Microknowledge

SharePoint Conference 2011 – Day One Wrapup

Welcome to Day One of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011. 

It’s already been a fantastic conference. I arrived here yesterday morning.  I got to spend a little time with family here in LA during the day yesterday – I was lucky enough to get a ride on my brother’s neighbor’s personally owned fire truck on my way down here.  (A long story.)  Hey, I got to SPC11 (in part) on a firetruck!

 

This is an interesting event – there’s no new release of SharePoint, so we expect a deep review of how SharePoint usage and enhancements.  Also, a lot of tablets here – iPads, and a few lucky Slate Windows 8 tablets. 

I already posted a summary of this morning’s keynote address, led by Jared Spataro with Jeff Teper and Kurt Delbene.  Here are some highlights:

• Expect a public preview of the next version of SharePoint at the SharePoint Conference 2012, November 12-15, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Nevada.
• 125 million SharePoint Users worldwide currently.
• The next version of SharePoint has the largest development history in SharePoint history to support v15 (the next release) and a new prelease of Office 365. Expect a lot in user interface enhancements and branding.
• Microsoft is launching the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) program for SharePoint
• Office 265 will support full two way Business Connectivity Services (BCS) connections to web-service based data by year end
• New Microsoft Visio server architectures visualization tools to be available this week for download from Microsoft.com
• New scaling and architecture whitepapers were used to support 14TB content databases with full failover of a live 15 server farm under load running on SQL Denali CTP

Session Highlights

Here are highlights from a few sessions I visited:

SharePoint for Knowledge Communities

The best take away from this is to organize your intranet around functional “communities” rather than traditional department sub sites.  Jim Kane from Paragon Consulting highlighted the following:

• Knowledge communities have to breakdown challenges of wikis and folders – they are repositories, not communities
• Knowledge hoarding – people pull in far more information than they push back
• Tacit information = information that is needed but not actively sought
• Tacit information is the core problem – how do you get information into the right hands without someone having to search for it.
• Organize your taxonomy around content repositories by project, practice, or topic centric
• Don't create department sites and throw a template at it - create a community
• Don't make it an -IT project
• Use a community to introduce mysites

Always On in SQL 2011 “Denali”

Bill Baer from Microsoft did a fantastic job showing how simply live failover is configured in SQL 2011 "Denali”  The best part isn’t just “disaster” failover, but graceful failover to smoothly transition between servers from planned maintenance, etc. “Always On” mode is setup via easy wizard.

But wait, there-s more – on October 6, Microsoft will release a new PowerShell command line builder – the PowerShell Design Surface.  It looks like Windows 8/Metro, and will be available from the Windows PowerShell Resource Center soon.

 

Developing and Extending Enterprise Content Management Features

Paul Swider led this session – and it was great to see such a big crowd for a great friend to the SharePoint community.

 Paul led through a series of practical tips and demos:

• You can easily customize a site and save the template to the SharePoint solution Gallery – then the template can be exported as a WSP and imported into Visual Studio 2010 for further enhancement
• The DocumentID function provides a static URL that can always reference a document by ID regardless of its physical position.  It is coded by referencing the Office.DocumentManagement library in the ISAPI folder of the SharePoint root/14 Hive.  It uses the server object model.  Paul showed a great implementation trick – implement GetDocumentURLs by ID to return the documents URL reference. 
• In addition, the end user web part that allows user to type in a document ID directly for retrieval can itself be overridden.

Other Stuff

A final note – I saw in the tweet stream that the Productivity Hub – a series of free end user training tools for SharePoint that can be added directly to your farm – is available for download now, and will be available for SharePoint 2010 SP1 in November from  http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122

Thanks! 

SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Webinar with BA Insight - Thursday 14 July 2011

Looking for more information about Managed Metadata and taxonomies in SharePoint 2010?  Join me for a free, BA Insight/KMA webinar this Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 2pm ET.   (Thankss to the team at BA Insight for inviting me!)  Register now at http://www.kma-llc.net/insights/Pages/KMAWebinarManagedMetadataServicesandTaxonomiesinSharePoint2010.aspx

In addition, you can catch me:

• 30 July 2011 - SharePoint Saturday NY - SharePoint/Project Server 2010 (www.sharepointsaturday.org)
• 10 August 2011 - Fairfield Connecticut SharePoint User Group - Data Visualization and Buiness Intelligence in SharePoint 2010  [Go Stags!](http://sharepointusergroup.corasworks.net/FCSPUG/default.aspx)
• 11-13 August 2011 - SharePoint Saturday The Conference DC - Speaking on Business Intelligence, Project Server, IT Admin, Adoption, and other topics (www.sharepointsaturday.org)
• 14 September 2011 - Princeton NJ Sharepoint User Group (http://www.princetonsug.com/SitePages/Home.aspx) - Business Intelligence
• 24 September 2011 - SharePOint Saturday New Hanpshire (www.sharepointsaturday.org)

Other future events are listed below - there are a few events still being finalized!

