Guest Speaker at Butler Group Strategy Briefing

Just a quick note that Matthew and I will be at the Butler Group Strategy Briefing on June 23rd. The topic is "Document and Records Management - Controlling Information Risk and Aiding Productivity".

I will be standing in for Microsoft as guest speaker talking about SharePoint DM around the Linklaters / Kinstellar case study. Agenda for the briefing is here (my slot is 14.05):
http://www.butlergroup.com/briefingAgenda.asp?mcr=DRM&scr=DRM230608

We will both hang around there the whole day to learn from the other vendors, and hear more about what companies are looking for when it comes to RM, ECM and DM.

Gabriel

How to protect SharePoint 2007?

Well, there are a number of options, including using STSADM, backing up 12hive manually and so forth. There are 3rd party tools, and there are PowerShell scripts.

What fewer realise is that there is an alternative from Microsoft themselves called DPM, or Data Protection Manager. We use it in-house and have experienced only a few glitches - but nothing to major. My opinion is that it generally functions well and if you don't have backup and restore tools and procedures in place already for SharePoint then it is well worth a look.

But I am not a backup or operations kinda expert, so I cannot tell you if DPM is "the best out there" or even if it is "enterprise level", but I came across this blog here from Margo on "To the SharePoint" blog which was published a few days ago. They also published this whitepaper: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd252713.aspx

Enjoy...

SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements

In case you missed it, Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog announced the "SharePoint Server 2010 Preliminary System Requirements" here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx

My 10 sec summary:
- 64bit only
- Windows Server 2008 only
- Windows SQL Server 2005 or 2008 only
- Browser support for: standards based browsers (XHTML 1.0 compliant) including Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x. running on Windows Operating Systems
- No more IE6 (thank you!!)... it's history! See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

SharePoint Server 2010

Yes, it finally became official (April 14th it was), the baby will be called "SharePoint 2010".

MS are dropping "MOSS" as Office is no longer part of the official name for SharePoint.

I like this extract from the Microsoft SharePoint Team blog: "Don’t try to acronym Microsoft SharePoint Server to MSS since MSS is already taken by Microsoft Search Server. Just remember, SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint."

So, what I will try to do here, is maintain a list of interesting posts/entries that I or colleagues spot, or add our own comments, as things about SharePoint 2010 starts to become clear.

Next Wave of Microsoft Office Products Will Redefine How People Work
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/Apr09/04-15Office2010.mspx

Microsoft SharePoint Team Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/14/microsoft-sharepoint-14-is-now-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.aspx (I think this is the most official Microsoft announcement?)

Bink.nu
http://bink.nu/news/microsoft-brands-office-2010-releases-exchange-beta.aspx

CMS Watch having a rant at the naming:
http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1572-SharePoint-2010-Brand-Confusion

SharePoint Buzz blog....
http://www.sharepointbuzz.com/archive/tags/Microsoft%20SharePoint%20Server%202010/default.aspx
nice one about expected features of SharePoint 2010:
http://www.sharepointbuzz.com/archive/2008/11/11/upcoming-sharepoint-14-features.aspx

Announcing Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and WSS 3.0
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/04/28/announcing-service-pack-2-for-office-sharepoint-server-2007-and-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0.aspx
While this link to does directly give any clues to "what will be in SharePoint 2010" it does state that SP2 will be required for upgrades to SharePoint 2010, and it includes a number of improvements that appear to be "staging" the new release, including:
"A new preupgradecheck operation is added to stsadm tool. It can be used to scan your server farm to establish whether it is ready for upgrade to SharePoint Products and Technologies "14". It identifies issues that could present obstacles to the upgrade process. It checks for several SharePoint Products and Technologies "14" system requirements, including the presence of Microsoft® Windows Server® 2008 and a 64-bit hardware, and provides feedback and best practice recommendations for your current environment, together with information on how to resolve any issues that the tool discovers."
More to follow... (and let us know of any good SharePoint 2010 resources you may come across).

