10 Warning Signs that Your SharePoint Implementation may be Heading for Difficulty

Published May 12, 2012 Business , Project Management , SharePoint , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy 1 Comment
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I encounter many SharePoint implementations that are planned or in progress. Some go on to be very successful, some are in difficulty. For the more problematic implementations there are often early warning signs that are common across many organisations. I have summarised the main warning signs that I have come across below.

  1. You think that SharePoint has a super-rich feature set that can solve all of your problems out of the box.
  2. There is no vision of how SharePoint will be used across your organisation. For example:
    1. You have not involved key business stakeholders in planning of your SharePoint rollout.
    2. Development was led by a single department e.g. IT rather than a by stakeholders from across the business.
    3. You are implementing SharePoint to solve a single problem but haven’t really considered it strategically.
    4. Users frequently grumble that “SharePoint sucks!” because their needs have not been met or understood.
  3. Your SharePoint deployment evolved from a pilot/proof of concept, rather than from a deliberate approach.
  4. You’ve decided to use SharePoint 2010 Foundation/Standard on the basis that it is cheaper than SharePoint 2010 Standard/Enterprise.
  5. You are using custom code to solve a problem because it is cheaper than upgrading to Standard/Enterprise, or purchasing a third party tool.
  6. You’ve decided to carry on using SharePoint 2007 (or 2003) because it is cheaper than upgrading.
  7. You want SharePoint to be a file share replacement and expect to “lift and drop” your content into it.
  8. Your focus is on how it looks not what it does.
  9. Investments in SharePoint have to be paid for out of departmental budgets and there is no centralised budget for strategic and shared investments.
  10. You aren’t too sure what SharePoint can do. For example:
    1. You’ve only had light exposure though a single article, demo, or anecdote
    2. You have not invested in additional SharePoint education for yourself or your staff to help to understand the full breadth of SharePoint capabilities.
    3. You have not engaged an expert/consultant to help educate and outline the possibilities of applying SharePoint to your organisation.

The good news is that it’s never too late to turn things around with a root and branch review of your SharePoint strategy. Our strategy planning sessions can turn a SharePoint implementation around in a matter of days, and help you to get real business value from the effective use of SharePoint. Contact us for more information.

PointBeyond achieve Microsoft’s Gold Project and Portfolio Management Competency

Published May 2, 2012 Applications , PointBeyond team , Project Server Leave a Comment
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Gold Project and Portfolio Management Competency logo

The team at PointBeyond are proud to add Gold Project and Portfolio Management to our portfolio of Microsoft competencies, placing us firmly within the top one percent of Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

As the UK’s leading SharePoint business application specialists, our in-depth knowledge of both Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server enable us to drive even greater efficiencies for our customers, including:

  • Accelerate ROI – Save money and deliver benefits faster
  • Increase productivity – Automate processes to save time and deploy best practice
  • Greater visibility – Give project managers full visibility of a project
  • Knowledge sharing – Encourage collaboration through project sites

To earn the Microsoft gold competency, members of our team have successfully completed a number of Microsoft Certified Professional exams to confirm our technical excellence.  At the same time, Microsoft has requested a number of customer references as evidence of the projects we have already successfully delivered.

Please visit our website to find out more about Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management and other SharePoint business applications.

Document Transmittals in SharePoint Using Nintex Workflow

Published April 21, 2012 Applications , Business , Composites , Nintex , Partners , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy , Workflow Leave a Comment
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Recently we have been working with an engineering company to assist them with document control – specifically with the challenge of managing transmittals. A transmittal is the supply of a specific set of version controlled documents to a third party. It is critically important in engineering since these documents are used as the basis for building things. In our customer’s case, the thing being built is mineral extraction plant at mines. The costs can run into the hundreds of millions of pounds/dollars, so the cost of a mistake as a result of the wrong version of a document being used can be huge.

Several options were seriously considered including:

  • Purchasing of an off the shelf engineering transmittals management system (very expensive, not easily integrated with other systems, vendor lock in and high cost of future changes)
  • Code their own (expensive, risky slow)
  • At our suggestion – extend their existing SharePoint platform using Nintex Workflow 2010 and build the solution by configuring (not custom coding) workflows

We installed Nintex and what impressed me was how quickly these guys (engineers without a programming background) were able to take it on. We helped at the outset and with some of the more tricky bits, such as auto-generating emails listing the contents of each transmittal, but the solution was in the main put together by the customer themselves in a matter of days.

They now have a high quality document control and transmittals application that reduces their workload, assists with their ISO 9001 compliance, and enhances the service they provide to their customers. It was built for a fraction of the cost of a third party system, or of getting the solution custom coded. In addition they know how it works and have true ownership of the solution. If they want to change it to meet changing business needs, then more often than not they can do it themselves in a matter of hours – no hassle, no expense.

