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SharePoint Saturday Boston presentation

Metadata Management In A Social Media World, Spsbos, 2 2010

View more presentations from Christian Buckley.

Post SharePoint Saturday Boston Thoughts

Congratulations to Geoff Varosky and Talbott Crowell, Pradeepa Siva, Michael Lotter, and Chris Bowen for putting on a great event this weekend at the Microsoft building in Waltham, MA! For those unfamiliar with these events, SharePoint Saturday is a free, community-organized event that brings together SharePoint experts and MVPs to share their knowledge about all-things SharePoint. These events are a fantastic way for professionals and newbies alike to come and learn, ask questions, and make connections.

I presented on “Metadata Management in a Social Media World” and discussed the underlying metadata and taxonomy related to the many different social media tools that user’s are considering implementing in SharePoint. It was a good discussion, with a lot of feedback and interaction from the audience. I’ll be posting material from my session on SlideShare this week, as well as the #SPSBOS website. I enjoyed some of the other sessions, as well, including Virgil Carroll’s discussion on metadata in 2010, which delved deeper into the new 2010 platform than was covered in my session. He’s a very enthusiastic and entertaining presenter who knows his content. (Unfortunately, his company High Monkey Consulting will soon become irrelevant when i open my new firm, Higher Monkey Consulting, with our wholly owned and operated subsidiary, Highest Monkey Consulting)

Participating in this event were some of the more familiar names in the SharePoint space, such as Chris Geier, Linc Williams, Steven Fowler (whose wife somehow made it through the entire day with him), Christina Wheeler, Virgil Carroll, Jerry Hughes, Ryan Tacy, Scott Singleton, Geoff Varosky, David Pileggi, SB Chatterjee, Richard Harbridge, Mark Rackley, Becky Isserman, Jeff Willinger, and others. And, of course, we saw familiar friends from the vendors area, including Sharon from AvePoint and Matt from RackSpace. And for those who may have attended and walked by one of the intense and very animated discussions inside the speaker’s lounge and wondered what we were discussing, one of the hottest topic was around the original MTV veejay’s, and which were our favorites -- with the consensus being Martha Quinn (I still say Adam Curry was better). I believe, at one point, there was even a video stream to the speaker’s lounge at our sister event happening in New Orleans, where I believe the veejay question also came up. While there were a few technical hiccups impacting some of the web-based demos, just about everything went off without a hitch.   

Following the event, a group of us headed over to the pub Joe Sent Me in Waltham, where we enjoyed sitting in close quarters and texting/twittering each other for a couple hours. It was pretty funny. One topic did come up which I want to mention – if you are new to SharePoint and have questions, or would like to get more involved in the community, please feel comfortable in reaching out and talking to any one of the presenters listed here, or, generally speaking, at any of the SharePoint Saturday events. I’ve been in hi-tech for almost 20 years, and I can honestly say that this is the most fun, welcoming, and eager to help group of experts that I have ever worked with, and they are always more than willing to talk. So don’t be shy.

I am looking forward to presenting at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte on April 10th. see you there!

I also want to congratulate David McCordick from Westborough, MA for winning the Zune HD from echoTechnology at the closing raffle. I grabbed this quick snapshot with David at the close of the event.

Translating Social Media Into SharePoint

In prepping for my presentation at SharePoint Saturday Boston this week, I came across a couple great articles outlining the business value of social media in the enterprise, which led to a great discussion this afternoon with my boss about online tools versus enterprise usefulness. To paraphrase Garry, he stated that social media was envisioned for the individual (and ad revenue), but business owners struggle to understand how to make them useful in the enterprise. They can see the inherent value, but they struggle with harnessing these features.

Part of what I am going to talk about Saturday is mapping these social media tools to what is available in SharePoint (2003, 2007, and 2010 versions), citing part of Dion Hinchcliffe’s article “Ten Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Technologies to Watch.”

For example, his first item is “Community management tools.” Well, this maps over to SharePoint as tagging, discussion forums, feedback and ratings, routing, bookmarking, blogging, sharing and tracking.

