buckleyPLANET

On the road: #SPTechCon San Francisco 2014

I’m on the road once again (nothing surprising there) is San Francisco for another SPTechCon event – my favorite SharePoint event outside of Microsoft’s own conference. I had been hoping to promote my three sessions a bit earlier, but with Typepad down for the past week due to DDoS attack, my site has been down. Amazing how something as little as your blog being down can impact how you feel about your own productivity. But that’s another discussion.

I’m sitting in a session by Ruven Gotz (@ruveng) this morning, listening to him talk about the importance of social networks and how Yammer (and SharePoint) can improve the way teams communicate and work together. (The picture above is of myself and Adam Levithan sitting in the back of Ruven’s session, clearly not paying attention) To be honest, I’m here more to figure out how my own Yammer-centric session compares to what Ruven is discussing. So far it sounds like my session will be a great Part 2 for his session, dealing more with Yammer to SharePoint integration. I’m also going to discuss, at length, the soft skills necessary with making social work within the enterprise, but I’m taking notes on what Ruven covers so that my session is complementary, not overlapping.

But that is just one of my sessions. Here are my abstracts and session times for those attending SPTechCon this week:

15 Reasons You Should Still Be Using SharePoint 2010
Wednesday from 4:15pm to 5:30pm, Yosemite B
An update to the very popular 'Top 10 SharePoint 2010 Features You've Never Used (But Should)' class, this session outlines 15 features in SharePoint 2010 that you may not yet be taking advantage of in your organization. We will walk through use cases for each, and show you how to make the most out of what you have in place today – SharePoint 2010. And I’ll be giving out a few copies of my 2010 book!

The Most Mind-Blowingly Epic SharePoint song, Ever!
Wednesday night at the Lightning Talks, beginning at 5:45pm, Grand Ballroom
The Hilton was kind enough to track down an acoustic guitar for me, and I’ll be performing live on stage within my 3-minute lightning talk window. You do not want to miss this performance. Mind. Blowingly. Epic.

Making SharePoint 2013 Social and Yammer Work Together
Thursday from 9:00am to 10:15am, Franciscan CD
With Microsoft’s integration of the world’s most popular enterprise social networking platform, Yammer, into their online offerings, many organizations who also have SharePoint 2013 running on premises are wondering how the two coincide. This class will tackle the soft-skills topics of creating and supporting a social organization, but will also address the many integrations between SP2013 and Yammer, with some real-world examples of how to use them side-by-side, or make the transition to a pure-cloud model.

Tactical Governance Planning for a Hybrid Environment 
Thursday from 1:45pm to 3:00pm, Union Square 5&6 (on 4th floor)
According to both Gartner and Microsoft, within the next three to five years the majority of SharePoint environments will move to a hybrid model. With various cloud-based components and mobile offerings, IT owners are rightly concerned about how to manage all of the moving parts. This class will discuss some of the security and management risks involved in a typical hybrid environment, and will walk you through a planning strategy for mitigating these risks.

If you’ve never seen me present, my sessions are very business analysts / project management-centric, focusing heavily on planning, change management, and optimization. So even when I am talking about Yammer and social topics, I try to apply it to real-world SharePoint implementations with a holistic view into the management, governance, and security/compliance issues surrounding them. I’m a terrible product pitchman (definitely not a kool-aid drinker), because I prefer to dwell in the real-world management scenarios, but people seem to appreciate this perspective.

Looking forward to my sessions, and in learning more from other experts in the SharePoint community. Watch my Twitter feed (@buckleyplanet) for the latest news and updates.

From San Francisco, I head to Salt Lake City for the weekend to hang out with Joel Oleson, Naomi Moneypenny, and Noah Sparks for a couple days, and then I’m home for a week before departing for Barcelona and the European SharePoint Conference in early May, followed by customer visits in London and a keynote presentation to the Swiss SharePoint Club in Geneva.

The Technology threshold of End User Adoption

Chalk this one up to stream-of-consciousness writing:

A couple weeks back I was discussing gamification and end user adoption with my fellow SharePoint MVP Jussi Mori (@JussiMori), founding partner at Peaches Industries Finland, with Jussi walking me through his company’s latest end user engagement method, called Gravity. For those less familiar with the concept of gamification, the goal is to use data and social tools to encourage desired end user behavior, often using methods such as recognition, rewards, and even games to help people better communicate and collaborate. A fundamental belief behind gamification is that having more people actively engaged will improve collaboration for everyone, and more quickly provide ROI for the organization.

A quick overview of Gravity from the Peaches website:

Gravity is an actionable End-User Engagement engine designed for Information portals built on SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 SharePoint online. It uses methods of games (Gamification) to help users get engaged in their work and get connected with each other and drive value for the Organization through that. The key is content and context. The Gamification engine works in all of the four adoption phases (Discovery, On-boarding, Productivity and Mastery) and takes the most out of the End Users activities and boosts productivity.

