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SharePoint Conference Recap–Day 4

I started this post while sitting at the airport in Las Vegas, chatting with Christophe Fiessinger from Microsoft about some of the announcements this week around Yammer and Dynamics analytics and where that space is going, waiting to board our flight home to Seattle and close out what has been a very successful SharePoint Conference (#SPC14). I woke up a week ago today with a severe cold, but I’m now at about 95% and happy to see my wife and kids – and sleep in my own bed again (bought one of those Westin heavenly beds a few years back, which has spoiled me – can’t sleep on anything else).

As a quick recap of the last day of the conference, it can really be broken down into 3 activities: my session, the hybrid workshop, and the speaker party.

I kicked off the morning by getting some work done from the speaker room, saying some last goodbyes to a few friends who would be heading to the airport during my session at 10:30am, and adding to some of my notes (OneNotes, that is) for content to be completed next week when I am back off the road. My session went fine – always tough to cover what is essentially an Executive session within an IT Pro track – but I did have some good questions and feedback, and have a couple points to expand on when I give the same session for the Best Of SPC event in Boston later this month at Microsoft Cambridge. when Bill Baer from the product marketing team at Microsoft asked me to do the session and we discussed topics to cover, he wanted the session to answer some of the fundamentals about moving toward the cloud, and to help people understand the terminology and options available via software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service, as well as public-versus-private options. For those who attended my session, and especially those who had questions and feedback, thank you, and please let me know if you have any additional questions I can help answer. As I mentioned, I’ll be doing this topic again in Boston this month (March 26th), and at a few other events and SPUGs in the coming months.

Following my session and a quick lunch, I sat through the SharePoint Hybrid workshop led by Bill Baer, which was a blend of content, demos, and hands on lab. I had hoped that Microsoft would provide a bit more of what was promised a year ago at the MVP Summit – a walk through of the hybrid roadmap, outlining all known gaps, with direction from Microsoft on which gaps they would be filling and which gaps they would never fill, giving partners and ISVs a clearer runway for solving those gaps. While there was some very useful content shared, most of it was known material and scenarios, save some of the new Yammer and OneDrive topics, with the real goal of the session to walk folks through the necessary steps to enable an end-to-end hybrid solution. This will continue to be an area that vendors such as my company, Metalogix, will continue to push for clarification and solutions from Microsoft.

Wrapping up the day, I walked the strip with my good friend and fellow MVP Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam) to the speaker party and back, held at the MGM, where I had a great conversation with former-community-member-turned-Microsoft Partner Technology Advisor, Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge, aka #ShareBieber). For the folks who walked by and saw us engrossed in conversation, we were talking about machine learning, the futility of the browser, and the discovery limitations and need for auto-provisioning of the mobile app. Talking with Richard is always a drink from the fire hose, but thankfully, we operate on the same frequency, so its all good.

Happy to be home, but I need a weekend to catch up on sleep. I have a massive task list for next week based on #SPC14 actions, as I’m sure is true for many of you who attended – plus an idea for another funny video. Looking forward to next week!

SharePoint Conference Recap–Day 3

As typically happens at these events, I started out the day with the intention of attending 3 sessions over the course of the day, only to see them pushed off the schedule due to partner and Microsoft meetings. While I enjoy the live sessions, for me – its all about the networking, anyway. Some fantastic conversations, exciting partnership developments, and tremendous pipeline building. Which means a lot of streaming videos and PowerPoint reviewing post-conference so that I can catch up on the sessions that I’ve missed.

While I can’t get into the details of the 5 or 6 partner meetings yesterday, I can talk about the Ask the Experts session at the end of the day. As you can see in the photo above, each speaker put on one of the SharePoint, Office365 or Yammer shirts to signify their area of expertise (I’m a SharePoint guy, increasingly an O365 guy, but also Yammer certified – so I went with Yammer because I wanted the t-shirt) and then stood by a table with a sign signifying the topic around which they were an expert. I stood next to the SharePoint Partner sign, as I am heavily involved in the partner community – both as a SharePoint ISV, but also as president of the Seattle chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP).

In fact, the video is now live on Channel 9 from my Tuesday session with Karuana Gatimu from MSIT, as well as fellow IAMCP peers Jeff Shuey, Barb Campbell, and Ro Kolakowski. Watch it here:

I was happy to help answer questions for about a dozen attendees, sharing my experiences and advice on connecting with and building a relationship with Microsoft (the secret is: know the commitments of the person you’re targeting), how to tap into the SharePoint community (identify and get to know the local influencers, attend SPUG and SPS events), and how to learn more about Microsoft offers and strategies for partners (PinPoint, IAMCP, WPC).