Microsoft SharePoint DM Case Study

It is always great when others want to know more about work we have done - somewhat flattering I guess ;-)

In this case the chaps from Microsoft had heard about our SharePoint Document Management project for Linklaters / Kinstellar. Seeing how the end result shows SharePoint's capabilities as a DM for a larger law firm, they have now turned this into a 2-page case study. You can read it here http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000003953 (written and published by Microsoft)

Or you can get a PDF version from here: www.clearpeople.com/ms-casestudy-sharepoint-dm (scroll down to the bottom somewhere I think)

If this topic interests you then you might also want to check out a recent blog entry here: http://thesharepointpeople.blogspot.com/2009/03/real-life-document-management-on.html

Enjoy!

New blog site added: http://tips4sharepoint.blogspot.com

We have added a new blog site on http://tips4sharepoint.blogspot.com/ .....

Sorry, but no prizes for guessing what it's for! Enjoy!

Real life Document Management on SharePoint

It's interesting how many blogs, articles and whitepapers are out there regarding document management on SharePoint. But there aren't really that many articles touching on real-life experience with implementing this for larger organisations (let me know if you find any good ones).

In my experience, implementing SharePoint for DM comes down to addressing three key areas, and the following is a summary of experience/best-practice that has been implemented in a number of larger organisations - including some very well respected law firms (and we all know that they are demanding when it comes to DM). These key areas are:

1) Structure
2) Extending
3) Surfacing

STRUCTURE
DM on SharePoint, like any other DM solution, requires some planning to ensure that the long-term document volumes are well supported. The solution must therefore be designed at max future capacity (uncommon) or designed to scale to future capacity requirements (more common).

SharePoint has the unfortunate reputation of not being able to cope with volume. This is simply a misconception. My guess is that many have thought that SharePoint out of the box would magically know how to structure millions of documents in a navigable and scalable structure. It doesn't and some work is required for you to get it right. But it's not rocket science.

For a recent client - a large law firm (and off-spring from a global top 5 law firm) - we implemented our best practice and we can comfortably claim that scaling to around 10TB is possible without issues (all things being equal and all sorts of other caveats).

The best practice (shown for a law firm here) is simply:

[web app root site collection]
/clients [managed path]
.../[Client Site Collection]
....../[logical sub site]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
....../[logical sub site]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
............/[matter/case/project document library]
.../[Client Site Collection]
.../[Client Site Collection]
.../[Client Site Collection]

The structure above sub-divides the overall structure into neat and manageable containers (Site Collections, Sites and Document Libraries).

Importantly, it breaks up the document volume across Site Collections, which then allows you to limit the size of content databases, by associating Site Collections to different content databases. The actual physical storage limit of a Site Collection / Content database varies depend on who you ask. Typically from 50GB to a few hundred GB (we have tested 400GB successfully) per Content Database is generally accepted.



EXTENDING
There are some gaps in SharePoint that you will want to address... We tend to address most of them with a great SharePoint Add-On (WISDOM DMF Pro) from our excellent partners in Australia, MacroView.

Unique Document Numbering
I.e. a document may have a unique ID in a Document Library, but this same ID will most certainly exist for another document in another Document Library. One of the features that we get with DMF Pro is a central feature to provision such unique IDs on saving a document into a library.

Document Reference
The feature above is enhanced further, by also allowing DM administrators to set their own variables for a document reference. E.g. "[Doc ID] - [Project Number] - [Client Number ] - [Title]" which is saved into the document properties.... Excellent for document footers I tell you ;-)

Provisioning
A DM is rarely a stand-alone app, so extending SharePoint and providing web-services for automated provision of areas (site collections, sites and document libraries). Commonly we see this used by accounting, crm or "Practice Management Systems" during the workflow of creating clients or client projects/matter.

Permissions
It goes without saying that some areas (sensitive matters/projects etc) need tight security and in my experience, providing an efficient way of doing this reduces the risk of this task being "forgotten". We have had good results from providing a simple interface (web service) for automated lock-down of areas. I.e. a workflow, or other can, during the provisioning process, fire off a request to lock down a site or document library to specific AD users or groups.