As Jussi walked me through the Gravity model that was designed for use with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online within Office365, outlining the purpose and actions taken within each of the four phases (Discovery, Onboarding, Productivity, and Mastery), one thought kept sticking out in my mind: For most end users who have reached the productivity phase, that there is a distinct point in time when the technology becomes “understood” and productivity increases. To help illustrate what I mean by this, consider something most people have experienced: learning to ride a bicycle. At some point in the learning process, riding become second nature – and the bicycle becomes forgotten. It becomes simply a tool with which you can get from point to point, and your thoughts no longer dwell on how, but where you can go.

So as Jussi was explaining the model and describing the Productivity phase, in my mind there were two steps within the phase – being productive with a limited understanding of what the platform can do (I can ride my bike and get from point to point), and an increased level of productivity with a full understanding of the platform (I forget about my fears of riding, and simply concentrate on where I want to go). In my mind, there is a threshold within the Productivity phase – which I have seen with the SharePoint education cycle: people can become very productive with a limited knowledge of SharePoint’s capabilities. But once that knowledge and proficiency increases, so does their potential for productivity.

Now, this increased productivity is not to be confused with the Mastery phase of the Gravity model – which, in my mind, has more to do with the business activities, and not with mastery of the technology (in this case SharePoint). Productivity is about improving on and automating existing activities and workloads, while Mastery is about creating entirely new workloads based on a new perspective of what is possible.

Wow, this all sounds much more philosophical than I had intended. But such is the stream-of-consciousness writing method. I had an idea stuck in my head, and now its out. Now I can get back to other things….

April 2014 #CollabTalk TweetJam on Social Influence

It’s time once again for my monthly #CollabTalk tweetjam scheduled for April 29th at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern focusing on the theme of “Microsoft’s Strategy for Social Influence” which is a supporting activity for a panel event I’ll be running at the European SharePoint Conference on this subject next month. I ran a tweetjam on a similar topic last summer, but wanted to touch on the topic once again because of the ESPC panel – and because we now have more details on Microsoft’s social strategy following the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last month. Specifically, Microsoft announced their new OfficeGraph technology, which plays a key role in the company’s efforts to identify, utilize, and measure social influence through various “listening” tools within the business and productivity platforms we use every day, like SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer, Dynamics CRM, and of course from our use of the internet to search, communicate and collaborate. It’s pretty simple – to identify social influence and do something with it, you need to track social activities….so OfficeGraph is a HUGE step in the right direction, and I’m pretty excited to see Microsoft innovate in this area.

If you’re new to the tweetjam model, basically its an hour-long public conversation held on Twitter and using a shared hashtag (or as @sebmatthews would call it, “a shared octothorpe metadata field”) which is #CollabTalk. You can use your Twitter platform of choice OR go over to http://twubs.com/CollabTalk which automatically appends each message with #CollabTalk, and has a nice feature that allows followers to actually slow the dialog down to a readable speed (it can fly by fairly quickly). The questions we will be discussing are listed below:

"Microsoft’s Strategy for Social Influence"

• Q1: How is social influence impacting collaboration and search?
• Q2: Is social influence important within the enterprise?
• Q3: How are organizations tracking and measuring social influence?
• Q4: What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s social roadmap?
• Q6: What are the logical “next steps” for OfficeGraph?
• Q7: Is social changing the direction of Microsoft’s business and productivity platforms?

As always, we will have a panel of experts on hand to help seed the conversation – but anyone can jump in and participate. That’s the point – we want to encourage people to share their perspectives, so don’t be shy. Our panel this month will include:

• Marwan Tarek (@marwantarek), SharePoint MVP and principal technology strategist at BrightStarr
• Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), cto at ManyWorlds
• Jussi Mori (@JussiMori), SharePoint MVP, social expert and consultant at Peaches Industries
• Barry Jinks (@BJinks), founder and ceo at Colligo
• Jeff Shuey (@Jshuey), director of strategic alliances at Gimmal
• Geoff Varosky (@gvaro), senior consultant at Jornata
• and myself as your host and moderator (@buckleyplanet), SharePoint MVP and chief evangelist at Metalogix

I’ll add to this list of panelists as I confirm them in the next day or two, and am excited to once again have a lively debate. We’re also doing something slightly different this time around – we’ll have a number of our panelists live via Google Hangouts, allowing viewers yet another way to participate, watching us as we “simulcast” the tweetjam via video. I’m not sure how it’ll turn out, or if it will provide any additional value – but we’ll try anything once, and it should be fun!

Mark your calendars, tell your colleagues, and get involved!

Gearing Up for the SP24 Conference

The whole idea of SP24 is fairly ambitious: a 24-hour online conference, with half of the sessions running live, in real-time (video backups on hand) and others provided in video format (but with a staff on hand to orchestrate) following the sun from New Zealand to Hawaii the next day. The community turned out to vote for the sessions they wanted to see (with a sprinkling of invited speakers), resulting in 4 tracks, over 100 sessions, and all built from and run on a SharePoint 2013 site (hosted by Fpweb.net). You can find out more about the event and its organizers here.

