Collabshow.com

Three Degrees of the SharePoint Community Challenge

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Joel Oleson

"Six Degrees of Separation." It was one of those catch phrases of the last 20 years. There are 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon, and those in Hollywood where you can connect him to any actress based on his work. Now the challenge I propose to you is to see if you can find someone active in the SharePoint Community anywhere in the world that is more than 3 degrees from me. In addition, going into a new community, find the leader and you’ll find the connection to the rest of the community. We are all about 3 degrees of separation and in many cases there is no separation, we are at 2! These degrees can much more easily be validated with the common social networking tools of Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, and we’ll limit the scope to validating the degrees with those social tools. As well, we’re talking about people who are not averse to being connected and are active in their community. This shrinking world is fascinating. Social networking and how we define a friend are really changing this game of how we are connected. You can read more about this shift in facebook heading from 6 to 3.

Not only is the SharePoint community getting closer as many of us connect online through social networks and in global travel to more local events, analytics based on facebook data is showing the world is getting more connected, and 6 degrees from those online is actually overestimated. "While 99.6 percent of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops)," Backstrom wrote on a Facebook blog, "92 percent are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74."

As an example, when I went to Manila for the first time, I sat down with the experts in the community and we had them each pull up facebook and provide their names. One by one we went through the list and it was incredible how we had connections through MVP leads in China and Singapore and SharePoint User group connections with Microsoft with as many as 11 connections to their SharePoint Microsoft Technical Account Manager or local Office Productivity Product Management lead. So in the Philippines the SharePoint community is now very well connected with 2 degrees in many cases to the leadership, but even prior to our arrival the group was well connected with 3 degrees.

Three degrees isn’t just something cool and mean we’re small. It means better access to information. When a CU has a serious regression, just posting a blog is sometimes not enough. It’s about sharing and disseminating this information through our networks to the communities around the globe. I personally have had a personal goal to be the best connected SharePoint guy for quite some time. Some would scoff and say I’m addicted to facebook, twitter and social networks, but personally it’s more about making friends and real connections all over the world. I’ve travelled to over 100 countries in my quest to connect the SharePoint community and build a more cohesive community where we can openly share information with each other. Compare this map of where I’ve been, to the map further below of where my friends are.

Places I’ve been

(Where should I be going that doesn’t have pins? I am planning for Calgary, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Armenia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Others in South America, Africa, Alaska, Saudi?)

When I was travelling in Nepal, below us was a huge expanse, a deep canyon, and a cable upgrade from a rope bridge over to a small village in what I’d easily call out in the middle of nowhere. As the curdled ox milk was poured we were talking to our young hostess the only one in the village who spoke a little English. She was asking us what we did. We said, do you know what a computer is? We didn’t know how many hundreds of miles she’d have to go to even see one. To our surprise, she asked us… "Are you guys on facebook?!"

At the Anaheim SharePoint Conference this past year I was walking the vendor hall and stopped at a booth by accident waiting in line for a free massage. With my attention captured the booth guy asked me if I’d heard of their company. I had not, he went on to explain they’d been in the SharePoint business for the last 9 years. I had to stop him. How was this possible? How could I have not heard of them? I wanted to say, what rock do you live under… but instead was nice and said "where is your business?" We are in DC. Ok, so do you know Dux, Fabian or Eric Harlan? No, he replied. What!!? Are you sure you’re involved in SharePoint? We were thinking about doing SharePoint Saturday DC, but… I had to sit him down at this point and tell him that he really needed to first embrace the community where he lived in order to better get connected with the community period.

Where my fb friends live

Michael Noel and I have been travelling together even so, that this next month we will have spoken at enough common events to have spoken on every continent including the continent of penguins. We have 513 common friends on facebook alone. Spence Harbar from Scotland has over 446 friends in common. Saed Shela, organizer of the SharePoint Saturday in Palestine has 220 friends in common. Paul Culmsee from Perth Australia has 154 mutual friends. Chand from NZ has 117. Ricardo Muñoz Monge from Costa Rica and Chile has 77 common friends. Patrick Yong from Kuala Lumpur, 43, Joy from Sri Lanka 40. Sure many of these friends listed are contacts, and are people we’ve met at conferences or met online. Many of them are people we meet at conferences or have reached out to for one reason or another. There are many different rules for who you accept as a friend, and many have watered down their information or used their profiles for work purposes, but to me it’s definitely still a rolodex and allows me to keep in contact with people I’ve met and want to keep in touch with. It doesn’t always mean they are someone I trust 100% and that may be where we differ.

