows to automate your business processes.
• You have stretched the out of box features and you need to extend the capabilities.
• You need to use the Enterprise Features of either SharePoint 2007 or 2010.
• You want to use the Managed Metadata Service of SharePoint 2010.
• You need to integrate into line of business systems.
• You need enterprise wide business intelligence.
• Your search isn’t working properly.
• You need a special web part.
• You need your sites branded / skinned.
• You have to get thousands of people to adopt SharePoint and you have no clue where to start.

There are endless specialists available to you locally and internationally – feel free to ask.

Let’s look at two fictional characters.

Bob is a hotshot financial guru.  He has decades of experience in the field and has been working for the same company for 18 years.  He has a team of people working for him, many of whom are juniors he is to mentor. He’s still young and has many years to go before he retires.  Bob’s monthly reports are always accurate and spot on, Exco trust his reports.  However, Bob doesn’t share.  He never tells anyone how he compiles these reports, he never sufficiently answers his juniors questions.  He only volunteers just enough information to answer the question.  The Knowledge Managers have come to Bob on various occasions asking to interview him, but he just declines them.  People have become too scared to ask Bob anything because he makes them feel inferior and like they’re doing him a huge favour.  He is very good at what he does, but never shares that expertise, so no-one in his team or company can learn it.  He’s scared that if he tells people, they will be able to do his job and he will become redundant.  He’s very grumpy around report time because he has to do the whole thing himself.  No-one else knows how.

Betty is also a financial specialist, but she’s nowhere near the level of Bob.  Betty works in another division as part of a team and been in the company only 4 years. Betty is super passionate about finances and decides to find a way to make this traditionally boring subject exciting for her colleagues.  She wants to become a guru like Bob but can’t get any information from him.  So Betty decides to take matters into her own hands and learn on her own.  She spends a lot of time doing research and reading all the international financial gurus’ books.  She starts a blog to share the info she’s learnt in easy to understand language so that her team members can benefit from it.  She also decides to start a tips and tricks newsletter which she puts on their team site, subscribes her team, and adds a new tip every week.  Betty started a Facebook page too to help people learn the world of finances in easy steps and share their experiences.  She thinks that by sharing her knowledge with her team, the whole team will get stronger.

The team really like this and mention it to their friends around the water cooler.  A couple of people from other divisions decide to email Betty to ask her questions they were afraid to ask, and she replied with courtesy and friendliness, answered their questions and referred them to sites they could get more information.  Word got out fast.  Before Betty realised what had happened, everyone in the company was coming to her for financial advice. Any time someone brought up the subject of finances, Betty’s name followed.  Within a year she was seen as the company financial guru and she was asked to compile her own reports to submit to Exco.   She became the Suze Orman of her company.  Her whole team became specialists and their department was the most efficient in the business.  She was flown to each region to help them get their financial departments into the same shape.  Betty continued to set the standard in sharing her knowledge in her team and they went from strength to strength.

So if you were new to the company and you needed help, who would you go to?  Bob or Betty?  If you were hiring a financial guru, and you Googled Bob and Betty, who would you hire?

Everyone has knowledge, everyone.  It’s not the knowledge that makes you the specialist or the expert – it’s how much you SHARE that knowledge that does.

Think about your legacy.  If you die tomorrow, what will you have left behind?  Bob will have 20 years of financial expertise that will simply die with him.  Betty will have 4 years of expertise that everyone will be able to access and learn from until the end of all our days.

Think about your personal brand.  Everybody has one, whether you’re conscious of it or not.  People instantly categorize you when they meet you and get to know you.  Are you an empire builder or a community builder?

If you told everyone you meet, every single bit of knowledge you know – you will still know it.  It doesn’t leave your brain, you still have it.  But you are empowering the people around you by sharing.  Only about 1% of people will actually decide to do anything about the knowledge.  1%!

No-one is trying to steal your job, they are just trying to be the best in their own jobs.  If you want to be a superstar in whatever you do, regardless of how old you are, how long you’ve been in the company, or how long you’ve known a subject, (you can learn anything at any time) – SHARE.  And you will stand out head and shoulders above everyone else.  The sky is the limit and there is more than enough sunshine for everybody.

Read some tips on how to become an expert.

It’s not how many followers you have, it’s how many leaders you create.

Download the PDF tutorial on how to edit, create and deactivate Site Pages  in SharePoint 2010.  It’s a beginners guide so also good for people with no SharePoint experience.

It is stored under Tutorials in the Resource Centre on Lets Collaborate; along with some SharePoint 2007 tutorials.

Happy reading.

27, 28, 29 February 2012 at the Southern Sun in Sandton

This conference is a pure business one with no technical content whatsoever.  The Eventful Group are the only organisers globally who offer this so I am extremely pleased to tell you about this this event.

The Eventful Group’s Share2010 event has been shortlisted for best conference in Asia and the awards ceremony is in London next month. Good luck to Steve Morris and company, I’m sure you’ll win it hands down!

They have secured some great international speakers which will be complimented with the best local speakers.

The website for the South African event will be up and running in a few weeks. In the meantime, have a look at the content for the Australia event happening in November this year, Share2011.

Check out the type of people who attend the event.  Just because it’s a business focus, doesn’t mean the techies aren’t included.  This is your chance to learn the issues that face business users in getting SharePoint adopted and the role you play.  Hot Topics are :

• Governance
• User Training and Change Management
• Business Process Automation and Workflow
• Information Architecture
• Information Discovery
• Collaboration
• Document and Records Management
• Reporting and Analytics (Business Intelligence)
• Integration with Other Systems
• Resourcing and Support
• Social Networking
• Selling the Value and Demonstrating ROI
• Security
• Going 2010
• Extranet Collaboration with External People
• Third-Party Partners and Products

The extra good news about this is these topics span versions of SharePoint in many cases, so regardless of whether you have SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010, you will get outstanding value at this conference!

You can get involved – research, partnering, speaking or attending – submit your details so you’re on the radar! They’ll be speaking to clients and partners from around the country to get our input, it’s all about us!!

I’m sure you won’t need a reason, but in case you do, the top 10 reasons to attend the conference are :

1. Experience a Uniquely Curated 3-Day Program Focused on Business Outcomes
2. Gather Non-Technical Information You Won’t Get Anywhere Else
3. Get Actionable Insights and Revisit Current Business Assumptions
4. Immerse and Network within a Thriving Community
5. Engage with Leading Microsoft SharePoint Partners
6. Acquire Exclusive Access to Collaboration Tools and Resources
7. Look Outside of Your Organisation and Your Industry
8. Attain Professional Development and Improve Your Skills
9. Play Your Part in the Microsoft SharePoint Community
10. Hedge Your Attendance with a 100% Investment-Back Guarantee

Where else in the world will you get a 100% money back guarantee on a conference?  That’s how good this conference is going to be and how confident they are.  So keep some budget open, they said conference costs will be advised as soon as possible.