Following Ask the Experts, I made a short visit to the MVP party hosted by the product team, made a round of hello’s and handshakes before walking (yes, walking) down to the Cosmopolitan Hotel and the Marquee club to participate in the Metalogix Best of Breed Award Celebration and party. Beautiful club, tremendous turnout, and a lot of fun. Of course, I took a load of selfies, said my goodbyes, and then walked back to the hotel to get up early for Day 4 and my session. But from all of the pictures, tweets, and emails it sounds like people had a blast, and the partners and award recipients got a lot of value out of the event. I’m glad it was a success. Oh, and check out my “meta-selfie” video on Facebook.

Ok, wrapping up so that I can do some final session prep, then its on to Bill Baer’s half day hybrid workshop, followed by the SPC speaker party tonight. And then a 7am flight home. I suppose I’ll get some sleep this weekend…

SharePoint Conference–Day 2 Recap

From the outside, it may appear that my day is filled with nothing more than selfie photos and tweets, but there is actual work that happens each and every day :-)  Attending a conference as huge as the SharePoint Conference here in Las Vegas can be overwhelming to the senses (except for conference food, which is always underwhelming), and yet I still try to sneak in an article or two on sessions that I attend, and announcements that are made. I’m feeling behind in the area of content, but am very happy with the quality and quantity of networking that is happening – which is the most important part of an event like this.

But as a quick recap of the day yesterday, I began the morning in Jason Himmelstein’s session (@sharepointlhorn) learning more about Apps for Office. As always, Jason did a great job of providing a comprehensive view of the Office app model, showcasing how businesses can easily build productivity solutions using the new app model – and without code. As a business guy, I always appreciate learning about new out-of-the-box and no-code solutions that can help me and my team be more productive, and I took a few notes on some things I am going to experiment on when I am back in the home office, and will plan on writing about those experiences in the future.

One of the main activities of my day was recording a session on #SPCtv with my good friend, SPS Los Angeles co-founder, and now current MSIT wunderkind on all-things collaboration, Karuana Gatimu. In a panel session (still waiting for the link from Channel 9), we talked about the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) and the opportunity it presents for partners within the SharePoint community to scale their businesses – or find new business opportunities. I was joined on the panel by my fellow Seattle chapter co-founder Jeff Shuey (@jshuey) from Gimmal, and Seattle board member and Women In Technology (WIT) leader Barb Campbell from Colligo, with SoCal chapter president and partner at 6th Street Consulting, Ro Kolakowski (@ro_kolakowski). At the end of the session, we left a challenge for every SharePoint ISV, SI, or independent consultant to visit the IAMCP.org website and find their local chapter, and to visit at least once to see what it’s all about.

Roaming inside and outside of the exhibit hall, I kept running into people snapping pictures (it’s a selfie revolution!), recording videos and podcasts, and just wanting to get impressions on announcements (and non-announcements) being made at the conference. I had a great conversation with the KnowledgeLake team and recorded a quick video on their behalf – Metalogix often partners with KnowledgeLake around events and campaigns, as we have very complementary solutions.

Other notables, I found a guy wearing my CherPoint t-shirt from the Axceler days, and was able to capture a picture with Chris and Jeremy, aka the Sport Coat SharePoint Mafia.

 

I was also able to catch up with former peers from my Microsoft days. On Monday, it was watching Bill Baer present, with Jim Adams and Sam Crewdson sitting next to me. The four of us were on the original Microsoft Managed Services (MMS) team prior to its rebranding as Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) in late 2007. Yesterday, I kept seeing Sean Livingston as I passed through the halls, also from MMS, but was also able to chat with Chris Norred, a peer from my advertising operations days at MS, who is working a kiosk in the Microsoft pavilion on the exhibit floor.