While some of the organizers approached me about speaking, this time around I was more interested in helping run things in the background, signing up to participate as one of the track anchors. I’ll help manage the first 6 development track speakers, including (in order of appearance):

• Jack Fruh, a SharePoint administrator who spearheads the SharePoint Saturday Chicago Suburbs (#SPSChicagoBurbs) event.
• Thorsten Hans, developer and SharePoint MVP at Experts Inside in Germany.
•  Jeff Adkin, former engineer with Microsoft IT, now at OBS Global in Canada.
• Chris Givens, developer, SharePoint MVP and CEO of Architecting Connected Systems in San Diego.
• Edwin Sarmiento, SQL Server MVP and Microsoft Certified Master with 15C in Ottawa, Canada.
• Marat Bakirov, SharePoint MVP senior developer at Readify and co-organizer of the first two SharePoint conferences in Russia.

You can register for as many sessions as you’d like – and the entire event is free, with Q&A throughout. You can find the session planner here, and each session description includes an overview video (prepared by the speakers), speaker bio, anchor bio (thank you very much!), and links to social tools. Don’t worry if you can’t make the event – recordings will be made available. (But live is always better). Here are the abstracts and links to the sessions which I’ll be introducing:

SharePoint PowerShell Time Machine by Jack Fruh (@sharepointjack)
Have you ever wished you had more hours in the day? We might have the next best thing! Find out how you can go back in time using PowerShell with SharePoint! In this session you'll learn the basics of PowerShell with SharePoint, and you'll see a few scripts that can help you go back in time by enabling versioning, recording Site Groups and Users and more. Between our "time travel" scripts, and scripts that just save time, this is one session that pays for itself. This material is all usable as soon as you've completed the session!

Speed up App Devs by using ShareCoffee by Thorsten Hans (@ThorstenHans)
SharePoint Apps are very powerful and flexible. This great flexibility brings higher complexity. Dealing with this complexity for each App costs both - time and money; this is actually where ShareCoffee comes into play. The small but powerful open-source library speeds up your App-Development by providing an unified API across all available REST operations for SharePoint. No matter if you're running Auto-, Provider- or SharePoint-Hosted, no matter if you're using AngularJS, jQuery or Reqwest. ShareCoffee gives you one unified API to call them all. Creating a preconfigured CSOM ClientContext for Cross-Domain calls? No problem. Loading SharePoint App Chrome in five lines of code? Join this talk and learn how to use these and other features of ShareCoffee by yourself.

Automation in the land of SharePoint by Jeff Adkin (@JAdkin)
SharePoint 2013 produces the highest ROI by combining tools and collaboration. The area where SharePoint begins to falter is in the time needed to administer the product. In this session we will look over administrative tasks that are repetitive, time consuming and downright monotonous. We will grab our trusted SharePoint Management Shell and our task manager, and prepare to do battle against those evil tasks. In the end we will have our tasks automated saving ourselves some sanity and our company’s some money.

Deep dive into SharePoint REST Architecture by Chris Givens (@givenscj)
Learn how the SharePoint built the REST architecture using SOA patterns and how you can utilize special tools to help you build your REST paths in your Apps!

Database Configuration for Maximum SharePoint Performance by Edwin Sarmiento (@EdwinMSarmiento)
Most of the SharePoint installations I've come across with use the standard and default configurations on the database server. However, the health and performance of your SharePoint farms are directly related to how your SQL Server databases perform. If the SQL Server databases are not performing well, that will translate to poor SharePoint performance. So, before you start spending more money into buying faster servers or upgrading your CPU and/or memory, you might want to check out this session first. We will learn how to properly configure a SQL Server instance for maximum SharePoint performance. We will look at understanding the underlying storage, proper database files placement, tuning the tempdb database database and other configuration settings that will help your SharePoint databases achieve optimum performance.

BCS – uncovering the mysteries by Marat Bakirov (@mbakirov)
Business Connectivity Services is a very good idea that appeared rather simple – a transparent view of the other data that are not stored in the Sharepoint, though it looks like. First version called Business Data Catalog was rather simple and provided read-only access to data. This evolved in Sharepoint 2010 with read write support, and now has evolved even more in SharePoint 2013 with additional features. However, people often meet some complex problems. A few examples – a limit of the number of items you could return from a single operation in a list or in an external picker. One of these limits is tweakable to some extent, and another is hard-coded. After that people often stop considering the technology, despite there is a simple redesign of your model that would solve the problems. In this talk, we will try to make an overview of the components that are contained in the Business Connectivity Services, will try to describe key notions like filters, associations, and providers. Then we will discuss the possible implementation of the data providers that you could implement yourself. After that, we will discuss the new functionality in SharePoint 2013, such as ODATA provider, an ability to have an app-scoped external type, events, and other enhancements. The author has a wide experience of working with BCS, including developing custom providers, connecting to Oracle and working with BCS on the client side.