See you there!!

So when you have a list of companies for example, and you try to capture a new record with an existing company name, you will be stopped.

But!  A common action in lists, is to restrict users from editing and viewing other items in that list.  You can change the settings so that they can only edit / view their own items. (Found under List Settings – Advanced Settings).

If you try and activate this restriction while you have enforce unique values activated, you will get an error message :

If you read the error, it makes sense.  What it is telling you, is that you can’t make users type unique values if they can’t see all the values available to them.

So if you want users to be restricted in what they see, you may get duplicate entries.  If you don’t want duplicate entries, then all users must be able to see all the items in the list.

What you can do though, is give everyone read rights to the complete list and edit rights on their own.  Then enforcing unique values will work just just fine.

Buy the May 2011 Entrepreneur Magazine, and start at page 84.  Here’s a high level overview of what they have to say:

Did you know you have to apply the CPA to social networks?  Facebook, Linked, Twitter, Youtube, and any online forums all have to clearly state who is managing that account.  No more anonymous company names; you open yourself to a lawsuit if you do that. Every account has to have a real, contactable person behind it explaining their qualifications or authority.  Kinda tricky for companies that have hired PR companies to run their Twitter and Facebook campaigns.

If consumers follow any of the advice you post on any social network, and they get harmed from that advice in any way, you and the social network can be sued.  If you recommend a product to a consumer, CPA applies.

Permission-based marketing is out! Nothing is permission-based unless explicitly received in writing.

Terms and conditions in accordance with the Act need to be everywhere and simple language that everyone can understand. Instructions for unsubscribing from any of your social platforms needs to be clearly visible in the terms and conditions on every website you have.

Don’t even think of sending unsolicited emails anymore, especially via Facebook and LinkedIn.

And sharing your database or any of your community’s private information – up to 10 years in jail!  Contravene any other section of the Act and it’s 10% of your annual turnover for the preceding year or R1million.

All that fine print the companies so like to gloss over now have to be brought to the attention of the customer and explained.  All the companies reported to Hello Peter  need to start paying attention, the CPA has changed the landscape for them considerably.

The Trouble Avoidance Guide (by Entrepreneur Magazine)

• Understand what the Act is about.
• Know which provisions apply to your business operations.
• Do a compliance audit of your performance in the ‘red flag’ areas, paying special attention to contracts, warnings, labeling, pricing, product quality, honesty in marketing and conduct and record keeping.
• Make sure your staff members know what is expected of them and the consequences to the business of them getting it wrong.
• Amend all your policies to include the changes to the law.
• Develop a policy to deal with cancelled reservations.
• Develop a policy to deal with customer complaints.
• Have in place a policy for dealing with difficult customers.
• Make sure you have adequate public liability cover.
• Let the public know that you comply with the requirements of the Act.

Companies really need to research this more carefully or it is going to be impossible to fill your positions when you advertise like this.  I’m not trying to make anyone look bad here, I am merely trying to highlight the problem in the industry – and it’ s global.  No-one is getting this right.  Companies are confusing the roles between developers, architects, IT Pros, super users, business specialists and trainers.  Determine what you are trying to accomplish on your platform and research what roles will fulfill that.  You don’t need a SharePoint developer to configure document libraries.

I often hear how SharePoint positions stay unfilled for years at a time.  Yes there is a shortage of good skills in this space globally, but posting entirely unrealistic job specs is compounding the problem.

The following random job specs are sourced from Career Junction, IW, Career Web, Pnet and Jobs.  Each has an explanation as to why they don’t work.  And then a couple that do work :

Ok so there’s travelling involved – what kind of administrator? Server, site collection, helpdesk?  What do they have to do, permanent, contract, etc etc.  Nowhere near enough information here.  How do you expect top notch candidates to take you seriously?

If I was looking for that many architects and developers, then there must be a big custom developed project in on the radar.  Surely the most important requirement then would be technical ability, not communication and presentation skills.  Again, not nearly enough information on the specs.

If you’re looking for a SharePoint Associate Consultant, then SharePoint knowledge should be compulsory, not beneficial. If you’re looking for a SharePoint person, then you need SharePoint development skills, not Microsoft developer skills.  What skills do you mean?  There are over 200 Microsoft products. But then it’s clarified a little with the .Net requirements. I fail to see how those degrees can in any way make you proficient in SharePoint, I would rather require SharePoint certification.  They need a developer, not an associate consultant.  That implies a totally different level of interaction with the platform.  This spec comes across as the company not having a clear understanding of what they need.  This could lead to the potential employee being shunted from pillar to post.  Not a very enticing job offer.

They are looking for a developer but want that person to manage the entire environment?  That’s not what developers do, that’s what architects and IT Pros do.  Document library management and changing ownership? That’s something that site collection administrators and site owners do.  Creation of application pools?  IT Pro. Migrating websites?  IT Pro.  Upgrading websites?  Maybe, depends if there is custom development on those sites.  This spec covers 3 completely different roles.

How are developers going to grow Knowledge Management for the business?  You need Knowledge Managers for that, not SharePoint developers.  Web / graphics design is a completely different development competency, as is K2 workflow.  How does that tie into the Knowledge Management plans?  This spec covers 4 different roles and in no way explains what you will be achieving if you take this job.  KM is it’s own specialised field.

Another spec that requires a supersonic human being. Developers are not responsible for network security, network specialists are. Configuring and administering the environment?  IT Pro and architect.  Managing permissions?  Site collection administrators and site owners.  That whole last bullet point – all IT Pro an architect.  Developers are not meant to perform duties like this.  They build web parts, event handlers and custom workflows – the only part in the spec that made sense.

Wow, that’s some training being offered by the company.  I’d like to apply.  Glad it’s a permanent position because that person is going to be there are very long time getting trained up to to do all that.  The only thing relevant to the job title is the development of InfoPath forms. You can’t expect the same person – let alone a junior developer – to do helpdesk support, train end users, manage the servers, implement an ECM solution, and migrate and upgrade the platform.  Once again, all completely different skill sets and roles.  The person they are looking for doesn’t exist.

So What Works?

Yes, perfect.  All ties in perfectly with what they need done.  Comes across as organised and focussed.

Another clear and concise example. Good understanding of their business requirements.

I’d let it slide because the role is that of a SharePoint Specialist, not developer.  There are people that have this range of skills.

Do you see how important it is to get this right?  Do your homework.  Good skills are rare!  If you want to attract them, you have to be worth it.  Having a flaky job spec is not a good start. It’s giving the impression you have no idea what you want or even understand the problem.  Environments like this are red flags to the top skills in SharePoint.

