Collaborate or die: Business Collaboration as survival of the fittest.

Carol, SharePoint Team Lead
for Entrance Software
2-21-2012

Why Business Collaboration is kinda a big deal:

No matter what industry we find ourselves in, we can all benefit from collaborating with other people in our business, whether those people are sitting next to us, down the hall, on a different floor or clear across the globe we benefit from others’ experience and knowledge.  We already do it – work on documents, learn who knows what, categorize our work and work through data to try and make our best decisions. But SharePoint has revolutionized mundane activities and made them true business insights. Businesses profit most when collaboration is seamless and, let’s face it, captured to build a knowledge base for the future. And it’s is a proven model for growth: “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate most effectively have prevailed.” – Charles Darwin

SharePoint has become synonymous with business collaboration and the latest version, SharePoint 2010, provides your end users with a number of possibilities for business collaboration that include: document collaboration, discussion boards, wikis, blogs, RSS viewers, contact lists, calendars, announcements, alerts, workflow, MySites and search.  All of this and it provides a highly intuitive user interface that interacts seamlessly with the programs your organization is already using on a daily basis such as Word, Outlook, Power Point, Excel, Access, OneNote and Visio.  SharePoint Workspace 2010 is a new addition to the SharePoint toolbox that allows your team to take their collaboration offline whether they are in the field or in the air and sync their changes with other users’ changes when they are reconnected.

Document Management

SharePoint has been proven to deliver solid business collaboration through its document management capabilities.  It seamlessly improves our ability to track versioning including who and when the file was created and modified, capturing these details behind the scenes with zero additional effort by your team.  It provides us the ability to do major or major/minor versioning.  Major is good enough for most needs, but major/minor versioning allows us to granularly control who is seeing a minor version and who sees a major version.  Add in a publishing workflow and suddenly you can edit your policies and procedures in place, only allowing Policy Owners to view minor versions and everyone to see major versions.  Once the workflow collects all required approvals it can publish a major version making new changes visible to all consumers.  Add to it an automated alert based on publishing a major version and you can keep all those who need to know in the know.  Not to mention, your file names can become so much more meaningful because we no longer have to track version and date information in the title.

MySites

How many times have you needed to collaborate with someone on a task in front of you and aren’t sure who to ask?!  SharePoint’s MySites, when implemented and championed correctly, can take the guess work out of who has the knowledge/experience you are looking for.  2010 improves on previous MySite functionality with colleague suggestions that recommend colleagues based on your reporting structure, communities memberships, email distribution lists, office communicator contact lists and analysis of the most common office outlook e-mail recipients.  It also offers an organization browser to navigate your organizational structure to see managers, peers, and direct reports.  My Profile page allows your team to enter information about themselves including interests, skills, and previous projects they’ve participated in.  My content gives your users a place to store documents, favorite links, personal blogs and wiki pages. The added benefit of having a picture and presence available should not be discounted either.  It can turn your business collaboration a much more personal experience.

Ratings & Tags

2010 improves Business Collaboration over previous versions of SharePoint with Ratings & Tags.  We’ve all seen ratings used in online websites.  Ratings allow the consumer/user to rate a particular item, basically ranking its value as good or bad, positive or negative.  The potential consumer benefits from previous consumers’ experiences being captured and can information can help them to make a decision about which item is going to perform best for them and their needs.  SharePoint introduces this new feature to empower your users to rank the content in your portal.  Administrators can use this information to find content with poor ratings in order to improve upon it or simply remove it.  It’s also used by SharePoint to promote higher ranked content to the top of the search results list.  The new tagging feature improves business collaboration by allowing users to apply either a set of predefined tags i.e. Taxonomy or to apply their own tags i.e. Folksonomy to content including files and sites.  Being able to quickly say ‘I Like It!’ or ‘Helpful’ can help build buy in, while simultaneously providing administrators and power users feedback on the portal.  This business collaborative tagging also builds a tag cloud that can be accessed via a Tag Cloud web part to further empower your users to find content that is meaningful to them.