In addition to this great lineup, don’t miss the keynote presentation by my good friend and former Microsoft peer, Bill Baer, Senior Technical Product Manager and SharePoint Certified Master on the SharePoint product team, who will be once again sharing his keynote from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last month, entitled SHAREPOINT ON-PREMISES, IN THE CLOUD, AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN at 3pm Pacific on April 16th.

Don’t miss it!

March 2014 content Wrap-Up

It was a relatively quiet Month in March -- you know, with that little SharePoint Conference thing happening down in Las Vegas and all. You probably didn't notice it was happening. But March (and now April) are quiet as far as new content from me because I am working on 7 (yes, 7) new presentations, plus 4 or 5 webinars (again, all new content) between now and end of May, with three new sessions and a lightning talk at SPTechCon in San Francisco later this month (followed by a short talk at a friend's baptism), and 2 regular sessions and a panel event to lead at the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona next month, followed by a keynote at the Swiss SharePoint Club in Geneva on May 15th. Busy times. Good times.

But after a quick crawl of my various newsfeeds, here is what I produced externally in the month of March:

At the top of the food chain was the content for my single session at SPC14, which Microsoft's Bill Baer (@williambaer) asked me to conduct on the last day of the conference. Always interesting to do what is essentially a business decision-maker topic in an IT Pro track, but I was asked, and I said yes. It was really more of a foundational topic to many others presented at SPC, and should have been scheduled for Monday, but that is life. Below you'll find my deck (SlideShare is struggling to format it all nicely) and a full recording of my deck and voice from my live session. I also captured the ebb and flow of the event in daily blog posts, and included here a panel session I did for Channel 9 (@ch9) with my fellow IAMCP Seattle board members Jeff Shuey (@jshuey) from Gimmal and Barb Campbell from Colligo, and SoCal IAMCP chapter president Ro Kolakowski (@ro_kolakowski) from 6th Street Consulting, moderated by Microsoft's Karuana Gatimu (@karuana):

• SharePoint in the clouds - select, mix, and deploy what's right for you (MSDN / Channel9) http://bit.ly/1eubIrM
• SharePoint in the clouds – select, mix, and deploy whats right for you (SlideShare) http://slidesha.re/PUSCW3
• SharePoint Conference -- Day 1 Recap (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1sGNbsL
• SharePoint Conference–Day 2 Recap (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1i5jDAn
• SharePoint Conference Recap–Day 3 (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1hlqINA
• SharePoint Conference Recap–Day 4 (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1gbZrbS
• SPCtv The value of International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP) (MSDN / Channel 9) http://bit.ly/1gQbs6c

For those who may not have noticed, my company Metalogix hosted a massive event (party) at SPC around which we conducted a 'Best of Breed' showcase and awards program with a number of partners. I conducted several interviews with showcase panelists, and wrapped up this series with an interview with the always-pithy Ruven Gotz (@ruveng) from Avanade. And as per usual, I conducted a monthly tweetjam using the #CollabTalk hashtag that focused on takeaways from the conference. This time around, I conducted the tweetjam from the road – hosted by my good friends Geoff Varosky (@gvaro) and Scott Jamison (@sjam) at Jornata in downtown Boston. My links include a summary, as well as a full transcript (with most re-tweets removed) via Storify:

• Best of Breed Panelist: Ruven Gotz, Avanade (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1jwuQtu
• March 2014 TweetJam–Takeaways From #SPC14 (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1kO36Qn
• Takeaways from the SharePoint Conference 2014 (Storify) http://bit.ly/1lThiLY

As most of you know, I don't write too much content that is a straight-up pitch for my company's products, however I do write around broader themes that align directly with our individual product and solutions sales themes. Internally, we refer to these as "key plays," but really its all about solving customer scenarios, not selling an individual product. I write a lot about the problem space, and then as far as products, let the customer make up their own mind:

• 9 Steps to Building a Governance Strategy (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1n8oEsp
• Its Not About Migration -- Its About Change Management (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1eu8owL
• Moving to Office365 Requires a Unified Strategy (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/PUPr0t

I wrote three articles last month that garnered more attention and traffic than all of my other posts combined, and really speak to the evolution of the SharePoint space, in my mind:

• Reduce Your Requirements (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1lNc6qz
• The Future of SharePoint and the Social Pivot (CMSWire) http://bit.ly/Q9QfhY
• The Maker Revolution (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1hDNw65

As always, I wrote a couple articles on the ongoing love-fest that is SharePoint governance, and also penned some articles on the transformation of the SharePoint platform currently underway as organizations more fully embrace social and the cloud:

• SharePoint Governance as a Hammer (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1lNcuW2
• Governing Your Governance Process (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1hDO8c0
• The Penultimate SharePoint Answer (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1mZxTOo
• The Evolution Of The SharePoint Blog (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1hlq5Uc
• 8 Things to Consider as SharePoint Moves to the Cloud (Metalogix webinar recoding) http://ow.ly/uyHmE
• The Golden Age of Cloud Services (AIIM) http://bit.ly/1gdla6F

Amidst all of my PowerPoint activities leading into SPTechCon and ESPC, I'll do what I can to squeeze out some of the content that is becoming backlogged in OneNote. For example, I am sitting on content for Wired, CMSWire, Business2Community, and for the new ITUnity site being launched by Dan Holme and Jackie Baillie (launching soon!) and am, for the most part, using these other articles as a mental escape from all of the other formal content and demo prep. Once completed, however, I plan to ramp things back up again to my 30-40 article output per month, so watch for it.