Remember that these specs are samples only in order to differentiate between the many varied roles available in SharePoint.  As stated in the original post on this subject, the list is far from complete, but see it as a starting point and work from there.

If you’re hiring, make sure you understand what you need.  One person can’t do it all – and if they can, they are going to be very expensive.  Check your candidates thoroughly and possibly make them write SharePoint assessments to make sure they can walk the talk.  Get references! They could potentially become very valuable people in your organisation, make sure you get the best person for the job.

Most times, I don’t even bother anymore.  It’s such a pity.  Doesn’t it worry anyone that people everywhere could be thinking like this?  If we as a community made it easier to figure out the time zones, all the webinars would have higher attendance.  Surely?

On timeanddate.com there is an index of all the acronyms that are all referred back to the Coordinated Universal Time.  Why then can’t we all just use the UTC format instead?  Or if you don’t want to just do that, include you own time zone, but also include the UTC time.  That would cut out a whole step in figuring out the local time of the international webinar.  (My own first webinar fell victim to this very issue last week).  I don’t know when all your summers and winters and daylight saving are, I live on the other side of the planet.  And it’s a waste of time to have to Google when your times are in relation to ours.  There’s too much activity going on to do that.

Everyone has such brilliant information to share – why not make it super easy for people to partake in that?  It’s just one teeny extra piece of text on your site.

I mean, look at this table below, it’s madness how many abbreviations there are.  UTC is much easier to figure out.  It’s the hours plus or minus.  Please, I beg you – just add the UTC zone.  I am dying to hear what you have to say so I can learn.  I can’t be the only person that feels like this.

Maybe we can put our UTC time zone on all our websites and blogs too, that would also start helping when we’re trying to Skype or email or tweet.  Mine are all updated now.

We are a global community forever, lets do something to make it easier to work together. Please.

There are two ways of doing this.

Click on Pages on the ribbon and View All Pages.  Or Site Pages in the Quick Launch.

Site pages are based on wiki functionality.  For those if you used to wikis in 2007, you will recognise the library view here.  Wikis are made up of a Home page, default How To, and your own defined embedded pages.  If you delete the Home page, you will reset the landing page to the 2007 view.

Once it’s deleted, go back to the landing page.  The default 2007 view is restored.

However!  Because the Home page is now in the Recycle Bin, after 30 days it will be deleted, then go to the 2nd Recycle Bin for another 30 days; and thereafter you need IT to retrieve it.  So if you’re just deciding between the 2 views, and forget to restore it in time, you will need IT to get it back for you.

A better way to do it, would be to deactivate the feature instead.  This can be done on a per site basis.  Click on Site Actions – Site Settings and Manage Site Features.

Click on Deactivate at the Wiki Home Page feature.

You will be warned accordingly, click Deactivate again.

And the feature will be turned off.

Go back to the landing page to work on the 2007 view again.

If you want the site pages back, simply reactivate the feature.  All the changes you might have made to the site pages before you deactivated the feature will be restored.  Using this method will store your site page indefinitely, so it’s safer way to revert to 2007, or switch between the two.

Pros and Cons

The cons of going back to the 2007 view, is that you won’t have the editing of the zones options available like there are in site pages. You need SharePoint Designer to change the default 2 column, left and right zones. There is also no instant editing so you would need to insert the Content Editor Web Part and make the site pretty from there.  The pros of this is that you won’t have to deal with the niggly and irritating formatting in site pages.

The pros of staying with 2010 site pages is that it is MUCH easier to add and change images, edit text, and MUCH easier to change the layout of the page.  The cons of this, is as said above.  Formatting text and tables in site pages can become a nightmare!

Use what works for you, you have options.

Site Pages / Wiki Governance – 2010 and 2007

It is good governance to always delete the ‘How To Use This Library’ page as it affects your search results.  If you ever search for ‘how to edit site pages’ for example, your first 20 hits will be how to use this library because people use wikis extensively and seldom delete this page.  If you have any training material on your platform, chances are good that they will have a ‘How To’ section.  People could also search for ‘how to create a client record’ and have the same problem. You don’t need this page, get rid of it.

Then insert the Announcements web part into the page.

Gotcha 1

Don’t delete the default welcome message while the page is still in edit mode.

If you do that, then save the page, the whole web part is deleted and you have to re-insert it.  So rather delete the default message after you’ve saved the page.

Gotcha 2

It should be part of your site governance that you always put an expiry date on your item so that when the event / news passes, the announcement no longer displays on the landing page.  If you don’t put in an expiry date, you’ll have this endless list of noise all over your landing page.  By putting in the expiry date, the announcement will automatically leave the landing page at midnight of that date, and be stored in the library itself instead.

However, the expiry date will not work in the default view that the Announcements web part is inserted in.  If I change the expiry date of the above item to yesterday, it should leave the landing page as the item is in the past.

But it doesn’t. It still displays on the landing page.

In order for the expiry date to work, you need to change the default view of the web part.  (This also ties to another complaint many users have had – the announcements don’t display a summary of the article like they used to).

Edit the page again, and modify the web part.

Change the Selected View to Summary View and click OK, then Save and Close your page.

Now the announcement is gone, as it should be.

But if you look under All Site Content, and click on the Announcements web part, the item is still listed.

And then if you add a new item with an expiry date in the future…

It will display on your landing page till midnight of that day, as well as a summary sentence of the item.

Gotcha 3 

If you insert tables into your announcements to manage images and spacing, the border will always display.  It can look a little untidy.

The styles on tables available on site pages is not carried through to the announcements, so you can’t make the lines clear.

You would need to edit the HTML code to fix it ….. but I’m sorry to say, this is where I get lost. You’re supposed to type in border=”0″ somewhere, but I can’t get it to work in announcements.  Must be doing it wrong!  I’m sure the HTML coders out there will get it sorted out chop chop.  Would be nice if Microsoft fixed it though.  So barring that, just be aware that the table style can’t be changed like it can in site pages.

Final governance thoughts

Don’t delete your old announcements, leave them stored inside the web part.  This is handy for when new people join the team.  They can go to the site and read about things that have happened and get a better sense of their new working environment.

Add an Alert Me on behalf of your team for new items so that SharePoint does the work for you.  However, if you are doing this on behalf of anyone apart from yourself, do a summary alert were possible; preferably a weekly summary.  Be sensitive to people’s inboxes.  You don’t want to spam them.

Because people can unsubscribe themselves from your alert without you knowing about it, users could say that they didn’t see you message.  This is another reason why you want to leave your announcements in the web part, so that people can’t tell you that you didn’t impart information when you actually did.

