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I have been doing a lot of reading on SharePoint 2007 lately. Please find some of the stuff that I have traced. Real people’s experiences:
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, KM, Knowledge Management
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Comment [1] | 
posted Nov 13, 11:53 pm on Nov 13, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
Yesterday I wrote about a paper of James Robertson titled Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing? and ended with a bit of a brain dump on how to overcome the problem of optimising knowledge sharing across silo’s, for the stuff that is relevant to outsiders of that silo’s.
Today, I did some further exploration on the topic and the specific post by James via Technorati and traced a great weblog by consultant Michael Sampson.
Micheal offers some good points in reaction to the negative stance James put in the initial paper (which he later clarified in the comments section in Michael’s blog). He also offered a solution for the “knowledge sharing across silo’s” problem mentioned above.
“It needs a governance approach that clearly articulates that collaboration spaces are for the collaborative development of deliverables and content, which should, when in final form, be published into corporate repositories for wider distribution. If you do that, and make it work through a combination of written policies and the post-project review phase, the problem goes away.”
However, I do not really have a good feeling about this. Especially because of the “what’s in it for us” issue. Some real discipline is required for getting people to share in this way.
In my opinion the real solution will come much more natural when internal blogging (in teams) to support projects becomes more widespread. This internal blogging will make sure important information emerges about the project process and outcomes, that can be picked up by outsiders via RSS. And not at the end of the project, but also during the project.
Then also the four complementary solutions mentioned yesterday will do their job to spread the information and have it emerge.
Anyone?
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, KM, Knowledge Management, Internal Blogging
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Nov 7, 10:52 pm on Nov 07, 2007 |
category: Enterprise 2.0
/ Sharepoint
Another very smart move from Microsoft, trying to capture its share in the Enterprise 2.0 arena: a community driven content recommendations and requests site built on top of SharePoint and about SharePoint. It is called SharePoint-Pedia and it is (how surprisingly) not a wiki!
Check it out! Seems to me as the perfect place for finding information and asking questions.
By the way, I tried to create an account but it did not work :(
Will try later…
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, KM, Knowledge Management
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Nov 7, 10:52 pm on Nov 07, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
James Robertson from the Australian Step Two Designs recently released a number of excellent small content management briefings. I learned about them today, a result of being on their mailing list.
One of the papers has a challenging title Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?.
Basically the paper outlines the issue of having a large or growing number of knowledge tools, like e.g. Lotus Notes or more common these days SharePoint (the latter my own input) that for the team/community that is using the tool are quite helpful, but that are virtually worthless in terms of cross community sharing of information. James argues that the issue arises because of the lack of context of the material stored in the silo’s, from the perspective of outsiders.
I quote:
“What is this file, is it a final or a draft? How does it relate to this other document? Where is the main project plan?”
Having visited a few SharePoint sites recently at my workplace, I can agree with the context point to some extend, although good descriptions to documents surely help. I guess insiders will also benefit from that? Actually, I find it a bigger problem that it is often hard to find your way around in spaces that are freely designed by the respective administrators. Thus not so much context as navigation. This last issue can be solved somewhat “company-wide” by using standards for designs I guess.
What puzzled me a bit about the issue of context, was that James stated that enterprise search will not be a solution for the problem.
“By definition, most of these collaboration spaces are only relevant to the people using them. Including them [content in the silo’s: MdR] will therefore reduce the quality and relevance of search results for staff as a whole.”
If search is not the answer, what can actually be done to solve the problem and optimise knowledge sharing across silo’s, for the stuff that is relevant to outsiders?
A bit of a brain dump to start off with:
Anyone?
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, KM, Knowledge Management
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Nov 6, 10:52 pm on Nov 06, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
While still recuperating from the discussion about Sharepoint which I started of on Monday, Bart Wessels, a Microsoft employee I got acquainted with only recently, pointed me to a press release presented today: Microsoft Powers Up Web 2.0 With Innovative Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Partners.
A quote from the press release:
(Oct. 17, 2007) Atlassian Software Systems, one of the top wiki providers, and NewsGator Technologies Inc., a leader in RSS technologies, have joined forces with Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, creating additional Web 2.0-based community-building capacity and expanding social computing opportunities in the workplace.
The offerings of the new partners:
Microsoft seems really serious about hijacking this market.
