buckleyPLANET

Community Insights on Microsoft Ignite 2016

There is a global migration to Atlanta underway, with Microsoft’s largest annual event – Ignite – set to officially begin on Monday. Most of my team, from various points around the globe, are already on the ground, and a couple more of us landing this weekend. Personally, I’ll be there mid-day Sunday, where a list of tasks awaits in prep for Day 1 of the event. If you have not yet seen the wave of social messages from the Beezy team, just wait – there will be more…

Looking at the agenda for the week, I thought it would be interesting to share opinions of the week, with all of the press releases and product announcements to be made, to get the pulse of those who are attending – as well as those who are watching things unfold from afar.

So on Friday, September 30th at 9am EDT we will once again convene as a community to discuss “Takeaways from Microsoft Ignite 2016” right there from the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia. I need to figure out where to host things – I’m thinking from the speaker’s lounge, which should have a decent wi-fi connection. So for the panelists below who may also be attending and speaking, feel free to join me there just before 9am.

No matter where you are located, you can follow along on Twitter using the #CollabTalk hashtag, or via the official #CollabTalk tweetjam page on Twubs.com/CollabTalk

Joining me on these sessions are a wide variety of experts and community members from around the world, including many MVPs, engineers, project and product managers, and so forth.

If you’ve never participated in one of these tweetjams, it's pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Twubs, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, retweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session may be tweaked between now and next Friday, but will essentially include:

1. What was the biggest news out of Ignite this year?
2. Was there anything not discussed that you expected Microsoft to talk about?
3. Did you pay attention to partner and vendor announcements, and if so, what caught your attention?
4. Based on what you learned this week, what will be the impact to your business?
5. What sessions or topics will you be watching on Channel 9 in the coming weeks, and why?
6. Between the Future of SharePoint event in May and now, what are Microsoft’s top 3 hits – and top 3 misses?
7. For someone who was not able to attend, what should they focus on first from the news and content out of Ignite?

Undoubtedly, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. The dialog is usually thought-provoking but also fun. Participating on this panel are a number of MVPs and experts on SharePoint and Office 365. The tweetjam is open to the public, so please join in the discussion!

• Eli Robillard (@erobillard), SharePoint MVP, musician, fly-fisher, collaboration technology guy
• Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura), SharePoint MVP, consultant, and owner of IW mentor
• Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Office365 MVP and cto at ManyWorlds
• Jeff Fried (@jefffried), cto and vp of engineering at BA Insight
• Jeffrey Schwartz (@jeffreyschwartz), editor of Redmond Magazine and editor-at-large for Redmond Channel Partner magazine
• John White (@diverdown1964), SharePoint MVP and cto at UnlimitedViz Inc.
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Office Servers and Services MVP, founder of PixelMill
• Randy Drisgill (@drisgill), SharePoint MVP and branding and design expert at Rackspace
• Chris Johnson (@LoungeFlyZ), co-founder and cto at Hyperfish
• Ryan Schouten (@ShrPntKnight) senior SharePoint architect and evangelist at ZAACT
• Robert Toro (@SharePointToro), SharePoint practice director at Slalom
• Brian Culver (@SPbrianculver), SharePoint MCM and founder, president of Expert Point SolutionEric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle 
• Scot Hillier (@scothillier), SharePoint MVP and independent consultant
• Stacy Deere-Strole (@sldeere), owner of Focal Point Solutions
• David Fletcher (@ooglebob), enterprise sales director for Beezy
• Michal Pisarek (@michalpisarek), SharePoint MVP and founder of Bonzai Intranet
• Noah Sparks (@noahsparks), community igniter and strategy manager at Carpool Digital
• Tobias Zimmergren (@zimmergren), SharePoint MVP and technical product owner for cloud offerings at Rencore
• Toby McGrail (@ctcfit), senior SharePoint technology architect for Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Office Server and Services MVP and cmo for Beezy

I’m sure we’ll have quite a few more folks joining the discussion – and as always plenty of lurkers, too. Really looking forward to wrapping up my week at Ignite by hearing from others…always a great way to hear about things you missed in the barrage of announcements.

Hope you can join us online!

My Sessions at Ignite 2016

As I’m sure many of you are, the Beezy team is heads down preparing for the Microsoft Ignite event in Atlanta at the end of this month. While m,embers of my tam will begin trickling into the area on Friday, my flight lands in the early afternoon on Sunday the 25th, and I will be in town through the following Saturday. Between now and then, let’s just say that I have a full plate. Of course, I’m very excited to get back out on the road, to see friends and partners and customers, and to talk collaboration!