Business Process Automation

Business collaboration is often hampered by paper intensive processes.  How do you track down a paper form, contract or AFE?  Unless you are tagging it with and RFID tag, you have to hope it’s on the last desk you left it or do the old door to door routine.  The data in these forms is just as hard to find as is the paper it’s written on.  By moving away from these archaic and inefficient processes we can take our business collaboration to the next level.  Data in InfoPath forms is captured in a SQL database where it is available for reporting and dashboards.  Workflows driving what used to be a paper process allows us to keep track of where in the process an item is without going desk to desk and gives greater insight into where bottlenecks or inefficiencies are occurring.  Instead of just trying to accomplish a task, with business process automation we can spend more time improving and collaborating on our deliverables.

Business Intelligence

Where, oh where is all the data I need to make an informed decision!?!?  Chances are its spread across multiple lines of business systems.  Our Information Workers and Executives spend large amounts of time looking for the data they need, not because it isn’t there, but because it isn’t easy to get to.  Think about the number of user names and passwords your staff need to do their jobs effectively.  I’ve personally worked at a facility where I maintained no less than twenty user names and passwords to access the data and systems to complete my assignments. It’s common to hear the complaint from users that they do not have access to all systems they wish/need to make informed decisions.  In this scenario instead of having access to the primary source of data, they are forced to rely on reports run by other users, which we have to admit is no replacement for up to the moment data.  Business intelligence brings that data to a central location with single sign on, and it’s another of our tools in the SharePoint toolbox.

In SharePoint 2010 business intelligence is expanded upon with Dashboards, decomposition tree and Visio services.  Dashboards can provide us up to the minute data, aggregated from multiple sources and display it in a web browser as a table, chart or graphical interface where your users can collaborate and interact with it in real time, drilling down into information that raise questions and allowing them to quickly define key opportunities and trends.  In the Houston area we see this feature used by numerous Oil & Gas firms.  Their multiple business units and the executives all operate more efficiently when they can go to a single screen and see data points coming out of multiple systems.  These data points typically include accounting information such as sales data, production data, and forecasting data.  The decomposition tree in SharePoint 2010 allows you to perform root cause analyses on mission critical data via powerful analytics only showing you the most important and pertinent information.

SharePoint Best Practices

Remember: any tool worth having is worth knowing how to use.  When considering SharePoint as a solution for your business collaboration needs, keep in mind while it is highly intuitive and user friendly a little bit of marketing and training for your end users will go a long way towards gaining user acceptance and buy in.  Marketing should focus on the why – all the ways this new tool will make your users’ work lives easier and all the possibilities that come with it.  While training should focus on the how – starting small and building on the basics as your user base becomes more savvy and advanced in their SharePoint skills.  Now, let’s go out there and collaborate!

SharePoint’s Return on Investment; How to calculate your SharePoint ROI

Carol, SharePoint Team Lead
for Entrance Software
2-10-2012

SharePoint’s ROI: It’s not always straight forward, so make sure to check under the cushions on your couch!

I hang my spurs in Houston, Texas and around here, people tend to love ‘one stop shopping’ for the sake of saving time and let’s face it MONEY.  Our big super stores allow us to get in, find what we need quickly, get everything from an oil change to bread and then get us back on our way.  SharePoint is that one stop shop, so keep that in mind when putting together your ROI.

Difficult to calculate ROI

Consolidated Overhead: Consolidating multiple solutions into one platform means you are going to do more with less just like our local Super Store.  Combing your needs be it intranet redesign, extranet capabilities, collaboration, document management, business process automation and/or business intelligence it into one tool means less, hardware, less infrastructure and less support staff needed to maintain a well-designed and governed SharePoint Solution.  This all in one allows you to eliminate legacy systems and empowers your end users to manage their own content and security meaning fewer support tickets.

Search & Collaboration:  We all know SharePoint and its benefits of delivering the right information quickly and easily and fostering collaboration amongst our information workers, but assigning hard dollar signs to these productivity enhancements can be challenging.

Get your Calculators Out

Business Process Improvement:  Think about your business and all the processes involved in keeping it moving and more importantly making it profitable.  Every organization is unique, but of all the industries I’ve worked in business process improvement projects are the easiest to calculate and show ROI.  Processes like contract lifecycle management, yearly employee performance assessments, new hire onboarding or help desk ticketing can see dramatic improvements when processes are well defined, automated and made visible to decrease inefficiencies and improve compliance.  I’ve designed multiple contract management solutions in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and I must admit it is one of my favorite solutions to work on because the benefits are so quickly realized.  With a paper intensive processes the complaints are various but the top 3 are:

1. It takes too long to move from contract request to contract execution.
2. I cannot tell where my contracts are during the approval/execution process.
3. I have no visibility into how many contracts are being executed, rejected or when they are expiring without significant efforts to maintain contract tracking spreadsheets.