• SharePoint Conference 2011 (Anaheim CA, October 2011)
• KMWorld (Washington DC, November 2011)
• Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (Bellevue WA, December 2011)

Hope to see you soon!

Records Management and the Hotel California

"You can check documents out any time you like, but they can never leave."[With apologies to Don Henley and Glenn Frey]

via kmamikegil-blog.kma-llc.net

Mike, thanks very much for the cross reference!

I was "freestyling" that day in Hartford, but the concept is extremely valid in records management. One of the core security design patterns is "nonrepudiation".  This is a fancy way of saying you can't deny having purchased a product, or printed a document, etc. just be deleting the log entry that provides backup evidence.

Records management uses the same pattern.  One of the questions we often ask our clients when considering records management is "what does being a record mean to you?"  Often, the answer is the records should be unchangeable and undeleteable.  (It can also help protect against accidental deletions.) 

If this is the case, records declaration usually should be a one way trip - otherwise, its easy to delete last year's employee self appraisal, or other documents.   It might mean an extra step to undo "accidental" records declaration, but that should be minor.  Anyway, I have more information in my post on Enterprise Content Management...enjoy!

http://blogs.kma-llc.net/microknowledge/2010/08/the-ultimate-sharepoint-2010-enterprise-content-management-ecm-cheat-sheet.html

Good luck!

 

Adding Microsoft Pivot Business Intelligence to SharePoint

Pivot is a unique graphical query interface released by Microsoft Live Labs in 2010.  Microsoft certainly seems to love the word – this follows in the wake of PowerPivot and PivotTables, two very different business intelligence subsystems. 

Pivot is entirely different.  At its initial introduction at WPC2010, Microsoft described it as “powerful, informative and fun”.  Fun?  Yes, I think it is!

Pivot lets you build an interface to items that can be represent with a graphical tag.  As you drill into the items, the pictures dynamically fly around the screen to rearrange themselves according to your query.  Pivot provides a local client, an Excel design interface, and Silverlight controls to allow you to integrate Pivot into your SharePoint site.  I’ve pasted a screenshot below – you can also “play along” with the interactive demos online at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/pivotviewer/

 

Let’s walk through building your first Pivot collection and viewing it through a Silverlight control from your SharePoint site.  Since one of my hobbies is digital photography (see www.flickr.com/photos/cmcnulty) I used Pivot to build a simple viewer for some of my favorite pictures. 

Step 1: Install the Excel Add-In

The simplest way to start building a Pivot Collection is to install the Excel Add-In from http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/download-excel-tool/ The Excel Add-In add the Ribbon control to allow you to create a New Collection.  What’s a collection?  A collection is maintained in an Excel spreadsheet, but is exported to Pivot as a .cxml file and related directory that contains all the related support fields and graphic element required by the Pivot interface.   You use Excel to maintain the data, and then users can query the data using the Pivot Collection.

Once you’ve installed the add-in, select New Collection from the Pivot Collections tab.  The Pivot template gives you two spreadsheets in your workbook:

• Collection Items.  This is the main screen where you will add image files and define the principal columns for data exploration.
• Collection Properties  The tab allows you to define collection-wide information, such as Collection Title, Icon,  Brand Image, Additional Search Text, and Copyright.

 
 

Use Import Images to browse for pictures you want to add to the Collection.  (You may note that some columns are hidden by default.)  Once the photos are imported, you need to start adding data for the existing columns:

• Name – A title for the image
• HRef – A link to follow if the image is clicked
• Description

There is pop-up help to remind you about each of those columns on the header line.  Most important, you can add additional columns to the right of the Description Column.  Here’s what our sample collection looks like after I imported photos and added several additional columns for State, Time (of day) and Year:

 

Once the collection is defined, you can play with it by using the Quick Preview option (which actually doesn’t show the images, just the query.