In the afternoon, some attention was turned to the Harmon.ie booth, where they announced the latest list of Top 25 SharePoint influencers. Last year I was recognized at #18, but I think my monthly wall of content and heavy travel schedule made the difference as I was recognized by Harmon.ie, their independent analyst, and over 3000 community votes as the #4 influencer. Now I know a lot of people have a difficult time with a list like this, and I would agree that there are some HUGE community contributors who were not included but should have been, but I am still grateful for being included. I’m also thrilled to see people like Dan Usher (@binarybrewery) and Becky Isserman (@mosslover) included, as they do so much for the community – and most of it behind the scenes. For me, it makes the list that much more legitimate when well-deserving people like them are included. Oh, and as I was sitting here in the speaker room working on this post, my good friend Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000) sat down across from me and suggested a tweet, which I promptly pushed out:

At the end of the day, I was able to sit in a session by Fabian Williams (@fabianwilliams) as he presented on Hybrid Business Connectivity Services. I’ve seen Fabian present a number of times over the past 5 years, and I have to say that he is easily one of my favorite dev presenters. As a non-dev, I appreciate the fact that Fabian does a great job of laying out the problem space, and making it clear what is happening at each stage as he walks through his examples. He spent a good portion of his intro walking through the boundaries of hybrid, explaining the attributes of the system and the gaps (data access and security issues, navigating multiple data sources, etc), and then stepped through each of the areas that a team will need to address to fill those gaps and connect data in some real-world hybrid scenarios. If you missed his session, I highly recommend you download his deck (#SPC319).

And of course, the rest of the day was spent in countless meetings and exhibit floor conversations, meeting and greeting people I haven’t seen since the last SPC – or people who I recognize (or who recognize me) through articles and tweets and videos. When you miss SPC, you can always find the content out there – but you miss out on all of the networking. Definitely a must-attend event for anyone in the SharePoint community.

And to round out the evening – I completely ditched the main SPC party over on the Las Vegas raceway, and instead grabbed dinner with friends and partners Mark and Kurt from Hi Software, where we talked about life in Northern California gold country. Great low-key dinner, followed by some brief fun watching friends from the community lose their life savings at craps. But good entertainment for me.

Ok, heading out to the next session…

SharePoint Conference -- Day 1 Recap

I wanted to provide a quick snapshot of some of my key takeaways from the first full day of the SharePoint Conference taking place here at the Venetian in Las Vegas this week. To be honest, it was not clear to me what Microsoft’s focus of this year’s conference would be. There was some buzz generated when former US President Bill Clinton was announced as the keynote speaker – I assumed he would be talking about his Clinton Foundation work since leaving office, and while I was not a fan of some of his politics, was looking forward to hearing about the great work he has been doing to improve the lives of impoverished people worldwide. Of course, people were having fun speculating as to whether Mr. Clinton would somehow talk about his SharePoint experience. Sitting with my good friend and business partner Bradley Geldenhuys (@bradgcoza) from South Africa-based GTconsult, Brad joked “I want to know what Bill Clinton knows about SharePoint, whether he uses it, and what are his favorite and most frustrating features to use.” After Clinton’s excellent talk on the global community and the idea that as technologists, we need to do more to work together to improve how we work, and how we can work together. Of course, I also had to tweet something fun:

As part of the keynote, we also heard from SharePoint GM Jared Spataro, and CVP Jeff Teper. Jared focused on four primary themes:

• Working like a network. He talked a bit about the need to work in ways that are similar to the way we work and consume content and information in our personal lives, via the tools and devices that we are comfortable using.
• Personalized insights. This was about leveraging big data, machine learning, and the social fabric to learn more about our business in increasingly dynamic ways.
• Power of an open platform and healthy ecosystem. Everywhere you turn these days, Microsoft is talking about more support for open standards, using the tools and standards that your team is comfortable in working with. For example, the new Android SDK was announced for developing for Windows and Windows Phone devices.
• People empowered on any device, anywhere, but with corporate governance, security, and standards. Arguably, this remains the biggest gap for many of Microsoft’s plans, and presents one of the largest opportunities for Microsoft partners to meet the needs of the enterprise.

Teper touched on these same themes, but abstracted them up to the broader Microsoft ecosystem. He talked about embracing the trends of the cloud, of the new social business models, of mobile and big data – the four pillars that Microsoft is building all of their “big bets” around. He talked about working with partners and customers to transform Office, and called out the 75 new features that have been developed in Office365 since the last conference (more than a feature a week) and how they are investing in increasing that rate of innovation.

He also introduced the Office Graph, which is Microsoft’s path toward integrating cloud, social, big data, and mobile into a consumable, extensible capability that partners and customers can use. we saw a little more on this topic during Christophe Fiessinger’s session on the social roadmap, where Christophe and members of his team introduced the new interface of the project code named Oslo, which utilizes Office Graph to present a powerful real-time synopsis of the data which is most important to the end user using a Flipboard/Pinterest-meets-Live Tiles-style interface. Some cool stuff, for sure.

