Making social productivity a snap

There’s social, and then there’s social productivity.

This distinction is at the heart of what SnapWorkSocial – a startup founded by ex-Quest evangelist Mike Watson – is looking to bring to market. “Social is the new way of computing, almost as revolutionary as computing itself,” Watson told SPTechReport in a recent interview. “We’re looking to take ‘social’ to the next level and make it work-ready.”

In the early days of computing, there was a 1-to-1 relationship between a user and a machine. The advent of the Internet allowed many people to connect to many entities. But machines only store data, Watson said; it takes people to decipher it and add context through conversation.

SnapTeam, the company’s free social software (now in beta) for SharePoint 2010 and Office 365, addresses some of the shortcomings extant in other social tools, Watson said. “There are problems with traditional social tools,” he said. “It takes months to implement, then you have the adoption process, and you end up with lost productivity, not increased productivity, because social tools can be a distraction, allowing you to connect to things other than business.”

Most social tools do not allow ownership of issues, while in business, hierarchies of people exist to enforce how business is done, he added. Further, he said, most social tools today are reactive, with items appearing in an activity stream. “But older items just stream off the page, whici is bad for productivity.”

SharePoint 2010 does introduce social features via MySites, but Watson said these are difficult to implement and control, and require big infrastructure to run. “MySite social is not what people expect,” he said. “You quickly run into roadblocks. For instance, you can only share a status; there is no ‘at’ replies, and no hash tagging. The profiles are great, but there’s a lot missing.”

SnapTeam has Microsoft’s TeamSite styling, and users can create tasks for individuals, color-code them as to the status and the approaching due date. Users can communicate back and forth; open documents out of SharePoint for review, revision and comment; and see a maintained thread of discussion that is searchable with metadata. It takes the best of twitter and Facebook and combines those features – along with SharePoint – into a single UI, Watson explained during a demo of the tool.

SnapTeam installs on a single site collection as lives as part of the site infrastructure, but not on the server infrastructure. That’s why in the free version, tags entered into discussions are not associated with SharePoint metatagging. But the free version also has an app store built right in for people who want to add more professional features – some are free; some are not, Watson said. He added that the company will release a professional version in the first quarter of next year.

You THINK you know backup

When Hurricane Irene was taking aim at our Huntington, NY, headquarters in September, we, like many companies, had the chance to review our disaster recovery plans. One thing that became apparent is that while backing up and recovering data and files is a job for IT, there is a business perspective that cannot be ignored.
All users know is that they were working on a PowerPoint that they need to have back to finish in time for an upcoming meeting. IT, on the other hand, takes a global look at the system and might not necessarily know that a particular document is stored in a particular place.
Sean McDonough is an expert in DR, and one additional thing he pointed out is that SharePoint Server presents unique challenges that overall IT plans do not take into account. We had a chance to talk at Microsoft's SharePoint Conference, and he pointed out that in SharePoint, content and configurations are stored across databases, but you can't back up in piecemeal fashion. "It's a real challenge to get to the data and restore it in a way that doesn't break things." SharePoint requires a granular backup that's different from what's involved in backing up a full farm.
He co-wrote a book on the subject that looks at backup and recovery from the business perspective first, and then backs into the IT view. It's an interesting look at a critical topic.
--David

The beauty of records management

When SharePoint first came out, ECM (enterprise content management) was a big driver for adoption. Users were now able to organize emails, PDFs, Word files and all manner of content. SharePoint 2010 introduced metadata, allowing users to tag content so it could be found again from massively growing content lists and libraries.
Now, organizations want to understand WHY they save documents, and HOW LONG should they be kept. Enter the records managers. I had an interesting interview with ARRAY's Mike Miller on the topic, and today I got a chance to speak with Colligo Networks' Barry Jinks on the subject. The company is introducing Colligo Briefcase, for browsing, viewing and storing SharePoint content on tablets (iPads for now, Windows-based tablets down the road, Jinks said), and Colligo Email Manager and Contributor Pro software. You can read about those here.
Jinks was talking about the expanding definition of records, and how everyone in a organization is creating records all the time. About how, in fact, EVERYTHING -- a blog post, a Wiki entry, an email attachment, even a TWEET -- is a record. So in-place records management becomes critical, and users must be empowered and trained to use SharePoint to choose content types, and create metadata tags at the time the document is created. SharePoint, he said, offers centrally managed compliance, but the hard part is getting users to do it. "The value of applying metadata is seen in search," he said, "so they get why they're doing it." And the organization gets the value of retention policies that work.
-- David