Influence Does Not Equal Popularity

A year ago, I made the somewhat sensational claim that Klout was the most interesting company in the world. My point was not really about Klout, but about the rising importance of understanding, tracking, and measuring social influence within the organization. It’s a topic that I’ve been writing about for over a decade, and one of the topics around which this blog focused when I started it back in 2002 as I began to catalog the various tools and thought-leaders within the space.

As this blog post title suggests, social influence and popularity are very different things. I often use the example of the highly-technical subject matter expert (SME) within your organization who keeps to his/herself most of the time, but when a problem needs solving or a question arises, this person is where everyone turns for the answers. Here is someone who may not be popular (someone who is socially active, generally extroverted, and liked by many) but is influential within the organization. Popularity can be easy to spot in comparison to influential. That schoolyard definition may not be all-inclusive, but I think we can all agree that we’ve had personal experiences with those who are popular, and with those who are influencers in one topic or another. Arguably, there are different “tiers” of influence, and patterns of influence can change and shift due to organizational structures, available tools (for example, communication capabilities, content publishing, and reporting tools), and roles.

I have not yet come into contact with any single tool or solution that dominates the category of social influence management. Tools like Klout and Kred track certain social networking data points, measured against their proprietary algorithms to provide dashboards to help individuals measure and track influence, but there is not yet industry acceptance of these tools. In fact, there is a lot of skepticism out there about these metrics, and the intent of these companies. I usually tell people that the data at any single point of time is less relevant to what they tell you about the trending information. The fact that I average 73 on Klout is less interesting than the fact that my recent blog post caused a surge of 2 points, where my previous 3 posts may not have moved the needle. It gives me data from which I can better understand why that topic touched a nerve within my network.

For those planning to attend the European SharePoint Conference in Barcelona next month, you may be interested in attending a panel that I am moderating entitled How to Track, Measure, and Get Business Value Out of Social Influence which will include SharePoint MVP and rising gamification expert Jussi Mori (@jussimori), Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Mark Kashman (@mkashman), and social technology expert and CTO of ManyWorlds Naomi Moneypenny (@nmoneypenny), among others. The panel will take place on Wednesday, May 7th at 2pm, and will tackle a number of questions, including:

• What is the role of social influence within the organization today?
• How are businesses leveraging social influence today?
• How do SharePoint and Yammer track, measure, and make actionable your organizational social influence?
• What do consumer solutions (Klout, Kred, PeerIndex) provide that are missing within the enterprise?

I’m organizing a tweetjam for later this month on the topic, which I plan to leverage for questions and comments for next month’s panel event. It’s a fascinating topic – one which I’ll be writing about extensively this year, and will incorporate into a book project currently underway (details soon). But for those who want to do some further research on this topic, there are a few books that I can recommend:

• Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. This is the 2003 version, building on the 2002 book which is what fueled much of my interest into network science and social informatics after working in the knowledge management space for several years.
• Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts (2004). Watts was really the one who brought network science into the mainstream, and was bleeding-edge content at the time when LinkedIn, MySpace, Ryze, Friendster and others were in full swing, prior to the era of Facebook and Twitter. A must-read.
• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler (2011) is an in-depth look at the power and possibilities of social influence, and specifically talk about the strength of a network over that of the individual.
• Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing by Mark Schaefer (2012) contains a lot of marketing fluff, in my opinion, but does a good job of outlining the strengths of various tools and consumer websites that create and monitor social influence data points. Worth reading through, but not the hard-science of the others listed here.
• Understanding Social Networks: Theories, Concepts, and Findings by Charles Kadushin (2011) is more of a deep dive into the social networking platforms. There’s a lot to be learned about how these sites work, ad what you can then translate into internal systems or strategies, such as through your gamification strategies (if that’s something you’re pursuing).
• Bursts: The Hidden Patterns Behind Everything We Do, from Your E-mail to Bloody Crusades by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi is currently in my reading rotation.

You may also be interested in a blog post by Rebecca Murphy entitled 10 Vital Steps to Building Social Influence, which begins with a link to a study that shows people do, indeed, consider popularity and influence to be two different things.

What all of this content will tell you – influence is not about popularity. They are two distinctive things. I would describe influence as something that is measurable (although the tools available are rudimentary because the space is still so new) and malleable, while popularity is tenuous and often irrational, based more on emotion than science. As our consumer and enterprise application become more and more connected, the ability to measure and modify (manipulate / change) social influence will become increasingly important to our customer, as well as employee, strategies.

Is there anyone else out there doing research (personally or for work) on this topic? If so, I’d love to connect and share notes, and add you to the panel for this month’s tweetjam. Ping me.

