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SharePoint Tips, Tricks and
Helpful Resources
Welcome to the
premier issue
of our SharePoint Newsletter!
On a monthly basis, this newsletter will cover
topics such as SharePoint governance, business
process management and custom workflows, centralized
SharePoint Management, as well as other related
real-world issues. Should you wish to unsubscribe,
please refer to the links at the bottom of this
newsletter.
IN THIS ISSUE:
PRO'S CORNER, Featuring Errin O'Connor |
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AvePoint is proud to announce the participation
in this newsletter of one of the most experienced
consultants in the Microsoft SharePoint community,
Errin O'Connor. Errin is founder and CEO
of the
EPC Group.net, and Author of "Windows
SharePoint Services 3.0 Inside Out" from
Microsoft Press. |
A Note from Errin O'Connor: Dear reader!
AvePoint has asked me to share my real-life
SharePoint deployment experiences with you,
and I am happy to do it. Here, you will find
a few topics in which will hopefully save you
time and effort in your ongoing or planned SharePoint
initiatives and help you ask the right questions
and develop an overall plan to ensure your deployment
is a success now and in the future.
SharePoint Governance
in Your Organization:
It may be now or never…
I have conversations
everyday with IT managers, stakeholders, SharePoint
administrators, and developers about how they
plan to roll out their new SharePoint implementation,
how they can take their existing implementation
to the next level with a new phase or customization,
or how they can correct some mistakes of the
past and get SharePoint back on track.
It's rare that you find one system that can
cover so many different topics. In this month's
CIO magazine, Jon Brodkin reports Forrester
predictions, including one prediction that "Web
2.0 will be a priority for 24% of organizations
over the next year." (CIO, Feb:2008) You cannot
say the same thing about SAP, PeopleSoft, Documentum,
or any other related tool. After numerous deployments,
I still get excited by how SharePoint really
can add business value to an organization. SharePoint
is not something that should be considered a
cost or a drain on available budget but rather
a platform that provides real opportunity and
value to get your organization where it needs
to be.
SharePoint can
be your organization's:
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Intranet
Solution |
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Internet-Facing
Solution |
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Knowledge
Management Solution |
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Enterprise
Content Management System |
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Business
Process Automation Platform |
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Application
Development Platform |
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A Hybrid
of all of the above |
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SharePoint is one platform with so many different
powerful solutions that can be managed by an IT
staff with one similar skill set with similar
hardware and (hopefully) similar licensing
agreement. SharePoint can become so popular within
an organization so fast that without the proper
governance model you can have 500 or 1000 sites with
content everywhere, no standard metadata, no content
management policies, and inadequate security
policies. Can you reel SharePoint back in after you
get to this point? It's possible, but not something
that you're going to get excited about. You're going
to alienate your user group because enforcing
governance policies on users after they have
experienced all these fun "bells and whistles" can
make them feel like the system is not giving them
what they require.
That is why enforcing SharePoint Governance within
your organization is so critical and the sooner this
is done the better. I am not suggesting this is
going to be a fun exercise nor are you going to have
all the answers from day one. However, you do need
to put this on your radar screen and start as soon
as you can in the right direction.
When I think of SharePoint
Governance topics, a large number of them come to mind
such as:
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Site Provisioning Governance |
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Look and Feel Governance |
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Content Governance / Power User Governance |
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Application / Custom Development Governance |
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SharePoint Email Governance |
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SharePoint Maintenance Governance |
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SharePoint External / Extranet Access Governance |
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Content Types / Metadata Governance |
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SharePoint Migration Governance |
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SharePoint Designer 2007 Governance |
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SharePoint Reporting Governance |
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SharePoint Security / Active Directory Governance |
And the list goes on. Put a
lot more stock in this area now and I promise it will
pay off in the very near future.
Site Provisioning Governance:
Easing the Process of
Managing User Site Requests |
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My organization,
EPCGroup.net,
has had great success implementing a site provisioning
form so that users have one central area for requesting
new Sites. This allows you to not only manage these
requests in one location and stay off endless phone
calls and email threads about new sites but also to
help the users understand that the organization does
govern these Sites and users must follow the companies'
policies with them.
Utilizing InfoPath 2007 for your organization's Site
Provisioning form will allow you to develop and maintain
a simple yet powerful solution to manage this possibly
time consuming task. As SharePoint gets more popular,
more organizations are considering using it to manage
items such as charge backs to departments for their
sites or the need for managers to approve their staff
members' site requests. A very simple workflow can be
developed to automate this process and provide even
more time and cost savings.
Business Process Management / SharePoint Custom Workflows:
A big win for new SharePoint deployments! |
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One way to increase SharePoint popularity in a hurry and get the user base on board in a new SharePoint initiative is to take a process that users currently can't stand, don't want to deal with, or simply do not have the time to address, and automate it. In a new initiative, the project team already
has so many items on their plate that they simply
want to deploy the solution, get the users using it
properly, and make sure it’s highly available. Most
organization’s will do a proof-of-concept initially
(which can end up growing to production in a hurry)
but don’t really address
the business process management and custom workflow
side at that phase of the project.
I believe that if you set aside a few weeks to address
at least one workflow to show the users the capabilities
of SharePoint it will pay off exponentially in the very
near future. Users' eyes can just light up when they
see a process that they deal with all of the time gets
automated. You need to set the users' expectations that
you are not automating all of the organization’s processes
in one project phase but that you have simply identified
this workflow as the first of many down the road.
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In next
month’s Pro’s Corner, we will be talking about custom
SharePoint workflows and their capabilities. Please
let us know if there are any article topics you’d like
us to cover by e-mailing your suggestions to
marketing@avepoint.com.
If you have any questions for
EPCGroup.net,
they can be reached via email at:
sharepoint@epcgroup.net
or at (888) 381-9725.
To purchase Errin's book "Windows SharePoint Services
3.0 Inside Out"
click here. |
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Street, Jersey City, NJ 07311, 1-800-661-6588
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Inc. All rights reserved. DocAve, AvePoint, and the AvePoint logo are
trademarks of AvePoint, Inc.
All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners.
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