Microsoft Products
CMSWire, a multi-author webzine focused on Content Management Systems recently featured an article that I wrote as an alternative perspective to an article written by Mr. Stephen Fishman a friend of mine. While I have immense respect for Mr. Fishman and his deep expertise, he managed to wander into my area of deep expertise and I felt compelled to correct him. The text below is a complete repost of the original article, Point Counterpoint: A Rebuttal to SharePoint is Crack. Please post comments on the CMSWire site.
CMSWire recently published a disturbing article, one that equates SharePoint to crack cocaine. The crux of the author's argument is that enterprises, which now use SharePoint, are destined to fall victim to the same problems suffered by heavy users of Microsoft Access and Lotus Notes, namely that what “started out as the next generation of sharing and collaboration technology turned into a loathsome mess that has stuck around in large enterprises without enough commitment to sunset it, despite the earnest pleas of a tortured workforce”.
While the author does make a couple of compelling arguments, he completely misses the point. The point he misses is that no tool, no matter how compelling or feature rich, will fix a broken process. If any organization decides to install Chatter, some fictional future Google Enterprise Suite, or Facebook’s never-going-to-happen SaaS platform without giving thought to the problems of information management, they are doomed to repeat the same exact pattern with ever-evolving user interfaces.
Setting the SharePoint Record Straight
Revisiting the original article, the valid arguments advanced by Mr. Fishman are:
- SharePoint does not solve every problem, despite Microsoft marketing campaigns that seem to indicate the opposite. Microsoft’s product development policy is to create an 80% solution and to leverage its extensive partner network to fill the remaining 20% gap. This means that if you are not a particularly savvy consumer of this type of technology you must either rely on help or accept the risk that you may “do it wrong”. Even with professional assistance, that which is right for today may be wrong for tomorrow. This is true of SharePoint, other Microsoft products, Oracle products, IBM products, Autonomy products and the 1,001 open-source options. Regardless of chosen platform, failure to plan means that you are planning to fail.
- SharePoint’s out of the box user interface leads users towards isolated information silos with independent security settings. This is actually by design and requires forethought and planning to meld distinct data environments into a seamless whole. SharePoint offers tremendous scalability and integration capabilities but these complex options are hidden from casual users. The intent is one of empowerment, with safety rails.
- SharePoint can be done well, but is frequently not. The author incorrectly blames a drive for functionality. This is actually a drive towards user empowerment and flexibility. SharePoint offers a dizzying array of options starting with an installation process designed to get users up and running with departmental servers quickly. It should not be surprising that the engine capable powering some of the largest websites in the world may require some specialized skills to configure correctly.
- SharePoint is not ready for enterprise use because of its reliance on Internet Explorer. While this is patently untrue to begin with, especially for the most recent version of the product, which has been available commercially for the better part of two years. While pointing to the five-year-old version of an application in comparison to modern applications is unfair, I’d say that the five-year-old version of SharePoint works a hell of a lot better than the five-year-old version of Salesforce Chatter (released June 2010) or Google+ (released publically September 2011).
- Poor design decisions which are annoying or even bad at small sizes get to be really bad at large scale. I agree, although this is not a problem restricted only to SharePoint.
Unfortunately, immediately after identifying some valid arguments, the author takes a turn into the realm of fantasy with his hopes for solutions by the end of 2012.
- Google integrates applications like Gmail, Docs, Apps and Google+ into a comprehensive suite. While application integration may occur, it probably will not occur for a LONG time. Again, we’re dealing with a corporate DNA problem.Google builds apps, not platforms by their own admission: Even if the tools were to be packaged as a suite, how is this significantly different than a tool like SharePoint or Oracle Portal? The problem here is that these tools may be great at the 80% solution, yet they do not offer the flexibility of tools like SharePoint for enterprise specific customizations the way SharePoint does. Additionally, he again points to Google as a way to get rid of an IT headache — meaning it will be by nature an unmanaged environment. There is no software system in the world, which is not, at some point managed. Either it is managed by IT (inevitably causing headaches) or is outsourced (causing headaches to someone else’s IT staff while at the same time reducing your flexibility).