I’m submitting a couple articles to CMSWire later today with more in-depth analysis of a couple of the sessions I attended yesterday, and will likely post some other updates from the exhibit hall floor as I am able. If you’re attending SPC14, be sure to stop by the Metalogix booth and say hello, or find me walking the floor. I am in and out of sessions and meetings today, and will be leading the Best of Breed Awards Celebration panel Wednesday night at the Marquee. And, of course, be sure to attend my session SharePoint in the clouds – select, mix, and deploy what’s right for you (#SPC293) at 10:30am on Thursday (Executive session within the IT Pro track) to learn more about the options for moving your on prem SharePoint environments to the cloud.

Yammer for the Power User–Q&A

Last week while on the road in Washington DC, I gave a webinar for the European SharePoint Conference community on tips and tricks for the Yammer power user (click here to watch it on demand) as part of their Training Week, and I thought it would be useful to outline some of what I covered, and answer some of the outstanding questions that came from the audience. Aside from using Yammer for the past couple years, and working with and building similar technologies since the late 1990’s, I’m also a certified Yammer power user and admin – and most of these items will help you with your own certification, if that’s of interest.

While I talked through a few items, the bulk of the time was spent giving demos of critical functionality:

1. Clean up email-based replies using a double-dash
2. Track important conversations using Bookmarks
3. Coordinate activities using Notes
4. Pull people into conversation 3 different ways
5. Redirect conversations using Share
6. Enable shortcuts key using Shift /
7. Recognize someone
8. Create Polls
9. Use the YamJam model
10. Create external networks to collaborate with partners and customers
11. Create a usage policy
12. Never leave a post/conversation unanswered
13. Share best practices with your team
14. Review App metrics on usage
15. Use the Announcements
16. Use document editing
17. Utilize Private Groups
18. Clean up content and comments
19. Remove yourself from conversations
20. Add relevant content and links to your front page

There were a few questions about permissions, and also around SharePoint integration, but as we ran out of time at the top of the hour, there were a few unanswered questions that I’ll answer here:

Q: Can you give some suggestions on how to practically do a records management activity on Yammer, could you give any real life example on how organizations do this, as even Yammer needs to come under purview of Records Management in any organization?

A: The RM functionality in Yammer is fairly rudimentary, as it is more of an ad hoc collaboration platform rather than a content management system. While an administrator has the ability to manually backup all conversations and content, there is no real way to classify, store, secure, and track these records in an automated fashion. One best practice is to keep SharePoint as your system of record, sharing links rather than documents in Yammer. 

Q: When you uploaded the document the way you have done in Yammer, does it go and sit within SharePoint?

A: Not the way I showed, but with the Yammer integrations to Office365, you can push content from SharePoint Online into Yammer and start a conversation. In that case, the edits you make to the Yammer document are reflected in the SharePoint Online artifacts. It’s not as clean as with the native Yammer editing capability, but at least it’s a more closely aligned solution. The Office blog provides an example.

Q: Does MS have some sort of open account on Yammer where you can network with partners etc? You mentioned YCN, what was that?

A: There are a few open Yammer networks where you can learn more about Yammer, SharePoint, and other Microsoft technologies. Just follow the link, request access, and you should be added fairly quickly. I recommend joining these:

• https://www.yammer.com/yammerycn/
• https://www.yammer.com/workingsocialtour/
• https://www.yammer.com/spyam/

Q: Do you know by when Microsoft foresees full Yammer - O365 integration?

A: I do not. Hopefully we’ll learn more from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas next week. I’ll be attending the social roadmap session Monday afternoon, and will most definitely be blogging about whatever news I hear.

Q: Christian, is it possible to get a guide/help to implement the yammer tips?

A: I’m working on an ebook as we speak! Hope to have it live in late March. I’m also working with Ruven Gotz and Michelle Caldwell on a Yammer book through APress which we hope to have out late spring / early summer.

Q: Is there a way to edit a post on Yammer like on Facebook? If not, will it be possible in the future?

A: No, and it’s a common complaint within the community. Your only recourse is to delete the comment and re-submit. And remember, there are three levels of control over who can delete: the user can delete their own messages, the group admin can delete messages in their group, and the admin can delete any conversation.

