Mauro Cardarelli

Are You a SharePoint Shepherd?

Recently, I coordinated a meeting where I had one client visit another to tell her SharePoint story (from design through implementation, the good and the bad, lessons learned etc.).  This is a very powerful experience as users new to SharePoint get to hear the “real” stories around effort, success and challenges and, most importantly, get to hear validation for the value of proper design.  Anyway, as I was sitting there, I heard my client make reference to her responsibilities to “shepherd ” her users.  It turns out that she doesn’t stop at sending out SharePoint cheat sheets or doing one hour lunch-and-learns.  She stays in constant contact with her users, guiding and reminding them of the value of the framework they defined.  I found this very interesting… I’ve talked to folks about identifying the proper resources for SharePoint success… Technical Administrators or Site Administrators or Content Owners… but SharePoint Shepherd?  Wow!

So, what does a SharePoint Shepherd do?  He/She:

·         Manages training… not just static content but highly personalized, repeating one-on-few sessions

·         Regularly meets with SharePoint users to assist, guide, validate, teach, and grow

·         Enforces data quality; not just on metadata completeness but on the content itself… “is this document really good enough to be in our portal?”

·         Is the voice of the people to senior management and is the voice of senior management to the people… the connector!

·         Runs regular test searches to validate both the quality of results and the strength of the security model… proactively!

·         Corals those that are excited about the capabilities that SharePoint offers and heightens participation

·         Works hard to break down the walls of indifference for staff that don’t see the value or don’t wish to participate

·         All this and much more!

I’ve always stated that no one “owns” SharePoint.  Responsibilities are highly distributed and, given its capabilities, SharePoint forces the mixture of technology and business (or, more accurately, technology and culture).  Maybe I’m wrong… maybe the success of SharePoint CAN be influenced by a single resource.  Perhaps there is a legion of SharePoint Shepherds out there, working hard under relative obscurity, to quietly influence SharePoint’s growth and success… focused not on stability and scalability but on quality and completeness.  That would be cool!  I know one and am proud of her.  For those others out there, the SharePoint community thanks you.

Interesting Summer Reading

A friend recently passed me a copy of “If Only We Knew What We Know” by Carla O’Dell and C. Jackson Grayson.  It’s an interesting read for those of us invested in the knowledge management discipline.  This book, while a few years old, is a great thought provoker for those in the midst of intranet and collaboration tools development.  It offers a good balance of what to expect from people and technology to enable knowledge sharing and reuse in an organization.

Chapter 1 sets you immediately into the core philosophy of effective KM… “Knowledge management is really about recognizing that regardless of what business you are in, you are competing based on the knowledge of your employees” – Cindy Johnson (Texas Instruments).

My favorite section involves the discussion of the 4 enablers for best practices transfer: Culture, Technology, Infrastructure, and Measurement.

Another chapter is on the 6 steps to setting the right culture for knowledge sharing

·         Believe People Want to Share

·         Prepare to Lead by Doing

·         Rely on the Twin Forces of Capitalism and Democracy

·         Develop Collaborative Relationships

·         Instill Personal Responsibility for Knowledge Creation and Sharing

·         Create a Collective Sense of Purpose

And finally, a self-assessment of where you stand (organizationally) with knowledg sharing…

·         Do you know what knowledge you have now?  Who has it?  How can you get it?

·         Do senior managers understand and support KM as a business strategy?

·         Are you systematically transferring knowledge inside your organization?

·         Are you systematically acquiring outside knowledge?  How?

·         Are you levergaing knowledge as a product?

·         Are you using technology to acquire, disseminate, and transfer knowledge?  To everyone?  Everywhere?  Anytime?

I highly recommend this book to anyone, using SharePoint or otherwise, who is struggling to understand where to begin when faced with the challenge of improving your company’s knowledge sharing.

Coming Soon - SharePoint Magazine

 Click here for more details...

Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites

I recently received a copy of a new analyst report entitled "Best Practices for Using SharePoint for Public Websites - A Business Person's Guide" (I was interviewed as part of the research).  It's an interesting piece for those considering using MOSS for their internet facing websites.  While I can't give too much away (it is a for-purchase report), I can say that it offers practical advice on how to manage the branding (i.e. using a professional design team), building the right team, and leveraging Microsoft expertise.

There continues to be strong interest in internet facing MOSS applications (at least in my world).  What I find most interesting is that I continue to interact with folks who are using MOSS on the internet as their first exposure to SharePoint.  In my mind, I always saw the progression from intranet to extranet to internet.  I’m talking to more and more companies that are doing the reverse.  This is a strong testimonial to the content management components in MOSS. It also offers the advantage of growing SharePoint expertise by starting with a highly focused initiative (web-based brochure-ware) and growing into more complex business projects like collaboration and social networking.

Get the analyst report here.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been tremendously successful for collaboration and intranets, but the dominant position in both the public and the private sector means that SharePoint 2007 has also emerged an obvious; some would say almost unavoidable choice as the next generation web solution.  While there are good reasons for the popularity of SharePoint, it is certainly not as safe and risk-free as many like to think. Find out, what you as a business user, should understand about using Microsoft SharePoint 2007 for public websites.

Limiting the SharePoint People Picker List

Found another goodie in MOSS SP1... By default, a web application that is tied to Windows Authentication will search the entire Active Directory to resolve user names.  This is great for a corporate intranet but what if you are building something smaller that is intended for use by a particular Organizational Unit (OU)?  You would want the People Picker to be limited that that smaller group (so other employees could not be added).  Right?

There is a new operation for stsadm available with SP1 called setsiteuseraccountdirectorypath.  The setsiteuseraccountdirectorypath operation allows the user's directory path to be set to a specific OU in the same domain. After the directory path is set to a site collection, the People Picker control will only search under that particular OU.

Check out details here.

Examples

To set a list of users to a specific OU (for example, Sales) in the Contoso Corp domain, use the following syntax:

stsadm -o setsiteuseraccountdirectorypath -path "CN=Sales,DC=ContosoCorp,DC=local" –url http://server_name