Let’s introduce a dose of reality to the conversation. Is SharePoint an invalid platform selection because it can grow into a siloed, uncontrolled mess like Notes and Access before it? Of course not. That’s not a platform or technology problem, it’s a governance and user behavior problem. Millions of users like Gmail, but the measured audience is only 20% of the total internet audience (among users of Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail).
Google offers no innovation in its messaging and collaboration services with respect to the control of sprawl that Microsoft hasn’t been offering for the better part of a decade. Google Docs as a file repository is exactly the same as a My Site (available in SharePoint since the 2003 product version). There is no enterprise content management capability here.
Salesforce Chatter? That’s basically enterprise content management by Facebook and Twitter. How can something which relies on an activity stream as the main interaction point be a viable solution for a large enterprise? (An in-depth comparison of Chatter v SharePoint is available). My favorite observations include: Chatter users MUST be Salesforce CRM users, no single sign-on, ONLY available in a hosted model, and HOW DO YOU GET YOUR DATA BACK OUT? Oh, and Chatter’s license model starts at$180/year/user for a feature set which minimally competes with SharePoint yet is three times as expensive as Microsoft’s most premium SharePoint offering. SharePoint has a server fee and a per user fee, but the feature set which competes with Chatter is available from Microsoft for free (SharePoint Foundation).
Just Say No?
Is SharePoint like crack? Yes. Is that actually a bad thing? Ignoring the fact that almost every large enterprise and most small to mid-sized enterprises already own SharePoint even if they’re not using it, the author’s biggest complaint about SharePoint is that users like it, that it spreads through an enterprise organically.
Instead of bemoaning that a tool may or has become unmanageable due to popularity, understand that SharePoint is a multipurpose tool which must be correctly configured for the scenario in which you plan to use it. A corporate communications portal does not and should not behave the same way a collaboration environment or Enterprise Content Management environment does.
Define and architect for the scenario and then invest in the guiderails known as governance. Create a plan and make it actionable. If you don’t have the staff or the expertise to make it actionable, invest in a tool to do that for you, such as AvePoint’s forthcoming Governance Automation toolkit.
The author of the SharePoint is crack article does make some valid points, but they should serve as object lessons for organizations seeking to implement any portal technology platform. Treat the corporate intranet as a core business system by investing in data protection, governance and expertise. Educate yourselves about the great applications and capabilities available to SharePoint. As the article [almost] mentions, the power of SharePoint is that it makes a tremendous amount of functionality available to the end user without requiring IT intervention. Any system handled casually will yield less than optimal results.
SharePoint 2010
Training Overview
SharePoint 2010 is a large and complex system which offers a combination of intuitive end user experiences, rich customization options, and deep APIs for completely custom extensions. Despite the fact that the user interface is intuitive for most basic end user tasks, some training will help to round out the experience and open everyone’s eyes to the possibilities provided by SharePoint 2010.
Start Here
End User Training Resources
Online
Books/Magazines
IT Professional Training Resources
Online
Books/Magazines
Developer Training Resources
Online
Books/Magazines
In Person Training Class Providers
Premium / Custom classes
Microsoft Official Curriculum
Self Paced (DVD) classes
[This post was inspired by PC World republish of a Mac World article, “How to Switch to Google Calendar”]
Hotmail is the largest email service in the world (unless you count Facebook), but you never hear people talking about it or it’s calendar the way you hear about Gmail and Google Calendar. A brief list of great features:
- it has always been free (since it was founded in 1996)
- unlimited storage space
- seamless and effortless integrations to Outlook and Windows Phone 7
- Integrations to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites
- Integrations to Office Web Apps which enables in-browser viewing and editing of Office documents a snap
There are a ton of other reasons why I like the Windows Live Hotmail service offering, but this post concentrates on the calendar…
Create a calendar
Creating a Hotmail calendar is as simple as signing into your existing Windows Live account or creating a new account.