It’s a great example of the power of SharePoint and appropriate tools being used to quickly deliver business applications without custom code. The customer and I are proud to be presenting it at next week’s International SharePoint Conference in London, where we’ll be showing it in action, identifying the key benefits, and explaining how it works. If you would like more information on delivering document transmittals in SharePoint then please contact us.

Ian

Read the full case study here: Document Management, Numbering and Transmittals

Determining Business Processes Using Card Sorting

Published March 25, 2012 Applications , Business , Composites , K2 , SharePoint , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy , Workflow Leave a Comment
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Card sorting is a pretty well-known technique for working with users to better understand how information should be organised. There are many excellent articles about this available online, and one that I particularly like is “Information design using card sorting” by James Robertson.

Card sorting is a technique we have used many times when working with organisations to define an information architecture for SharePoint, and I find it very useful.

However, as well as doing a lot of information architecture work, we are also helping organisations to implement business processes within SharePoint. Much of this work is focused around Case Management, and implemented in SharePoint using the K2 Case Management Framework.

While working on a bid management system with a customer recently, we had an idea – could a card sorting exercise be used to map out a case management type business process? In particular, could we use a card sort with the end users to map out the stages and actions undertaken as a case progresses? The answer is a resounding yes – it works very well! Here is how we did it.

To keep the language non-technical, and to get the users on board we defined the following three concepts:

  • A stage is a status that our case has for a period of time. So for bid management some stages are “Opportunity Identified” and “Bid Manager Assigned”. In other words these are stages that our case may be at. More formally they represent states.
  • Transitioning activities are things that happen to move a case from one stage to another. In our example a bid at “Opportunity Identified” stage may have transitioning activities of “Decide not to Bid”, and “Assign Bid Manager”.
  • Actions are things that may be done when a case is at a stage, but which do not result in a transition from one stage to another. In our example a bid at “Opportunity Identified” stage may have actions of “Obtain Clearance from Legal”, “Obtain Clearance from Ethics” and “Create Bid Management Collaboration Site in SharePoint”.

We use a 6″x4″ card for each stage, transitioning activity, and action. The name is written on in coloured pen using the following convention:

  • Stage = black
  • Transitioning activity = red
  • Action = blue

Stages go horizontally left to right across the table with transitioning activities in between and with branches where needed. Actions go vertically under the stage in which they belong. You might need a big table!

Some other useful tips are:

  • If an action can be performed in more than one stage, create a card for each stage.
  • Write on each transitioning activity and action if it is manual or automated.
  • Write on each action if it is mandatory or optional, or the rules that decide if is required.
  • Use arrows where needed to clarify flow.
  • Pre-prepare a few cards to get things started and demonstrate how it works, but be prepared to replace your cards if a better approach emerges

The following diagram shows how the cards would look for our (simplified) bid management process.

I’ve found this approach works well with up to about 6 people plus the facilitator. Users engage well with this visual approach and are soon pretty keen to start contributing new cards and moving cards around.

SharePoint Solutions Showcase London

Published March 1, 2012 Applications , Business , Composites , Events , Functionality , Partners , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy Leave a Comment
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PointBeyond, K2, BA Insight, Axceler and Knowledge Lake have teamed up to bring a complimentary event to Microsoft in London, filled with subject matter experts, insightful presentations, demos, food, fun, and prizes!

Join us on the day and learn about:

  • Building Business Applications on SharePoint – What, Why and How by PointBeyond
  • Delivering ECM Value in SharePoint by KnowledgeLake
  • Case Management Framework for SharePoint 2010 by K2
  • Enhanced Search and Management in SharePoint 2010 by BA Insight
  • SharePoint Governance by Axceler

DATE: 22/3/2012    09:00 – 12.30 (GMT)

EVENT LOCATION

Microsoft – London Victoria

80 Victoria Street

London, SW1E 5JL

To secure your place please ensure you Register here as seats are allocated on a first come first served basis.

Back to the PointBeyond web site

Delivering Maximum Business Value With A SharePoint Based Application Strategy

Published February 10, 2012 Applications , Business , Composites , Functionality , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy Leave a Comment
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IT decision makers are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. At the same time, many are struggling to cope with a backlog of applications awaiting delivery. A strategic approach to the delivery of business applications is therefore required to help decision makers achieve their goals. This paper from PointBeyond explains why SharePoint 2010 should be seriously considered when defining an application strategy.