As a lead-in to this annual event, I thought I’d share my “official” schedule with all of you. Believe me when I say that there is a lot more coming your way. In fact, for those of you who may only have an expo hall pass for the week, be sure to keep tabs on the happenings around the Beezy booth (#2044) as we plan to offer a full agenda of content from our product team, partners, and MVPs. More on that later this week…

As you search through the sessions on the Ignite website, be sure to add the following to your personal schedules:

Measure Collaboration Success
THR1044 – Expo Theater 2
Monday, Sept 26th from 5:10pm to 5:30pm

The #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative was created to capture feedback from the community and develop best practices around a shared definition of what makes collaboration successful, to understand the metrics being used to monitor and measure that success, and to identify the best practices for implementation to achieve these goals. This session shares the results of the community surveys, including insights from the participating panel of MVPs and community experts. More details can be found at http://bit.ly/22W72bY

And if you can’t make this time, stop by the Beezy booth (2044) on Tuesday at 10:30am for a repeat of this session.

Improve Office 365 adoption: Top 10 Ways
BRK2275 – Room B203
Tuesday, Sept 27th from 9:00am to 9:45am

How are organizations able to succeed with the constant change of Microsoft Office 365? Office 365 provides an incredible amount of value to individual employees, teams, departments and organizations. Much of this value is not realized immediately upon purchase or even deployment of Office 365. The value is realized as more and more users understand, adopt and embrace the technology that has been implemented. So how can organizations drive faster, sustainable and effective adoption? They perform campaigns, run activities, and take action. Join Kanwal Khipple as he shares industry leading real world experience, advice and activities that other customers are leveraging to get more from Office 365 and drive more meaningful adoption.

I have been invited to participate in what I’m sure will be a fun and informative panel discussion with Susan Hanley (@susanhanley), Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge), Kanwal Khipple (@kkhipple), and Heather Newman (@heddanewman). Lookintg forward to this one!

Gather Insights from the Measuring Collaboration Success Community Initiative
THR1047 – MVP Hub Talk 1
Wednesday, Sept 28th from 10:20am to 10:40am

This is a Hubtalk session that delves deeper into some of the insights from the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative, and I hope to have some of the panel members joining in the discussion (Sue Hanley says she’ll be there!)

Based on insights and community feedback from the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative, this session provides discussion around the question: how do you define, and then measure, collaboration success? Panel members are invited to participate in the discussion, with audience Q&A. More details can be found at http://bit.ly/22W72bY

Learn from MVPs: Panel Discussion on All Things SharePoint
BRK2255 – Thomas Murphy Ballroom 2&3
Thursday, Sept 29th from 4:00pm to 5:15pm

Microsoft SharePoint MVPs talk about SharePoint across the board, be it within Microsoft Office 365, in Microsoft Azure, on-premises and certainly hybrid. Via a panel Q&A format, these MVP experts expose how online and hybrid improvements increase both deployment scenarios and value. This session is designed to help ITIs and ITDMs find the right cloud formula to deploy based on practical business and technical considerations. This is a must-not-miss session for any IT pro!

If you missed last year’s STELLAR panel with myself, Dan Holme, Laura Rogers, Chris McNulty, and Jennifer Mason (both main room and overflow filled to capacity), I view this panel as THE repeat performance of last year. Looking forward to stirring things up with Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), Jennifer Mason (@jennifermason), Jason Himmelstein (@Sharepointlhorn), and Susan Hanley (@susanhanley)

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Hope to see you in Atlanta! If you’re attending, please stop by the Beezy booth and say hello.

August 2016 Content Wrap-Up

For many months now I have been planning a road trip with my oldest son, Preston, to drive down through southern Utah and into Arizona to visit some of the areas in which he served his LDS mission. And last month I was finally able to take a day off and drive with him. It was an adventure, for sure. We spent a night in Moab and hiked up to see the famous Delicate Arch, we passed through Monument Valley (above) and see parts of the Grand Canyon. We also stayed a night in Snowflake, and drove through Show Low and Payson, AZ before driving down into the valley and Mesa to stay with more friends. Loved getting to spend time with my son, but it was also great to see some of these places for the first time. In fact, I purchased a intra-agency national park card, and hope to use it much more in the upcoming year.

August was the first month in a long, long time where I did not attend some kind of event. Lots of conference calls with partners and customer demos, and plenty of content – internal and external-facing. There was, of course, the webinar with Mike Oryszak from B&R Business Solutions on the topic of idea management, and my monthly CollabTalk tweetjam on the topic of the new SharePoint Framework (#SPFx). Other than that, 12 to 14 hour days of content and emails and online discussions.

I read the latest Harry Potter book. Oh, and I went fishing a couple times. Always a great way to break up the work week.

I have to say, when you’ve traveled the world as much as I have over the past 7 years, its been an adjustment to stick around the home office this much – but I have to admit that I do like being home more.

