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Michael Noel and I recently finished a 3 city SharePoint day tour across India reaching over 600 passionate SharePoint people.  We started by flying into Mumbai and driving to Pune.  Originally when I started planning this trip with Michael Noel, we were planning on visiting Persia where one of my contacts Neo Farvashan, now good friend Neo was going to give us a tour of Tehran and the sites of Iran.  With the more recent political activity we decided to focus on India and Nepal, and Neo decided to join us in our tour.

We did a call with Mark Miller over Skype while we were in Kathmandu Nepal on a recap of our India & Nepal trip in Today in SharePoint.

The Pune SharePoint day was with the Pune User Group (PUG) http://www.punetech.com and http://www.puneusergroup.org a Microsoft technologies special interest group with over 1000 members.  We had around 300 register and 200+ attendees in a huge auditorium.  The amount of SharePoint experience in the crowd was much, much more than either of us expected.  More than 75% of the room had working with SharePoint.  Our Q&A was quite intense with great questions that kept the crowd going on technical questions alone for more than an hour.

After the event we rode on motorcycles with a couple of people from the User Group leadership.  Even getting the chance to drive for a few blocks.

The Chennai SharePoint day,  started with a visit to the beach where we got hit with a wave.  Great attendance with over 100 attendees.  Apparently they’d only notified the attendees five days earlier to the Chennai .NET and IT Pro chapters in Chennai http://www.cnug.co.in .  The lead there has been running the group for 9 years!  We had a chance to sit down with the user group lead for lunch afterward.  The community was very developer heavy and hadn’t had much experience with SharePoint while a handful were currently working on SharePoint projects.  We met a number of MVPs across a number of technologies in the group leadership. 

The Bangalore SharePoint day had an amazing 300 show up for the user group meeting http://www.bdotnet.in.  This would be the largest user group meeting I’d ever been to, if I was there.  Unfortunately I had to leave, but Michael Noel presented my deck along with his.  Michael told me it went extremely well and got a number of contacts that we both plan to follow up with to help foster community in one of the largest centers of IT focused people in the world!  It’s exciting to meet

Our Decks from the event can be found here:

• Best Practices for SharePoint 2007 Architecture – Michael Noel
• Preparing for SharePoint 2010 – Joel Oleson

Q&A about our experience in India:

Did you do your sessions in English? If so, did anyone have any problems understanding?

Yes, we did our sessions in English.  All attendees in all our sessions were very well versed in English and were quite comfortable in asking questions.  We didn’t have any problem understanding them either, beyond a bit of getting past the accent in some cases.  Very intelligent and smart people with a deep development focus from what I saw.

Is Microsoft Technologies well understood in India?

Microsoft has been investing in India a lot in the past decade.  I remember about 8 years ago when Microsoft really started moving a lot of it’s operations to Bangalore.  It also started investing a lot more in schools and colleges.  The number of MVPs and community leadership that showed a deep technical knowledge was impressive for any country.  I understand the number of development centers that are now in India.  It was interesting to see the Who’s Who of American Silicon Valley by simply driving around and seeing various in sourced companies not just with call centers, but development centers and even operations centers for follow the sun scenarios.  At 5 in the morning we ran into a couple of IT guys that were getting off their American shift.  .NET and C# are well versed in the communities that we visited.  The wave of SharePoint experience and training appears to be on the cusp.  We found deep developers, but our experience varied when it came to pure SharePoint development.  In fact when we asked for business cards with the words SharePoint, we didn’t find any, but some development experience with SharePoint we found 30% in the more purist .NET community and 50-60% when mixing IT Pro and Devs.

In these cities did you find it hard to get a good hotel?

Nope.  Hotels were great.

How was the transportation?

Getting a car from the hotel to pick us up at the airport was easy, as is getting a prepaid car from the airport or hotel.  While you won’t see much traffic lights, transportation does flow.  I find it kind of flows like a river and the collective consience of the drivers keep the traffic moving with little interruption, assuming that horns don’t bother you.  Most Americans would have a problem driving here, not just because it’s the other side of the road, but because of the importance of the honking and lack of ‘rules and assumptions.

What else did you see?

After the SharePoint meetings we flew to Delhi and got a visited some amazing locations across India

Our favorites were in the Rajasthan area:

Karni Mata Rat Temple – looking for a culture shock this is the place to visit.  This Hindu temple has hundreds if not thousands of rats that scurry around waiting to be reincarnated into human form.  It was a wild experience to have the rats scurry over our feet and see a young girl studying without barely even noticing the rats around her.  Read more about it on National Geographic.