Watch this quote:
Microsoft’s use of social computing includes a commitment to create up to 100 next-generation business applications on the SharePoint platform by next calendar year.
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Atlassian, Newsgator, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog
Add to del.icio.us Comment [1] | posted Oct 17, 09:22 pm on Oct 17, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
Maybe it is because I am really interested in the topic, but it looks as thought there is an increasing amount of activity around the Microsoft Sharepoint product in relation to Enterprise 2.0.
Euan Semple already seems to have made up his mind. Others that I read, like Simon and Sid are still very much in the process of making up their mind.
I am in the same boat (as you may know), working for a big company and currently also in a “mode” to learn about the value of Sharepoint, as it is inevitably coming towards us all.
Issues with Sharepoint
One of the common “issues” mentioned in relation to Sharepoint, is that it is so easy to partially close the site to groups of fellow employees. This is obviously not what you want (unless regulation demands it!), so the best way now is to learn to get the most out of it in terms of emulating a real “open” environment. This is where corporate policy kicks in, I think. Corporate policy should understand/explain the value of open connections and stimulate it, to a point where the policy is “open unless….”(a very, very exceptional case; e.g. Chinese walls regulation).
Other comments, like that of Euan Semple (as I understand it), deal more with the look and feel offered by Sharepoint (“Microsoft seems too good at creating sterile environments run by control freaks who hate messiness, consider conversations unprofessional and rarely understand the true pulse of their organisations”). Simon mentions Sharepoint sites being difficult to navigate for non-frequent visitors, in the out-of-the-box version, requiring some serious re-skinning overhead.
Is it not about the tool!
While I still, personally, have to really get some hands-on experience with Sharepoint, I get the feeling that, instead of focussing on “the tool”, we should worry far more about the mindset of people requiring to work with it. Who is actually going to blog on the new blogging templates Sharepoint offers? And who will provide the open, fully transparent, feedback via commenting while everybody is watching (including your boss!). Who dares to ask questions openly and show he does not know all? And so on. The same for wiki’s (also included in Sharepoint!), which seem to have even a slower adoption process. It appears to me that there are some real educational and cultural challenges ahead. Nonetheless, these are interesting times…
What do you think?
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog
Add to del.icio.us Comment [7] | posted Oct 15, 11:02 pm on Oct 15, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
I love reading about experiments like this. Hat tip to my favourite podcast For Immediate Release for mentioning it in episode 275.
CIO Insight has the story.
To summarise:
The fourth largest bank in the US, Wachovia Corp, will roll out a social networking service for 110,000 employees over the next several months. The aim: giving workers a sophisticated knowledge-management platform that combines the user-friendly approach of the popular Facebook service with broad integration into Wachovia Corp.‘s business applications. Community development is a primary benefit expected of the system.
Features include:
The network should also help Wachovia attract new talent as well. And I bet it will.
One of the most interesting things about the experiment, is that not a score of fancy Enterprise 2.0 start-ups have been brought in to do the job, but Microsoft with its Sharepoint Services Product. And why? Well just because MS already has such a big footprint in companies (some more perspective on this: here and here). To quote:
“Microsoft has a relatively rich technology offering, with natural integration across different product sets,” says Pete Fields, Wachovia’s director of eBusiness for employees. “Desktop and productivity tools are still so Microsoft-centric that it made sense.”
Technorati tags: Wachovia Corp, Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Sep 19, 10:30 pm on Sep 19, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
I have written about the potential of MS Sharepoint earlier. More than one year ago I pointed to the potential for Microsoft in terms of hijacking the Enterprise 2.0 market. My feeling has become stronger and stronger in that direction since then.
Having had a look at some recent documentation on the wiki and blogs components of Sharepoint Services 3.0 and taking into account the issues there are with trying the get a (big) company to experiment with E2.0 tools, it made me think again about that old post and the potential of Sharepoint. What about this scenario:
Advantage of this strategy:
Of course, this places the majority of the challenges for E2.0 introduction on technical aspects in stead of emotional/political/fear backgrounds. It sounds a bit like “build it and they will come”, but nonetheless Sharepoint it is something that will happen anyway at least in our MS dominated company.
Update: Simon Revell shares some interesting thoughts on Sharepoint as well!