My point is, adding social media capability to SharePoint does not necessarily mean complex integrations of third party software. The pieces are there – the hard part is figuring out:

1. which features to use
2. what metadata and taxonomy are needed to enable these features AND help you meet all enterprise security, compliance, and intellectual property asset management guidelines
3. how you’ll manage the metadata and taxonomy going forward

Looking forward to hearing from the audience on the topic. See you there.

SharePoint Saturday Boston

All of this beautiful weather here in the Seattle area got you down? Why not join me at SharePoint Saturday Boston later this month? (Saturday, February 27th) These free regional events are a fantastic way to get in front of SharePoint experts and learn more about best practices and leading-edge business solutions. You can register here for the Boston event, being held at Microsoft’s Waltham Building. I’ll be speaking on “Metadata (and IP) Management in a Social Media World.” Here’s a quick description of my presentation:

Many companies planning upgrades to SharePoint 2010 are reviewing their social media strategies, as users are chomping at the bit to deploy and use the new, natively supported features in SharePoint 2010. But many administrators don’t fully understand the issues associated with managing the data created by these tools. The intent of this presentation is to walk participants through the taxonomy and governance (and Intellectual Property) implications of the new social media capabilities within SharePoint 2010 (and 2007), providing guidance and best practices on how to track metadata, align these tools with broader corporate content management strategies, and maintain manageability of their SharePoint environment.

echoTechnology is a proud sponsor of this event, and we are providing a shiny, new Zune HD 16Gb to the raffle. You must be present to win! For more information about the other speakers and topics, follow this link. See you there!

Facebook a Security Risk? Say it isn’t so!

Nick O’Neill just posted an article on All Facebook claiming that “Facebook now poses the greatest security risk to companies among the leading social networks.” He directs readers toward a new report published by Sophos that “reveals which social network people believe poses the biggest security risk.” In the report, underneath the lopsided graphic illustrating that a <snarky>statistically impressive</snarky> 60% of respondents believe Facebook poses the greatest risk (really? only 60%?), there is a quick attempt to make the point that Facebook is a security risk only because of its size and influence. Much like Microsoft is maligned by the apple-fan-boys. 

What this all means is that you need to be more vigilant about your systems, and aware of what your users are doing. As I mentioned in my last post, and as Joel Oleson followed up in his blog, these security concerns are not reason enough to stop you from building out your social networking capabilities – especially in SharePoint – but to be aware of the issues, and have a plan to deal with them.

Top 10 Reasons Your CIO Blocks Social Media

Over the last couple months, I’ve noticed quite a few articles outlining CIO concerns over the rise of social networking in the enterprise. To be honest, I don’t think there’s anything new here. These were many of the same concerns we dealt with in the late 90’s as hosted applications came online. Some of us spent a lot of time in front of customers trying to convince them that it was safe to go in the water, that the online paradigm was coming. These days, whether an application is on-premise or hosted offsite or in the cloud is almost inconsequential – just give me the features/storage/performance I need, and get out of the way. That’s where we’re headed.

Having lived through these battles more than a decade ago, it’s interesting to read articles, such as Nigel Fenwick’s piece on the Forrester Blog, or Kristin Burnham over on CIO, that illustrate the sluggish response to social media by many CIOs. Do you find yourself stuck with your own organization, trying to make the case for expanding your collaboration capability? Is your CIO blocking your every move? What are the issues? Should your management team be concerned about these new technologies?

To help you understand the CIO point of view, I’ve put together a quick list of the major CIO concerns that I’ve seen – and tried to manage around – in my various roles in online and collaboration technologies (most recently SharePoint), that seem to be spot on with the rise of social media tools in the enterprise:

1. Security
   First and foremost in any CIO’s mind is security of existing systems and applications. Will enabling these new tools create backdoors and open the company up to issues? What does this do to access controls and permissions management? You need to understand the network, identity, and device-specific requirements of these tools before you consider deploying.
   