Jodhpur, the Mehrangarh Fort & Blue City – We thought the fort on the top of this mountain overlooking the blue city should be in the current 7 Wonders of the world.  I personally think it’s the name of the place and possibly it’s obscurity that kept it under the radar. It truly was amazing and I hope anyone who goes to India is able to see the fort along with the view.

Jaipur, the Amber fort and Pink city – in such a small area with such grand palaces, and multiple forts in such a small area complete with floating palaces, and elephants to take you around.  The mystery and magic of this place was incredible.  I found the women very beautiful with their silk and amazing lace and bead work.  It was different in Rajastan, being so close to Pakistan and Afghanistan.  Felt like a different world.  A few of the kids had these piercing green eyes.  It was suggested that it might be from Alexander the Great’s army.  The maharajas of the past had really built some amazing places.

Pictured: Amber Fort in Amer just outside of Jairpur. L-R: Michael Noel, Neo Farvashan, Joel Oleson – (me)

Outside of Rajasthan, the Taj Mahal was incredible.  Highly recommended, amazing this thing was built so long ago with LOVE as the driver. 

The actual city of Varanasi was quite chaotic, but the river and the gattes was an incredible experience.  Known as the most holy city for Hindu’s you could actually feel the importance of it by spending time along the river.  The holy river itself has is refreshing after a hot and humid day.  On the steps of the river you can see the faithful washing and swimming, enjoying the effects.  Not far you can also see fires burning the dead.  If that’s not enough culture shock, jump in and join the water buffalo and other followers in a dip.  The water has amazing soothing affect.

More Pictures of our trip…

From My Profile:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=148753&id=613898782&l=94cc5fa769

From Michael’s Profile:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=111858&id=719377913

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=111928&id=719377913

One of the most fascinating things from my recent webcast  was the interactive real time survey in the preparing for upgrade session.  With over 1000 registered and around 450 online at peak we had an incredible sampling.  I had a chance to digest these results and wanted to share this information.  It’s amazing how much you’d have to pay to get this kind of data. 

• By the way the next webcast is with Steve Walch, Notes Migration Expert on “Streamline your Migration of Complex Notes Applications” on Sep 1.
• Also don’t miss the Preparing for SharePoint 2010 whitepaper, Preparing for Upgrade of SharePoint 2010 deck and webcast archive and the post webcast Q&A blog

When do you plan to upgrade to SharePoint 2010?

Let’s take this first question…  An impressive 65% plan to upgrade in the first year!  I know the focus of my efforts around SharePoint and the community is around planning and upgrade.  You’ll see me and my efforts with Quest and the community on upgrade.  I want to make sure people are taking advantage of the technology.  The other parts that are impressive about this is most have NOT seen much of it beyond a video or two.  Lots of good buzz and a cutting edge group.

What is the size of your SharePoint Environment (in GB)?

This was a question I came up with.  I’m always curious to find the distribution of sizes of environments.  Very interesting to see the nearly equal distribution.  The important thing as well is most do know, or think that know.  That’s great.  Couple of good one’s here.  Nearly 22% of environments are less than 50GB and 16% more than a TB.  I think most Microsoft estimates are there are a TON of small environments.  When you look at environments at this scale, you can see at least those who would attend a preparing for 2010 talk would represent all sizes of environments with an emphasis on the larger ones, but definitely a wake up call that scale is important and it is definitely a reality.  Everyone is challenged with disk storage and scaling their environments from the person managing a single SharePoint box to the multi mega farms with TBs and TBs of info where SANs can’t provide storage fast enough and you find fabric managers.  Pretty cool to see the largest group at 250-1TB.  There are a ton of lessons to learn and to experience at the more than 100GB size of environment and the majority here definitely represents *REAL* SharePoint deployments.  No cracker jacks.   The other thing I find when walking through this list, the consultants are listing themselves with the 0-50GB bucket as well, so this represents some real experience as well.  Their day job isn’t with that small environment.  I hope people who build tools do read this, hey real environments are of all sizes, so make sure you test the really big ones, cause they are well represented.  A large sample data size needs to be more than 100GB.

Do you plan to move to SharePoint Server in SharePoint 2010?