If you have additional questions I can answer, don’t hesitate to drop me an email at cbuck@metalogix.com, where I’ll do my best to get back to you quickly. Of course, you can also check out my three previous blog posts on the items listed above:

• 5 Power User Tips for Yammer
• 5 Additional Power User Tips for Yammer
• Another 5 Yammer Power User Tips

And for those who are struggling to make the case for using Yammer within your organization because of management concerns around the platform, I also write this article for the ESPC community that you may find helpful: Answering Your CIO’s concerns About Yammer

Another 5 Yammer Power User Tips

As I talk to people who are beginning to use Yammer more and more, inevitably the question comes up about certification, and whether there is anything to be learned in the Power User certification, or even the Administrator certification. As a heavy user of the Yammer platform and having completed both, there were quite a few things which I picked up from the trainings which have made me more productive. You’ll have to decide whether completing a course is the right step for you, but hopefully my first and second posts on this topic have prepared you to ace these tests.

And because all good things come in trios (or is that all bad things?), I have pulled together five more power user tips for Yammer below. And if that’s not enough, I will walk through all 15 of them in a webinar this Friday at 8am Eastern for the European SharePoint Conference community. If you would like to participate, you can follow the link to find details on the entire European SharePoint Training Week, or register for my webinar here.

Here are my latest tips for achieving maximum Yammer power user value:

1. Use the announcements. Anyone can start a conversation, but not anyone can make an announcement. The difference is that announcements done at the network-level (only by an Admin) are set in the header of the network feed, and send out an email notification to everyone in the network. However, if you created the external network or group, you’ll see the announcement option appear in the drop down under More.
   
   
   It’s a great way to get the attention of your group, team, or the entire network and ensure that everyone sees it (until they click on it within their inbox and mark it as read).
   
   
2. Master the art of document editing. There are different ways of getting your content into Yammer. Personally, I’m a believer in making SharePoint your system of record, and using Yammer for more of ad hoc collaboration around newly created, not-yet-ready-for-prime-time content where you need to quickly collaborate and discuss a new item, and, once finalized, moving it over into SharePoint. Now, there’s not yet two-way integration between Yammer and SharePoint (you can push content from SharePoint into Yammer using the Yammer web part), so its still a manual process, but there is still value if you’re using both platforms. For most document editing, however, simply go into the conversation you want, and select Add a Doc/Image.
   
   
   What happens next is that your document is added into the Files for that group or network.
   
   
   Once within Yammer, you can view, download, email, delete (if you have the right permissions), or upload a new version. To see or interact with a previous version, simply click on the version history at the bottom right.
   
   
3. Know when to use private groups. Yammer security is rather simple: you either have access to the network or you don’t, access to the private group or don’t, permissions to open the document/artifact or you don’t. That last piece is dependent on the artifact type you’re working with, but most Microsoft Office artifacts (doc, xls) can be secured at the item-level. Microsoft recently announced two-factor authentication (you must confirm your email on login, but also have a password sent to you via text or email). Private Groups are a way to secure a conversation to just the people who should have access to your content.
   
   
   You can create a Private Group and then @mention those who you would like to add to the group so that they can participate in that conversation, or add them to the group so that they can view/participate in all conversations.
   
   
4. Regularly clean up content and comments. How often are you removing content and conversations? If you are the network or verified admin, you can remove content and conversations anywhere within the network. If you are the Group admin, you can remove content and conversations within the group you manage. If you are the end user who made the comment or added the file, you can remove your own content.
   
   
5. Remove yourself from conversations. One of my favorite things to do. Arguably, notifications and emails are the one area where Yammer needs dramatic improvement – and my speculation is that we’ll see more in this area in the next year or so as Yammer becomes more integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem. But for now, its removing yourself one message at a time. When you get a notification, and you know you don’t need to be part of the discussion, select Stop Following in Inbox, which removes you from all future conversation – unless someone specifically @mentions you in the future.
   
   
   Once removed, you get a quick confirmation, and life goes back to normal.
   

I hope this content helps you get more out of Yammer. Looking forward to this Friday’s webinar, when I’ll be walking through all 15 power user suggestions shared within this series. See you online!

Defining Value in Social Collaboration

In case you missed it, Phil Wainewright posted a great article this morning (Yammer: 3 reasons social can't prove value in the enterprise, yet) over on diginomica.com on the hype surrounding social media in the enterprise, which was very timely as I wrap up a presentation I'll be giving in Boston at the Microsoft MTC next Tuesday on the evolution from content management to engagement management within the enterprise. At the center of the modern organizational collaboration model is social. Everyone seems to be looking for the "killer app" of social computing, because it makes nice marketing copy -- but defining the ROI is somehow more elusive. You can wrap your head around one of the leading consumer products, or even a specific feature, but making the case for social can be downright difficult for some people to articulate (its that qualitative versus quantitative benefit discussion).