Download your free copy from the PointBeyond website here

SharePoint 2010 content organiser – document routing workflows made easy

Published February 6, 2012 SharePoint 2010 , Technical Leave a Comment

 A really powerful new feature in SharePoint 2010 is the content organiser, a suped-up version of the routing engine found in the SharePoint 2007 records centre.

There are a good many articles out there extolling the virtues of this flexible new feature which is great. In this post however, I want to concentrate on one very specific area: -

http://YourSiteName/_vti_bin/OfficialFile.asmx

 I know, I know, not catchy (or fun) and I know it’s not gonna get you out of bed on a wet London morning.

What it is going to do though, is be the url for the content organiser web service for that particular site collection.

Big wow!?

Whilst this might not seem like a massive deal, I’m sure you’re not lining it up to fill that elusive after dinner speaking slot, it does open up a few interesting possibilities – namely easy document routing workflow.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “hang on a minute…isn’t that what content organiser already does?”

Well yes, it handles document routing based on rules in a really slick way. It even has other elegancies such as evoking the routing engine when you update a document to a library that has rules pointing to it (see fig. 1 below)

This is really nice and very fast to configure. But what if you wanted to build in more complexity to how the documents are routed? Not so easy.

Back to that url and how it can help? Anyone who has looked at SharePoint Designer 2010 will know that things have moved on in leaps and bounds since the 2007 version and certainly where creating workflows is concerned.

The beauty of that url is that it can be referenced in workflows, meaning document routing can be achieved without having to worry about complex rule creation in SharePoint Designer.

So why would this be useful?

Take the example where you have an image library storing corporate images, but you need to be able to move items based on their status to a different location – where an image is marked archive or inactive for example.

Simply create a basic workflow in SharePoint designer and let the content organiser handle the complicated rule based and alerting functionality.

 SharePoint workflow

The advantage of this approach? Should it be decided at a later date to change where archived images are to be stored this can be easily handled by simply changing the ‘Target location’ in the organiser rules.

 Content organiser rules

No need to worry about setting up complex alerting rules in designer either, as this can be addressed in the content organiser settings, along with other useful functionality such as saving original audit logs and properties with the content wherever it lands.

 Great! Of course if your organisation doesn’t have particularly strict audit requirements but it would be really useful to know where the image has moved to and from (and who changed its status from archive to inactive for example), you could always look to expand on the variable outputs in the SharePoint Designer workflow…

SharePoint workflow output variable 

…and write these outputs to a ‘Multiple lines of text’ field that appends (version control required here of course).

Voila – a rudimentary audit trail of what your image has been up to while you’ve been away! If only it was that simple with cats…and children! (and stocks, and socks, and so on, and so on).

Have a play. Get creative. Enjoy.

Back to the PointBeyond web site

The “No Code” SharePoint Strategy

Published January 31, 2012 Business , SharePoint , SharePoint 2010 , Strategy 9 Comments
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For an initial deployment of SharePoint 2010 how about saying:

“We will not do anything that involves custom code. We will restrict ourselves to what we can do with out-of-the-box SharePoint and associated tools”

This is somewhat controversial. I can already hear rumblings of discontent from distant IT strategists. IT strategy should be derived from business strategy, right? An IT strategy should put in place systems and practices that support the business in achieving its objectives. If we say “we won’t do any custom code” this is surely a classic case of tail (technology) wagging dog (business). Why should the constraints of a technology be used to tell the business what they can and can’t have?

That is perfectly true. But, and it’s a big but, SharePoint also gives us the following to consider:

  • The number of things that SharePoint can potentially do for a mid-size to large organisation is pretty large. It encompasses collaboration, intranet, document and content management, social features, search, business intelligence, and business application delivery. Deciding where to start can be a challenge.
  • As soon as you start custom coding within SharePoint (or anything else), the cost and risk both go up considerably.
  • For almost all organisations there are some real “quick wins” that can be delivered without custom code. For example, we often build one or two form and workflow driven business applications. These can be delivered in a matter of days and provide tangible value. The appropriate use of third party products such as those from K2 and Nintex can also facilitate the delivery of more complex workflows without custom code.
  • Users and stakeholders want to see something. Custom coding projects can take months. A no code approach gives them rapid visibility of where all that money they spent on licencing has gone.

I should make it clear that I am not advocating that custom code should never be used. If for example you have a requirement with a compelling business case that can only be delivered with custom code, then make the case and go for it! However if you are looking at SharePoint, and have numerous possible projects under consideration, then an initial no code approach will allow you to derive some quick benefits at low cost and low risk. You can then revisit your strategy later once users have got used to the system. At this point you’ll probably find that business requirements have changed anyway, as once people have started using and benefitting from SharePoint, their thoughts about where they need additional functionality almost inevitably change. So when you decide it is time to crack open Visual Studio and start custom coding, the chances are you’ll end up with a better custom coded solution than you would have had if you’d done the custom work up front.