Of course, all of that is about to change, with Ignite coming up this month in Atlanta, the Collab365 online event in mid-October, SharePoint Saturday Redmond taking place end of October on the Microsoft campus, and then the MVP Summit (also in Redmond) followed by the European SharePoint Conference in Vienna. Basically, no break until Thanksgiving. In-between there, there will be more webinars, tweetjams, and possibly even the launch of the podcast series I’ve been talking with Noah Sparks about starting up.

As far as content goes, I had a couple major focus areas in August, the first of which was idea management. With the formal launch of Idea Campaigns this summer, we've out a tremendous amount of interest in our new SharePoint capabilities that, as with all Beezy features, builds off of SharePoint capabilities, enhancing and extending what is available out of the box. I was joined by Beezy partner, well-known speaker and former MVP Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) from B&R Business Solutions for a webinar on the topic, where I demonstrated the Beezy solution, and he shared some of B&R's deployment experiences. Be sure to check out the whitepaper, or watch the on-demand recording of our session:

• Formalizing Idea Management (Beezy whitepaper) http://bit.ly/2cAahyp
• Making Innovation a Repeatable Process (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2cfBpUK
• SharePoint as a Knowledge and Ideation Platform with Mike Oryszak (SPcomm) http://bit.ly/2crmgRx
• Webinar: From Ideas to Innovation - Formalizing Idea Management in SharePoint (Beezy webinar on-demand) http://bit.ly/2cd9ov8
• From Ideas to Innovation: Formalizing Idea Management in SharePoint (SlideShare) http://bit.ly/2cd9oLL
• Turning Ideas Into Innovation Inside of SharePoint (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2cc8tMu

For last month's CollabTalk tweetjam, I was able to put together a stellar panel of MVPs, MCMs and experts from around the community to share some of their takeaways from the new SharePoint Framework. In the blog post below, you can find the panel details and questions discussed, and in the Storify post, you can read through the tweet-by-tweet discussion. Great stuff.

• Discussing the SharePoint Framework (Storify) http://bit.ly/2bYbFcJ
• Discussing the New SharePoint Framework (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2bYci5X

As many of you know, I've been leading a community effort this year that is examining different aspects of collaboration planning and measurement. The 'Measuring Collaboration Success' initiative is in its second phase this month, with the third and final phase kicking off the week of Ignite. If you have not yet participated in the second survey, which looks specifically at the metrics that organizations use, please click on the link below and take the short survey. There's also a podcast discussion with BA Insight's CTO Jeff Fried (@jefffried) that is worth checking out:

• How do you monitor and measure collaboration success? (Typeform) http://bit.ly/2aQIw54
• Collaboration: Failing or Flailing with Christian Buckley and Jeff Fried (BA Insight podcast) http://bit.ly/2cpPul1
• The Metrics for Successful Collaboration (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2cfFIPQ

Oh yes, and Beezy was included in KMWorld's Trend-Setting Product list for 2016. Press release and the entire list below:

• Beezy Named KMWorld Trend-Setting Product of 2016 (PRWeb) http://bit.ly/2cpNppi
• KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2016 (KMWorld) http://bit.ly/2bLAs3R

In typical fashion, I wrote a number of thought-leadership pieces this past month dealing with topics around planning, governance, UX design and productivity, some of which will be included within our customer nurturing programs over the coming months:

• Closing the Governance Gaps in Your Social Strategy (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2cfBgk9
• Reducing Your Information Silos (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2c45Ihy
• Resetting Expectations for Your Collaboration Platform (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2cLIG1M
• Productivity Requires Operational Change (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2cwOdWs
• Social Will Not Displace Email, People (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2c61b19
• Improving Employee Engagement is a Social Activity (Medium) http://bit.ly/2bZI0Vd
• Good UX Directly Impacts User Productivity (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/2cdalnb
• Making Internal Communications More Interactive (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2cLngkg
• Key Considerations for Moving to Office 365 (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2cLJaoQ

One article that stands out was a post on the rise of mobility solutions. In the post, I point to a great whitepaper written by my peer Maximo Castagno, who leads the product management efforts here at Beezy, in which he discusses the trends that are moving the enterprise toward the mobile-first model. It's also a great lead-in to the announcement made this week about Beezy's new messaging solution built on Office 365, called BeezyPocket. Definitely check out the post and related whitepaper, but also be sure to sign up for the BeezyPocket beta.

• The Mobile UX is on the Rise (Beezy blog) http://bit.ly/2ch2Efq

And finally, promotions have begun for the European SharePoint Conference in November, and with it, my keynote with Sharegate’s Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin). Ben and I have some fun plans for our teaser video. Looking forward to completing that.