Stop looking for "the" defining reason to move to social. There will be no big bang. There will be no killer app. No single vendor will "own" the space. And the tools and technologies that will dominate the information worker space for the next couple decades are already here. From Forbes columnist and Evolve! Inc CEO Mark Fidelman, who is one of the leading experts in the are of enterprise social collaboration: "The social business revolution is starting to take hold in companies. These solutions are starting to empower individuals, enabling them to challenge traditional hierarchies and bypass communication road blocks. It is also enabling the knowledge worker to better communicate with suppliers, partners and remote employees."

Back to Wainewright's 3 reasons, and you have to admit he's got a point.

1. The technology is not ready
   While the Yammer teams are enthusiastic and passionate about social, spend any amount of time within community sites around SharePoint and Office365, where Yammer is heavily influencing future product roadmaps, and you'll hear from the experts and influencers that there is ill fit for many enterprises who still need the structured collaboration and content management features of more mature platforms, like SharePoint. Compounding the problem are poor communication around roadmap, or even how SharePoint and Yammer can work better together today.
2. The networks aren't big enough
   What we've seen time and time again is that to make collaboration work, people have to participate. Adoption and engagement have been problems for SharePoint (and every one of its competitors, no matter what their marketing may claim), slapping a new social tool or platform on top will not solve what are fundamentally cultural and educational issues. It can take years for an organization to make a new collaboration methodology part of the corporate culture. It's no surprise then, that much of Yammer's training and certification focuses not just on how to use their capabilities, but how to work with your management, peers, and employees to adopt the platform.
3. No one knows how to do it
   There are huge advocates for social within your organization. But for many (most) companies, the social model is something entirely new, and even the influencers in the space are learning in real-time.

Feeling deflated? Don't be -- I really do believe in what Fidelman says up above. People are feeling empowered, and they are subverting process and bypassing confused and out-of-touch decision makers to better communicate and collaborate with customers, suppliers, partners, and each other. That's how Yammer's numbers are growing so quickly. All you have to do to start the change within your organization is to sign up and register your company. It's as easy as submitting your email. As a cloud-based solution, all it requires is connectivity, and your team can access a shared Twitter communication stream (and other features) directly from the browser.

Now, integrating Yammer with other platforms or with your intranet, that's a different story. It's just a tad bit more difficult. But there's a path, and it begins with end users searching for tools that allow them to get better at their jobs.

SharePoint has a similar model, although a much more complex platform. Microsoft was very wise to offer out a very powerful free version. Companies have spent years building and tweaking their intranets, and suddenly, out of nowhere (10 years goes by fast) SharePoint does out of the box what took a team of people months or years to build. Maybe not as powerful in certain verticals (ECM, for example), but powerful enough to grab the attention of every competitor. It's a multi-billion dollar business for Microsoft -- hard to argue with that kind of success. And while many of SharePoint's features are not considered social features, per se, I am in the camp of collaboration = social. So SharePoint is social by nature. And because SharePoint has enabled teams and end users to break out of the IT bonds and, in many cases, self-serve their collaboration needs, SharePoint is a major mover and shaker in the social revolution.

Over the coming months, I predict we'll be seeing even more content and ideas about how to get ROI out of social. The tools are here -- now it's just a matter of finding the right ones to fit with our organizational culture and plug them in. Find the pieces that fit, and move forward. Try things out, break some things on the way, and figure out what works for your team, for your customers, for your partners. Pay attention to what is happening within the community, and how others are finding/defining business benefit. As more people use the system, you will undoubtedly discover and be able to articulate the benefits to the business. Just don't look for all of the answers today -- we're "still working on it."

The Social Spark: Instant Messaging

When you look back at the history of social computing, we often point to major brands and platforms that have transformed our personal or professional lives more recently – but we tend to forget the technologies that paved the way before them. All the media attention seems to fall on the enterprise collaboration tools as of late, and if you look beyond tools like Yammer, Tibbr, Box and others, you’ll see a number of consumer-based platforms that helped shape what we now have in the enterprise, like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, and I would even argue, going back a bit further, the AOL platform of yesteryear. But before any of these platforms (I’m being generous by calling AOL a platform) were the Instant Messaging platforms.