Once you’ve signed into your Hotmail account, use either the left pane navigation or the dropdown menu at the top of the screen to change views to your calendar. From here you can either interact with the default calendar or create a new calendar
Dropdown navigation:
New calendar:
Access your calendar how you want
Web
If you’re at a computer, you can obviously visit your Windows Live site and interact with the calendar via your browser. The Windows Live Hotmail calendar site works well with every browser – check out these comparative views of the same calendar page in Chrome and IE9.
I am a big fan of the Chrome browser, but IE9 is winning me back with a few of the great new features. My favorite new usability feature is that you can pin a website to your Windows 7 taskbar and use the custom Windows 7 jump lists to interact with the website before you even open the site by right-clicking on the taskbar icon. Check out how pinning LinkedIn, Facebook, and HotMail to the Windows 7 taskbar behaves:
When you click one of these icons you get a customized version of the browser, themed for that specific site. Notice how the back and forward buttons are colored differently and the addition of the site icon in the top left. This site icon acts like a home button, bringing you back to the home page of that custom pinned site (Hotmail in this case). Contrast this screenshot of the subtly customized IE9 browser to the default IE9 experience of the same page above.
Outlook
If you’re anything like me, Outlook has become the hub around which your life revolves. I’ve got three accounts in Outlook today – my corporate account, my client-provided account, and my Hotmail account. Installing the Outlook Connector, part of the Windows Live Essentials pack is an effortless way of pulling your email, calendar, and contacts into Outlook. Outlook 2010 offers a seamless way of interacting of multiple calendars, including side by side and my favorite, the overlaid view as seen in the screenshot below:
Mobile
Hotmail supports the same ActiveSync protocol that corporate Exchange servers and GMail use. This means that you can get your calendar on your favorite mobile device. Here are a couple of links which might interest you.
Of course, I’m a Windows Phone 7 enthusiast and I’m happy to say that the integration experience on any Windows Phone 7 device is entirely effortless. Among the very first questions asked by a Windows Phone 7 device after being started for the first time (including after a reset) is whether or not you’d like to connect your device to your Windows Live ID. Once you do that, you’re done! Hotmail shows up, as do your contacts and your calendar. The following image was borrowed from MSCerts.net.
Read more about the pros and cons of the Windows Phone 7 calendar on Paul Thurrott’s WindowsPhoneSecrets.com calendar blog post.
Share your calendar
Sharing a Windows Live Hotmail calendar is almost entirely effortless. First you simply enable the sharing of the calendar according to your desired level of public interactivity.
Step 1 – select the calendar to share:
Step 2 – set up the sharing rules:
You can share a calendar with specific named individuals (I’m sharing my calendar with my lovely wife Kim) and you can grant each of those named individuals distinct view and edit permissions according to this list (view details, view only times and titles, view only busy/free status, edit, and co-owner):
Beyond sharing with named users, it is possible to create calendars which are entirely public (view only) and even calendars which are exposed to search engines.
Here is what Kim sees on her calendar. Notice first that she’s using Firefox (browser test #3). On the left side of the screen you can see the calendars she’s viewing, including mine. You can see my shared event at the bottom of the screen, complete with the ability for Kim to edit my event details.
Summary
This was my attempt to help you use freely available digital tools to simplify your life. I live and die by my calendar and I tell everyone I work with that if it isn’t on my calendar, it doesn’t exist. The ability to pull all of my calendars together in Outlook and on my mobile devices is crucial to my professional survival.
This doesn’t stop my wife from keeping a paper calendar on her desk. Despite my protestations, we frequently spend time in the kitchen comparing calendars. Whenever I mention that sending me calendar invitations would greatly simplify things, she gently reminds me that she isn’t my secretary. Oh well! One day I’ll convince her that a jointly digital life is a simpler life!