• Where Form Meets Function: Understanding Collaboration’s Cultural Fit http://bit.ly/2ch5aT1

Ok, that's a wrap for my August activities. Things are already in full swing for September. I'm planning this month's tweetjam from the road in Atlanta, so watch for that. Otherwise, keep watching the tweets on @buckleyplanet and other social channels, and hopefully I'll see you at one of the upcoming events.

Closing the Governance Gaps in Your Social Strategy

As I begin to prepare for some of the fall events, one of the topics I will be picking up again is governance. It’s a subject that continues to interest SharePoint and Office 365 admins, and there have been major announcements around governance, security and compliance from the product team this year. Historically, Microsoft has a strong record of mitigating security risks. As most cloud-based competitors have focused on rapid innovation, the gaps have only become wider and the management of the many collaboration tools across any single enterprise has become quite complex. With Microsoft, the gaps have not been as wide, which has continued to keep platforms like SharePoint and Office 365 as the market-leading tools of choice for enterprise customers.

Even with the restructuring and realignment of product, engineering, and marketing organizations under the “one Microsoft” banner, the company has made major investments in improving their security and compliance story across the board. 

Microsoft “gets” the enterprise space. Through investments in the Office 365 Compliance Center, various regional and global standards and certifications, and customer and partner evidence efforts, the company continues to invest in governance and compliance features. It is only a matter of time before Microsoft closes the remaining governance and security gaps — either directly, or with the help of its partner ecosystem.

Of course, they need to stay on their toes – because the requirements and expectations of customers is always evolving. In fact, I would say that there is a fundamental shift underway in how organization approach collaboration. Whether building out an intranet, engaging with partners and customers through a formal extranet or consumer-based social networking platform, or even within the business platforms we use, such as CRM and ERP systems, the use of social tools to improve how we connect, communicate, and collaborate is on the rise. And you cannot ignore the rise of the mobile device -- check out the latest whitepaper from my team at Beezy on this topic.

But while end users are quick to adopt these technologies, concerns over how these tools are monitored and managed can present a sizeable gap for compliance-minded organizations.

As companies increasingly look toward social technologies to improve the user experience within enterprise collaboration management (ECM) platforms, we need to not forgot one of the primary reasons we have these ECM platforms in the first place: their document-centric functionality, role-based security features, and their robust auditing and compliance capabilities.

Most organizations go to great lengths to ensure only the right people have access to certain content, and that the content adheres to sometimes very strict industry and regulatory standards. Unfortunately, the leading social tools do not always comply with these strong governance, reporting and compliance standards, and organizations must take steps (sometimes very manual steps) to mitigate any risks.

From a SharePoint social perspective, you still have the benefit of sitting behind the SharePoint security model. While there are some out-of-the-box metrics and reports, the best Microsoft can offer today for on prem SharePoint social customers is the ability to dig into the change logs and other social activities through the various content databases. And then there are those teams also using Yammer. For the most part, how you work across SharePoint and Yammer is incomplete within the current versions. This is a rapidly changing discussion — but the key is to be aware of your own security, compliance, and governance requirements, and understand (and mitigate) the risks inherent with social collaboration.

For now, your best defense is training, helping end users to understand the process and limitations of security within your chosen social collaboration toolset. Another option is to let the community police the social platforms. People tend to come up to speed very quickly, and correct each other when, for example, someone shares a secure document in Yammer that should be in a secure area within SharePoint, sharing a link rather than uploading content (which may also be duplicating the content).

Overall, many companies are finding that the value they receive through social collaboration is greater than the risks of working without some of the security and governance safeguards. Of course, one of the major advantages of working with a solution like Beezy is that we provide an extensive set of social collaboration capabilities — beyond what either SharePoint or Yammer can provide — all within the SharePoint framework, meaning that all of your SharePoint governance, compliance, and auditing controls and capabilities automatically apply to Beezy. Our solutions was built on SharePoint, for SharePoint — whether on prem, in the cloud, or somewhere in between.

If you are interested in more best practices around building a governance strategy for your social collaboration tools, you should check out the whitepaper I co-authored with Melinda Morales who is now over at 3Sharp, and who I will be presenting with on this topic a couple times this fall. The whitepaper covers three key areas in order to best apply social governance to your existing or new environment, and can help remove the stigma from the word “social” for your management teams. This guide will help you:

• Understand the scope of social collaboration and the gaps that exist
• Learn how to close those gaps when applying SharePoint governance policies and best practices
• Learn the keys to success for creating a governance framework around social collaboration

Click here to download your free copy of this whitepaper. And watch for updates via Twitter and other social channels as Melinda and I begin promoting our sessions. Looking forward to talking about governance again, as this remains an important topic.