There are a few more details .... but enough for now... over to surfacing.

SURFACING
It ain't going to be a success if your users don't like using it. I tend to use the term "surfacing" to cover everything that we do to "surface" SharePoint to the desktop. I.e. any desktop client apps, office plug-ins etc. The key is to make it as intuitive as possible for the user to use SharePoint as their DM repository. Here again we use the WISDOM DMF (Pro) Add-on for SharePoint which allows us to give the users a consistent experience across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, in addition to Adobe Reader/Acrobat. So all the save to / open from is handled neatly. Searching for documents on SharePoint is available straight from the plug-in. Drag & drop in Outlook for email management and lots more. All out of the box.

Right that's it for now.... I might add a bit more detail to this article. But feel free to comment/ask questions ....

Those SharePoint alerts are just filling up our inboxes

How often have we heard this complaint from IT Managers with enough to worry about already. SharePoint is a great tool, and alerts are really useful, but the reality is that they get overused and therefore very quickly ignored.


Result: loads of alerts are filling up users' inboxes, and they are either just being left there, or they get deleted by the users without ever getting read.

And hey, how about coming back from vacation and finding your inbox jammed with irrelevant notifications?


We were asked - about 6 month ago - to develop a little "instant message" alerting mechanism for a client. As soon as we heard about it we thought this sounded like a neat little idea. Another client happened to complain that same week about their FD sending global emails with massive attachments. His messages really belonged to a SharePoint announcement list, but they were reluctant to start alerting users even more than they did already via SharePoint.

Two weeks after I was discussing how to use SharePoint for contingency planning, and the topic of notifications came up again. The organisation really wanted to use SharePoint as a primary location for contingency information, and as the primary mechanism to distribute information. Long story short, email is a great mechanism, but not fast enough, and what if email servers are down. So as a primary distribution mechanism, how about something that broadcasts directly to the users from SharePoint.

Right that was it. We just had to get to it, and CorpCast was underway.....

CorpCast was built as a "stand-alone" communication tool, i.e. it does not require Office Communication Server, Exchange or other. Just SharePoint standard edition, and a port to broadcast on.


We released CorpCast about one month ago, and are getting some great feedback at the moment (thanks to everyone who have been providing this feedback).


Let me quickly summarise how CorpCast works:

A SharePoint feature allows Site Owners to configure CorpCast notification alerts on any list. CorpCast can be configured to notify individual users or groups, and can be set to trigger notifications on Add, Update or Delete events on the list.



So, when a new item is added to a list the event is caught by CorpCast, and it passes a message to the "CorpCast Server Service", which in turn broadcasts the notification to all listening CorpCast clients.

On the client a little light weight application is installed to the Windows notification area, and displays the notification with the "toaster effect" on the users desktop. When the user clicks on it, it closes and the user is taken straight into the relevant item on SharePoint.


So, the feedback we have had since is that this is great for:
- contigency planning
- reducing email alerts filling up Outlook
- pulling users into specific areas of SharePoint (i.e. this is a great tool to encourage people to visit a newly published intranet page)
- support / helpdesk lists, to instantly notify the helpdesk team.
- etc

(keep the feedback coming, and tell us how you are using CorpCast)

We have uploaded latest version of CorpCast here: www.clearpeople.com/corpcast
You can download a free - fully functional - 45 day trial.


Also -here is a One Minute Demo... not the most impressive video editing skills (I admit it), but should give you enough to get going on (and I promise I will record/edit something better soon):

Gabriel

Microsoft discloses plans for FAST ESP

Came across an interesting article on plans for the new SharePoint.

Summary
FAST Search for SharePointThe SharePoint flavor will see the light together with SharePoint 14 (which will probably be early 2010).

Read more on:
http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1498-Microsoft-discloses-plans-for-FAST-ESP