Across these hundreds of connections from the hundreds of SharePoint leaders running SharePoint user groups, running blogs, and actively trying to keep in touch with what’s going on, I expect we will cross paths and I hope we do, and if we do I hope we connect and make the world a little smaller and make that much more well connected.

I’ll tell you it does make me feel like my own personal perspectives are greater as a result of every user group, every conversation, and nearly every event, I find I’m a better person as a result of having met you. It’s each and every community that expands my mind and perspectives. Just got a Christmas card from Slovenia. Yep, I’m thinking about you guys. LATAM definitely hoping to connect in a big way in January, and so on… South East Asia, I’m holding my fourth quarter for you guys.

SharePoint Community in 2008

SharePoint Community in 2011

250 most connected of more than 2500

What communities do you see represented here? I see Portugal, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Malaysia, South Africa, Belarus, Singapore, Vietnam, Microsoft, Canada, Belgium, France, UK, Denmark, Croatia, Germany, Netherlands, UAE, SQL, IIS, .NET, Vendors, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, Mobile, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, SharePoint Saturday leaders, Microsoft MCS, SharePoint Rangers, PFEs, MCMs, Product planners, Product Managers, Microsoft IT, SharePoint Online, MCTs and Instructors.

Ok. So your call to action here is to help us connect your community to make the world even smaller. Let’s connection on your favorite social network, well let’s start with Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In, and if I can’t visit you I’m sure I can find someone who can.

Merry Christmas from SharePoint Joel and his family

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Joel Oleson

Leave a Comment

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukah, Happy Festivities, Good times Kwanza, Feliz Navidad and if nothing else… Hope you’re spending some good time off to chill and connect with family and friends.

View or Download the Oleson Family Christmas Newsletter on slideshare.net

Hola! Amigos de LATAM y Sur America Communidad de SharePoint

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Joel Oleson

Leave a Comment

(Exusa mi a momento por favor, while I speak a little Espanol via the help of mi amigo Ricardo. I’m still working on mi Espanol. Una de these dais — Joel)

Comunidad de SharePoint de habla hispana (HispaPoint)

Alguien sabe de eventos/conferencias SharePoint para el proximo anio en Latino America?

Hola Amigos de la comunidad

La presente es para invitar a todos los que viven en Argentina, Uruguay y Chile al mayor evento del ano de SharePoint en SurAmerica y el cual ya tenemos completamente confirmado y que llegara a estas 3 Cuidades de Latinoamerica en enero, El evento se llama Share the Point y es una iniciativa de comunidades y un grupo de reconocidos expertos y speakers internacionales que han realizado charlas en Asia, Africa, Europa y Norteamerica, ahora es el turno de SurAmerica.

Esta vez le toca el turno a 3 ciudades las cuales seran:

Enero 21, 2012 – Buenos Aires, Argentina
Enero 23, 2012 – Montevideo, Uruguay
Enero 24, 2012 – Santiago, Chile

Ademas a estas 3 ciudades tendremos una ultima escala en un lugar muy interesante:

Enero 26, 2012 – Villa las Estrellas, Antarctica

El evento sera completamente gratuito lo unico necesario es registrarse, contaremos con un nutrido grupo de expertos que estaran realizando charlas en Ingles (con traduccion) y en espanol.

En el caso de Chile el evento se realizara en el DUOC de Antonio Varas Piso 15 con un espacio para 230 personas.
Para Uruguay y Argentina estaremos dando los detalles del lugar proxiamente.

