1. Reading multiple books at the same time – Some would say this is a bad habit, and maybe so but I do it. I generally am reading 5-7 books at the same time. I’ve challenged myself to read a book a week. Unfortunately, I don’t always meet the goal, but typical I”ll hit at least 2 weeks out of 4. So one downside to this habit is I would have to carry with me all these books. Maybe ok if I just was in the car, but parctically it’s too painful. So the Kindle makes this soooooooo easy!

2. Reading while on the treadmill or elliptical machine – if you are like me, I absolutely hate walking on the treadmill or using the elliptical. I much prefer to walk or run outside. But alas, this needs to happen. Reading while exercising makes the painful time go by so much faster, but holding a book open with your hand is just not doable, especially if you are sweating up a storm. Enter the Kindle. I can do 45 min – 60 min reading the Kindle and time just flies by. I still hate the elliptical but Kindle makes it a love-hate relationship.

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What? Did I hear you say who cares about social media tools/solutions? Well, since you must have been living under a rock or deep inside the earth, here are some stats to chew on. Digital Marketing Intelligence source ComScore says in its 2011 report that social networking websites reach 82% of worldwide internet users. Facebook reaches over half of the worldwide audience, and accounts for one in every seven minutes spent online. Twitter grew nearly 60% in the last year, reaching one in ten internet users worldwide. Clearly social media use is growing like crazy, and making a big business impact within the marketing space as recently revealed by Econsultancy. Their report says that 91% of companies say social media is becoming more important to their overall marketing strategy. More specifically, their State of Social 2011 worldwide report indicates 87% use Twitter as part of their social media marketing strategy, and 82% use Facebook.

Well one could argue that success in marketing does not necessarily mean improved enterprise collaboration. And ROI from social tools has been the key issue keeping folks out of the water. But recently, say the last 18 months, “show me the ROI” has turned into “I don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage” so even aqua-phobes are at least putting their toes in the water. So, I thought I would post some of the key learnings I’ve had from numerous projects, as well as others that I have not been intimately involved with but know about through colleagues. Surprisingly, or maybe not, the learnings apply across vertical industries and appear to be common to social solution adoption, and they also apply across different vendor’s tools and across platforms.

The customers I”ve been working with have been some of the larger enterprise companies, interested in “best of breed” solutions like Jive, Yammer, etc, as well as social platforms from IBM and Microsoft, and social applications like SF.com. These customers have a heterogeneous environment, usually utilizing both J2EE and .NET applications, and multiple portal and database products.

Do NOT adopt a fire, ready, aim approach. Well, just because some may be having success doesn’t mean you will. So don’t just throw on the bathing suite and jump in the water, even if you think you know how to swim. You must define your social strategy before you start. By strategy, you need to articulate how the social solution will improve innovation and create a competitive advantage. Big Gulp you say, well if the social solution is going to make a big difference why do it?Specifically,

1. Define your business objectives and ensure the social solution will solve very relevant business problems. What are you really trying to accomplish?
2. Design the solution and the implementation to take into account your company’s culture. This is critical because it is more about people and processes than technology.

I know you’re probably saying to yourself, “this is obvious, of course we’ll do this”. Well experience says that this is NOT being done. There is a lot of beef here and I”ll make sure to break this into a blog all it’s own. But just so I’m clear, by strategy I’m not talking about a 100 page document, and I’m not even saying it has to be a document, better if it is, but as for most things the process of discussing what you are really trying to accomplish BEFORE you design and deploy is what is key. You don’t even have to have 100% agreement before you start. I’m in the process of working with companies to develop their social strategy and it is a very interesting process, key word is PROCESS. More later.

Just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. Many organizations set very aggressive metrics for their deployments in terms of adoption, which were very unrealistic but they must have looked good to somebody. Many times I’ll see companies expecting 100% adoption of the new solution solution, only to be very surprised to find that they have less than 10% adoption. Even though they know that some of their folks will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to adopt anything new, they still think they will jump on the “next great solution”. It’s interesting that companies are finding that some employees adopt and contribute very readily while others will “participate” but very rarely contribute. Forrester has recently released its report “Global Social Media Adoption in 2011“. The full report is available to Forrester clients only but they publically share a great graphic that tells the whole story. If you have a chance to read the whole report definitely check it out. But one of the more interesting conclusions was that less than 25% of those who are online participants actively create content. This is pretty amazing when you think about it. Also notice, that the majority are spectators, folks who use the tools but just to read/see what others are doing. This has dramatic ramifications in how you implement and deploy your social solution, and I will devote a whole blog to this in the near future. Stay tuned.