Number one is by far the easiest to calculate.  If you know it is taking 3 – 6 months to turn around a contract following processes in place today because you are pushing around a word document through email and then printing it for manually routing it for signature, then you know this process is prone to inconsistencies and errors.  These operational inefficiencies lead to lower profit margins and increased legal and regulatory business risks.  I’ve seen organizations already started working projects without having contracts in place because these processes are so drawn out.  With SharePoint content type templates for contract creation, automated workflows for approvals, notifications and reminders, and digital signatures you can turn this process into a well-oiled machine.  Moving quickly through contract creation in a template controlled by the powers that be, routing based on a number of parameters defined specifically for your organization, alerts to get the process moving again when it gets stuck can all help you execute contracts in weeks instead of months.

Example of how to calculate Contract BPA ROI:

1. Assumed facts for estimating: 200 AFEs which require new Contracts per year, with the average time for execution equaling 3 months or 480 hours
2. The lost time waiting for execution is 96,000 total hrs. or 4000 total days of lost productivity
3. If we take the total days times 8 hours in a work day that’s 32,000 lost productive work hours waiting for contract execution
4. Multiple 32,000 times the average employee hourly rate (let’s estimate $50/hr) that’s $1,600,000!!!

Two & Three may be a little less easy to put a dollar sign on, but trust me contract administrators, managers and executives love to go into a dashboard so they can quickly see where in the process their contracts are, how many are executed/rejected within a specific time frame and who their most productive team mates are.  Another added benefit is being able to monitor ever green or auto renewing agreements and contract expiration.  Creating a calendar view of your library with these files can empower your contract administrators to quickly see which previously executed contracts need their attention.  This risk management should not be discounted and can be calculated if you survey how many of these contracts were neglected in a previous period.

Performance reviews and ticketing systems benefit in a similar fashion to contracts.  Turning around the tickets/reviews quicker and more efficiently with data capture allows for managers to look into the process like never before and do data analyses to reduce inefficiencies and/or better align their team and ultimately their organization to be that well-oiled fighting machine.

Know it? Prove it! Use SharePoint Drill Downs:

Reliable, accurate, verifiable Business Intelligence is key to making good decisions as a business.  Ideally at the strategic level, the information you live and breathe on is lower-level data rolled-up into an at-a-glance format that can be quickly interpreted and consumed by the decision maker.  But even with the best team, the most eye-catching charts, and a perfect presentation, a trust issue often arises between the decision maker and the source of the intelligence.  A trust-but-verify mentality will (and should) prevail.

So how do you establish Business Intelligence trust?  Enable the decision maker to delve further into the building blocks of data that make up his information.  By drilling down into the individual line-items of data you validate your claim made at the broader, strategic level.  Seeing the components of rolled-up information gives decision makers the necessary trust to remove roadblocks and continue toward an informed decision.  The faster this process becomes, the more agile your business will become.

SharePoint dashboards are great at giving both the overview at-a-glance and the granularity on demand you need to get to the point faster.  Imagine you have a gauge illustrating your budget vs. actual spending, it shows you are 10% over budget.  Your CEO will almost certainly ask, “Where are the numbers coming from and where are we going over budget?”  To answer his question, you smoothly click on the gauge to drill-down into a table showing expenses that have exceeded the allocated budget.  Showing this detail both confirms that the data is accurate, and provides the information necessary to take action.

Soon after the meeting, your business can reign in the overspending at exactly the place necessary. Then your profits skyrocket, and you become a hero and local celebrity! Or maybe you just decrease time spent digging through reports by half… Or maybe you find out the problem isn’t in expenses, but in lack of sales – so you can go to your sales department with numbers. The possibilities are endless, but the result is always smarter faster reactions to what’s happening in your business.