A continuacion les dejo todos los links de interes del evento, incluyendo el registro:

•Pagina del Evento: SharingThePoint.org

•Speakers

•Agendas

•Registro Gratuito

Los esperamos no se lo pueden perder

Muchas Gracias,

Joel Oleson y Ricardo

Special thanks to Sur America SharePoint Communidad for hosting us!

SharePoint Site Collection Administrator vs. Site Owner

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Joel Oleson

Leave a Comment

SharePoint permissions aren’t confusing. Sorry I jest. They are pretty weak, but most of it comes because users ask for this granularity. Here’s a 1 star rated excel document on SharePoint permissions, and it doesn’t cover this core issue. Let me know if you find a better document on the detail around rights.

"I’m the owner of the site, the person who requested this site be created," starts a user as he describes his issue. I clarify, "Are you the site owner or site collection administrator?" He goes on to say, "Well, I have full control to the site." The discussion goes on, "Well, that still doesn’t answer my question." Who is the site collection administrator? I’m not sure. From there we dive into his site and verify he is site owner and he does have full control. Then he goes onto the real issue. He’s the site owner, and wants a new look and feel. Well, as site owner you don’t have access to the galleries. Have you turned on the publishing features on your site? What? I can add the master page.

You can see there’s a lot of confusion going on. First off, the Site owner is a very confusing role. It isn’t described very well anywhere either. Essentially I see the best way to describe this role as the content owner. They are the NON technical owner of the site. The site collection administrator is really the person with the power. They are the one who can go in and activate the site collection features, not to be confused with the site features which if you try to activate publishing from there, you’ll get a dependency error. If you want to have easy to use master page galleries and a nice drop down selector for managing your master pages and system master page, you first need the need the site collection feature activated. You’ll notice that that managing the site collection features requires site collection admin rights.

When comparing the two, the site collection admin has "god" rights, but the site owner has "full control" from a content perspective within the site. It is better understood that file share equivalent may be thought to be full control as having full rights, but with SharePoint you’re going to need site collection admin rights to better control the behavior of the site and to better manage the galleries of the site collection.

Below is a screenshot taken by Mike Smith who goes into the more intricate details of this issue in his post: Mike Smith’s Training Notes on Site Collection Administrator vs. Site Owner (full control). Which compare the site collection admin rights (the full list) with those in red as NOT available to the Site Owner. The site admin vs. Site Collection Administrator is a similar set.

Microsoft’s own documentation on Site Collection Admins describes the role:

"…As a site collection administrator, this means the following:

You might be expected to be the main point of contact between your part of the organization and your IT department.

You’ll need to work closely with people in certain roles in IT, such as your SharePoint farm administrator.

You’ll be performing some tasks that might previously have been referred to your organization’s IT team, such as deciding who has access to important intellectual property stored on your organizations web sites (that is, setting site-collection level permissions), and deciding which features to make available to the people who will be using the sites in your site collection.

You’ll probably be providing some technical support for the people who use your site collection."

If you decide you need to change the rights… Here are some simple steps:

1. At the top level of your site collection, click Site Actions and then Site Settings.

2. Under Users and Permissions, click Site Collection Administrators.

3. In the Site Collection Administrators field, type or browse to find the name of the person you want to designate a site collection administrator.

4. Click OK.

Summary:

The site owner is the content owner and has full control over content in a site.

The site collection admin controls the features, permissions, both content and technical management and has god rights across all content and galleries.

Who Owns the Intranet?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Joel Oleson

Leave a Comment

In a world of Intranet turf battles, the easy answer is… well, uh… IT, HR, Corp Communication, Marketing, and so on, but in this social world isn’t it really the end user should own its destiny? I reference an article from 2001 "Our intranet doesn’t need an owner. It belongs to all of us — and to none of us. Fortunately, that freewheeling approach is picking up surprising support from managers, consultants, and intranet users." Amazing that 11 years later, we are still trying to move in that direction. Social Business would dictate that it isn’t owned by any department if the platform is governed and setup properly. The personalization and needs of all should be surfaced in a way that it serves the user. Join in the poll. I’ve created a poll to see who you think owns the Intranet. I’ll replace your results with this best guess.