Of course, there were other collaboration tools in place prior to IM. Within the manufacturing sector, there had been product lifecycle management tools for a decade or more, we had email, and you could even argue that bulletin board services (BBS) provided some degree of collaboration between geographically-dispersed groups. But it was IM that was the change agent for social collaboration. My first experience with IM was when a former college roommate invited me to participate in the beta for AOL Instant Messenger within their closed network, sometime around late 1996. Mirabilis, an Israeli-based tech company, went on to create the very successful ICQ platform which is credited as the first stand-alone, web-based IM platform, which was sold to AOL a couple years later. Amidst the success of AOL IM and ICQ, other platforms were launched, including Microsoft Net Meeting, which came bundled with IE 3.0 and 4.0 (and was eventually retired when the Vista OS was launched) and very successfully incorporated video and voice over IP (VoIP) with 1-to-1 and group chat capability.

I often share some of my experiences testing systems and software in a pre-IM world, where my team would open up a conference line and leave it going throughout testing so that people could jump on the line, as needed. I remember one particularly stressful time where I left the office late after a long Saturday preparing for a Sunday cutover, and tried to get some sleep. I woke up around 2am, unsettled about the state of the project, and dialed into the conference line – only to find most of my test and engineering teams on the line trying to work through some serious issues. It seems almost surreal now that we would have to rely so much on such synchronous communication methods, but that’s what we knew. Fast-forward a couple years, and that same team had fully embraced the IM paradigm. At that time, we used the new Yahoo Messenger almost exclusively, with some folks connecting AOL and Yahoo using the Trillian tool, which linked various IM networks. When I started my own software company in 1997, one of the first things we did was build a simple IM client into our platform.

When 9/11 happened, I was at the end of a work day in Tokyo, dialed into Yahoo Messenger via my hotel phone line, using its VoIP capabilities to try and track down friends and family on the east coast as it was happening. IM is how I was able to get through to people when phone lines were busy.

Instant Messaging is at the core of almost every social platform. Whether we connect in real-time to have a conversation about an upcoming project, or to discuss an architectural diagram or PowerPoint presentation, IM has become embedded into the daily habits of the information worker. As a remote worker, I don’t know how I would be able to do my job without IM conversations, sometimes happening concurrently in Lync, Skype, Facebook, and Google. And as you can see, I am a fanboy…which is why when Adam Levithan (@collabadam) from Portal Solutions invited me to co-present on IM as the first in his social webinar series, I was happy to participate.

You can find our webinar recording below:

Webinar: Instant Messaging Ate My Intellectual Property from Portal Solutions on Vimeo.

And for those who like slideware:

Portal Solutions Social webinar Series: Instant Messaging Ate my Intellectual Property from Adam Levithan

With audio and video streaming technologies improving each year, you would think that we’d see a decrease in the written word – but it hasn’t happened, and I don’t see it happening at all. Instead, we’re augmenting our audio and visual collaborations with written communication. For example, I’ve been pushing the idea of the YamJam or TweetJam model for various group trainings or conferences – using Yammer for events that are internally-focused, and Twitter for public events. The idea is to simulcast the written conversations  with the audio and visual, allowing people to ask questions, comment, and otherwise capture another layer of collaboration that would otherwise be lost.

In my mind, IM is one of the three most important social technologies to be invented -- along with video streaming, and real-time group editing. But that’s for another blog post.

Be sure to follow Adam for updates on his social webinar series, courtesy of Portal Solutions.

SharePoint in the Clouds

It’s late on a Friday, and here I am still sitting in the office, working on a couple minor content items, as well as my SharePoint Conference session, entitled SharePoint in the clouds – select, mix, and deploy what’s right for you (#SPC293). We’ve been talking about the move to the cloud for a couple years now, but as the Office365 and Windows Azure platforms mature, and other private hosting options become readily available, more organizations are accepting the fact that they have options.

For some, a hybrid model of on-premises and private and/or public cloud components offers their organizations a way to ease their IT assets into this new paradigm. Many companies are, for example, looking seriously at how they can offload some workloads to Office365 (for example, HR processes, such as reviewing health care options or submitting time and expense worksheets) while maintaining critical business systems (with all their customizations and complexity) on prem.  The vision of the hybrid computing model for SharePoint, where costs can be optimized and users can be transitioned when it makes sense, is not so much a technical exercise as it is a deep dive into an organization's business requirements and constraints.