Sept 2: Publish Collection

First, save your Excel file – and it doesn’t need to be in the location where the finished collection will live.  Then, choose the Publish Collection item.  Pick a new local folder, and give the Collection .CXML file a name.  This process can take a few minutes while the engine parses and resizes all the graphical elements.  Once it finishes, your collection should open up in a new Pivot Viewer local window.  You can explore your data and test to make sure your collection is ready to share.

One of the things you may note is that you’re not limited to “check box” queries – if you define number values the Pivot query interface lets you use a slider control to filter a range of values.

Step 3: Publish to Web

The first thing to do is to copy the entire Collection directory to your SharePoint server – somewhere on the file system, outside of SharePoint.  There are a LOT of files, so this process can take a while.

In our example, I created a new C:\Pivot directory.  The entire collection goes into C:\Pivot\PivotPix. 

You’re also going to need to download the sample Silverlight Pivot viewer and viewer page from Microsoft (see http://www.silverlight.net/learn/pivotviewer/release-notes/) In our example, we put the XAP file (a compiled Silverlight app) and HTML page in C:\Pivot\Viewers.  We’re really taking a shortcut here – however, recompiling a hew viewer is pretty simple in the Silverlight 4 Toolkit.

Step 4:  IIS Configuration

Now the web server needs to know about the files we just added.  In IIS7 manager, I add two virtual directories:

• Pivot – mapped to the location of the viewer files
• PivotPix – mapped to the location of the CXML file and the rest of the collection

 

To do this:

• Right click on the web site where you want to add the alias
• Select Add Virtual Directory
• Enter the Alias and Directory as needed

 

Step 5: Edit the HTML File

There’s a lot in the sample HTML file, but the key line is:

<param name="initparams" value="initialCollectionUri=http://msshome2010/PivotPix/FavoritePhotos.cxml" />

Change the value of the initiaCollectionUri to match the “http://website/alias/nameofcollection.cxml” path for your local server.  (Substitute your own local server name and alias.)

Step 6:  Add links on SharePoint

Test the path to your edited HTML file – it should be http://yoursite/your-alias/PivotViewerSample.HTML [match to your own actual server names etc.] If you’ve set up the aliasing correctly, add a link in SharePoint and you should get your browser to render the Silverlight view to your collection:

 
 

What next?  There’s a lot more you can do.  You may start by adding custom columns to your collection.  Also, you’ll want to redesign and recompile the Silverlight viewer to patch your interface requirements  but we’ll leave that for another day.

Alternative Approach

Use the Silverlight Pivot Viewer for SharePoint on Codeplex http://pivotviewersp.codeplex.com/  This control is desgined to let you skip the Excel collection generation and IIS process entirely.  Instead, this solution consumes its images and data directly from:

• A picture library
• The User Profile List
• Site navigation

The web part is not hard to figure out once you’ve downloaded and deployed the WSP.  (Hint – although the documentation tells you how to install it using Stsadm, why not follow through on that New Years’ Resolution and use PowerShell:  Add-SPSolution and Install-SPSolution).

Anyway, once you’ve installed the part and added to a page, you can connect to a library, and get almost the same experience as you had using the HTML-hosted XAP file:

 
 

 

Have powerful, informative fun!

Upcoming 2011 Speaking Engagements

Happy New Year!  This year is already shaping up to be a busy year for us at KMA.  Here are some of my upcoming speaking engagements over the next few months:

• 12 Jan 2011 - Princeton NJ SharePoint User Group (http://www.princetonsug.com) “See Beyond the Numbers – Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010”
• 29 Jan 2011 – SharePoint Saturday Hartford CT (www.sharepointsaturday.org/hartford) “Content is King – Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2010”
• 7 Feb 2011 – SPTechCon San Francisco CA (www.sptechcon.com) “SharePoint Administration 101” [one day course]
• 9 Feb 2011 – SPTechCon San Francisco CA (www.sptechcon.com) “See Beyond the Numbers – Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010”
• 26 Feb 2011 – SharePoint Saturday San Diego CA (www.sharepointsaturday.ord/sd) “See Beyond the Numbers – Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010” and “Playing Tag – Managed Metadata and Taxonomies in SharePoint 2010”
• 9 Mar 2011 – Boston Area SharePoint User Group (http://www.bostonsharepointug.org) “See Beyond the Numbers – Data Visualization in SharePoint 2010”

I will have more information on SharePoint Saturday Redmond WA (5 March) and Boston (26 March) shortly.  More to come on these and on other events in April-June as the year continues…hope to see you soon!