Any social solution must take into account and maybe be part of the overall corporate communication strategy of the organization. This makes adoption more seamless, because it conforms to how people are communicating today and how they are getting their work done. You say, what is your corporate communication strategy? Well, I have found that most organizations have not articulated a strategy, but every corporation has one and it is implicit in how people communicate. Typically, the communication strategy utilizes the following, with email and DLs being the most prolific, with blogging and microblogging growing in interest. Interestingly, Web portal are under-achieving in terms of their value to the knowledge worker.

• email
• Distribution Lists
• Web Portals
• Video
• Blogs and Wikis
• Microblogging

This essentially means that people are used to communicating in some way(s), and they have a process for getting their work done. The social solution must conform to that process for doing work because this introduces the least change. Now it is also very clear that social solutions can change the way we communicate. So one could argue that the solution doesn’t have to conform to how folks work it it provides a radically more efficient and effective communication solution, and I have seen this as well, and so have others How Social Media Changes Technical Communication.

Social tool adoption within an organization must include a governance plan. Although very similar privacy issues occur with email, social tools provide many more opportunities and typically broader audiences for divulging information that should not be shared. Also, many corporations are having to manage social account proliferation as employees adopt these tools as discussed in Corporations at Risk From Social Media Adoption Issues. This has reminded me of the fire, ready, aim approach many have done with SharePoint and then realized that they had site proliferation and figured they should implement some type of governance.

Well much more to say, but as always too little time…until next time….

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BA Insight’s Longitude Auto-Classifier automatically categorizes content in two ways: 1) as content is uploaded into a SharePoint library, and 2) as content is indexed from external repositories using FAST. This classification is based on highly-customizable rule sets. As we looked at the rules, it reminded me of rules in Outlook for filtering email. It was a very simple process. Not using FAST for SharePoint you say? Well, they assured me you could use the library upload process to classify content and this does not require FAST for SharePoint.

This capability can be used in at least two ways:

1. To autoclassify content to circumvent the need for users to perform this function. This would ensure more reliable classification and ensure the process occurs.

2. To use in combination with user manual classification. This ensure that a standard taxonomy is being implemented and a users folksonomy is also occurring.

This solution provides a complete taxonomy management and automated content classification solution for the enterprise on top of the SharePoint 2010 platform. I plan to test it out after the holidays but it looks pretty sweet! So if you’re interested, check out the links below or send me an email and I”ll get you hooked up with the BAInsight folks for a demo.

15-minute video: http://www.bainsight.com/Pages/sharepoint-metadata-auto-classification-video.aspx

Data sheet: http://www.bainsight.com/Pages/sharepoint-metadata-auto-classification.aspx

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With this update, you can now view PerformancePoint reports and scorecards, Excel Services reports, and Reporting Services reports on iPad devices running the iOS 5 Safari browser. A recent TechNet article provides all the viewing and configuration details so go check it out Viewing reports and scorecards on Apple iPad devices.

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External sharing allows customers to share SharePoint sites with partners, vendors, and customers who are not licensed to use O365. An organization could utilize an O365 site specifically for when it needs to share content externally and still maintain their on-premise SharePoint deployment. This “hybrid” environment is drawing a lot of interest. With O365, you can invite an external user to your Web site just by sending them an email. External sharing is not available for all O365 subscriptions so check with your Microsoft or licensing specialist to confirm that you have or get the right subscription. But if you have the right subscription, you have 50 external sharing licenses. Keep in mind, this licensing may change over time.

The process for doing this is covered in depth here so I won’t repeat all the details. By default, SharePoint Online does not allow external users. SharePoint Online administrators can enable this capability as shown in the dialog below.