   
2. Intellectual Property / Competition
   While we’ve seen news of inconsiderate employees losing their jobs over loose talk on unmonitored social media sites, there just hasn’t been the wave of IP issues predicted in the early days of these tools. Part of this is because many companies closely monitor  their brands and trade secrets (some great links here on brand monitoring), but the real reason is that the way we work has changed. People inherently understand what can and can’t be talked about in these forums. Having said that, you need to be aware of the capabilities (and limits) of these tools to provide security trimming, in-use monitoring, and custom permissions so that your intellectual property is not put at risk by a cheap tool. Yes, there is overlap with the previous item, and with the next.
   
   
3. Compliance
   At the root of every compliance rule is a creative lawsuit claim. Somebody, somewhere was sued for leaking the kind of data floating around in your internal social media hub. So how do you capture that IM conversation, the web conference whiteboard markup, the teleconference chatter? The problem with many of the common platforms is that they are limited in their ability to capture and store historical data. Of course, in most cases, pay a little bit of money, and anything is possible. You can monitor, capture, and archive just about anything, and some companies are doing just that….in case they’re asked for the conference call logs the next time they’re in court. You need to know the capabilities of the tools you’re proposing to deploy.
   
   
4. Productivity
   Are you scanning your Friend lists, checking on the status of your college buddy to see if he was able to catch Avatar in 3D last weekend, or are you actually doing something “work-related?” To be honest, this is one of the most difficult issues to overcome with a CIO who insists that social media = unproductive employees. It’s hard to sell effectiveness and efficiency, the intangible fruits of social media. Senior managers who see everything as quantitative have a hard time understanding qualitative arguments. You’ll need to be clear on the benefits, show them as much data as possible, and get other senior managers on your side.
   
   
5. Support Issues
   What is the server footprint? Is it freeware or a supported product? What are the support options?  What are the priority and severity levels? What is the mean time to resolution of any issue you might find? Are there SLAs? How much visibility do you have into the types of supports issues you can expect, or that other enterprise customers are experiencing? Any company claiming to be enterprise-ready should have an enterprise-class support system in place, otherwise you are at risk.
   
   
6. Cost
   A legitimate concern. There’s the cost of the software, the hardware it requires, the external maintenance and support, the internal maintenance and support, the overhead to manage the technology – such as regular security and compliance audits, support metrics, and other critical business intelligence reporting and status meetings. You’re adding a new transactional system to the mix. Yes, these tools can make the team more collaborative and productive, but they also spit out a lot of data that you may want to / need to mine.
   
   
7. Lack of Visibility / Transparency
   Truth be told, this is just another flavor of the security, IP, and compliance concerns above. If I were a psychologist (I’m not, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night) I would say that this concern has more to do with control than anything else. One way around this is to provide as much data as possible, until their comfort level increases. Of course, this raises the issue of quantitative value versus qualitative. 
   
   
8. Bandwidth
   Really? Is this still an issue? Possibly. Just be aware of the resource-hog-iness of the tools. Every vendor under the sun has this question answered, so just be prepared with the data.
   
   
9. Fad
   You crazy kids. How long is this social media stuff going to last? Get a haircut.
   
   
10. Ignorance / Apathy
    The good thing about a CIO who doesn’t seem to care about the latest, greatest technology is that they don’t last long. Your best approach to this issue is to show your CIO why they should care, such as productivity or happy end users. Or maybe you just wait them out…

Hopefully you’ve found this list to be helpful, and it helps you better understand your CIO’s hesitations around social media. Don’t be deterred. The first step for you is to understand their concerns. The second step is to answer those concerns. Do your homework, and be prepared. Good luck.

Another product release, another flurry of email spam

Sometime in mid-December, we made the decision to pause on some of our 2010 (next-gen) development efforts to create a product that is a derivative work of our existing product suite. Basically, we wanted to strip out a powerful feature, clean up the UI, add some new bells and whistles, and release a new product, after which we’d dive head-first back into our next gen development activities. Voila! The echo FileLoader is released! Blog post here, product page here.

So here we are, 2 days after the release of the echo FileLoader, and we’re slowly rewiring ourselves to get back into Davinci, our internal name for the 2010 version of echo for SharePoint. It feels good to have the echo FileLoader out, and the press releases and ad campaigns should garner some attention and start kicking in the page views over the next several days.