 
 
  
 

Information Architecture Web Site User Theory

We recently began a site information architecture (“IA”) project for a long standing client.  (It’s part of our prep work for a SharePoint 2010 upgrade.)  One of the key points we’ve been emphasizing is the different usage styles across the user base.  Users can be divided into at least four classes as they interact with any web site:

• Mailers
• Mappers
• Searchers
• Browsers

A fairly common technique in web site requirements and design has been dubbed “OTS” – over the shoulder.  Basically, just by watching users interact with a web site you learn a lot about its organizational and navigation architecture.  Some users jump right in and start clicking on things.  Others use guidance from search or maps, or seek advice from other users.  There’s no right or wrong way to use any site – but you need to be able to accommodate all of these usage patterns.  (No “magic quadrant” here!)

 

I’ve grouped them along two axes:

• Static vs. dynamic – is the navigation changing in real-time as the site itself changes, or is it relying on preconfigured or remembered signposts?
• User vs. site – do users get guidance from the site itself or from something that’s directly user generated.

Here are the four types:

Mailers – Historically, these users don’t actually use a web site, just its contents.  Rather than browse or search they ask friends, colleagues or administrators to “just email” links to them.   Although this seems like the least sophisticated way to use a site, modern web trends have greatly expanded this technique.  Instead of solely relying on email, users increasingly look to crowd-sourced innovations, like microblog status updates, personal sites, or wallboard posts to get and use the links they need.

Mappers – My dad would always look at the table of contents in a reference book first.  Some users are the same way – rather than search, they look to a static site map to find the section they need.

Searchers – Instead of flipping to the front of the book for the table of contents, other readers start at the back – for the index.  (Or else they're used to reading the Forward)   Similarly, some users almost always use site search to find what they need.  These users need to be accommodated by metadata crawling, faceted searches, refinements, and usage-oriented results ranking.  Quality of search results, keyword management, and best bets are critical to serving these users.   These users can teach you a lot about site IA – top search terms are usually good candidates for home page links.  If the most frequently searched for term is “holidays”, you should probably have a holiday list link on the intranet home page.

Browsers – Browsers just use the navigation links on the site to get what they need.  You might think of them as “traditional” users, but they require a lot of care and planning.  If the user interface and navigational structure aren’t intuitive, they get frustrated and try another technique (search) or give up.  A good example is a company travel policy.  It may be obvious to Finance that Finance is the home of the travel policy, but if a user expects it in HR, how would they know to visit another internal area of an intranet?

We used to view this as evolutionary – meaning, how you get users to stop emailing each other for advice and build a self-navigating web site?  In this view, users began by always asking other users where to find things, then progressed to search, and “matured” to a self-navigating site taxonomy. 

It doesn’t work that way anymore.  The rise of search oriented user interfaces like FAST and social networking has changed this paradigm.  I don’t think you can expect a progressive evolution from Mailers to Browsers anymore.  Instead, all usage styles can be expected at any point in a site evolution.    De-emphasizing search or overlooking social networking may disregard a permanent part of your user population.  Remember, no two people – including you – use a site the same way.

SharePoint 2010 Collaboration at SPTechCon

I’m speaking today at SPTechCon in Cambridge, MA.  (Slides will be up on Monday!) It’s been a fantastic week, with many great sessions from top-notch experts in SharePoint technology.  Last night we had a great panel discussion at the Boston Area SharePoint User Group with Joel Oleson, Andrew Connell, Bill English, Heather Solomon, Mark Miller, and Dux Sy.

 

 

Multiuser graphic collaboration in Windows, preschool edition

I’m pulling together my notes on Collaboration Best Practices for this afternoon.  Here’s what to expect today:

Locations

Where should we collaborate?   Remember –My Site is NOT “Our Site”.  In general, shared team sites offer a single place to collaborate.  It’s better to keep the content in one place and allow people to use different links and clients to get there rather with multimodal access across remote and mobile clients, also exposed to social networking  / My Sites.

Remember, it’s called SharePoint, (singular!) not ShareFuzzySetOfOverlappingLibrariesAndSites!

Go beyond the firewall!   Use an extranet to extend your collaboration to partners and external users.