There are also a bunch of BI webinars scheduled, our local Mark Stacey is one of the presenters.

——————————————————————————————

POST BLOG NOTE :

Unfortunately due to confusion with the time zones and organisation, the webinar did not take place. We were both waiting for each other on different sides of the planet at different times. Our sincerest apologies! I hope it will be rescheduled.  Trust me I am just as disappointed as you are.  So sorry everyone.

>V<

Check what version of Excel you have, and check what version the spreadsheet is being saved as.

The spreadsheet needs to be saved in the same version as the software.  Saving is as a 2007 or 2003 version if you have Office 2010 will cause your Title field to move one column down – for some reason!

So save it back to the software’s version and all will be well when you import your spreadsheet.

Thanks to Heidi and Nicole from Nedbank who helped figure it out.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is – how are you standing out from the crowd?  What are you doing that makes you rise head and shoulders above anyone else in what you do?  If you can answer that, you could be on your way to MVP.

The next thing to ask is – how passionate are you about this?  Because you have to be passionate on insane levels to achieve and then maintain this award.  It can take 3 – 5 years to win an award.  It’s a brutal attack on all your senses! Are you sure you can maintain unpaid community work for that long?  And thereafter?  If not, this is not for you.

There is a common misconception that MVP is a technical award only, it’s not.  It’s a community award too.  It’s for exceptional work in the local and international community.

Some things you need to know about the program :

• It’s not open to Microsoft employees.
• There are 15 main categories of MVP’s which are then broken down into the various competencies.
• There are less than 250 SharePoint MVP’s worldwide. (And less than 5000 MVP’s in total across all the product lines).
• There is a rigorous review process that looks at your last 12 months of activity.
• The award is only valid for 1 year and you need to re-apply every year to the same strict criteria.
• Awards are given every quarter.
• Budget is allocated to each product and country for MVP’s.  This means that regardless of what you’re doing, you may not be nominated as there is only budget available for 2 SharePoint MVP’s in the country.  (This is extra motivation to really shine hey).
• MVP’s are subject to strict non disclosure agreements and you will be in plenty of trouble if you break the NDA.
• The local and international community leaders have to sign off on your nomination.
• You can nominate people for the award if you think they’ve really excelled.
• You get an MSDN and TechNet license for the year.
• You get a really cool trophy and certificate!! … and of course modest bragging rights.
• You can attend the annual MVP Summit at Redmond long as you pay for the flights.

Your reasons need to be pure.  If you suddenly start trying to contribute because you think it will get you MVP, you won’t succeed.  You need to help the community because you genuinely want to and believe in your heart it’s what you are born to do.

Finally, should you succeed at being awarded, remember that with great power comes great responsibility – don’t let it go to your head. In other words, don’t become a schmuck, (lots have).

Get all the rest of the official details from the MVP site – and good luck!  Go for it, you can do it.

What has changed since I became MVP in January?  The hits on my blog have gone up by 1000+ every month, I’ve had people contact me from all over world asking for advice or to work with me.  Is it worth it?  Hell yes!!

[This post has been placed on the Information Worker website for your convenience.]

When I landed in New York a few weeks ago, I went to the British Airways Business Class Lounge in JFK for the lay-over.  I went to the computers to do the daily Facebook update when this gentleman asked me if I’d like anything to drink.  I told him I hadn’t really thought about it.  He immediately smiled and asked if I was into drinks that make you dizzy with emotion and feel like liquid pleasure.  Like champagne.  How could I resist an offer like that.  When he brought it, he sang to me and quoted the most beautiful poetry.  He escourted me to the spa, he escourted me to the dinner area and bowed and sang and and danced with me and told me how amazing I was the whole time.  I have never experienced anything like it in my life.  He does this with everybody I hear and is world famous in airport lounge circles as a result.  Ganesh was a rockstar lounge attendant!  He completely changed my perception of the BA lounges which can be really pompous and stuffy.  What a refreshing change. I left there smiling from ear to ear and posted just about every word he said on Facebook. Legend!!

A couple of months ago I was at a party where someone recommended a hairdresser.  Being in need of a new one I decided to give them a try, Creative Hands at Northgate.  When I walked in I was greeted with a huge smile in a very vibey awesome salon.  I expressed my concerns to Maryka and she immediately allayed my fears and introduced me to Michelle.  Michelle is from the USA living here now.  She sat me down and discussed everything  I wanted ever so gently and kindly.  Then gave me a hair cut unlike anything I’ve ever had before, as well as colour for the first time in my life!  I smiled from ear to ear and immediately arranged a show off party.  The hair wash includes a back massage in those massage chairs, as well as 2 massages from the Jacques who washes you hair!  I am always offered something to drink. When I called in 3 weeks later to order some product, Maryka and Michelle knew exactly who I was – after one visit?!  I am greeted by name when I walk in and phoned when stuff I need is available.  My last visit cost me R1900 – up to now I would have died rather than spend that much money at a hairdresser.  I didn’t even blink at the cost. I didn’t just get a cut, I got a treatment, colour and products for good measure. I got 5 massages this time – one back, 2 neck and 2 head massages!  (All included).  I had staff telling me my hair looked fantastic.  Superstar service from a very young team!!

Today I joined Run / Walk for Life in Sharonlea.  When I checked the website to enquire, the website wanted a year up front payment.  I emailed to query that and said I wasn’t prepared to commit for that long.  Within 5 minutes, Ray replied to my web form saying I could pay R100 a month as I go along. I went this evening for the first time.  Ray greeted me with a big smile and handshake and pronounced my name perfectly right off the bat! He is one of the 3 founders of RWFL and a Director.  He spent half an hour with me showing me all the ropes himself.  He told me his personal running history that ended when he broke his neck in a car accident. But it hasn’t prevented him from doing other sports he loves and managing RWFL.  He greeted every single person that arrived by name and with either a hug, kiss or handshake or all three and enquired about their wellbeing, taking the time to listen to what they say. He walked around the field with me 3 times teaching me all the little tricks I need to know.  He wanted to know if I needed any info on anything, I said socks were confusing me.  He is putting an article in the newsletter tomorrow to discuss socks and what works and doesn’t and why. You can see he just loves what he does and cares with every fibre of his being. I’m ready to pay up a year in advance just based on one hour with him.  Megastar!!

My point is, how are you treating your customers?  How seriously do you take your job? Do you believe that what you do doesn’t matter?  I am here to tell you that it most certainly does.  Whether you sweep streets, clean office dustbins, or run the company – everything you do matters and can count on the bottom line.

I am happy to spends thousands more than I ever budgeted for or would have thought to spend, travelling, doing my hair and getting fit purely based on my experience with Ganesh, Michelle, Maryke, Jacques and Ray.  I don’t care if it was fake or not, or that they do that to everybody.  What matters is that they made me feel like a goddess and the most important, special client on earth. And I liked it!