The Leadership Vacuum Around Quality

Its long been true that the vast majority of business executive choose mediocrity over creativity, evolution over revolution, and following over innovating. They may not do this consciously, but through a series of bad choices, employee compromises, and a general lack of creativity they have developed bad management habits that allow these things to take root, and eventually take over.

In the latest edition of Harvard Business Review, there’s a great article by Ashwin Srinivasan and Bryan Kurey called Creating a Culture of Quality that shares some of the results of a quality survey, focusing largely on manufacturing organizations, but touching on many of these same areas. At the end of the day, the issues they identified in their research are much the same as what author Eliyahew Goldratt identified in his must-read management guide The Goal, pointing to leadership, message credibility, peer involvement, and employee empowerment as the key drivers of quality in an organization. And when quality is emphasized at all levels of the organization, and at every stage – from the way you hire employees to the execution of a marketing initiative to a product release – it changes more than the short-term delivery of a product or service, but the culture of the organization also improves.

Quality is the opposite of mediocrity. Quality seeks after revolutionary ideas, and inspires and expects innovation.

Look at your own organization -- when did "good enough" become the standard within your marketing and product strategy? Many organizational cultures have collectively stagnated because we've focused on short-term financial gain as the primary measurement of business success, and hired those people who fulfill a role and can be easily controlled rather than those who would individually or collectively improve what is in place today.

Its time to do something different, to be different, authentic, and bold in our decision-making. Reject mediocrity, embrace quality.

Ruminations on the Future of SharePoint

I’ve had quite a few people ask me why I waste time organizing these monthly #CollabTalk tweetjams. It can be difficult to follow the conversation threads, they’re full of inside jokes and side conversations, and if it’s a hot topic – its like drinking from the content fire hose. But what I love about the format is that you focus on certain themes and conversations during the event, and after reading through the summary, you find dozens of additional ideas and comments and links that you missed before. It’s a treasure trove of great content, packed into a one-hour texting barrage. And I’m planning to keep it running. I’m still thinking about my April topic, but rest assured it’ll happen at the end of the month, before I wander away and join the festivities in Barcelona for the European SharePoint Conference.

For this month’s tweetjam, we had 14 panelists, over 60 participants during the event, and more than 600 tweets produced. You can find a summary/transcript of the entire event (with most re-tweets removed) on my page at Storify. But here is a snapshot of some of the comments made during last month’s event:

Q1: In your opinion, what was the biggest news out of the conference?

• @kkhipple A1: biggest news had to be #oslo and the introduction of the #officegraph
• @jamescallaghan on-premises is still in MSFTs minds. More Hybrid options becoming available. Oslo.
• @dlairman A1 Microsoft's move toward openness and transparency (ex #InfoPath replacement)
• @diverdown1964 Q1: 1. Big Push into non-Windows platforms
• @wictor A1: MinDB and Fort Knox
• @buckleyplanet A1 was also great to see an iPad demo and Android SDK announcements in the #spc14 keynote
• @jshoq Q1: I think the biggest news was the confirmation of on-prem Exchange and SharePoint coming next year.

Q2: What was the best session you attended, and why?

• @erobillard A2 #SPC388 great walkthrough of building Win 8 and mobile apps against SP Services, and showed off #ProjectSiena
• @SPHotShot A2: Kirk Evans Azure sessions, hands down
• @ben3003 A2: Session by Nationwide with their case study. True real world examples with not just the why but also the how
• @jamescallaghan A2 Keynote and a look at Office 365 behind the scenes. Microsoft take security seriously. More please - great for customers.
• @dlairman A2 @olenickSP 6 tips session - I repurposed some of the deck for an internal preso about the benefits of moving to #SP2013
• @erobillard A2: Dev trending towards apps consuming SP content on all devices, @waldekm's #SPC388 was the best guide yet.

Q3: What was the most underrated topic at SPC?

• @erobillard A3 SPDesigner conspicuous by its absence, dead as InfoPath? And those Excel surveys rock. #SPC14
• @kkhipple A3: could @yammer take over @Sharepoint as a platform for collaboration?
• @buckleyplanet A3 an underlying theme, with support for iOS and Android, what happens to the MS stack dev strategy?
• @NickKellett A3. SharePoint platform was buried under cloud services, infra, new widgets. Not much talk about strategy / impact
• @sympmarc A3: Shift from cool features to real solutions. New territory for Microsoft. It isn't about the tech.
• @teknirvana A3. ECM seems to be dead. Nobody seems to care about metadata tagging or content management much anymore

Q4: Based on SPC, what is your take on the current on prem vs hybrid vs cloud messaging?

