Category: Uncategorized

Last week I went to a “Utah bloggers” event.  It first surprised me to see 90% women, didn’t bother me, just surprised me.  Then I went on to find I was the only technical blogger there.  All were mommy bloggers, food bloggers, hair bloggers, and DIY bloggers and on and on.  It was amazing to see that really as opposite ends of the world there was something common in terms of how bloggers can have influence, and how brands look to bloggers for awareness and PR.  In my last post I brought up the question: “Should Bloggers and Influencers Make Money from Posts and Tweets?” I did expect to see more of a discussion.  Guess everyone is already convinced that, hey it’s your blog… do what you want.  People are influenced by what they read and influenced by their peers.  I think it has a lot to do with who we follow and who we trust.

I’ve had a unique opportunity in the SharePoint world to work for Microsoft, a Vendor and now a customer.

When I was in Microsoft IT, there were times when we’d approach a vendor to find out how we’d address given issues.  We had a special relationship with the product team where we could always ask them for things, which is what they would want, but depending on the amount of pain we were going through, we’d either consider off the shelf or build it ourselves to bridge the gap, and times where the product team would say they had no plans to address our need.

Next when I was in the product team, I spent a lot of time with customers and vendors and listened as they described things they wanted fixed.  We had discussions about whether or not we could fit in these features.  When we knew we wouldn’t be able to address them, we’d reach out to vendors with specialties and or capability for delivering.

Next in my move out to the field, and landing at a vendor.  The experience was now analyzing what customers needs were, Microsoft’s gaps, and then figuring out if people were willing to pay.  Beyond that there was figuring out if the need was more than one vocal customer, but seeing if the cost to build could be justified.  This struggle is a tough one.  Once a solution is delivered there’s another problem.  How to you reach the person looking for the solution?  Also how do you tell the story that describes the problem or challenge that resulted in a solution.

As a blogger, I was interested in helping out the vendor that was looking to connect with his audience.  When I first started looking at google ads I noticed there was a lot of what I’d consider SharePoint pornography or anti-SharePoint content.  There was simply bad analysis that was exposed by google ads.  There was junk whitepapers that would simply bash SharePoint and try to sell a competitor tool.  Frustrated by what google was doing in their ads exposed by people in our community I looked around at a vendor hall one day I thought, there has to be a way that we could connect bloggers with the vendors.  In sharing my dilemna with Inna Gordin, an entrepreneurial spirit with marketing skills who understood the problem as I did.  She had a vision of how we could build the platform that would connect these publishers with vendors.  SharePointAds.com was born out of this.  SharePointReviews.com was born out of the need for awareness as well.  Leveraging social media features with focus on ratings and reviews.

I’m now looking at opportunity with the advancements in social media.  Ads themselves give some level of awareness, but don’t give the full story.  While it may contain a line of text presenting up a problem or opportunity.

I would suggest that we comparatively build a very serious network in our community.  The penetration of facebook, twitter, and linked In. The most passionate dedicated SharePoint people are very well connected across the globe.  This network building happens online and in events, and gets built and happens across the social networks.  The pages of our online book and collective conscience is captured on blogs and in the status of microblogs.

In a recent Sharing the Point tour where we sat down with the Filipinos.  In an on the spot exercise I went around the room asking each of the local SharePoint experts what their names where fascinating things happened.  Despite the fact that I had never stepped foot in the Philippines, we had people in common that we knew, many of them were from Malaysia and Singapore.  This exercise in discovery helped us understand the world is smaller than we knew.

With Facebook, twitter, and linked in it was amazing how we could spread messages around the globe through our networks and help reach even those only connected with local people.   

In the SharePoint world there are people with clout, but we’ll refer to that as Klout which is a tool which tries to represent a score that provides a number to describe the reach and influence of an individual.  There are a few hundred individuals that have very serious influence in our community.  Efforts by Global 360 produced an Influencer 50.  Many looked at that list and realized that that was too small, or questioned the algorithm or methods used to calculate it.  Microsoft has it’s own list based on some formula of newsgroups and community work.  In addition, they’ve put together some of their own charts around the influencers in twitter, facebook, and in the blogsphere.  There are hundreds that have significant influence in the SharePoint community across social networks, blogs, and as speakers and writers.

Rather than simply trying to create the hierarchy of the influencer 50 or 100, or 1000, I am interested in putting together a bloggers and influencers network.  People who are interested in working together on topics and conferences and events, and yes ultimately reaching out to the vendors and even Microsoft.

SharePoint Bloggers and Influencers

Real world is always more raw and has so many more variables. I think we’ll continue to learn always… not matter how many tests you do.