What are you doing for your internal and / or external customers today to make them feel like I did on these 3 occasions?

Best Practices for Using Microsoft SharePoint in an Enterprise

Best Practices for Using Twitter as a Marketing  Tool

How to Avoid Social Media Overload

Happy reading…

There is one particular section in the book that touched me the most that I’d like to share with you : How do you want to reach your last day?  Which path will you take?

10 Human Regrets

1. You reach your last day with the brilliant song that your life was meant to sing still silent within you.
2. You reach your last day without ever having experienced the natural power that inhabits you to do great work and achieve great things.
3. You reach your last day realising that you never inspired anyone else by the example you set.
4. You reach your last day full of pain at the realisation that you never took any bold risks and so you never received any bright rewards.
5. You reach your last day understanding that you missed the opportunity to catch a glimpse of mastery because you bought into the lie that you had to be resigned to mediocrity.
6. You reach your last day and feel heartbroken that you never learned the skill of transforming adversity into victory and lead into gold.
7. You reach your last day regretting that you forgot that work is about being radically helpful to others rather than being helpful only to yourself.
8. You reach your last day with the awareness that you ended up living the life that society trained you to want versus leading the life you truly wanted to have.
9. You reach your last day and awaken to the fact that you never realised your absolute best nor touched the special genius that you were built to become.
10. You reach your last day and discover you could have been a leaders and left this world so much better than you found it. But you refused to accept this mission because you were just too scared.  And wasted a life.

10 Human Victories

1. You reach your end full of happiness and fulfillment on realising that you are all used up – having spent the fullness of your talents, the biggest of your resources, and best of your potential doing great work and leading a rare-air life.
2. You reach your end knowing that you played at a standard of concentrated excellence and held yourself to the most impeccable standards in each thing you did.
3. You reach your end in noisy celebration for having the boldness of spirit to have regularly confronted your largest fears and realised your highest visions.
4. You reach your end and recognise that you became a person who build people up versus one who tore people down.
5. You reach your end with the understanding that while your journey may have not always been a smooth one, whenever you got knocked down you instantly got back up – and at all times, never suffered from any loss optimism.
6. You reach your end and bask in the staggering glory of your phenomenal achievements along with the rich value you have contributed to the lives of the people you were lucky to serve.
7. You reach your end and adore the strong, ethical, inspirational and empathetic person you grew into.
8. You reach your end and realise that you were a genuine innovator who blazed new trails instead of following old roads.
9. You reach your end surrounded with teammates who call you a rock star, customers who say you’re a hero, and loved ones who call you a legend.
10. You reach your end as a true Leader Without a Title, knowing that the great deeds you did will endure long after your death and that your life stands as a model of possibility.

I’ve made my choice.

In this example, I wanted to add my Announcements web part to the landing page to display all previous announcements per category.  The web part inserts perfectly, but there are too many columns for the landing page.

I then tried to edit the view.

And remove the miscellaneous columns.

But when I click Apply and OK, the whole web part is deleted.  Thanks SharePoint.  You can change all the web part settings except the columns in a view.

The work-around : Create a view exactly how you need it to display on the page.

And the web part will then display as originally required.

This is not a problem in SharePoint 2007, you can edit the columns as you please.

A much simpler solution :  Save the slideshow as a PDF and upload it.

Thanks to Neels du Toit from Absa Capital for bringing this to our attention.

It works fine in SharePoint 2010.

It was a good question I thought, so included some ideas into my slidedeck for her.  For the benefit of everyone else that couldn’t attend the conference, here are some examples of what you can do as a Site Owner to govern your world.

You need to decide what’s important to your team.  So the rules you will set up need to be easy for the team to follow, as well align to the overall company SharePoint governance plan.  If there isn’t one, just do what works for you.  Whatever you decide, it is very important to communicate the standards to your team and explain how to do things.

• Use metadata and views instead of subfolders – you could decide that it is more efficient to store and access information using this method, rather than traditional subfolders.
• Every document library must have a column which categorizes the documents in it – eg: Security Level – Confidential, Internal, Copyright, Privilaged, Public Use.
• There needs to be a link to the corporate intranet page on every team site.
• You may not delete the People and Groups link (2007 users only).
• All documents need to adhere to the naming standard YYYY-MM-DD – Full Name of Document.
• Major versioning must be used on each document library and document may not be renamed once assigned the correct naming standard.

Alternatively, create the perfect document library, with all the columns and views and versioning activated, and add a rule that any future document libraries need to be based on your template, not the SharePoint default library.

And that’s it.  It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but it’s little controls like this that will make your site easier to run in the long term, as well as give you better search results.

So go on …

As Mother Teresa said, “if each of us would only sweep our own doorstep, the whole world would be clean”.

Every bit helps in SharePoint governance.  Start small and grow.

Venue : Phwoar!  What a setting!  Torrey Pines Hilton in San Diego.  Nice!  You do things in style Bill.  You are a shining example of how to live a first class life.

Sessions : My tracks were SharePoint Business Governance, Team Site Security for Site Owners and Effective End User Training, the slidedecks are on SlideShare. ( They are not the same as the previous conference’s decks, there are changes everywhere).   All 3 were very well attended, and well received judging by the feedback I was given by the delegates.  Thank you to my regulars who followed me faithfully, you made a huge difference to the experience.  Someone wanted a copy of the permissions cheatsheet, but I didn’t see her again.  If you were the one looking for it, please email me and I will gladly send it to you.

The two most controversial topics of the conference by far were My Sites and permissions management.  There were many a heated discussion about this.  What a pity we couldn’t spend an entire day workshopping both to get them sorted out once and for all.  I think poor Brett Lonsdale was ready to hit me over the head by the end of his session.  But if it’s any consolation Brett, I believe DeliverPoint is a fabulous product!!!  Well done.  You’ll be hearing from me.

The business tracks did extremely well this year and it looks like the delegates were happy with the advice they got from everybody.

There was also a 5 author book signing session where copies of their respective books where given away.  That was pretty unique.  Well done to Marsee at O’Reilly for organising that.

Size : The conference was a bit smaller than last year, but it gave everyone the opportunity to really talk to each other and take their time in getting answers and getting to know people.  It was as usual a fantastic networking opportunity.  It was great for me to be able to spend so much time with the delegates and learn about challenges in other countries and industries.  It also afforded me the opportunity to spend more time with some of the speakers and organizers and share ideas and knowledge on all things SharePoint, events and running a business.  Thanks for all the advice guys, you know who you are.  I’ve got some great ideas to work on in the next 6 months thanks to your advice.