In the meantime, I hope this has been helpful to those of you reading this!
What the heck? I just got an error message telling me that I am unable to install the 64 bit version of Office 2010 b/c I have a 32 bit Office product installed. The odd thing is that I have a 64 bit version of Office 2010 installed already! I’m trying to install Microsoft Project 2010! This must be an order of operations issue.
Do you work with documents? Maybe Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and/or OneNote documents? Would you like to be able to create and edit these documents without having to pay for new versions of Microsoft Office and without having to worry about upgrades and security patches?
Have you ever want to securely share these documents or back them up in some online location? Would it be helpful if you had an online location to save documents, photos, music files, etc. Would 25 gigabytes be a good start?
Wouldn’t it be even better if this was all free? 
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s all here now! Go to http://Office.Live.com (same as http://SkyDrive.Live.com) and check out the really fantastic capabilities for document editing and sharing. Create folders and define who can access the contents of those folders. Upload documents into those folders or use the online web apps to create new ones.
This is seriously the best value in consumer computing out there right now – blows the pants off of Google Docs! Go check it out!
For more information from the Microsoft team check their blog post announcing that Office is now live on SkyDrive
The Next Generation of Windows® is almost here!
Microsoft has released a video blog called Talking About Windows.
This video blog provides insight on Windows 7 from the Microsoft engineers who helped build the product.
www.talkingaboutwindows.com
Check out what those who have used the product have to say.
The IT Pro Evangelist in Atlanta will be hosting a Windows 7 loadfest at Microsoft in Alpharetta on June 11th at the Microsoft office. Come Join!
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032410648&culture=en-US
I make not secret of the fact that I'm a Microsoft fanboy. I use a Microsoft Zune. I have several Xboxes (I kept 1 and gave 2 away). I use a Windows Mobile phone. This morning, my Microsoft Life got updated.
I fired up my Xbox 360 and downloaded the new Xbox Experience - an entirely new dashboard which introduces the "twist" style navigation familiar from the Zune and Windows Media Player. Now I have dozens of screens to look at and a generally improved way of navigating through the content. I spent all of about six minutes playing with it b/c I was excited to set up my most anticipated feature - integration to my NetFlix Instant Queue. Unfortunately I didn't get to demo that functionality as the NetFlix device activation web site was down. I'll hit that when I get home tonight. I also created an avatar, which I'd show you but apparently the Xbox Live site is still being worked on - I can't log in or look at my stats and friends.
I checked Twitter and saw Mike Gannotti talk about why he loves the Zune, including that he just got an update to the 3.1 firmware. This update includes new games like Soduku and some new listening features which I have yet to explore fully but anticipate loving the hell out of!
I'm thrilled with the new updates and can't wait to waste unbelievable hours of what would be marginally productive time listening to music, watching movies, and playing games. All I can say is that if the NetFlix integration is as awesome as I hope it is, I'm going to cancel HBO and ShowTime (and save a bucket of money). Next up - Windows Mobile 6.5. Rumors indicate we may finally see Zune software integration on handsets which will give me yet another way to kill my battery superfast. Yay!
Register today and getVIRTUALnow.
Atlanta event November 17, 2008
https://www.getvirtualnow.com/usevents/CitySelect.aspx
Find out how Windows Server 2008® with Hyper-V™, Microsoft System Center--including Virtual Machine Manager 2008—and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization can help you virtualize from the data center to the desktop.
Choose from the seminars, the labs, and the expo booths.
Get access to everything, from three seminar sessions to the all-day Solutions Pavilion featuring Microsoft experts, virtualization technology partners, and Hands-on Labs.
Take virtualization home.
Take home a free readiness kit** that includes product, training materials, product evaluations, and learning opportunities.
If you have Windows Vista SP1 and would like Free Support until 18 March 2009 check this out.
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Background
Free, unlimited installation and compatibility support is now available for all worldwide customers using Windows Vista SP1, until March 18, 2009. Telephone support is available worldwide. Chat and Email support in US and Canada only.