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Sep 19, 10:23 pm on Sep 19, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
If you cannot conquer them, join them…
Socialtext has integrated it’s open sourced wiki into the upcoming Sharepoint 2007, in order to create the best-of-breed wiki, considering some shortcomings in the upcoming Sharepoint’s own wiki.
Read the full story on Ross Mayfield’s weblog. As always, Ross provides a very thoughtful story on the rational for this Socialtext / Microsoft co-operation, and it’s not (only) about the money…
For a related post on Sharepoint and its potential Enterprise 2.0 capabilities see: Will Sharepoint Hijack Enterprise 2.0?
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Ross Mayfield, Socialtext, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki
Add to del.icio.us Comment | posted Oct 30, 11:33 pm on Oct 30, 2006 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Wiki
Just spend the last 55 minutes on one of those great Channel 9 video’s from Microsoft. It must have been one of the last video’s made by Robert Scoble, who recently substituted MS for Podtech, a pod- and videocasting company.
The video was about the RSS, Wiki’s and Blog features of the upcoming release of Sharepoint 2007 (coupled with release of Office 2007, I thought it was planned for the second halve of 2006).
Sharepoint is a collaboration product (groupware) where people can work together, but until recently it lacked the new Web 2.0 like applications like blogs and wiki’s and the RSS feature for “connecting” and publishing it all. But that has changed now: blogs, wiki’s and RSS are part of the product.
Blogs
So Sharepoint now has a real blog inside and publishing has really been made very easy. Comments and RSS do complete that. In fact one could also publish from MS Word (in the upcoming Office 2007). The Channel 9 video showed how easy this really has become. How low can hurdles for people get? By the way, if you prefer this, you could also use third party software like Ecto to post.
Some other features:
Something not in there yet:
Wiki’s
The wiki feature looks much like Mediawiki in terms of the markup of links, but more important is, that there is a very rich WYSIWYG editor included. Actually the only markup that is needed is how to create a new page (like [[title of page | alternative page name]]). This is very good! The editor looks very similar to what I have seen in the Socialtext software recently. In fact, even the empty page links look similar to that in the Socialtext wiki.
By the way, Robert Scoble made a nice slip of the tongue when refering to Socialtext as Simpletext, which however is a logical error because the company could even be called “Social-Text-Simply”, to combine two core characteristics of their product.
Some additional features:
RSS
RSS is everywhere in Sharepoint. RSS has a lot of functionality and MS is making it easy to find the feeds because a lot of people do not really find this easy.
Some additional highlights:
Extra: Outlook 2007
Most of you may know this already, but it was nice to see Outlook 2007 include the possibility to read RSS feeds (like IE7 will)
Access denied?
During demo there were some access denied hickups which were of course a bit entertaining, but this happens to all of us every day. The fact that Robert has not edited this stuff out, is one of the reasons of the popularity of Channel 9 as a communication channel with MS customers. I keeps it all very authentic.
Will the Enterprise 2.0 market be hijacked by MS Sharepoint?
So what will this mean for vendors with wiki and weblog products looking for business within the corporate world.
Let me say first of all that I am not a Sharepoint expert. In my opinion:
I am curious to what extent companies like Socialtext, Jotspot, and Six Apart feel “comfortable” with this development. To quote one, Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, who actually reacted quite relaxed and confident in a recent post:
I should probably acknowledge Microsoft and IBM’s entrance into the market Socialtext created. They definitely get it, which has been part of the View Source plan. Within a year, the market will grow more than ever, a function of the exposure and credibility incumbents bring. The litmus test will be if they adhere to the openness they seek to extend. As the best of breed, with the openness to breed, our fun is just beginning.
Of course, wiki’s and blog have a long ride to go on the adoption curve and this means those markets can show high growth rates. Getting the bigger companies like Microsoft behind this really helps.
Maybe somebody else is having a strong vision on this? Any serious comment is appreciated.
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Robert Scoble, Socialtext, Jotspot, Six Apart,Ross Mayfield, Microsoft, Channel 9, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, Wiki, Blog
Add to del.icio.us Comment [4] | posted Jul 11, 10:41 pm on Jul 11, 2006 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0
All content on this weblog is presented on my personal account, representing my own views, and as such does not necessarily reflect the views of my past, current or future employers.