Tweets : Read all the tweets from the event.  And as per usual, the top tweeter was me. You can’t say I don’t share information huh!  Drill down into the archive if you like.

Fun : There were various SharePinting activities every night – standard practice at the conferences.  Being invited for a cocktail evening in the Presidential Suite was certainly a highlight and before we knew it, ShareShower was born!  Then we decided to get double the people in, the giggling and laughing lasted half an hour.

We also had our version of Angry Birds – now known as Angry Pandas.  See what happens when the booth babes get bored… Bill has got quite the aim though.  Pity the sound isn’t working on the clip, but you don’t really need it.

The silliness continued during the dinners with Mark Rackley and Jennifer Mason making all kinds of slips that can’t really be mentioned on paper – good times guys.  Good times.  Mark is now an established South African speaker who has “Howzit” and my name down to a T.  Good job!

Susan Hanley and I had a bidding war on an XBOX Kinect that someone wanted to just give away. But unfortunately, I lost.  Next time Sue, next time!  But see you on Facebook so long, hehe.

Check out the rest of the photos on Facebook.

New Friends, Old Friends : It is such a privilege to be part of a global community like this one.  Seeing all the old faces felt like a family reunion.  Meeting incredible new people made it even more special.  Got a ton of business cards to follow up on.

My Favourite Part : All the hugs.  I felt the love, ten times a day.  *Wonderful*

Thank You : To Bill English and Ben Curry for inviting me.  And to Reed and Pam for organising everything.

Sunset : Over the Pacific.

[Been sitting here keeping an eye on the clock so I can get an early night.  All happy that it's only 10:00 - only to turn around and see the clock in the room that says 00:00AM!  Great!  Time zone not adjusted on my laptop. Goodnight y'all].

Special thank you’s to :

• My assistant Elsie for all her help and giving part of her weekend.
• Sandy from Letshwao Advertising who did all the swag for us.  Couldn’t have done it without you girls.
• The wonderful Michael Lotter for his unending patience while I ripped the site apart and sent him 87 emails asking questions! Literally.
• All the speakers who volunteered their time : Annelize Jonck, Francois Pienaar, James Avenant, Joel Oleson, Louis Yssel, Louise Michelson, Marc Lenferna, Mark Stacey, Marlon Green, Megan Hobson, Melanie Sutton, Michael Noel, Nico vd Dussen.
• The sponsors without whom this would not have been possible : Microsoft, AvePoint, Didata, Immix, Alactrity, Pragmatic Works, Lenferna Consulting, Intersoft, Lightning Tools, Michael Sampson, SMC Enterprizes.
• Everyone that attended and all the great compliments you paid us!

How did we do it?  I attended SharePoint Saturdays on 3 continents and made tons of notes on what works and what doesn’t.  Came back to Jhb, and started working harder than ever on bringing the best event ever to the community. Read all the planning documents supplied by SharePointSaturday.org and listened to what they said.  Dragged my poor brand new assistant into the deep end the last 2 weeks.  Surrounded myself with only helpful, positive and supportive people, and just got on with it.

The stats :

• R234 000 – my consulting rate of R600 per hour x 390 hours over 5  the months it took to organise
• R48 000 – sponsorship money raised
• R29 275 – catering at Microsoft for 150 people
• R12 857 – speaker and delegate tshirts, delegate bags
• R2200 – speaker dinner
• 3500 – sheets of paper  (sorry trees)
• R1500 – SPS pullscreen
• 1497 – emails
• R1050 – SharePint first round
• 473 – page views on website the week of the event
• 157 – people that attended in total
• 156 – very happy people
• 155MB – size of my SharePoint Saturday file
• 86 – photos uploaded (so far)
• 85 – prizes of all sizes to give away
• 80 – companies represented at the event
• 64 – evaluations completed
• 20 – number of vendors approached for sponsorship
• 14 – speakers
• 14 – sessions, 7 business and 7 technical
• 13 – slidedecks sent back
• 11- people that wanted to register at the last minute
• 11 – revisions of artwork for tshirts
• 10 – people that cancelled before the event
• 9 – Microsoft staff members that we dealt with to arrange the event at their premises
• 8 – sponsor tables
• 8 – cartridges of ink on all the printing
• 8 – site visits in 6 weeks to potential venues
• 4.9 – highest speaker score – which was me! (out of 5)
• 4.5 overall event rating
• 4.3 – average scores of speakers
• 4 – number of vendors that accepted sponsorship packages
• 4 – printers and advertising companies used for swag
• 3 – number of other vendors that volunteered to sponsor
• 3 – sticker design reviews
• 3 – speakers that travelled far to come and speak (2 international, 1 regional)
• 3 – hours sleep the night before worrying that we’ve thought of everything
• 2 – days people spent complimenting a great event
• 2 – people that volunteered to man the registration desk (thanks Louise and Margie)
• 2 – different tshirt designs done
• 1 – iPhone app to called ConFab to view the schedule for the day
• 1 – number of sponsors that paid on time
• 1 – slidedeck submitted by the deadline
• 1 – XBOX given away
• 1 – less than completely satisfied customer (one in every crowd they say)
• 1 – great present given to me by the speakers and sponsors to say thank you
• 0 – major disasters
• 0 – days rest after it was over, straight into post event evaluation recons and reporting
• 0 – times I want to hear the words ‘SharePoint Saturday’ for at least a month!

Lessons learnt? Tons. Next time round there will be plenty of organisational changes. One thing was clear, delegates wanted more sponsors there.  Good news for all vendors.

Goal? Get 500 people to attend and have 5 concurrent tracks.  Bigger, better, best!  Big plans in the works.

When is the next one? We will advise soon as we have the event calendar from Microsoft, we don’t want to conflict with other events. Planning will commence in April.  But there will be one in Cape Town shortly.

Feedback on our speakers from the evaluation forms :

• “Great to have some info that includes practical examples from the corporate world.”
• “Interesting! Speaker very charismatic and entertaining to listen to.  Presentation humourous and interesting.”
• “Well informed speaker and was very informative.”
• “An eye opening experience. Answered a lot of questions on mistakes normally made.”
• “Great tips and advice on improving communication.  Nice to see / hear about tools that will soon be available to our mobile / remote teams.  Very interesting / involved speaker.”
• “Very proud of a non-technical person to have such a beautiful site.  Encouraging indeed.”
• “Great info and very interactive.  Especially Q&A! Great!”
• “Brilliant, exactly what I expected.”
• “Good ideas on how to start and what to have in mind before you start.  Great ideas and understandable.”
• “Great session.”
• “Informative and effective!  Great user campaign / engagement tips!”
• “Awesome presentation. Great content. Very technical but easy to understand.”
• “Made me appreciate the fact that SharePoint can be used across any industry with great benefits.”
• “As always brilliant advice! Presentation very interesting! Great end to a great day.”