Greetings from SharePoint Conference! A live blog

I'm here in Anaheim for Microsoft's SharePoint Conference. Walked past a marching band, cheerleaders and some guys dressed in football uniforms on the way to the keynote, promoting collaboration software called "Huddle." A slideshow in the keynote hall featured a mock Metro interface as a DJ dropped some beats in the background while a crowd estimated at 7,500 attendees by Microsoft's PR legions filed in.
Microsoft senior director of SharePoint product management Jared Spataro opened the event with the theme "Productivity Delivered." He reflected on the 2009 event, which featured Steve Ballmer, Huey Lewis and the News ... and the release of SharePoint 2010. It was the "unveiling of our baby to the world," he said. What happens next is what customers and partners do with the product.
* * *
Some stats: sold more than 125 million licenses of SharePoint. If SharePoint were a standalone business, it would be one of the top 50 software firms in the world. Millions of customers using SharePoint Online and Office 365.

* * *
Spataro introduced a funny video of the Microsoft team going to Hollywood to find a good keynote to discuss SharePoint. It featured "teen heartthrob" Luke Perry, Carmen Electra ("How are computers in the cloud? Won't they just fall through?"), Alan Thicke (who thought it was a reality show where he could discuss his innermost feelings about the girls from 'America's Next Top Model' ) and Florence Henderson (who, yes, sang 'The Brady Bunch' theme). The ultimate passionate SharePoint spokesperson they finally hit on? Microsoft vice president Jeff Teper.

* * *
Teper explained the SharePoint team's guiding principles: redefine collaboration,unleash the ecosystem, build a world-class platform. Self-service business intelligence is one area that Teper said was a critical focus, as part of the self-service experience for rich collaboration. A social fabric that enables people to move from one group to the next, with permissions that carry over, using different communications tools, is another powerful feature that Teper cited.
* * *
Collaboration needs to include customers and partners outside the organization, and this is done via SharePoint for extranets. This breaks down the walls of the organization, Teper said. Office 365 takes this to another level, he added.
* * *
11:59 AM local time. First reference to Bill Gates.

* * *
Teper hinted that SharePoint team is working on the next release, then went on to say he won't be talking about it.

* * *
Second guiding principle: the developer ecosystem. There are 700,000 developers working on SharePoint around the world, and 1,162 books on SharePoint available on Amazon, Teper noted.
Visual Studio integration, binding to external line-of-business or database data with read-write, search and take data offline -- those were breakthroughs in SharePoint 2010, he said. First update of Office 365 will have BCS functionality, including read-write data access for cloud-based applications.

* * *
New certification: Microsoft Certified Architect. More info to be published today on microsoft.com. A credential that shows greatest level of depth in the SharePoint community, Teper said.

* * *
Scale, performance and high availability. Richard Riley, SharePoint director, discussed hardware and deployments. VERY technical, discussing racks and clusters, NEC and EMC2 servers. Check out the configuration on microsoft.com/visio.

* * *
FAST search. More than 107 million items returned on a search in 0.23 seconds. Impressive.
High availability. Riley also demonstrated the failover capabilities of a server farm, with 14+ terabytes of data and 7,500 concurrent users. The SharePoint deployment was restored in about 40 seconds. Very impressive.

* * *
Kurt Del Bene, president of the Microsoft Office division, came on to discuss building businesses on top of SharePoint. He said the Office division is betting on SharePoint. Nature of workforce is changing. More stats: 84 percent of businesses have people working remotely. Sixty-five percent are deploying at least one social software tool. Four MILLION millenials are entering the workforce each year. Seventy percent of IT budgets are spent maintaining inflexible and siloed data center solutions. This, he said, is why moving to the cloud has great appeal.

* * *
Del Bene showed a video of NetHope, a charitable organization that uses SharePoint to collaborate, train, manage funds, data and donations. They are working in Haiti to rebuild lives after the devastating earthquake of a few years back. Microsoft is also providing a site where people can donate to NetHope. Unfortunately, as I was going to their site to get the link for you, dear reader, the network here crashed. It failed over quickly, but Microsoft's SharePoint Conference site was corrupted. Unbelievable!