Usage

Here’s the easiest one – you can still use the Feedback Workflow from SharePoint 2007.  It’s a great way to send a document around for comments, and get back an integrated summary of everyone’s comments.  SharePoint handles all the messages and reminders for you.  And it keeps the content in SharePoint, instead of email.

If you’re collaborating “real-time”, remember you can use multi-edit modes in Office 2010 and Office Web Access.

Use tags and metadata for Categories, not folders. 

Use document versioning for versions, instead of renaming successive copies.

Messaging

Every time someone emails a document from a SharePoint library, God kills a tree!   Don’t email documents if you can avoid it – instead, email a link instead!  (Apologies to Todd Klindt and Shane Young)

Recap from the MIT Sloan School CIO Forum – May 2010

Last month, KMA, along with some of our clients, attended the annual CIO Forum at MIT, co-sponsored by SIM.  The CIO Forum is a great format.  Having four or five panelists for each roundtable session, with no PowerPoint, keeps a focus on new ideas.

Intelligent data cashing

One of the major themes this year was the economy (it’s the economy, stupid!).  With the understanding that sectors and regions have varying responses – some are in full recovery, and some remain in contraction – positioning for recovery was a common topic. 

There’s some basis for being reassured.   Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT Digital Research prefers to dub the last several years the “Great Restructuring” (not a recession) and noted that at current productivity growth rates, the US standard of living will double in 12 years. 

My own take?  It remains to be seen if the current growth rate is sustainable.  In addition, there’s been speculation in the media that some of the productivity gains are not from permanent enhancements but from personal unemployment fears – people may just be scared into working harder.

That said, many of the most memorable comments came from CEOs and CIOs alike:

· “Information doesn’t go on a recession” – Bob Brennan, CEO, Iron Mountain

· “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance less” – Bob Brennan, again.

· “You can’t save your way to success” – Bob Brennan, again – and I promise there really were 20-30 other speakers!

OK, so you may be thinking, from an IT perspective, how to make sure you can participate in driving that success.  There are two ways – excellence and innovation.

Excellence

First and foremost, you need to continue managing IT fundamentals with precision and efficiency – as noted above, data didn’t take a holiday.  Anne Margulies, the CIO for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, observed that tactical excellence is the “table stakes” for admission to strategic discussions.  The “cloud” was a common point – removing infrastrucuture creation from the timeline of most projects has become a more achievable goal than ever through lean provisioning and distributed structures.

Innovation

There was also a lot of talk about fostering an innovation culture.  It was a late-in-the-day discussion, but this session stayed with me.  According to Martin Reeves, CTO of Boston Consulting Group, there are  three critical ingredients of innovation:

· External, customer-client facing orientation

· Tolerance of creative dissent

· Slack and downtime

Ananth Krishnan, the CTO of Tata, pointed out that once you start generating new ideas, you don’t need to read and explore all of them personally – you can use “Web 2.0” tools like ratings and tags to let users pick the best ideas for further exploration.  For our SharePoint readers, I’d note that SharePoint 2010 includes new tags and ratings functions out of the box, as do third party solutions like NewsGator.

And about Enterprise 3.0…

I also sat in on Andrew McAfee’s session on “Enterprise 3.0”.  Personally, I think E3.0 remains a little “cloudy” – is it about peer data sharing, or document collaboration or metadata enablement?   Again, we heard  lot of speculation that users won’t recombine their own data.  There was a lot of talk about  empowering end user data discovery so they don’t have to code their own “mashups”, rendering the UI superfluous. 

Superfluous?  It's essential!  Think about the great grandfather of all data mashups – the mail merge.  Users have addresses in a spreadsheet and text in a word processing document.  Can they combine them?  You bet.  If you build it simply enough, people will come. 

In short, no shortage of stimulating ideas this year.  You may disagree with some of them, as you may disagree with my assessments – but you’re guaranteed to think.

SharePoint 2010 Preview

Greetings from sunny Las Vegas!  With Steve Ballmer’s announcements this morning at Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, I can finally tell you all the great new things coming in SharePoint 2010.

I was greatly privileged to get a head start working with an early version of SharePoint 2010.  Some to these features, as always, may be revised as we get closer to the ship date (which I don’t know, sorry.)   I’ll have more to share as the week progresses, and more detail coming over the next few months, but here’s a summary of some of Microsoft’s key investments in the new platform:

Sites:

SharePoint 2010 supports IE7/8 as expected – but also adds full support for Firefox and Safari.  It will be easier than ever to create and customize attractive pages for your sites.  Many SharePoint 2007 sites still remain focused on the document library, with the somewhat clunky Content Editor Web Part used to update page content.  Branding was largely limited to the in the box themes, unless users were comfortable with CSS. 