Feedback on the whole event from the evaluation forms :

• “I award you with the Knowledge Sharing Award. Real cool and connecting knowledge champions to create new knowledge.”
• “Communication around the event was great. Next time it will be great to hear a bit more about how SharePoint works with other MS technologies like CRM and EPM.”
• “Well organised.”
• “Glad SPS came to Jhb! Thanks V.”
• “I had a lovely time, thanks Veronique!!! ”
• “Sweets / chocolates with afternoon tea please.  Many of the speakers referred to SharePoint 2010, which we as users may not have been exposed to.  Might have been nice to have general overviews of both 2007 and 2010 and possibly obtain beta version or upgrade offers free or to be purchased on site to take home and try out.  Perhaps include a speaker who is able to relay to user principles and practical help or tips and tricks.”
• “Thank you very much for a well organised event.  It was very empowering.  I would however like you to take us through a topic / session on SharePoint 2010 branding, InfoPath forms and Nintex workflow.”
• “I found this session useful.  I am new to SharePoint and it is very encouraging to know that there is so much support and there is a community willing to assist and share information.  Am feeling positive.”
• “Record sessions and make available like PDC does.”
• “The event was very much helpful.  Keep doing what you are doing.  Many thanks to the sponsors and everyone, I have learned a lot from this.”
• “It was fabulous and I learnt a lot.  Maybe if we give the speakers more time like an hour to present and 15 minutes questions.”
• “Good planning made the session a huge success.”
• “Thanks, very enriching!!”
• “Quality assurance, testing.”
• “Very satisfied.“
• “The overall event was very informative and I learnt a lot on the day.”
• “Great event, awesome food, great speakers and most of all it was free.  Will definitely attend the next one. Networked with a lot of experienced people.”
• “This my first SPS event.  Within minutes I was on Twitter, saw all the interest and knew that my Saturday was well spent.  SharePoint will really take any business to the next level!”
• “Need more exhibitors.”
• “Keep up the good work, looking forward to more sessions.”

Download all the slidedecks …..  See all the photos on Facebook …..  Read all the tweets

Download all the slidedecks …..  See all the photos on Facebook …..  Read all the tweets

• Minimum 2 years full time SharePoint experience on out of box features on SharePoint 2007 either as an end user trainer, Site Collection Administrator or Site Owner.
• Some 2010 will be an advantage.
• BUSINESS focus person required!!  This is NOT a developer or IT pro position.
• Looking for the entrepreneurial spirited person who has possibly run their own small business before.
• Full time position in northern suburbs of Johannesburg.  Clients countrywide so some travel may be required.
• Must have own car, cellphone, laptop, ADSL access at home!
• Will do training, support, documentation and events.
• To start asap.
• Write your own cheques!  Great earning potential.
• South African citizens living in Johannesburg only please. We will branch out much further at a later stage.
• Shortlisted candidates will be required to write a competency assessment.

Send CV with a covering letter as to why you would be ideal and stating where you heard about this position.

You configure SharePoint in SharePoint and only use SPD for the nice to haves, custom workflow, fancy web parts or branding.  You need to understand what SharePoint can offer you out of box before you take on SPD. This is true for end users, site owners, site collection administrators, business analysts, trainers, etc.

SharePoint Designer is not a tool for business users.  If you think you need to go on SPD training, ask yourself these questions first

1. Do you know the difference between a table and a div?
2. Do you know how to create a three column div layout?
3. Do you understand Style Sheets?
4. Can you set overlaying divs with CSS?
5. Are you able to resize images?
6. Explain what this style will do:

div.topbar
{

height: 420px;

width: 970px;

background-image: url(Images/people-jump.png);

background-position: right;

background-repeat: no-repeat;

position: relative;

z-index: -100;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

}

If you can answer them, you are ready for SPD training.  If not, attend good end user training and learn about the out of box functionality first.  You need a decent HTML and CSS course under the belt before attempting SPD to get the most value from it.

Thank you to The SharePoint Designer (Louise van der Bijl) for compiling the questions.

With hosted sites you usually get a certain number of users you are allowed to add to your site or subsites. The gotcha is that if you want to delete them off the site collection so you don’t waste user accounts you can’t view all your users and remove them all at once.  Thanks for that Microsoft.  You can view groups, but not all users on the site.

So if you add temporary subsites, before you delete them, you need to go into each group and delete the users manually.  If you’ve deleted the sites already (like I did), the users are not deleted from the site collection.  But now there is no way to get back to those users.

The Work-Around

Go into any site and click on anyone of the groups.

Then change the URL at the top to replace the number you see at the end with a zero.  MembershipGroupId=0.

Now you’ll get a list of all users on the collection.  Select and remove as required.

Thank you so much to Katrin Weixel for the help.

• Identify your company’s top 10 priorities and map them to SharePoint.

• SharePoint has a $7billion ISV network, (Independant Software Vendor).

• Always ask “what’s next” in SharePoint.

• Business users don’t want an application – they want a problem solved.

• It was asked whether the next version of SharePoint will have the same upgrade challenges as from 2007 t0 2010.  ”Certainly hope not” was the response from the panel.

• SharePoint is not a product or a platform, it’s a religion!

• Don’t look to Microsoft for leadership on adopting SharePoint, they’re good with the technology; go to the ISV’s for the rest.

• SharePoint is a big magnifying glass.  It will showcase duplicate information – but it’s always been there.  SharePoint is not the bad guy here.

• Social networking is changing the way we do business – turn on My Sites!

• For users to adopt a technology it has to be 9 times better than what they’re currently using.

• My favourite question of the day by Robert Bogue : “Is SharePoint about enablement or control?”  Blog coming soon on this.

• Site Collection Administrators can upload solutions to the Sandbox.  It’s ok!  It can be managed sufficiently to have no impact on the platform.

• Slidedecks on my end user training and governance sessions presented at this conference.

Tony Lani, Me, Christian Buckley, Richard Harbridge, Owen Allen

1. Document - decide what you want to govern and why and document it.  (Get some samples here). Think about turning the governance plan into a wiki instead of a Word document.  It’s far easier to maintain, see point 6 for more.

2. Communicate - you need to communicate to your user base on a weekly basis at least.  Tell people about the governance plan, changes to the platform, tips and tricks, problems and successes.  This will buy you plenty credibility and help with user adoption.

3. Enforce - there’s no point in writing a governance plan and not enforcing it.  It has to be communicated to all the users who need to acknowledge and understand the plan.  There needs to be consequences for people breaking governance rules.

4. Meet - you need to have a governance forum in place to manage the platform.  It needs to have representatives from each of the major business areas as well as IT.  Meet minimum once a month and don’t skip a meeting or you’ll battle to get it off the ground again.