What does this tell us?  Do WSS people not attend webcasts?  Is WSS overshadowed by MOSS/SharePoint Server.  Are people embarrassed to say they do WSS?  80+% Say they are already using SharePoint Server, MOSS, ala the Portal technology.  Amazing!  The answer to this question surprised me.  I was really interested in making sure the wording wasn’t confusing, and revised this question a couple of times to make sure those on previous versions understood the question.  Not that many PLAN to use WSS.  For partners building product this is an important answer, it tells us to focus on the enterprise deployments.  It tells us that people are paying for SharePoint and it really is Core Infrastructure and everyone needs to get use to it.

How many corporations or organizations were represented in this poll?

While this wasn’t a question, I sorted those that responded to the questions with the most responses copied the email addresses into their own worksheet, did a text to columns with the @ being a delimiter and then sorted the domains alphabetically, then ran a subtotals, copied visible cells and got a count.  I’m sure that little exercise is one of the most common functions in excel 🙂 (Still works in Excel 2010, but I did have to re-add the select visible cells buttons, one of my favorites.)  Enough of that.  The totals were at 287 unique domains from the 355 responses.  So that gives you an idea of how many unique organizations were represented.  To make this even more credible, 12 responses were from hotmail, 5 from yahoo.com and 6 from gmail.  So realistically there were very close to ~300 organizations represented in this poll.

Thomas Resing have recently been working on a SharePoint 2010 Adoption Survey…

I encourage you to take the poll to increase the relevancy… (Used with permission… results so far with 32 respondents)

So nearly half of those who answered the question have run the preupgradecheck, that’s pretty good.  When I first looked at this a few weeks ago it was at 30%.  As well the 64 bit question was much lower, so I’m glad to see we are in better shape.  The survey itself isn’t for financial gain.  This one gives the consultants insight into the challenges their customers will be facing and as we all try to anticipate the issues and adoption.

Jeremy Thake expert SharePoint Dev from Perth did an extensive survey to try to understand the tools that developers use.  You can see the results from his SharePoint implementation approach survey and results from the SharePointDevWiki.com.  While I wish I could have fixed up his admin toolset choices, the results are still quite interesting with a few aha moments.  Very useful information.  Thanks for sharing Jeremy, and thanks for lunch after the user group in Perth.  You guys are amazing.  I’ll host this time, my treat!

He’s currently looking for people to fill out his latest survey “SharePoint Application/Content Lifecycle Management.”

One of my favorites from his results is the RAM question for the dev environments.  I tell people you gotta have 4, and things won’t even start appropriately if you don’t give it 2GB.  My preference these days is 8GB which is impressive to see at 20%.

Surveys and Polls are great.  Thanks for contributing… These wouldn’t be worth anything if no one contributed.

Technet has so much going on all the times behind the scenes, sometimes it’s tough to know what’s new.  I was following @emilysc on twitter this morning when she announced the latest find!  There is a portal for SharePoint Governance on Technet, but this particular paper hasn’t yet made it to the list, I’m sure it will be featured soon enough.

@emilysc: New #SharePoint content published today: SharePoint Internet presence governance plan (white paper) http://bit.ly/VfZf4

I’ve been working with Nicola Young (congrats on the new one!), Jennifer Mason, and John Ross from SharePoint911.com (Congrats to Laura Rogers Author on End User SharePoint, and MSPress SharePoint Admin book fame who just accepted a job with SharePoint911.)  They did quite a bit on this paper, so I want to give them the credit (Nicola especially).  This is one of a collection of three papers, we’re still waiting for the portal one to publish.  So to recap here’s what we’ve got and what’s coming! (I’ll update the link when it’s live)

1. SharePoint Collaboration Governance Plan – An example plan for an organization that is focused on the collaboration side of SharePoint, not looking to replace their Intranet portal just yet and are focused on more of the out of the box features.
2. NEW!!! SharePoint Internet Presence Governance Plan – Plan for the WCM .COM type environment.  This is where you have authors and an internet site you’re trying to run with specific processes.  This sample itself is based on real samples used with the consultants at SharePoint911.com. (Just released!)
3. SharePoint Intranet Portal Governance Plan – an example enterprise with a three tiered application portal hosting, and collaboration environment integrated to provide a vanilla and custom service.  This mimic’s what I find in most mature enterprise SharePoint environments from an IT hosting perspective.  Coming soon!  For now refer to Sean Livingston’s Customization Policy whitepaper a definite authority on the topic.