Discussing the New SharePoint Framework

At the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco in May, Microsoft announced a number of new features and capabilities expanding on the SharePoint platform. As part of their roadmap, they announced the SharePoint Framework, a new development model that "enables fully supported client-side development, easy integration with the Microsoft Graph and support for open source tooling."

Microsoft has been "dog-fooding" the framework with the development of some of their latest innovations, including their latest mobile applications, and new document library and list experiences in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Reactions from the community have been mixed, but mostly positive as it allows customers and partner to leverage the latest JavaScipt frameworks like React and Angular, and better supports dynamic user experiences that are responsive and mobile-ready.

On Tuesday, August 30th at 9am PDT we will be convening again as a community to discuss "Building on the SharePoint Framework" as part of the monthly CollabTalk tweetjam, and picking at the seams of the SP Framework. We’ll talk pros and cons, share experiences from the preview, and discuss the future of SharePoint development – from a technical and business standpoint.

Follow along on Twitter using the #CollabTalk hashtag, or via the tweetjam page on Twubs.com/CollabTalk

Joining me on these sessions are a wide variety of experts and community members from around the world, including many MVPs, engineers, project and product managers, and so forth.

If you’ve never participated in one of these tweetjams, it's pretty simple: anyone can jump in and share their thoughts, or just lurk in the wings and absorb the wisdom of the crowd. Either way, it’ll be a TON of content to consume in a single hour. You can follow the live session using the Twitter UI of your choice (Twitter.com, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Twubs, whatever). How it works is that I’ll post a series of questions every few minutes, and people will respond to Q1, Q2, Q3 and so forth with A1, A2, A3, always including the #CollabTalk hashtag with their answers. Feel free to reply as often (or as little) as you’d like, ask your own follow up questions, share relevant links, retweet others, and engage with the audience.

The questions we will discuss during the session include:

1. What do non-developers need to know about the SharePoint Framework?
2. Does the SharePoint Framework replace, or coincide, with old models?
3. What is the impact of the SP Framework on existing solutions and customizations?
4. Microsoft has changed dev models with each version: Do you think they'll stick with this new model?
5. How does the SharePoint Framework impact how you design solutions today?
6. What new skills are required to use the SP Framework, and will old devs need to learn new tricks?
7. Will Enterprises adopt this, or is it too much down the modern javascript dev path?

Undoubtedly, there will be side-questions, side-conversations, and wise-cracking throughout. The dialog is usually thought-provoking but also fun. Participating on this panel are a number of MVPs and experts on SharePoint and Office 365. The tweetjam is open to the public, so please join in the discussion!

• Marc Anderson (@sympmarc), SharePoint MVP and co-founder, president of Sympraxis Consulting
• Randy Drisgill (@drisgill), SharePoint MVP and branding and design expert at Rackspace
• Wictor Wilen (@wictor), SharePoint MCA, MCSM, MCM, and MVP, and Nordic digital workplace lead at Avanade
• Bill Ayers (@SPdoctor), SharePoint MCMC/MCSM, solution architect and developer
• Stefan Bauer (@StfBauer), Office Development MVP, information architect and UX consultant
• Doug Ware (@DougWare), SharePoint MVP and founder of Elumenotion
• Rob Windsor (@robwindsor), .NET/SharePoint developer and MVP, trainer, and author
• Ryan Schouten (@ShrPntKnight) senior SharePoint architect and evangelist at ZAACT
• Bill Baer (@williambaer), senior technical product manager at Microsoft 
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and ceo of Empty Cubicle 
• Scot Hillier (@scothillier), SharePoint MVP and independent consultant
• Chakkaradeep Chandran (@chakkaradeep), program manager on the SharePoint dev platform at Microsoft
• Dan Usher (@binarybrewery), SharePoint MVP and lead associate at Booz Allen Hamilton
• Hugh Wood (@hughajwood), core engine developer at Rencore AB
• John White (@diverdown1964), SharePoint MVP and cto at UnlimitedViz Inc.
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Office Servers and Services MVP, founder of PixelMill
• Asif Rehmani (@asifrehmani), consultant, trainer and SharePoint MVP at VisualSP
• Jared Shockley (@jshoq), senior systems engineer with SESIT at Microsoft
• Gokan Ozcifci (@gokanozcifci), SharePoint MVP and IT infrastructure consultant at Neoxy
• Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), Office 365 MVP and evangelist at ShareGate
• Brian Culver (@SPbrianculver), SharePoint MCM and founder, president of Expert Point Solutions
• Sebastien Levert (@sebastienlevert), Office365 MVP and specialist in Azure, SharePoint, and O365 at Pollen
• Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), Office365 MVP and cto at ManyWorlds
• Eli Robillard (@erobillard), SharePoint MVP, musician, fly-fisher, collaboration technology guy
• Jeff Fried (@jefffried), cto and vp of engineering at BA Insight
• and your host, Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet), Office Server and Services MVP and cmo for Beezy

As always, it should be a fantastic discussions. Everyone is invited to participate whether or not you’re part of the panel. Join the conversation using the #CollabTalk hashtag and share your ideas and feedback. Thanks!

