Top 10 Ways to Put SharePoint to Work

To use a sports metaphor, CorasWorks has always done a great job of skating to where the puck is going to be. In this perspective, we have stayed ahead of our competition and sometimes perhaps a little ahead of the mass market in general, so if this topic does not resonate with you now - give it time. This post draws directly and nearly completely from a recent CorasWorks White Paper titled 'Solutions Quadrant for SharePoint' which can be downloaded @:

http://community.corasworks.net/sites/v1Data/Material/Solution_Quadrant_for_SharePoint.pdf

What anyone should get from reading this or any other similar paper on the topic - is that planning is of paramount importance in the SharePoint process. Without proper planning and vision, SharePoint communities like any other 'planned' community will have problems. Without proper planning and requirements gathering - issues will arise over time. These problems, however, are foreseeable and avoidable. Whenever we take a 'quick fix' we know there are trade-offs in the long run. What one saves in short term cost and expediency is generally paid back in long term inefficiency and less obvious re-engineering costs.What a company like CorasWorks brings to the table, aside from the software, is the experience. A company need only respond to the needs of their client base over an extended period of time as CorasWorks has and it will refine it's product and increase its value to the wider market.

The solutions quadrant paper highlights the fact that CorasWorks has a vision for the product beyond the functionality of the individual piece parts. So if you are wondering how to derive value from SharePoint this year – here are some good starting points:

Top 10 Ways to Put SharePoint to Work in 2009

These recommendations are principally oriented towards organizations
that have a commitment to SharePoint as a corporate platform and that are looking to leverage SharePoint to “do more for less” in 2009.

1. Make Sites Part of the Whole
If you have siloed team sites, look at making them part of an integrated work environment. Social Collaboration applications are a solid bet to provide “the glue” to tie them together. In addition, we recommend implementing Global Navigation, Site Portfolios, Site Locators, and Site Profiling. The benefits are less duplication of effort and greater visibility of activities.
Further, we’d recommend adding a site collection for work consoles (by user, role, or group) that leverage site portfolios to increase end user productivity.

2. Leverage the eSAS model
If you have a shared services collaborative environment, we recommend that you move towards the eSAS model to manage application services. Small steps include creating an eSAS Center of Excellence, a Governance team and process, and a learning community. The products, services, and best practices for this approach will further mature during 2009.

3. Move Project Work up the stack
If you are working with just Project Workspaces, we recommend you move to Project Management by incorporating group dashboards
and/or work consoles. These dramatically increase productivity of managers and contributors.
If you have Project Workspaces or Project Management we recommend that you implement Portfolio Management. This simple step brings visibility and control to project work. The effect is to reduce duplication and increase the ability to act in real time. Once this is in place, it is an easy step to move to extend the basic architecture for Program Management.

4. Improve Internet Sites with Communities and Application Portals
The increased adoption of SharePoint for web sites is a great start. We have two next steps:
Add a community to your Internet presence allowing your communities to work with you or with each other on items that 1. drive your organizations objectives. This provides untapped leverage of your external community. Transform your Internet site into an Application Portal by adding interactive capabilities that leverage back end data sources using a standard composite application design.

5. Build in Social Collaboration
If you use SharePoint broadly, of the different Social Computing areas, we believe that Social Collaboration applications can add the most value. It starts with simple Bookmarking of pages. Adding Commenting, Tagging, and Work Sharing at the item level dramatically increase the usefulness of the existing information in SharePoint. They also serve to reduce email and meeting time, and increase responsiveness. Third party vendors are supporting this area with off the shelf capabilities and tools to easily implement
them in a customized manner.

6. Add Front-End Extensions to Back-End Data/Services
Each organization can benefit by taking a look at the key items where integration of back end data, applications, and services can be leveraged on the front end. It doesn’t need to be complex. Simple personnel directories from Active Directory or a back end data source are effective. As is Customer and Vendor information. Take this step towards composite applications on the front end and broadly distribute the access and use of information you already own.
We also recommend that you take a look in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices. While these were designed for back end applications, the general approach is highly relevant to the front end environment of SharePoint which is effectively a distributed, composite architecture. You should also conduct an evaluation of your core back end applications to understand their roadmap for service enabling their application. You will find that much of the work is already being down for you and which you can leverage on the front-end.