Best of Existing Key Samples and Templates For Which You Have to Be Aware

Deployment Guide and Checklists – This checklist paint swatch is used by the best SharePoint Project Managers everywhere.  It’s an essential.

SharePoint Governance Plan (the original) – The original blank plan based on an actual MCS engagement.  This is where all this started.  Companies were looking for something filled out with a bit of actual choices and guidance.

As we prepare our environments for SharePoint 2010 to take advantage of new features and solutions, there is still much more we can do to so we can take advantage of the social features today.  You may have read the heated debate around whether SharePoint 2007 is social software or if it’s true enterprise 2.0 or read the various whitepapers that drill into the feature sets.  Have you stepped back and looked at your environment and asked… Did we turn on those knobs and switches?

When I hear about customer’s who have turned their SharePoint my sites into Facebook, Twitter (have you seen the free Tunnelpoint?), or Myspace.  I chuckle a little, but when I hear what they’ve done, I realize that it isn’t that much of a stretch.

Those who have deployed their 2007 just like they did their 2001 and their 2003 environment simply by upgrading it, or simply didn’t spend any time figuring out how to take advantage of their features may feel like their environment is FLAT or they are feeling the chaos of a flat environment. 

Here’s my description of what’s gone wrong…

1. You can’t find anything
2. You can’t tell who owns anything
3. You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old or what has changed
4. It’s all disconnected

There’s one word to describe it.  JUNK.  It’s a total mess.  It’s far from social, it’s ANTI-Social, and it’s that way not due to the software, but due to the deployment decisions or lack thereof.

I’m working with a customer who describes this environment and they say, SharePoint is missing the social features they need in SharePoint 2007.  I’ve told them, the problem isn’t with the software.  Sure there are more exciting features rumored and dozens of various partners like Newsgator, Telligent, Kwizcom, Tomoye, and SchemaLogic plus a ton more that have some cool enhancements, but have you looked at the core infrastructure and the core information architecture as well as how you’ve integrated the social features that are actually built right in the box?  Evaluate yourself against this quick list…  Also let me know what I’m missing or create your own as you continue to drive social features into your deployment.

Is Your SharePoint Environment Social Ready??