5. Record - have minutes, agendas and tasks for every governance forum you have.  When users escalate issues to the governance forum you may need to prove later on how it was resolved.

6. Publish – the governance plan, minutes and agendas all need to be available to the user base.  Create an evangelism site open to everyone in the company and publish everything SharePoint, then communicate the link to everyone.

7. Maintain - a governance plan is never finished.  Review it at least bi-annually and adapt it to your growing needs.  This will especially be relevant if you’re upgrading from 2007 to 2010.

1. Good hair days – gone.  Snow, wind, hoodies, scarves and hats are not hair friendly.  Just learn to live with the bad hair days or you’ll ruin your holiday worrying about it.

2. Make-up – hardly worth bothering.  Apart from waterproof mascara and eyeliner, it will all rub off in an hour.  Put make-up on before you get dressed or you’ll sweat it off before you leave the room.

3. Wrinkles – scary! The air at altitude is so thin and dry that every little line is exaggerated.  Take a very good moisturizer, three times as strong as you normally use.  And preferably a good quality eye cream.  The elements are hell on the face which is exposed a lot.

4. Sunglasses – don’t forget these.  Even when it’s snowing the glare can be unbearable.

5. Lips – standard lip ice doesn’t cut it.  I had Labello lip ice, Elemis lip balm and Victoria Secret lip gloss.  The gloss worked the best by far! Your lips take a beating in the wind and you end up licking them a lot.  The get dry so quick.

6. Ears.  Change the whole outdoor experience by having ear warmers.  And not those cute ones with animals on an alice band type thing.  They might look cute, but they will irritate you almost immediately when you have to put your hat or hoodie on.  Get the ones that go around the back of your neck and flat on your ears.  This is the best investment you’ll make.

7. Hands – take good gloves.  If you’re planning on building snowmen, (and not all snow is snowman snow unfortunately), take leather gloves so they don’t soak through.  Wear two sets of gloves if necessary.  Thinner leather ones fit fine under the material ones.

8. Upper body – get a good quality thermal, don’t skimp on this.  You’ll be glad by day 2 outside.

9. Torso – get a jacket that covers the bum and blocks the wind. Get one that has lots of pockets then you don’t need to carry a handbag around which also gets irritating as it keeps falling off your shoulder from the baggy jackets and scarves.

10. Feet – boots are a must!  Tackies are no use in the snow.  They get wet and soggy real quick and there’s nothing worse than wet, cold feet.  Also get good quality thermal long socks, make sure they fit cos there’s different sizes.

11. Layers layers layers – you’ll hear this a dozen times.  While it works, what they don’t tell you is that it takes 20 minutes just to put your clothes on and get them off again.  No such thing as rushing around.  And breathing … yeah, not so easy when you have 4 pairs of pants on, 4 tops and a jacket.

Snow ain’t for sissies … but it is awesome!  Just be prepared. I can highly recommend Canada. You just have to see the Rockies before you die. Now those are mountains!

This is everything I had to put on everyday to survive Canada.

And for something completely different, go dogsledding!  It rocks!  This is me with Dreamer, the coolest dog on earth.

1. Give them a site and walk away.

2. Pilot it in IT and don’t engage any business users then try roll it out.

3. Give training by showing a video or throwing a user manual and walking away.

4. Don’t offer back up support when users have questions.

5. When they do ask for help, tell them to “Google it”.

6. Say : “well it works on my machine”.

7. Give technical answers to queries.

8. Give no details to answers, “it’s fixed”.  Really?  How and why did it happen?

9. Tell them SharePoint is easy.

10. Fail to communicate.

From left to right : Tony Lanni, Veronique Palmer, Christian Buckley, Richard Harbridge, Owen Allen.

Please note - Just because SharePoint can handle this, does not mean it’s best practices!  Also understand there are massive space, performance, cost and backup issues with everything max’d out.  This is just to show you that we aren’t dealing with a Mickey Mouse product here; and why things like dedicated teams, governance, training, communication and support are so crucial in 2010.

Think about how many users, sites, lists and libraries you have right now – then do the math in SharePoint 2010.  Imagine all your users embraced SharePoint like you want them to, and they start hitting these numbers. How are you planning to manage it?  It should be enough for a wake up call…

(Source: Technet)

• 500 million social tags, notes and ratings
• 30 million documents per library
• 30 million items in a list
• 2 million users per site collection
• 1 million alerts on Searches
• 1 million terms and terms sets (think metadata on steroids)
• 400 000 major versions per document
• 250 000 site and subsites per site collection
• 10 000 user groups per site collection
• 10 000 metadata tags recognised per item when searched
• 5000 documents or list items displayed per page
• 5000 blogs per site
• 5000 groups is how many each user can belong to
• 5000 users can be in one Active Directory group
• 2000 site collections per content database
• 2000 subsites under View All Site Content
• 1000 comments per blog post
• 1500 projects deliverables per Project Server plan
• 1800 documents in a SharePoint Workspace
• 100 items at a time you can bulk edit
• 25 web parts per page / wiki
• 10 people editing a Word or PowerPoint document at the same time
• 100GB space per site collection
• 2GB per document upload size

This month’s topic was 12 Months 12 Goals.  Melanie Sutton from iSPartners showed us how spidergrams can be leveraged to break down our tasks into manageable sizes.  She demonstrated her own spidergram that she uses to grow InCider, iSPartner’s intranet.  Download the slidedeck from Lets Collaborate or Information Worker.

Her talk got a very spirited discussion going and we got very side-tracked.  The great part about that was that we have now identified topics for just about the rest of the year that we can address.  There is a new information page on Lets Collaborate which has the proposed topics for the year; presentations and flyer.

We have speakers lined up till June already, so if you have something you’d like to share with the business community, please email me any time and/or put your suggestion on the new SBW LinkedIn group.  This group has just been started so we can carry on the discussions started during the sessions.  There’s just never enough time in an hour to cover everything we have to say.  If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, you can also post your questions and ideas on Information Worker.

[In case you don't know what the #SBWJHB thing is in the title, it's a Twitter hashtag for the event.  Learn how to use Twitter for the next one].

What I actually wanted to put together thanks to an idea from Joel; was a list of everyone’s countries, blog addresses, Twitter names, LinkedIn and Facebook links – but there is a serious lack of information out there and I just don’t have that much time on my hands.  Come on guys and gals, get your profiles updated so people can find you. However if you’d like to volunteer the missing information so we can have a really awesome SharePoint MVP contact list for the world, send it to me. I’ll put it together and publish it on SharePoint.  (Just add it in the comments field below if it’s easier).

By Country

Alphabetical by First Name