After working through the last couple weekends to get everything ready, I am a little tired, but I feel good. Email blasts going out later today, and then there will be 2 things on my personal agenda: 1) Davinci product planning, schedules, features, and the 3 new developers coming on board next week, and 2) content. Joel Oleson and I got together last week to map out that series on SharePoint 2010 and social media, which was delayed due to EFL. But we have some great ideas, and I’ll be writing on the topic tonight and tomorrow. The intent is to promote these articles through EndUserSsharePoint.com. I am speaking on related topics at upcoming SharePoint Saturdays and regional user groups, so check my calendar often!

Ok, going to wander down Pike Street to find some food….

Twitter Growth, Less Filling

I’m adding 2 to 5 users per day on Twitter, but does that translate into anything? Surely not blog traffic, as I still talk to myself on here. I tell myself it’s for posterity, but my kids rarely look at my Facebook page, much less read what I write. Luckily, the narcissist in me doesn’t care, and I’ll continue to flit about and talk to myself. Cheers!

You Can’t Write About That….yet

It’s the product company dilemma: you want to blog about the latest project milestones and bleeding-edge technology that your company has in development that you know will be a game-changer, but you have to hold back, keep things under  wraps, and wait. Not that there isn’t plenty to write about – you can talk about the products that are out there already, customer success stories, and problem areas you’re trying to address. But much like the tragedy-focused 24-hour news cycle, it just doesn’t compare to the sizzling hot, fresh-off-the-presses technology news that people want to hear about. Let’s face it: people, generally speaking, want to be dazzled.

And what makes blogging restraint even more difficult is that the SharePoint crowd loves to be entertained. The loudest voices out there are typically consultants and experts who are in the trenches, deploying solutions, and chatting it up about every cool tool, trick and triumph they encounter. Sometimes I envy the consulting class of this business for their ability to freely discuss their latest projects and the technologies they encounter.

At Microsoft, I hated the fact that much of what I worked on could not be discussed outside of the firewall – and sometimes even within the firewall – as the internal battles raged (and still rage) over what our hosted SharePoint business could and should look like. Once outside of Microsoft, I was intent on finding an company and role that would allow me to speak my mind and openly discuss our technologies. People who know me would agree that I am a chatty guy who really likes technology.

Now that I’m on the outside, and own the marketing voice for echoTechnology, I realize how important it is to pace yourself on your external communications. Not that I didn’t realize this within Microsoft – but on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is being anal retentive surrounding all corporate messaging, and 10 is having the personal cell number of Perez Hilton, Microsoft was at a 1.5 in regards to freedom of the employee press (in my humble opinion). At echo, it’s more like a 4 or 5 during the build cycle, but an encouraging 7 to 8 after release.

For now, it has more to do with coming up to speed on the technology, and then sharing that knowledge with the world.

echo blog and website upgrades, on the road to Boston

I got back in town late Friday night from a road trip to Boston, and ended up sleeping for about 10 hours. Great meetings with some partners back east, but after a 100+ hour work week, my brain needed a couple days off, so I refrained from even checking email until late Sunday night. I am driving a few major initiatives for echoTechnology that I thought I’d also mention over on  this blog, such as the launch of the echo4sharepoint blog and branding, which spreads across YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. Going forward, I’ll duplicate some posts across these two sites. The echo4sharepoint site also shares content with the blog page on the echoTechnology website (click on the blog tab). In addition to these announcements, we refreshed all site content and cleaned up landing pages on the website, tuning them for ease-of-use and, hopefully, better ad campaign performance.

This is all part of a broader social media strategy to optimize for and increase traffic to our website, and develop a better SharePoint community profile.

On a personal note, it was my first time to Boston, and I was glad to have a couple hours to spare before having to jump on a flight home. I was able to walk the freedom trail from Boston Common up to the North End and back, and was able to catch great pictures of the Massachusetts State House, Old Granary Burying Ground, King’s Chapel Burying Ground, Old State House, site of the Boston Massacre, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere House, Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, and the Old North Church. Although it was a brisk 20 degrees or so, there was not a cloud in the sky, and I was bundled up nicely. Boston is a beautiful town – would love to get back there in warmer weather.