InfoPath + SharePoint = Professional, Clean Data Management

Kenny, SharePoint Consultant
for Entrance Software
1-27-2012

InfoPath is key to getting clean, useful information from users into SharePoint. Your valuable information can easily be gathered at a granular level with InfoPath forms, and SharePoint can then extract data you care about to create relevant, useful information for decision makers. Basically, InfoPath translates inputs from user information into data points, preparing SharePoint with good data to produce actionable information – ideally customized for specific users.  Because of it’s ability to control data input, InfoPath is the tool to use with SharePoint in order to gather and validate data, which can then be sorted and sourced by SharePoint’s document management system. So what exactly is InfoPath then?

InfoPath is a platform for developing, distributing, filling and submitting forms. The InfoPath desktop software exists in two forms; a design mode (for developers) to create the form and a filler mode for data entry. A well-made form would contain rules to format and validate all data entered into the form preventing any malformed or invalid data from polluting your system.

InfoPath can pull data from XML files, SQL databases, web services, and SharePoint lists; this data can be used to populate dropdown lists and grids to expedite data entry. When a form is complete and there are no invalid fields it is time to submit the form. Forms can be submitted in a variety of ways: via Email, to a web service, or a SharePoint form library.

Since an InfoPath form is nothing more than a XML document, it lends itself very well to SharePoint’s document management system. InfoPath also offers a SharePoint web part that can be used to view and fill out forms within a SharePoint site while in the browser (platform independent data entry).

In most companies there is a process in which employees can ask for new hardware or software; usually involving emails, phone calls, and verbal discussions. This can turn into a long and frustrating process (typically leaving very few records), so let’s replace this with a SharePoint managed InfoPath form.

1. You open the “Request for Hardware” form within SharePoint. InfoPath uses Active Directory to populate your First/Last name, phone number, and department into the form.
2. InfoPath retrieves the available purchase types from a SharePoint list and displays them to you in a dropdown list. In this case you select “Computer” as your purchase type, and fill out the product name, model, and comment in the fields provided.
3. You review your request and submit the form to a SharePoint form library. It is common for companies to have some level of oversight over what employees purchase. To manage this, a workflow is triggered within SharePoint that requires 2 managers to approve your purchase request.
4. The managers receive a notification via a SharePoint alert that they have a pending purchase request; let’s assume they both approve the purchase.
5. The form is moved from the Pending Purchase Request library to the IT department’s Purchase Request library. The folks at the IT department will get a notification similar to the approval request notification that was sent to the managers.
6. When this form is opened by someone in the IT department, they will be looking at a slightly different view of the form. All of the information you entered into the form will be read-only, and a new section will be visible for the purchaser to log all the purchase details (supplier, tax, and actual cost).

From here there are numerous paths the form could take from logging the shipping information (allowing SharePoint to display tracking details) to assigning the hardware to the end user within SharePoint.

SharePoint Dashboards – Keep your eyes on the road, not an (old) excel sheet!

Kyle, SharePoint Consultant
for Entrance Software
1-16-2012

Carol on SharePoint: Our New SharePoint Team Lead’s Perspective!

Carol, SharePoint Team Lead
for Entrance Software
1-13-2012

I’ve always been a lover of all things technology related, but in 2006, when I first learned about SharePoint, drive for efficiency with technology became an ever increasing part of my life.  SharePoint first caught my attention because a close friend was consulting for the 2003 version, and by the time SharePoint 2007 was released, I became instantly hooked. The ease with which it empowered the end users of an organization to manage their own content immediately impressed me.  Up to that point I had been mostly a technology consumer. And coming from the medical community, where I was routinely asked to remember (no exaggeration) 20 different user names and passwords, the concept of single sign on seemed revolutionary!

It wasn’t long before I completely jumped feet first into SharePoint consulting full time, initially getting my feet wet with simple collaboration portals and quickly moving onto intranet solutions and eventually the full blown enterprise content management solutions where I enjoy spending most of my time today.  Seeing the evolution of the product from 2007 (I often like to ignore earlier versions) to 2010 has been exciting.  Microsoft SharePoint truly offers companies a cost effective and extremely flexible portal solution to begin providing a centralized place for capturing employee knowledge via collaboration and documentation. Not to mention enhancing findability via a robust search feature, while simultaneously lowering the total cost of ownership for the IT department and organization as a whole!