SPTechCon: SF 2012 coming together

Wow! More than 200 submissions for sessions at SPTechCon! Now the fun begins.
There are so many things to consider when putting a conference like this together. There are people attending who perform all different roles around SharePoint -- developers, IT pros, business strategists and users, software architects, power users, and of course, your company's "SharePoint guy."
These people all come to SPTechCon with different levels of expertise: some want advanced and expert training; others are getting their first introduction to SharePoint. We need to keep them all happy.
We have submissions from some of our favorite speakers, and submissions from folks looking to join us for the first time. We get submissions from companies that sell software that extends or enhances SharePoint, and we have to vet these offerings to ensure our quality remains high -- and that no "sales pitches" find their way into the program.
Then, we have to whittle it all down to the 100 or so sessions we'll be able to present during the conference.
It's a fun process, during which time we reach out to some of our closest friends to help ensure the information we're delivering is the information our attendees need.
We're looking to wrap this up in the next couple of weeks (we've been working on the program since early June), and you'll be able to monitor our progress on the conference website at that time.

New Storage Limits for SharePoint

Microsoft today announced a whopping increase in SharePoint 2010 storage limits, to accommodate the building of much larger server farms. The limit has grown from 200 GB to 4 terabytes. SharePoint 2010, according to the company, now supports unlimited content database size for archiving, and supports SQL Server's FILESTREAM Remote BLOB Storage Provider, which makes NAS storage via iSCSI more economical. The full technical details can be found here.

Thoughts from the best SPTechCon yet

I’m on the Amtrak just outside of Old Saybrook, Ct., with some time to reflect on what many folks were saying was the best SPTechCon yet.

With a new location in downtown Boston at Copley Square, SPTechCon played host to about 950 people, including some 50 third-party partners and about 40 of the most knowledgeable people in SharePoint to present the technical sessions and workshops. Some snapshots: Joel Oleson looking ready to go even as he eases into “retirement”; sharing a pizza (commandeered by the SPTechCon staff) with Andrew Connell, Geoff Varosky, Mark Rackley and Christina Wheeler at about 2 in the morning; Eric Shupps and Rob Bogue jumping in to fill a last-minute hole in the program; Mark Miller taking the “most talked-about presentation” award at the Lightning Talks; the crew (Shane, Nicola, Todd, Laura, Jennifer, Randy, John) from SharePoint911 seemingly everywhere, dishing out advice, leading sessions and engaging the attendees... And that’s just for starters.

There were outstanding keynotes by Microsoft’s Christian Finn and Dux Raymond Sy, who talked about the business value of SharePoint. Finn invited the Boston Red Sox to talk about how they use SharePoint to control invoicing, player correspondence, ticket accommodations and a lot more; then Steve Crowley of the Red Sox gave away a pair of tickets to Friday night’s game at Fenway Park. (Some of the SPTechCon team went too, and saw the home team rally from a 4-0 first-inning deficit to turn back the pesky A’s of Oakland. Sat two rows behind a band of bloody wankers from across the pond, who sang throughout the entire game and threw off their shirts at the most routine of plays!)

People had a lot of fun with Horse’s End, a fake rock band from the twisted minds of Christian Buckley and Varosky (their very funny "VH1: Behind the Music” spoof must be watched). And they had fun at the SPTechCon After-Party on Thursday night, co-hosted by Microsoft, Axceler and Jornata.

We ran two focus groups to get feedback from attendees as to what they like and don’t like about SPTechCon, to continue to work to make it a better experience. We’ll work to bring some of their suggestions—a more flexible, customizable mobile app, and more detailed class descriptions, to name but two—to fruition.

There were giveaways galore; I liked the foam Boston lobsters from KMA and the orange rubber ducks from Idera on the exhibit hall floor… not to mention the roughly $10,000 worth of software Microsoft gave away during a launch event for two new solutions for SharePoint and Microsoft Project Server. A big thanks to Christophe Fiessinger from the Microsoft Project team for making this happen.

We also gave away hundreds of books at signings throughout the event, as the speakers got a taste of celebrity, watching people queue up to meet them and get a signed copy of their books.

I’m sure when we go through the forms we’ll be told what we could have done better, but one thing I heard at the focus group stuck with me. When I asked people what they didn’t like about SPTechCon, they all qualified their answer by first saying they thought the event was great and they got a lot of great information to take back to their jobs.

-- Dave