Comments welcome as always!

Ian

Free Strategy Paper Download  – Delivering Maximum Business Value With A SharePoint Based Application Strategy

Build a Simple Language Translator using InfoPath and No Code – Part 1 of 2

Published January 25, 2012 Applications , Composites , Infopath , Technical , User Group 4 Comments

One of the most useful features of InfoPath, is the ability to easily set up and use data connections from so many sources. Using data connections to web services, InfoPath can be used to create a form that passes data onto a third party website where the data is acted upon in some way and a response passed back to the end user.

A simple, yet practical example of this is this simple text translator. This was built on the back of a customer request to have forms available in multiple languages. No code is used in this development, but we do make use of the “Rules” functionality by which Business Logic and in-form workflow can be built.

While the result of some InfoPath experimentation presented here will not be putting any multi-lingual technical translating staff out of business I’m sure you can think of other applications which could benefit from a Web Service interface such as this.

Ok – so how do you go about creating a translation form? It’s as simple as baking a loaf of bread, so let’s start by looking at the ingredients we will need!

Recipe for InfoPath Translator – Serves 5 ( English, German, Spanish, French and Italian!)

Ingredients:

Instructions

  1. In InfoPath 2010 Designer create a new Blank Form and create a table with six rows and two columns
  2. Create a Data Connection – Not built one of these before? – Don’t worry a wizard makes this really simple!
    1. From the ribbon select Data / From Web Service /From SOAP Web Service and enter in the web service URL as below:

3.Now from the list of Services select Translate

4. On the next screen you will see a list of Parameters that are used by the web service – Enter your Bing Application ID here by using the Set Value button (You do have an app id don’t you? If not, sign up at http://www.bing.com/toolbox/bingdeveloper/) In the content type and category parameters set the values to ‘text/plain’ and ‘general’ respectively

5. The next screen should be skipped – hit the Next button

6. Now we are on the final screen for our data connection set up. Deselect the “Automatically retrieve data when form is opened” check box – Best practice for forms is to only use data connections when needed, and we will only be calling this service when a button is clicked

Build a Simple Language Translator using InfoPath and No Code – Part 2 of 2

Published January 25, 2012 Applications , Composites , Infopath , Technical 2 Comments

7. After you have finished your data connection you will have two data references in your InfoPath project – Main and the Translate service you just created will be labelled a secondary connection…

You will see from the view above that the data connection is in two parts “query fields” and “data fields”. Put simply, the query fields enable you to pass information through the data connection and the data fields represent what you get back!

8. Enter text labels in the left hand column of the table you created in step 1 and drag the text field and the TranslateResult fields from the fields pane on the right into the form layout 

9. Now switch to the Main Data view in the fields pane and add two dropdown list controls and label LanguageFrom and LanguageTo… This will create two extra field references in the Myfields folder of the Main view of the Fields pane as in the screenshot below. These two fields will be used to provide data to the “From” and “To” query fields of the Translate data connection

10. Enter the values as in the screenshot below to the Drop Down List Box properties for the LanguageFrom field

11. And enter the values as in the screenshot below to set up the LanguageTo Dropdown List Box properties: Yes, pretty much identical to the LanguageFrom field!

For this example I have only added five languages and their associated codes , but you can add additional languages to these controls if they are supported by the Microsoft Translate API.

12. Now finally we just need to add a button to our form and attach some logic to the button so that when pressed the following will happen:

  • Populate the “From” query field of the Translate data connection with the value selected in the LanguageFrom Dropdown List
  • Populate the “To” query field of the Translate data connection with the value selected in the LanguageTo Dropdown List
  • Run the web service to see the translate result

This is achieved simply by adding a button from the Controls section of the Home ribbon and adding a Rule with three actions as below:

The three actions are

  1. Set a fields value (select the “from” field from the Translate data connection and make equal to the LanguageFrom field from the Main data connection)
  2. Set a fields value (select the “to” field from the Translate data connection and make equal to the LanguageTo field from the Main data connection)
  3. Query using a data connection (select the Translate data connection)

Conclusion

Well, that’s all there is to it! Test the form in preview mode and add some simple sentences and combinations of From and To languages. If you have been successful, you will appreciate how InfoPath can be used to address some fairly complex Business scenarios in a straightforward manner with NO CODE REQUIRED!
J

Do you have any similar examples of code free web service based InfoPath development – we’d love to hear from you!

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