I see SharePoint as a Swiss army knife of Information Technology solutions, because it can be so many things for any one organization, and while it does most things well, with a little customization or addition of a third party tool/feature it can quickly become a powerhouse for business intelligence, social collaboration, enterprise content management, physical asset management, e-discovery and/or web content management.

2010 features I’m particularly excited about include the content type hub, the ability to manage millions of documents in a single library, managed metadata, metadata driven navigation, document sets, multi stage records disposition, remote blob storage and the improved business connectivity services.  I hope to blog more about these new features in the coming months.

Entrance Software has made its footprint on the application development market and I plan to help them build on their impression in the SharePoint market. I bring experience from hundreds of previous implementations to the table, along with my strong background in enterprise content management from both the private and government sector.  I look forward to mentoring my team of experts, growing our SharePoint practice and helping Entrance become an industry leader in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint Mobile – The now (and the future) of professional collaboration!

Consistent observation:

If a person is idle for more than 5-10 seconds, the odds are very high that they will produce a mobile device of some kind and bury their attention in it.  My point?  Mobile devices are here to stay and growing ever more quickly.  In fact, Flurry.com found that in June 2011, consumers spent 81 minutes per day on mobile apps compared to 74 minutes per day web surfing!

SharePoint content can also be served to mobile applications, and not just Windows Phone, but also on other mobile operating systems, such as Apple’s iOS (iPhone, iPad) or Android.  SharePoint provides the following mobile features:

• Data views which are optimized for viewing on mobile devices
• Ability to open Microsoft Office documents using Office Web Apps
• Mobile MySites
• Mobile Alerts (when list items change)

As with any system, getting value out of SharePoint mobile features for your organization requires planning and forethought.  Security planning and education is key.  Professional security configuration will allow you to access your data, and proper education will empower your users to secure data, should their device be lost or stolen.  You wouldn’t want your Personally Identifiable Information left unsecured someone else’s mobile device, would you?

Now is the time to get started with mobile, and actually if you haven’t you’re too late. Mobile capabilities are the future, and the next release of SharePoint will almost certainly promise even more capability.  Perhaps even full blown mobile apps built on the Microsoft “Metro” user interface will be available, bringing the even more SharePoint functionality to your mobile device.

Mobile devices are a great tool for productivity and communication from just about anywhere, add the power of Microsoft SharePoint to your mobile device and knock-out tasks anytime, anywhere!

Knowledge is Power – Keep yours.

Every company has ‘that guy’ who you go to when you need information about ‘x’. But then ‘that guy’ moves on and suddenly a wealth of knowledge goes with him. Good companies have strategies and methods for capturing and retaining knowledge capital. Great companies use state-of-the-art tools to guarantee that their strategies achieve practical results. Knowledge should be pro-actively gathered, and then made searchable and accessible to all levels of your organization. Use one of the most powerful, flexible and user-friendly tools available: SharePoint 2010 Wiki!

Hawaii – land of pineapples, Pearl Harbor, surfing, beautiful beaches, and the source of the term “Wiki”.  For those who aren’t aware, the Hawaiian term ‘Wiki, Wiki’ translates to ‘quick’ and has been attached to the relatively new form of information sharing known as a Wiki. Ask anyone who is engaged in post-graduate studies where they find their inspiration: I would argue that a large percentage of the time Wikipedia is involved in this process, even if JSTOR or other official article archives are their stated references.

Wikis were specifically developed for efficient and accessible information gathering and sharing. So Microsoft naturally included a
Wiki library with its SharePoint product.  It’s searchable, collaborative and effective, but I rarely see it implemented properly. When I do see it implemented, it’s unknown and unused. Except that guy in the basement – he loves it!

Making a Wiki successful in your organization relies on buy-in from the entire organization.  If only one or two people are contributing to your Wiki, you’re not maximizing value and ‘that guy’ is going to get away before you know it!  Encourage everyone in your company to share what they are best at in wiki form.  It will not only become a place to search for easy information, it will be a place for you to track your employees’ knowledge, some of which you might otherwise not have even known they had.

The true value of buy in for a company wiki is that it levels the organizational playing field. Experts are found at every level of
the company. When that knowledge is shared, it empowers users and retains the organization’s intellectual property.