• @erobillard A4 MSFT will keep undermining on-prem until we're all in the cloud. #SPC14
• @dlairman A4 The Cloud is Coming (if you aren't fully onboard, get your toes wet with hybrid)
• @diverdown1964 A4: On-prem is the way we deliver features that we can't put in the cloud #
• @SPHotShot ... O365 is a freight train coming at you (and it's better to be on the train than in it's path)
• @kkhipple A4 feels like roles of on-prem and cloud will switch places. 4yrs ago cloud was 2nd citizen. Now on-prem is the 2nd citizen
• @sharepointlhorn A4: one of my customers stated after #SPC14 that his takeaway was "get to the cloud, on-prem is now a red-headed step child"

Q5: How much has/will what you've learned at SPC change your strategy for 2014?

• @NickKellett A5: Major focus on comparing and understanding MS and other cloud offerings now
• @shellecaldwell I would say most companies should say no to this question but alas they still answer yes #collabtalk
• @SPHotShot A5: Didnt change so much as re-enforced what was already suspected #collabtalk
• @barkingd A5: For #Apps strategy, the big question is, how efficiently will MS execute "stack" collaboration and API maturity #CollabTalk #HardToDo
• @EVanRoy A5: didn't change much, need to put more effort into cloud and hybrid than I planned. Was expecting a slower push :) #collabtalk
• @teknirvana A5. No change - SharePoint App model is the future of SharePoint customization and solutions #collabtalk

Q6: What was the most interesting takeaway from the exhibit hall?

• @diverdown1964 A6: The Bose headset that I got from #Nintex ;-) #CollabTalk
• @gvaro A6: I have still yet to win a Ducati or any tablets. #CollabTalk
• @sympmarc A6: There are form vendors with real options out there: @Nintex @Formotus etc. Do we need InfoPath? Nah. #CollabTalk
• @erobillard A6 The ecosystem is healthy, and partners who offer services but not products don't get much traffic. #CollabTalk #SPC14
• @NickKellett A6: core vendors are still around, but heavy consolidation is taking place. Sign of maturing market
• @dlairman A6 #InfoPathFuneral !!
• @shellecaldwell A6 product partners finally recognizing they need to offer solutions that work both onprem, cloud and hybrid

Q7: What SharePoint events are you most looking forward to in 2014, and why?

• @mkashman A1: my three favs | #oslo, video for #Office365, #1TB + community reinvigoration #latetoparty
• @NickKellett A7: @SPSOttawa SharePoint Saturday Ottawa in Q4 because it is always fun ;) #ShamelessPlug
• @diverdown1964 A7: SPC Adriatics, ShareThePoint Oz & NZ - Great locations!
• @erobillard A7 http://SP24conf.com in Apr: bold experiment, #SPSToronto Jul: great community, MVPSummit: best folks in the world #SPC14
• @rhrempel A7: #SPSTC and #ESPC events
• @mkashman A7: TechEd-NA (lots of #SharePoint there), SPC14-Euro (Barcelona), & SPTechCon

There’s a lot more than this over on Storify, so click here and peruse the detailed responses from the community. And if you missed the conference, just remember that ALL of the sessions are available (for free) on MSDN’s Channel 9. And if you’re so inclined, you can watch my #SPC14 session SharePoint in the clouds - select, mix, and deploy what's right for you, or watch my fellow #IAMCP Seattle board members and I, with Ro from the SoCal chapter, as we are interviewed by MSIT’s Karuana Gatimu (@karuana) on #SPCtv on the topic of IAMCP and why you (SharePoint vendors and consultants) should get involved.

The Maker Revolution

A man has the right to change his mind. I’ve used the analogy of the Model T a few times to describe the traditional IT project methodology, with clearly defined roles and a somewhat structured approach for moving a project from beginning to end in a way that reduces risk and raises transparency of what is being developed. However, my thinking has evolved. I recognize that we are very rapidly moving away from anything that looks like an assembly line. Everyone knows the story of Henry Ford, the Model T automobile, and the advances made to productivity and mass production by utilizing a revolutionary process called the assembly line, where instead of having workers move from vehicle to vehicle to perform repetitive tasks (which was slow, and introduced unnecessary risks and mistakes), the vehicles were moved down a line of worker stations. This allowed individual specialists to quickly add their part of perform their role, and then repeat the process on the next vehicle in the line as it moved down the factory floor, resulting in a finished product at the far end.

You might argue that this shift is obvious, that we moved away from the IT assembly line long ago. I don’t think so. When you think of agile development and scrum, they have more to do with assembly line optimization than something revolutionary. SharePoint as a platform, and with its broad partner ecosystem, has become – for the most part -- the enterprise application assembly line. Many Strategic Integrators (SI's or consulting companies) have established themselves in the space by quickly building out assembly line-type practices revolving around specific solutions, whether it be Business Intelligence, external websites, or team collaboration, or other targeted areas. They’ll differentiate by building out scripts and “accelerators” to help move your solution quickly down the assembly line toward delivery.

But where my thinking has changed is around the ability for organizations to break down complex platforms (like SharePoint) through virtualized platforms and services, using the core services as needed to build out very granular, specialized solutions. My good friend Mike Watson (@jmikewatson) often talks about (and sends links to me regarding) the “maker culture,” which is a movement or philosophical emphasis on ‘do it yourself’ solutions, which, in my thinking, fits in very much with the idea of the ‘consumerization of IT’ that takes technology decisions out of the hands of the traditional IT organization and puts them in the hands of the business user. The future of SharePoint, I posit, has / will have a lot in common with the maker culture due to the maturity in PaaS and IaaS offerings.