This approach could be used as a temporary solution while you add extranet capability to your on-premise SharePoint farm, or it could be used indefinitely, only resorting to a full fledged extranet as the need requires, or it could provide pseudo-extranet capabilities to your O365 deployment.

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First, for those that did not attend the SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA, 193 of the conference presentations can be accessed on YouTube so go check them out.

Second, I continue to get requests daily for a version of the Productivity Hub that is compatible with SharePoint 2010 SP1. Well wait no longer, you can get it here.

Hope everyone had a great holiday break.

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So during a progress review, I popped open the laptop and started to show how easy it is. Unconsciously, I fired up PowerShell ISE, the OOTB editor. It’s almost second nature to me to use ISE and because that’s how I got started, after graduating from the universal Notepad app, because that’s how I like to learn by getting dirty and reading SDKs. But unfortunately, it’s not a good tool for ramping up folks quickly, especially ones that have the “just show me what I need to know” mentality.

So, I remembered that when I did the 2-day PowerShell workshop a couple of years ago (which by the way was very well attended), I used Idera’s PowerShell Plus for all my my demos and examples. I loved it, and admins from all the 4 different cities also loved it. But unfortunately I didn’t have PSP installed on the laptop so I had to use ISE.

So here are some tips for learning PS using the ISE. ISE is a very good tool but you have to do at least 2 things to really make it a good experience:

1. You need a reference to the online PS commandlets; there are several but I used this one: Index of SharePoint Server 2010 Windows PowerShell cmdlets

2. Modify the ISE to include the SharePoint snap-in, PSSnapin "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell". I recently saw Kirk Evan’s blog post that summarizes how to do this so kudos to Kirk for not being lazy like me. If you don’t do this, it can be a frustrating experience for new users to constantly add this to the top of every script they write. So experienced folks are probably saying, why don’t you just use the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell shortcut to open the ISE? Well, that is the last step I tell folks, but I want them to understand some the key under-the-hood details as part of their learning experience, so they understand what to do when things go wrong.

Well the learning experience went very well and in the end we added several new PS disciples. You may want to graduate to a more powerful editor environment so I suggest 3 tools below, as well as I’ll refer you to a good review “PowerShell Editor Roundup” of editors, all though it’s a little dated.

You should download the Mastering PowerShell free book. This will tell you more than you wanted to know. Also, a new Windows PowerShell Command Builder tool has recently been released that provides a GUI environment for learning that may help as well. Plus, there is a wealth of information, free scripts, etc. so just go Bing and get busy.

So, I have vowed to add PowerShell training to any pilot I do in the future to increase the base of believers.

Maybe it’s time for another multi-city, PowerShell Admin training tour. Fun, fun, fun…..

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Tools:

PowerGUI

Sapien PrimalScript

PowerShell Plus

Other Resources:

Gary Lapointe’s blog

Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Server 2010

Mastering PowerShell

PowerShell Editor Roundup: Who's the Winner?

SharePoint 2010 Products administration by using Windows PowerShell

Best PowerShell Editor & Debugger

Just another reason to begin using PowerShell, there is a wealth of capability there.

I taught a SharePoint 2010 PowerShell course in 4 different cities earlier this year and many attendees were amazed at the flexibility and capability, beyond what is available in the GUI. Especially since many features, eg., multitenancy, can only be enabled via PowerShell.

So what are you waiting for…

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I delivered this same talk at several SP user groups but this time it was extremely interactive which made the whole discussion that much better.

I have changed my presentation focus from feature demos to solution demos. When I have presented SP2010 to numerous companies I consistently get feedback that customers want to see use case/solution presentations, rather than feature presentations. Matter of fact, they are tired of feature presentations. So I have begun to do the solution presentations more and more. I have noticed that there is better comprehension of the features because they are in the context of a solution. Also, the more diverse the audience these seem to provide more for everyone. The challenge is that solution presentations are more work because they usually require some moderate to heavy customization.

Specifically, I focused on:

1. Implementing an Internet Web site using SP2010, and

2. Improving Innovation with Social Communities using SP2010

A special thanks to Bob Logan for being my host.

SP2010 is becoming very viral…

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From the description:

“The Silverlight 4 Training Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!”

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