Once your SharePoint Wiki is in place, everyone knows where to go for information. Hours of time that would have been spent trying to find ‘that guy’ are replaced with a simple SharePoint search.  Increase your employee’s impact on the company as a whole, create permanent knowledge-building in a centralized, protected location and ensure organizational stability.  Foster a new level of information sharing in your organization that is low-cost, easy to use, searchable, and of course ‘wiki, wiki’! Believe us, SharePoint will be your new ‘that guy’.

Your knowledge: in one place, searchable, easily digested and collaborative.

SharePoint and E-mail: Never lose an attachment again, right out of the box.

Kyle, SharePoint Consultant
for Entrance Software
12-9-2011

It’s incredible that we’re now over a decade into the 21^st century and e-mail—a standard that was first developed and implemented in the 1970s—still reigns as the king of business communication. Invoices, meeting invitations, contracts, and automated alerts are just a few of the critical items that might be sitting in your Outlook inbox right now. Interestingly enough, you can manage all of those things using SharePoint 2010, though I would not suggest dumping your Exchange server outright in favor of SharePoint.  Instead, I’d like to talk about some e-mail-enabled features of SharePoint 2010 and how you can use them together to get the most out of you SharePoint deployment.

Anyone with a little bit of SharePoint experience knows that one of SharePoint’s most powerful features is its out-of-the-box e-mail alert capability. But in case you’re not familiar, SharePoint 2010 allows you to enable e-mail alerts on any document library, list, or page in the system. This means that any time an item is added or changed in a library, or if a page is edited, you can receive an e-mail alert letting you know what has changed, when, and who changed it. I’ve personally seen this feature used in a variety of different ways, from organization-wide e-mail alerts on announcement lists to group-wide alerts on project pages and Wikis. The fantastic thing about SharePoint’s out-of-the-box alerts is that they are simple for any SharePoint
user to set up and manage.

Alerts don’t have to be instantaneous, either. SharePoint 2010 alerts can also be configured to deliver all of a day’s alerts as a digest message. That ability comes right out of the box, too. Additionally, SharePoint workflows can be used to achieve even more customized alert messages. For example, can you imagine opening your inbox in the morning and being greeted with the following SharePoint alert:

Good
Morning, David!

You have three outstanding invoices to approve.

Click here to visit the SharePoint
invoice library and approve the invoice for payment.

Thanks,

YourCompany’s SharePoint Server

With SharePoint 2010, automated alerts like those can be configured to be sent on a regular schedule, or any time an item is added to a list, using a SharePoint workflow that identifies the name of the user, the number of outstanding tasks, the URL of that user’s task list, and more.

One of SharePoint’s primary roles in an organization is to cull the use of e-mail attachments. Any business that relies heavily on e-mail-attached documents is setting itself up for massive problems down the road. If living documents are sitting in an employee’s inbox, what happens when that employee gets sick or can’t access their inbox?  For businesses not using SharePoint, losing access to attached e-mail documents and not sharing those documents across the organization can lead to lost time, lost information, and a lack of transparency.

Herding your Flock to SharePoint

It’s safe to say that Microsoft SharePoint is a framework which lies in the technical arena.  I would like to argue that its success, however, often lies in a psychological realm – winning the hearts and minds of your target audience.  Forcing a SharePoint solution on an unwilling audience is an uphill battle that will be lost and perhaps salvaged only by imposing ugly consequences on those that resist.

It has been my observation that the human condition is such that we do not like being told what to do; think “Declaration of Independence,” written over 235 years ago.  Contrarily, when we are gently guided to the same conclusion on our own accord, we develop a more thorough understanding of the “why” behind the “do.”  We then ultimately support the directive that we have been given with more enthusiasm and a sense of ownership.

When considering a SharePoint solution within your organization, I highly recommend involving your stakeholders from the very beginning.  Let them generate a list of problems to which the SharePoint framework may lend a solution, gather their vision of the end state, and let them offer solutions. Allowing your end-users to identify issues and participate in the envisioning phase of problem solving builds a sense of ownership, generates a desire to see the vision through to completion, and will ultimately increase the probability of a successful and well-received implementation.

Once the problems and high-level designs have been identified, constructing the solution within the SharePoint framework becomes a much simpler process and the end product that much more valuable.  Returns on your SharePoint investment will be rich in terms of productivity and your employees’ sense of value to the organization.