SharePoint 2010 now favors an inline content editor that uses wiki syntax, along with a theme builder right in the browser UI.  Multilingual support is greatly enhanced, and there’s much better support for managing and serving digital media (audio/video) directly from SharePoint.  In addition, “OWA” now means Office Web Access – there’s a browser based, server hosted version of almost all Office applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, One Note, and Outlook.

 

 

Communities

Social networking – especially Facebook and Twitter – have exploded in the three years SharePoint 2007  was released.  Enterprise users have come to expect the same types of Web 2.0 interactions from their enterprise web platforms.  SharePoint 2010 makes good on the promise by adding or extending contemporary social networking, including:

· Twitter style microblogging

· LinkedIn style expertise finding

· Facebook-like wall posts,

· Digg/Del.icio.us tagging,

· User-driven ratings (1-5 stars, etc.)

· Wikis and blogs

· People/expertise search

· RSS feeds [not new]

 In addition, there a fantastic new Silverlight based org chart browser, which relies on your Active Directory information to generate a real-time navigational view of your enterprise hierarchy.

 
 Content

Library support gets better – you can now hoist up to 50 million items in a library, and there’s a new out of the box Document Center template designed to offer an optimal experience for a larger (500,000) item doclib.

Records management also gets a big overhaul – when you declare a document a “record”, you can now leave behind a “shortcut” link to point to a new location in the Records Center, or you can manager an official record in place.

But probably most exciting is the new Managed Metadata Service.  MMS will let you define a central hierarchy of document tags and groups and share them across multiple web applications and site collections.  There’s also support for watching enduser-defined tag trends (“folksonomy”) and promoting commonly used terns to the enterprise standard store.

 
MMS tags and ratings are also surfaced through the UI as navigational elements, both in documents libraries and in search results.  You can reach across content anywhere in your farm to find all documents tagged as “Marketing”, for example. 

 
  

For knowledge management, this means you can define your knowledge taxonomy independent of a physical or organization hierarchy, to be able to find relevant information wherever it lives.

Search

Microsoft has made greater improvement in the 2010 search platform.  Relevance engines are refined to help show more accurate results from the outset.  There’s also better support for federated search (pulling in remote search engine results) and faceted search (drilling down through results by tags, dates, or other classifications. 

 

Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of the FAST reporting engine, extends these great capabilities further.  Let’s suppose that you work in construction.  A search for “Windows” is likely to mean different things to a glass designer than an IT professional.  FAST allows you to customs results based on a user's role.  FAST can also find and interpret metadata embedded in documents -- such as locations, dollar values, and dates – without users need to add keywords.  FAST results can show better previews and full results counts in refinement “facets” (the left hand navigators above).

Insights

Performance Point dashboards and Excel Services are well integrated in the new release, allowing much simpler deployment of interactive data modeling solutions.  Dashboards may be Excel oriented for drilldown through very large data sets using an optimized Excel interface (this is part of “Project Gemini”).  Or business processes can be monitored and exposed as diagrams using the hosted Visio Services.

There’s also a great new Chart Web Part that can tie out to all these rich data sources.  Charts can be extended using the “Decomposition Tree” to let you drill back, graphically, through a chart to find elements that contributed most or least significantly:

 

 

Composites

SharePoint 2010 is a stronger application platform than ever.   Three key investments here:

· InfoPath becomes the tool of choice for customizing end user list and forms without coding

· SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio add support for publishing all enhancements as WSP packages, which can be shared across the spectrum of development complexity (a WSP solution can also be extended in Studio, etc.)

· SharePoint joins the BCS.  No, SharePoint 2010 isn’t angling for a Fiesta Bowl bid – it’s the new Business Connectivity Services, which replaced the 2007 BDC (Business Data Connector).  In the BCS world, there’s a new Content Type called “External Content”.  External Content refers to a data set -- such as orders, customers, products – that live in an external data but look like a read write SharePoint list in the browser.  External Content can also be republished to other applications, such as Excel or Outlook 2010.