Making Innovation a Repeatable Process

Every company talks about innovation, but how many put the infrastructure in place to make innovation a key aspect of their business? Innovation is not just an output – it is also a process that requires cultural and technological support to help you manage the complexity. Many organizations try to leverage industry standards (such as the IDEO and NABC models), but also want to modify those standards based on internal best practices and to support their unique business requirements. Some try to do this leveraging SharePoint as the primary knowledge repository, but struggle to make it work. Why is that?

Companies need a consistent method for moving an idea through a formal review process, and the ability to elevate an approved idea to a formal project where action can be taken - and innovation measured. You cannot improve upon something if you cannot monitor and measure its progress and results. To understand the business value of ideas, and to track the return on investment of innovation generated from your own employees, you need something more structured and formal that a Suggestion Box in your lunch room. And you definitely need something more that a slightly modified SharePoint list to track outputs.

The idea evaluation process you employ can vary depending on the type of idea, which right there adds more complexity that most people are comfortable building themselves out of the box with SharePoint. For example, a cost-cutting measure, or a suggestion for improving the customer experience might have a much lower bar to meet than would an idea for a new product introduction, or even an improvement to internal systems and processes, which could include considerable costs, time, and resources to take action – and may also include risk to existing business norms.

If you missed last week’s webinar with Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) and I where we discussed the value that formal idea management can bring to the traditional SharePoint knowledge repository, you should definitely watch the on-demand recording. Check it out:

From Ideas to Innovation - Formalizing Idea Management in SharePoint

In the webinar, we walk through some of the pros and cons of using SharePoint OOTB, but we also spend a few minutes showing you what the Beezy team has built for Office 365 and SharePoint, and how we can dramatically improve your team’s ability to capture corporate knowledge – and build a repeatable innovation engine. The solution is completely configurable based on these kinds of decision matrixes, with appropriate workflow behind each idea type.

Within most organizations, idea management should be more about aligning with their internal culture than about mapping to a formal methodology. Common sense tells us that the better the fit with the culture, the more likely people are to use the solution.

At its core, an idea management solution must provide a method for employees to:

1. Submit ideas to a centralized location, where they can be expanded upon, edited, and appropriate supporting materials attached.
2. Share ideas with peers and managers, where they can be refined, defended, and expanded through the collective input of the team.
3. Align ideas with other existing plans and projects. An idea may closely match that of an existing plan, and steps may have already been taken to make the idea actionable. By allowing ideas to be discoverable and aligned with existing material it will further strengthen the idea.
4. Archive ideas, creating a knowledgebase of input from across the organization, with shared tags and conversation history that allows the team to leverage this historical data.

Additionally, incorporating idea management into an organization’s social collaboration capabilities can be a highly-effective method to raise visibility, and the level of dialog, surrounding employee suggestions. By leveraging the social capabilities within Beezy, for example, such as the ability to vote up on the best ideas, helps to elevate community consensus.

After being reviewed by management, the best ideas can then be promoted to team projects where actions can be assigned, tracked, and measured, and where employees with winning ideas get public recognition. In fact, beyond the business advantages of employee-led innovation, idea management can have a profound effect on the overall level of engagement with employees. Public recognition is a top factor in generating employee engagement.

And for innovation to happen, you need an engaged workforce. If employees are not engaged, they are not generating ideas, sharing best practices, discussing how to optimize and improve the business, or performing at their best.

Turning Ideas Into Innovation Inside of SharePoint

Early in my career, I joined a team on the week that a core team member was retiring, and was tasked with helping him with the transition. As a young project manager, I was already well-versed in the difficult process of transcribing years of knowledge and expertise into a consumable format. I remember sitting through a session with him, walking through a thick binder filled with process diagrams, flowcharts, and spreadsheets that was supposed to somehow encapsulate his 20+ years with the company – and as he was explaining the history behind one of the initiatives he developed and ran, I realized how much context was missing from what he had documented.

In a webinar tomorrow, August 18th at 10am PDT, I will be joined by former SharePoint MVP and Senior Solution Architect Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) with Beezy partner, B&R Business Solutions, as we talk about some of the problems surrounding knowledge management, using SharePoint as a knowledge center, and how idea management can help. You can register for the webinar here.