When I started this job, I was told, "You are the solutions manager. You own the Intranet, the team sites, the profiles, and quickly I’d define that to include the enterprise intranet social strategy." Expectations were big in delivering a cohesive strategy to move this work forward. In subsequent weeks I’d work quickly to help flush out the ownership in the organization around who has a vested interest in the intranet. Who would be my steering committee, my stakeholders or working group. What a fascinating experience that was as the conversations quickly turned from questions about roadmaps into technology interests and divides. When I talk about portals I get some level of interest, but with trying to build a steering committee representing the organization made up of directors asking them to invest time in my endeavors was futile… at least in the beginning. After a few successful changes, and demonstrating that our team had the ability to transform what was happening, more and more interest has been coming out of the business and this sense of who has real ownership, has been a fascinating question.

I’ve been focused on gathering talent, passion, and abilities around engineering and infrastructure, development and design, and in understanding the needs of the business in building real solutions that meet the bottom line. Now as our team looks to build the roadmap, others across the business are interested in being involved… very involved, and not only want to steer, but want to own it too. They see that we have the capabilities to deliver and shouldn’t HR own the intranet? Shouldn’t corporate communications own the Intranet? Doesn’t everyone really have a vested interest? Definitely!

As I research the top search requests, I’m fascinated by the practical search requests of cafeteria menu, discounts, and holiday calendar. Often we focus so much on what tools, and resources we want to provide, that the reasons people even come to the intranet end up being those things that help someone organize their day. The intranet itself is a tool, not just a hub for gathering links. The more we can expose the things people are looking for, and provide feeds from other parts of the corporate web, and even external web, the job becomes about organizing data in a way that it can most easily be consumed, but then again it’s about personalization. You must not force feed them; you must provide a mechanism for them to consume.

Ownership is what anyone who is working on a project wants to feel. In this way, IT needs to feel like they own the platform, and the departments need to feel vested in their tools, solutions, and so on. So who owns the navigation? Well, I guess that depends on where the UI designers and expertise is. Simplicity is the key. Information must be parsed faster and faster these days, and people expect to consume more and more of it in less time. We want our own filters, aggregators, and the ability to quickly parse what we feel is important and we want our interfaces to learn our preferences. No more do we want some organization telling us what’s important, but despite the fact that the organization continues to provide that information, and require it be read, there is a happy medium.

Many would call this conundrum of ownership a governance issue. We must sit in committee to determine who has ownership of what, and we’ll produce some document that lays this all out. That’s one approach. Somehow we need to bring these vested groups and organization to find out where the expertise and the vested interest lie. You may have a battle on your hands, but a battle definitely that’s worth raging. It’s one that will help determine the success of the intranet and its properties and in ultimately working out the roadmap and governance for years to come. You’ll definitely have a budget, and an executive sponsor when you finish the meeting.

Let me warn you that Portal Governance is not about making every decision a decision by committee. These times of agility require that you have a process that drives agility through building transparency into your taskforce. Those boots on the ground must share their roadmap with the vested representation of the business in a working group. This working group or steering committee is assembled to direct the priorities of the organization. A working group like this should meet on a monthly or bi-monthly basis to review the next two to three months user stories that will be built against. An executive committee that represents all sides of the business would likely seek to review the overall progress of the intranet portal and its associated departmental properties and strategy on a once or twice yearly basis to gain insight into the broader roadmap.

The other approach I like to suggest is what I refer to as "chosen path." I’m going to be transparent and gather feedback from users and the business along the way, and we’re going to incorporate industry standards, build solutions and be transparent in our approach. If you don’t like what we are doing, get involved, and don’t just throw stones. It’s very easy to criticize what someone is doing, but it’s a lot more useful to provide constructive feedback that we can incorporate. In this agile and scrum approach, our users can really get involved in what we’re doing and with microblogging tools like yammer, I welcome the constructive criticism and voting up feedback that can make a difference to what we do. Give me the feedback. I can take it. Let’s incorporate your best ideas and vet out the not so great ones. I love the engagement.

Don’t forget to take the quick poll!