Every time I post an article or tweet about cloud options, I almost instantly hear back from people within the community with all of the reasons why their organizations are NOT moving to the cloud. Listen, I get it – and I think Microsoft has also finally accepted the fact that there is a large percentage of customers who will never move to the cloud. Gartner says its about 35% of existing SharePoint customers, and in a post-NSA breach world, that percentage may have temporarily moved higher. But the cloud is not going away, and over time these performance and security issues will be mitigated.

Hybrid may be the logical path forward for many companies, however most organizations need to ease their way into the cloud. Moving everything to the cloud all at once is not as simple as point and click– the best path is to baby step it, ensuring workloads can be supported, and both end user and management needs are being met.

Some guidance on planning out your transition to a hybrid model:

• Identify the use cases.
  Clarify the business benefits of each workload. Common scenarios include sharing content and collaborating with customers, field personnel, or partners. But also understand the workloads that should remain (at least for the near future) within your on premises environment, such as your ticketing system, or your highly customized product development platform. Beware the hidden costs of moving to a platform that cannot support all of your business requirements -- understand which use cases can be supported today, and let other use cases expand organically as your cloud platform matures. 
  
• Clarify the relationship of data and content between platforms.
  How will your on prem and cloud systems communicate, if at all? Does data or content need to be correlated (synchronized) between environments, or can these use cases and workloads be maintained separately? Key to maintaining a hybrid platform is having a clear understanding of how data, roles, and permissions are shared between platforms -- and how they will be managed going forward.
  
• Identify the governance, compliance, reporting constraints.
  An underlying problem with SharePoint deployments, in general, is that organization do not make a sufficient effort in defining success metrics, and methods for monitoring activity against those metrics, up front. It is important that you develop a governance strategy for both the old (on prem) and new (cloud) platforms, understanding (and documenting) how they will be managed individually, as well as together as a single platform. For many organization, one of the primary constraints of moving to the cloud is not necessarily the technologies (although there are some limitations, for sure) but in the inability to manage SharePoint across both environments.
  
• Define how end users will be transitioned.
  When your use cases have been defined, your data and content requirements are being met, and your governance strategy is in place, you also need to consider the end user experience. How best to transition users to your new system? If your focus is on key use cases, your answer may be in place already. Prioritize your use cases, and work with sub-sets of users (not all at once) to transition to the new model -- providing training and feedback loops, so that you can learn from the process and improve the model for future workloads.

The main message here is that moving to the cloud is never as simple as whipping out a credit card, signing up for an online service, and adding people's emails. That may answer a very small sub-set of users for their external collaboration needs, but making a transition from an enterprise-scale on prem SharePoint deployment to a similarly equipped, feature-rich cloud solution will take time, and careful planning.

I’m looking forward to presenting on the topic in Las Vegas next month, and will have similar topics in my abstract rotation at SharePoint Saturdays and user group presentations throughout the coming months.

The Future of Social in SharePoint

In an August 2011 article for CMSWire, I made some predictions about the future roadmap of native social features in SharePoint --- as well as how these capabilities would span across every flavor of SharePoint you might be running (on prem or online):

As SharePoint continues to grow and iterate, we'll see expansion of the most common (and expected) social computing features, likely with increasingly seamless movement between on-premises and online (both dedicated and multi-tenant) environments, allowing the social tools to cross these divides. The future will include capabilities that span your entire SharePoint footprint — in a secure way, of course. For example, news feeds that provide a snapshot of activity, security-trimmed, across various platforms that an end user can access, allowing the user to quickly move between those environments and seamlessly collaborate with multiple teams, customers and partners.

In the short term, the real punch will come through developments in Office365, which may be the most viable extranet model for SharePoint. As a parity of features is reached between Office365 and on-premises platforms, we will see Microsoft strengthening their position in the social computing space. Partners will lead much of this innovation, providing tools to help synchronize between these platforms and enabling collaboration online and offline, between on-premises and cloud-based components, and using a variety of computing and mobility devices.

We’re not quite there yet with SharePoint 2013 and/or Yammer, but I’m anticipating more news out of the SharePoint Conference (#SPC14) in Las Vegas next month, and am excited to be presenting one of the European SharePoint Conference (#ESPC14) keynotes in Barcelona with Microsoft’s Mark Kashman on this very topic.

Btw, if you’re going to Vegas, be sure to attend my session SharePoint in the clouds – select, mix, and deploy what’s right for you