While idea management and knowledge management are not the same thing, we’ll make the case that idea management is a strategy that can dramatically improve your knowledge management efforts. Idea management is part process, part cultural change. It works best when you open up your environment to the entire community, allowing different voices and work experiences to join in and voice their opinions. As more people provide their input, it makes your environment more social – people become more engaged, sharing and commenting on other’s ideas, and creating information assets that become searchable within SharePoint.

Thinking back to this former peer, leveraging an idea campaign would have helped us capture much of the tacit knowledge (individual skills, ideas and experiences that are difficult to document) that was lost when he left the company. For example, we could have created an idea campaign looking for ways to improve the define project management methodology. The campaign would have included his documentation and description, but then allowed people to share their thoughts on how to improve upon the model. Employees would have been able to add ideas, comment, vote, like, and share – including the individual who started the campaign.

As workloads become more social, as with idea management, people share more: they generate more content, they apply more tags/keywords, and they are more apt to correlate ideas to other, existing content. The end result is not just the creation of new ideas – but an enrichment of existing ideas and content and profiles. That’s the power of social collaboration – and idea management is an organizational tool to unlock that social dialog.

For more on idea management and SharePoint, I encourage you to check out the Beezy blog for relevant articles, download a copy of our free ebook Formalizing Idea Management, or you can join us tomorrow for the webinar.

Productivity Requires Operational Change

There is a definite ROI in improving productivity: faster employee onboarding and training, for example, or simply generating more business output and more usage of the platform, all of which lead to a faster realization of the financial investments you've made in the platform. But until you understand your business goals, and then develop a productivity strategy that links those goals to specific end user activities (workloads) and measurable outcomes, you will not be able to easily define those perceived benefits.

Thinking about this in terms of SharePoint, it reminded me of a great quote from my good friend and author Paul Culmsee:

“It is common to hear consultants wax lyrical about how we have to align SharePoint to "business goals". While this and other popular clichés like "obtain executive support" or "obtain user buy-in" are easy to say, in practice they are much harder to do. After all, if this was not the case, then business goal alignment would not be near the top of the list for SharePoint challenges.”  The Heretics Guide to Best Practices (iUniverse)

There are some foundational questions you can ask that will help you begin to identify your productivity goals:

• How do your employees search for content, expertise, and innovation within your organization today? Don’t think about the technology, specifically, but try to understand the process that people go through to find what they need to accomplish their work today. While we rely heavily on technology, tracing the real-life scenarios of employees often uncovers gaps in business processes and opportunities for automation and other improvements.
• As new content, expertise, and innovation is created, how do your employees make them more ‘findable’ for future searches? This is a key component of your search strategy, but moves the activity ‘How do I find this?’ to ‘How do I make sure this can be found?’ Few organizations take the time to adequately tag or label the various content, data, and artifacts created within their system. The activity is seen as time-consuming and burdensome, and yet it has the most direct impact on long-term productivity. These two questions go hand-in-hand: one optimizes the experience for how people search within your platform, while the other optimizes for the artifact, so that it can be more quickly and accurately located within the search experience.
• What are your employee’s primary workloads? Where do they “do” most of their work today, and what are the steps they follow to accomplish their work? Defining your key use cases is a critical piece of every organization's productivity planning. Beyond searching and finding artifacts within the system, these use cases begin to define the business processes and workloads around which your system operates. Look at how your end users are working today, and look for opportunities to reduce steps, streamline workflows, and empower people to accomplish as much as possible with as few steps as possible. Remember that a critical aspect of the productivity-centric planning process is ensuring that solutions are designed to match your end user work patterns.
• How can these workloads be improved? Here in your ongoing operational change management activity. Begin by analyzing the individual workloads, and then look at efficiencies between workloads.
• What is your process for operational change? The most successful IT efforts are defined by the quality and effectiveness of their change management processes. Improving productivity in an ongoing effort – business requirements change, end user needs change, and, of course, technology changes. No platform is ever static -- people will need modifications, customizations. Have a process defined and in place to capture their feedback and requests. Make it transparent, as the more you involve people in the process, the more likely they are to accept the end results (even if what is ultimately delivered does not matches their request 100%).

The goal of these questions is not to prescribe a methodology for change management, but to help you understand the fundamental steps within your current planning, and to identify whether the systems and tools in place today within your organization help or inhibit end user productivity. Once defined, these steps will also help you to incrementally improve on them.

Social Will Not Displace Email, People

In a post by Himanshu Sareen, founder and CEO of Icreon Tech, entitled Enterprise Social Networks May One Day Replace Email, the author makes a case that we’ve heard again and again over the past 4 to 5 years that social will replace email. I understand his point, but excuse me if I disagree.