Even after doing a test upgrade 2 weeks prior. Engineering completed an upgrade and here’s what we saw:

1. Plan on Doing Visual Upgrade Soon – Sites that were binary upgraded all new sites created underneath existing non visually upgraded sites where in the 2010 look and feel. Yes all new sites were 2010, but also all new webs were as well. Some of these new webs underneath sites that were not visually upgraded had issues with list creation. You could go directly to the create page if you knew the URL, but otherwise it would hang. Work around was to upgrade the root site collection. We weren’t ready to do this due to a custom look and feel.
2. Workflows can be problematic especially if they have Fab 40 dependencies – We had a number of sites that had problems with workflows. Apparently we had some small bits of an application template that were dependencies. A list definition from a custom site definition in one of the app templates was being used. Yeah, I very upset at those app templates, more because I’m the admin and don’t see the value in them, but also because due to MS not supporting them in SharePoint 2010 we have concerns about supportability. Yes, Kahlil rocks and it’s great he upgraded the Fabulous 40 all those for the rest of us, but it hasn’t been very clean, and I now don’t consider these sites "vanilla." This was supposed to be an easy upgrade of some out of the box sites. I had been saying I didn’t think we needed a third party tool since we just had out of the box sites. Now I’m saying I need a script to track down customizations to a greater detail than test-spcontentdatabase. I sure wish either preupgradecheck or test-spcontentdatabase would actually identify the site collection that’s impacted due to the custom site def or feature, so we could plan on using third party migration tools like Quests Migration Manager for post migration sync, or Metalogix Migration Manager for SharePoint for site migration and workflows or AvePoint’s free 100GB of data deal. Something that will make getting out of these customizations. We were hoping to simply attach these databases and simply ignore the errors. This was a big mistake. While the data looks fine there are a lot of issues underneath with dependencies such as list templates, workflows and so on that apparently break if those features aren’t in place. Those features being specific app 40 templates. Now we’re looking differently at ensuring on the 2007 side things are nice and clean with 0 errors related to missing features. I’ve been stressing that we shouldn’t be getting any upgrade errors or warnings if we’ve actually prepared our databases correctly. We’re looking at separating those site collections that have app 40 templates into a "chocolate farm" separate from our vanilla farm. I think this is a good start to keeping a clean environment and may need to start some type of charge back for those that need application functionality.
3. Some Excel Webparts ended up slower, but we think this is due to the number of cells we are publishing. We’ve built our own Gantt charts into excel that are data driven and displayed as colored cells. Hence each webpart is rendering thousands of cells. Not sure how we’re going to optimize these webparts since they were faster to render in 2007.
4. Microsoft support – If you have a Sev A. You do get Microsoft’s attention. We went through a lot of engineers. If you request you can have a dedicated PFE if you’re a large enough customer and actually have them handle the relationship on tickets. We were having an issue with timely returns with lower priority tickets, and Sev A is expensive. So we plan to have MCS or PFE resources lined up this next time we do a big upgrade.

More lessons to come…

Did you know that built right into SharePoint 2010 during installation there’s a little check to look for a container in AD and if it exists then add the server? In fact you could create an AD Group Policy to block SharePoint installs! By default nothing more than a warning happens in the installation log and most people will ignore it and move on. Others will be a little confused and say, why is SharePoint trying to access an object in AD. What is this service connection point in Active Directory? I didn’t know I should extend my Active Directory schema for SharePoint. Again, by default you don’t have to extend the AD schema, but are there any benefits by doing so. I see three key scenarios here you can take advantage of all fairly straight forward with the right support from your AD team. (You know they already love you from your User Profile Service meetings.)

1. I want to track installations of SharePoint 2010 – You’ll simply create the "Microsoft SharePoint Products" under the system container for the service connection point (SCP) . Write does have to exist for those installing SharePoint servers to actually get the SCP created. If they don’t they’ll get an installation warning and move on. See the resources below on the how to details for configuring this.

   See Jie Li put together a script in the Script Center for listing all the SharePoint 2010 server names

2. I want to BLOCK new installations of SharePoint 2010 including SharePoint Foundation – Since pretty much anyone can install SharePoint Foundation and run it under their desk, you might want to actually block the installation. Of course this would be the plan for someone trying to keep only the managed SharePoint farms on the radar and avoid the rogue deployments.

   

3. I want to control who can install SharePoint in the enterprise to a limited group – I remember discussing this need with the SharePoint product team… "For governance reasons we should be able to control who can install SharePoint." We went on to explain… "we don’t want it popping up everywhere" because people assume we won’t support their app. We want them to engage us. You can do that too! Here you’ll create an ADM policy or GPO with Disableinstall=1 filtered by the security group. Mark Cresswell goes into great detail including links to sample ADM/ADMX files.

Now you’re asking. Why didn’t I see this in the documentation before I installed my first SharePoint box? One option is running discovery… Consider a free demo of Quest’s Site Adminstrator to help you locate the SharePoint boxes in your enterprise. There have been a number of scanning tools I’ve used over time, but make sure you’re network admin knows before you start a port scan. I say that from personal experience. It looks nasty to a network admin and could be grounds for dismissal.

Key references on the *HOW TO* on configuring:

Mark Cresswell –SharePoint 2010 brings new Governance controls to IT Pro’s

Jie Li Track SharePoint 2010 Installations by Service Connection Point