7. Add the Structure of Departmental and Corporate Workplaces
If you are working with departments or a corporate environment, we recommend that you look at the top down design for adding
the structure of a workplace. You can start to embed the applications, processes, into your Intranet. Or, you can start to bring up new departmental environments along side of existing environments. The best practices for these environments are rapidly maturing as is a standard feature set. Take advantage of this in 2009.

8. Improve End-user Productivity
In truth, the productivity of the end-user has been under-served in most SharePoint implementations. A case in point is the typical
need to navigate to sites and then lists and then items to get work done. ISV’s are moving their products forward to increase end user productivity by reducing the need for navigation and automating routine tasks. A good exercise is to do a few “time and click” studies to understand where the issues may be. With tools as mentioned above, you can greatly improve the user experience and increase productivity and adoption.

9. Optimize Productivity with Work Consoles
This is really the next step to end-user productivity. The most effective way to increase productivity is simply to provide users with consoles that are user specific, role based, or group based; the more user centric and task centric, the greater the productivity. With the new capabilities, task centric components can be distributed to consoles enabling the end-users to see, contribute, and act on information without having to go anywhere other than your console.
However, it requires a bit more work to put consoles in the hands of each end-user (your benefit is reduced system resources from less navigation and page refreshes). Thus, you must decide what level of granularity you want to offer. For instance, you can start with Group Consoles, add a few key Role-Based consoles, and create a few User specific Consoles that are important.

10. Centralize Some Data
Workspaces are common in SharePoint. Here users work with information. Yet, a great deal of key information can be centralized to reduce duplication and increase consistency and data integrity. A “dataspace” is simply a workspace that is just used to hold data and/or configurations to external data spaces. They can • be implemented on a regional (department/site collection) or global basis. Just create a site to contain this Master data. Various vendor toolsets allow you to connect information to these central data repositories.
Most SharePoint environments can benefit significantly by bringing up a SQL Server database to store commonly used • information that cuts across the environment. A dataspace can get you started. However, getting used to working with a structured external data source is the next step. For instance, for larger organizations you will find that your Social Collaboration applications with typically use SQL Server custom databases to provide the scalability. This database will create the structure for composite applications on your front-end.

Source: 'Solutions Quadrant for SharePoint' from CorasWorks, published January 27, 2009 and available for download @: http://community.corasworks.net/sites/v1Data/Material/Solution_Quadrant_for_SharePoint.pdf

Skepticism and Minimalism

Skepticism and Minimalism. For me ,these are two indicators that a technology has a chance for success, short and long term. Skepticism, primarily by those 40 and over, is the best indication that a technology resonates in a way that those who have grown up with technology at their fingertips will readily embrace. Minimalism, in terms of promising very little functionality out of the box, allows a technology to become what it's users desire. This type of minimalism allows an iPod to be anything..a phone, a gps device, a level, a video game, a noisemaker, and on and on...Apple did not create all those uses, they made the device capable.

In my business, two technologies for which this thinking applies are SharePoint and Twitter. The product description for SharePoint promises very little, using words like 'accelerating shared business processes', 'facilitating information-sharing' , and 'can help improve organizational effectiveness'. Out-of-the-Box it does none of these things and yet at a record pace, companies are paying money to use the platform to deliver these capabilities. But why is the SharePoint community embracing a path of writing their own 'Apps'? Why would every company create their own version of something available for the relative price of $1.99?

For me, the future of Twitter is less clear, but it has the qualities of being minimalist and confusing to those over 40. Nobody knows what to make of it which means people probably will make everything out of it.

Version 10 is out!

Given someone ten chances to do anything and they will almost certainly get it right. My company has released ten versions of our core product, the Workplace Suite and, while being admittedly biased, I think we got it right - or at least we are getting close. We have the unique benefit of having started while SharePoint v2 was still in Beta in the spring of 2003 and of also having supported over 1,000 organizations worldwide in using our first 9 releases. The feedback and intelligence gained in that interaction was invaluable and can be found nowhere else in the SharePoint market. We may not always do things the way people assume they should be done - but that is almost always for a very very good reason. We are not creating web parts or the 'solution of the day'. We are not a quick fix or a company interested in a 'hit and run' sale. We are looking to help companies create sustainable, powerful, scalable and secure environments through the use of a cohesive system of interconnected resources. This system has a consistent interface, and is supported by full contextual help menus and a superior support team. Check it out and if we are doing something in a way that you think is not optimal - ask us why - the answers might surprise you.

Version 10 Launch Site: CLICK HERE