While there has been much talk of social replacing email, I think this energy is misplaced. The problem with this concept is that our collaboration needs (with email being a major part of those needs) has expanded, and yet email usage has not decreased. IF a company were to only be using a single mode of communication and collaboration (email) THEN a wholesale replacement could happen. In other words, email alone is an insufficient collaboration mechanism, and if given a choice between email or a social collaboration tool, I would argue that the trend is to move toward social.

But the reality is that people want email IN ADDITION TO other social collaboration and communication capabilities. Beyond a few heralded efforts to “turn off” email, the overwhelming majority of firms see no benefit to a one-or-the-other strategy.

Part of the reason is that the walls between networks are coming down. While every social platform provider (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and many others) is primarily building a closed network, or possibly with loose ties to other networks, generally speaking one must be a member of — and working inside of — that network to benefit from the social interactions. But increasingly, APIs are being made available that allow organizations and individuals to leverage the capabilities of one network within another. A great example is Slack’s use of bots to leverage actions and notifications across other tools and platforms – even those of competitors. Microsoft and others answered back with their own bot strategies, giving more cross-network power to the end user than ever before.

Back in the early days of instant messaging (IM), if you wanted to communicate with your buddy on AOL’s Instant Messenger platform, you needed to download, install, and run AIM. And if you wanted to chat with a friend who only used Yahoo Messenger, you had to run Yahoo IM. There were a handful of vendors who built unified messaging platforms (I used Trillium myself), but the OEMs were constantly changing their APIs and standards, making it difficult for any of these vendors to truly catch on and become a standard.

Most IM platforms now offer federation out-of-the-box.

And to contest the premise of Sareen’s article — email was one of the first technologies to embrace this openness. I can use my Hotmail account to contact and communicate with someone on Gmail, Yahoo, or any other email platform. And most email apps for iOS, Android, and the 4 people using Windows Phones all allow you to integrate with multiple email platforms. Email is ubiquitous, and remains essential.

The early days of social collaboration had a fundamental flaw in that they limited communication across social networks — the ability to link social activities across platforms and solutions. That flaw is being removed. Microsoft is certainly going after this problem area, between bots, cloud integration, and a robust partner ecosystem. And that is just one ecosystem.

Change is happening at an incredible pace within this space.

Good UX Directly Impacts User Productivity

When I first read The Goal by Eli Goldratt, it had been following a discussion with some of our service technicians who had been talking about our company’s productivity reporting. Specifically, a huge part of our business was running the refurbishing business for Hewlett-Packard in Rocklin, California, and tracking our processes was critical, as much of the equipment we repaired and refurbished lost considerable value the longer it sat on one of our workbenches or in the warehouse.

While that early tech startup experience was very different from the IT world I soon entered in my next role, I picked up some valuable insights that have come up from time to time throughout my career. In his book, Goldratt talks fairly extensively about the loss of productivity during the manufacturing process as a result of machines on the line breaking down or needing to be retooled between tasks. This loss of productivity on the manufacturing line is much like the loss of productivity experienced by an Information Worker switching between workloads and tools – or of being overloaded by meetings and other interruptions during their day.

How productive are your employees? In my years as a project or operations manager, where I was responsible for the work output of others, I was constantly thinking about what we could do to improve productivity. It’s never an easy undertaking, especially when you don’t have the tools or systems or reporting you need. What is more common is a patchwork of tools and methodologies to make due with what you have, which can results in a lot of manual activities to get work done. It may not be the most efficient way for people to work, but it’s reality.

Rarely do users have the luxury of working with a single platform – and the fact is that our tools are getting more and more complex. Even within the Microsoft ecosystem, there are productivity tools that overlap. With BYOD policies firmly entrenched, we use a mix of work and personal devices across an array of enterprise and consumer applications. It may be a governance nightmare, but it’s the way most people work these days.

We all have an idea about what productivity means, and whether or not our organizations get the most out of their employees. The problem with improving productivity is that its much more than simply adding another tool. It involves a rethinking of the entire user experience: the tools, the conversations and sharing that happens between tools, the lifecycle of a project, and the governance of all of these moving parts.

One major difference between the typical IT project and the manufacturing examples illustrated within The Goal (which I highly recommend everyone read, btw) is that IT projects often move forward without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered, without a clear picture of that “end state” of the project. You don’t have that problem with manufacturing processes – you know you’re building a DVD player, a car, or whatever. IT efforts are much more fluid. Inputs and expectations can change at any moment – which is why organizations should think more deeply about the UX of their systems. A good UX is not about explicitly directing the actions of end users, but in providing options and a “flow” to the work.

Productivity is about reducing friction, allowing employees to focus on solving problems rather than getting hung up on the underlying technology.