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Effective dates
From now until 18 March 2009.
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Location
Find out more and access the service at http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx?rdpath=1&prid=11274&gprid=500921
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Here are the details from the web site (http://www.sharepointjams.com)
Want to know what a SharePoint Jam Session is? http://www.sharepointjams.com/what-is-a-jam-session/
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First Ever SharePoint Jam Session
Get ready for the first ever SharePoint Jam Session in Atlanta!
Bring in the new year with some fun, learning, and new challenges with SharePoint 2007.
To get location information make sure and email the leader of the Atlanta Jam Sessions.
January 17th, 2008 / 6:00PM - 9:00PM
Topic: Using the CKS projects
To join the session contact Brendon Schwartz atlanta@sharepointjams.com
This week has been a busy week and it is only half way over.
The IE team announced today that they had the first check in of code for Internet Explorer 8 passing the Acid2 test. http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/19/internet-explorer-8-and-acid2-a-milestone.aspx
I hope this will mean better standards compliance with the next version of SharePoint, as they already have a start with Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS). Many people have already added master pages, CSS, and standards compliant functionality, but it would be nice to have it as an option out of the box.
A couple days ago Microsoft released Microsoft CRM 4.0 (Titan) - http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2007/dec07/12-17CRM40PR.mspx
With this release of Microsoft CRM 4.0, I am looking forward to increased integration with SharePoint. I think that companies will continue to see the value of this version of Microsoft CRM and continue adoption. I have started working with the new version and will let you know of any exciting SharePoint/CRM points.
I gave a presentation on InfoPath and InfoPath Forms Services to the SharePoint Users Group in Manhattan last month. Here are a few ideas I got from the questions people asked. I recently found these written on some scrap paper in my bag and figured I'd publish them so I wouldn't lose them. I've done absolutely no research on these, so solutions may already exist...
- If I have a large number of form templates, I don't want to put them all under the New button in a single library. In fact, in a publishing site I probably don't want to have users able to see the library at all if the site is a heavily customized publishing site. I need to create a control which gives me the ability to run the same JavaScript that the New button does, but lets me configure the template to use. This should be some simple JavaScript to emit and the control should be light weight and output something to the user which can be stylized via CSS
- If I've got a form that gets newed up from one form library but the content gets saved to another form library, I've heard that there are lots of people out there struggling with permissions. The destination library has restrictive permissions. The source library has wide open permissions. A user with a relatively low level of permissions creates a new form based on a template from the source library but doesn't have permission to submit the result to the destination library (see - this is why you should never test as while logged in as an Admin user). The solution most likely involves impersonation, but how do you do that in the tool? InfoPath is supposed to be a PowerUser tool, not a developer-required tool. Maybe this addin code could be created and placed on CodePlex or something.
You tell them to do things and they partly do it. My gripe with MakeCab is that the files in the CBA archive (or wsp) don't use the same date stamp as what Windows Explorer uses. Building a DLL and as part of a post-build step you're putting the new DLL into the CAB file? Wouldn't it surprise you when the DLL in the new CAB file has a date weeks or months old? It sure surprised me! Leads to all kinds of confusion as to whether or not you are about to deploy the correct code.
As for STSADM - why doesn't it deploy from a batch file correctly? I'm running the fairly standard set of RETRACTSOLUTION, DELETESOLUTION, ADDSOLUTION, DEPLOYSOLUTION commands with the EXECADMSVCJOBS sprinkled throughout in the correct places. I'm deploying to a single server. Why would it fail to delete the old stuff or worse yet, delete the old stuff and not deploy the new stuff? So frustrating! This annoys me so much b/c the "admin" can't figure out what happened and so I have to handle the deployment every time - I can't just say "Double-click this batch file and you'll be upgraded".
[I originally wrote this post weeks ago but it hit me again recently so I felt the rage all over again - hence the post]
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