From Wikipedia:

'Maker culture' emphasizes learning-through-doing (constructivism) in a social environment. Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, peer-led, and shared learning motivated by fun and self-fulfillment. Maker culture encourages novel applications of technologies, and the exploration of intersections between traditionally separate domains and ways of working. Community interaction and knowledge sharing are often mediated through networked technologies, with websites and social media tools forming the basis of knowledge repositories and a central channel for information sharing and exchange of ideas, and focused through social meetings in shared spaces such as hackspaces.

Past versions of SharePoint was to the company website, portal, or extranet as Ford's assembly line was to auto manufacturing: strong components, easily assembled into the end solution you needed. But the future of SharePoint is much more akin to the maker culture, and, for example, the 3D printer: pull down your plans from community discussion and best practices, create the parts you need on the fly, and build to suit.

I feel like I’m not explaining it properly, but it all makes sense in my head. What do you think?

[Interesting side note: While Ford is credited with making the assembly line a competitive success (and a primary discussion topic for business school programs around the world), the assembly line would not have been successful without a similarly successful standardization -- the screw. Back in the day, screws varies widely, with each machinist using their own style or size. One pair of machinists, brothers Job and William Wyatt, wanted to mass produce screws, creating lathe devices that allowed them to eventually generate 16,000 screws per day, and thereby greatly reduced the cost and time involved with any mass production activity…..including later advances in automobiles.]

The Penultimate SharePoint Answer

One thing that is consistent across online communities is the ease at which we can take things out of context. Honestly, after a few conversations on Facebook around the latest local city council procedures took a turn down a dark path of religious bigotry and personal attacks, it got me thinking about the many topics that can act as a lightning rod in a business conversation -- which, sadly, is not too far from what I experienced this past week on Facebook: Religion. Politics. Race. Ageism. I've-been-here-longer-than-you syndrome. People tend to dig in and want to be heard, but rarely take the time to listen -- and much less time to actually understand other perspectives.

The same can be true for technology circles. For example: when should you bring in the end users for their perspective on your SharePoint strategy? Nobody disagrees (I think) with the idea of involving end users in the process, but people have some very strong opinions on the topic, most of which stem from the real or perceived lack of control that happens when you ask people for feedback rather than tell them your prescribed solution.

The question stands: when is the right time? If you bring them into the planning too early, there are impacts to the scope and design. In my experience, when end users are brought in too early, they see the new capabilities, all of the bells and whistles, and get caught up in what could be, and skew their thinking about what is actually needed. If you bring them in too late, there are also impacts to the scope and design. They may limit their requirements because they cannot fully envision what is possible, and worse yet, may close themselves off from future discussion because they've already told themselves that it won't be what they want (and what the business needs).

I know that you have all had this discussion at some point with your team, or with management. The problem is -- there is no right answer. To be honest, there are some solutions that never need to run through committee, like whether to use the Microsoft Office suite or to move to some knock-off brand. When 99% of the business world is using Office (don’t pester me with stats that show its slightly less….I don't care. My point is that it’s the overwhelming majority), and if Office is what you've always used, and therefore all of your existing content and productivity artifacts are Office-related, is there really a question? But for most other technology decisions, there are many options, in which case the most correct answer is the penultimate SharePoint answer: It depends.

Part of the problem is that people have a tendency to jump to solutions before they fully understand the problem, or the scope of what is needed. We see this with developers who prefer to jump right in and start coding without fully understanding the business requirements. We instinctively want to solve problems. We're good at solving problems. We're just not good at getting the requirements right up front, which tends to impact the scope and design (and cost).

When designing and building a new enterprise portal, or a team collaboration hub, or an operations and business intelligence platform -- whatever the plan may be -- the initial focus should be to thoroughly define and understand the current-state (what is in place today, what is working, what is not working) so that the project team (and the business) has a clear picture of how the solutions should work before moving to the design of the future system, much less before decisions are made about which technologies to utilize.

That's one of the glaring problems with SharePoint. We sell end users on the excitement of what could be, and skew their perspectives on what is actually needed. Or we don't tell them anything about it, only that its being rolled out, and they react negatively -- shutting themselves off from it, affecting adoption. Spend too much time too early focusing on new technology, and it may slow down the requirements and current-state documentation process. By waiting too long, and not getting them involved until after the future-state planning and design process, end users may reject your solutions, feeling left out. Just remember -- end users who participate in the design of a system are more likely to support that system.

The key is to engage with them at the right time, after they've been able to articulate their business needs, but before they've become married to any particular solution. You need to have a plan for when and how to involve your end users. Do this, and you'll have them engaged and on-board with your plans. Or, at least they'll be a bit more understanding about the tradeoffs being made.