1. Is your environment Internet Accessible?  Is it easily accessible?  I find people that have both hard to access or require multiple logins and many hoops to jump through keeping them from effectively using the environment on the go, on site at a customer, or even remote device accessible like mobile and/or lightweight…  Complicated URLs, VPNs, and smart cards can destroy the usefulness of the SharePoint environment.  Security is their to protect the information, but if people can’t use it or create it, the usefulness goes away.  Many still use crazy server names for their URLs which make it difficult to remember.  Make sure the portals and URLs are short, and easy to remember, and if you are using internet accessible URLs they are again Short and easy to remember FQDNs and the alternate access mappings and security is again accessible and actually works.  This area is definitely one to get feedback on.  There’s some give and take here.  ISA or IAG may be a consideration if you need some added layers of security.  Don’t forget anti-virus checking as well.
2. Have you deployed My sites?  With both structured and unstructured environments, the context of the individual is very important.  As a person flows through the organization, it’s important to have that sense of place.  The my site is where not only the individual can store their most relevant information, but also out of context information and file sharing 
3. How rich are your User Profiles? Some people haven’t invested much in AD, and manager’s and colleagues and that sort of thing are simply non existent.  While all the information for that sort of thing is tied up in some HR system, you’re missing it by not importing it into SharePoint.  The richer the profile, the richer the people search, and the more likely people will use it for lookups and user directories.  Even if you don’t have all this, have you made it user editable and trained the users on how to leverage it, so they can leverage the features in their my sites?
4. Are you using SharePoint Search, Federated Search with People Search? Many are simply using the out of the box unconfigured search.  They haven’t setup the federated search capabilities that came in the infrastructure update, let alone the federated search displaying users in search results.  The people search capabilities will really help drive people into the my sites and profiles making what people contribute in those areas more relevant and help promote the people and their expertise based on their roles and projects.
5. Using Blogs & Wikis? The SharePoint blogs and wikis are very simple ways of including web 2.0 technology on the intranet.  They aren’t the best blogs or wikis out there, but when combined with the community kit, and when integrated with the my sites, the social interaction can be much richer.  I find team blogs really relevant.  The IT Group who manages the SharePoint environment should use a blog to show what they’ve been doing with the SharePoint environment and share stories about what they are troubleshooting and fixing.  Share the planned downtime, share links to the service pack you’re installing.  You’d be amazed who cares and how much more connected IT can get with the user base by simply sharing this information.  The SharePoint wiki along with the Enhanced Wiki Edition from the Community kit creates a whole new editing experience for users.  Wikis in SharePoint could use some training the first time to introduce a user to the versioning, linking, and so on, but once the user gets it, it’s amazing how different and dynamic a set of information can be.  Next time a group is working on working on a combined document have them try a wiki instead.
6. Enabled your Presence Integration with LCS or OCS (& Telephony) & Exchange for Out of Office? While simple and easy to enable (hey it’s on by default if the SIP address is lined up), the RTC, LCS, OCS integration of getting the simple presence integrated into SharePoint can make it easy to reach out and touch someone.  It saves a lot of time and effort when you search for someone and see their out of office on their my site or in the presence drop down.
7. Is your SharePoint deployment easy to navigate?  A bunch of team sites whether created on MOSS or WSS can be extremely flat and difficult to navigate if you haven’t setup a structure for 1) Search and 2) Browse.  The site directory alone does NOT solve this issue.  You need to have navigation that helps you get from site collection to site collection, and across departments and team sites.  How do you do this?  You setup an enterprise portal with enterprise search, and a lightweight navigation structure of departments, groups, business units… essentially a taxonomy that’s easy to navigate where you then can find the applicable applications, teams, documents, and has a mechanism where you can find what you need as it relates to both public and private/more secured data on that group or division.  This information architecture and taxonomy of web apps, site collections and sites is key to a successful deployment not only for scale, but discoverability and usability.  SharePoint out of the box doesn’t do this for you.  You need to actually configure and set this up and train those that own these properties on how to integrate with each other and roll up and aggregate into information portals.
8. Are you expiring sites or content? If you simply continue to use SharePoint without turning on some type of archiving at various levels, you are adding a lot of junk that will make it hard to use.  You need to keep the environment relevant.  Document Mangers need to expire documents, Site admins need to expire old lists and sites, farm admins need to archive and expire old site collections.
9. Are you using Tagging? Tagging is a term that’s overused and difficult to distinguish the old from the new.  Many don’t use the columns and content types to capture the most relevant information about their content.  Search and search properties could then expose that information as well as filtering on lists or content query web parts for aggregation across the site collection or even search webparts for pulling information based on topics.  Tag clouds are introduced with the free codeplex community kit for blogs, but it isn’t difficult to create tag clouds with content editor web parts or more advanced tag clouds with a little bit of code to aggregate the information at various levels.
10. Are you using webparts to keep your sites information dynamic?  People need to see what’s new, they need to see information that’s deep in the site aggregated and rolled up to the top.  They want to see interesting charts and reports.  These features like the content query web part, search web parts, but also easy to write web parts that expose information based on date can be easily written with no code using filters, or SharePoint designer, or using Quest webparts, or free enhanced discussions (very forum like) or a dozen other companies that put together aggregation features, charting, and so on.  As people add documents and list information the users of those sites shouldn’t have to be alerted to know something is new (but it is a nice feature), a newsfeed of sorts should be included on the homepage of the site to show content that’s been added.  My sites have web parts that show content that you’ve added, but are you using those features?  This is one area where it takes a bit of effort, not by the admin of the farm, but by the content owners.  They need to get creative in working with the designers to expose the information that’s nested and further down into the site to make it more exciting and interactive and sticky.  Yes, sticky.  That’s why people visit facebook.  They want to see what’s changed, who’s done what since they were last there.  It’s a very important piece of running a good site. 

Remember with any good SharePoint deployment, if you find gaps in your requirements, there are partners, and your platform is extensible.  Based on deployment type, you could include free social solutions from Codeplex to JQuery, to Community Kits and There are a TON of social SharePoint Partners (check out the Read Write Web article on 9 of these) as you really don’t have to wait to get these things going, and of course we all look forward to SharePoint 2010 announcements as they may relate to social at the SharePoint Conference!

My new whitepaper on Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today was just published.  It is based on the recent webcast and user group sessions I’ve been doing recently with a similar title.  It includes a lot more links to resources and includes rich screenshots and captures of the PreUpgradeCheck with more detailed background than I could cover in the one hour webcast session.

• Whitepaper: Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today
• Archived Webcast and Deck: Preparing for SharePoint 2010 Upgrade Today
• Q&A for the Webcast