Infrastructure

Some upfront fundamentals.  SharePoint 2010 will be a 64 bit only platform.  Direct upgrades from 32 bits servers to 64 bit servers will require some advance prep work.  The basic requirements:

· Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 X64

· SQL Server 2005 x64 SP3 CU3

o   Or

· SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1 CU2

On the client side, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox and Safari will all be supported.  However, IE6 will not be supported, so IT shops that had been deferring that upgrade should plan accordingly.

In the Office 2010 suite, Groove has been rebranded as SharePoint Workspace 2010.  Workspace gives a full range of offline, synchronized access to SharePoint forms and lists, in addition to the document library support already provided under Groove 2007.

Finally, there are some much-needed enhancements to the core server infrastructure:

· Services “a la carte” – rather than using one monolithic Shared Service Provider, you can mix and match among User Profile support, BCS, MMS, Excel Services, Visio Services, etc., to only deploy services you need.

· The code “sandbox”, which allows untrusted end user code to run in a throttled environment to prevent runaway code form impacting the rest of your farm

· Elimination of the indexer as a single server, single point of failure in larger farm topologies.

In general, Microsoft has extended an already rich product even more.  As we’ve seen before in SharePoint, Microsoft likes to introduce a raft of new feature and refine them in the next release.  The core document manegement, search, data access and personalization features are likely to be the most robust.  Newer functions, such as multitenancy, often require more care in implementation and training.  For example, when should you use an MMS keyword instead of a tag store?  Or how best should we control multiuser editing in Excel Web Services or Word?

Obviously, I’m still wrapping my head around all the new features, and will have more to share soon.  Thanks for reading.

Last.fm and Xobni…music AND lyrics for personal knowledge management

I’ve been reading and considering some of the distinctions between information management and knowledge management lately.  It’s a common theme – how to turn information into real knowledge.  Let’s look at two major areas of personal knowledge management – music and email.

Several years ago, a good friend of mine introduced me to Audioscrobbler (now Last.fm).  The software sits behind the scenes on my PC or Windows Mobile device, tabulating what songs I play, and synchronizing back to last.fm (it also works on fruit-based (Apple) MP3 players.)  I originally started using it to help discover new music -- since I’m well past college, I need all the help I can to find new music (e.g. U2, The Beatles, the Rolling Stones or Muse, the Fratellis, Gaslight Anthem).  

There are now Facebook and desktop widgets so every visitor to my Facebook profile can see what I'm listening to.  (I don’t think anyone else really needs this information, but it’s there.)

Xobni, in concept, is similar.  Xobni (that's “Inbox” backwards) integrates with your corporate email inbox, and tabulates who, where and when you send or receive messages.  The information is stored locally – there no central repository for Xobni.

Both services, then, compile a time series of events about me, tracking attributes like artist-album-song or recipient-domain.   However, I’ve found that Xobni’s analytics give me much greater insight than Last.fm.  I can use Xobni to find out where and when I need to be more responsive in my communications, and where I do a good job.  Xobni makes it pretty easy to figure out not just which domains receive the most email traffic form me, but the top people in each domain.

For strictly personal reasons [my top 100 songs of the decade] I’m trying to explore my music cabinet in greater detail.  Let think about a similar question: here are my top 10 artists of all time on Last.fm.  Which are my top songs for Spoon – is it all two or three songs, or are the songs well dispersed with their discography?  Unfortunately, this isn’t a question Last.fm can answer.

· 1    Spoon    294

· 2    U2    285

· 3    The Beatles    271

· 4    The Police    225

· 5    Fountains of Wayne    211

· 6    Wilco    204

· 7    Radiohead    174

· 7    Coldplay    174

· 9    Steely Dan    169

· 10    Chris McNulty    154

· 11    Foo Fighters    153

· 12    Pixies    146

http://www.last.fm/user/cmcnulty2000/charts?subtype=artists

However, Xobni can show me the aggregate hourly traffic to and from each of my contacts:

I would love to be able to distinguish my music trends are in the car vs. at home, morning vs.,. evening, or even over a custom data range.  Unfortunately, I’m locked in to day ranges of 7, 90, 180, 365, or all time.  Year over year (who don’t I listen to), under-listened genres.  Why are my top 12 artists and songs of all time so widely divergent?  All good questions.  But that’s fundamental to (self) knowledge management, and why Xobni does a much better job at knowledge management than Last.fm.

Don’t get me wrong – I use Last.fm meticulously, and study my charts closely.  Its reliable, easy, and fun.  I just want more.