Collabshow.com

A while back I thought about creating a list of top 100, but then I saw that Ian Morrish has been doing a good job on his SharePoint Internet Websites list and has actually taken thumbnails to build his own top 100 MOSS Sites list.  Rather than reinvent the wheel I decided to take a cut at sites from amongst his full list and more recent MOSS announcements, like Ferrari and the Cadbury… mmm.  It’s not that we don’t want to keep talking about Hawaiianair.com which by the way is still super cool, we need to have a quick global COOOL list we can refer to.  I tried to provide a sampling across industry, region of the world, and style.

(Note many of these sites have other systems integrated on the backend as well, navigation may take you to pages not served by SharePoint.  At a minimum I have verified MOSS “Pages libraries,” and IIS 6 Headers coming from response to the initial GET Request.)

Ferrari.com – Italian Auto

Cadbury.com Chocolate

ETIHAD AIRWAYS – Middle East

Kroger.com – US Grocery Store with commerce integration

Carlsberggroup.com – Carlsberg European Beer Brewer

Marines.mil – US Marines streaming video

WesternAustralia.com – Tourism – great search!

Orange County Florida Public Schools

(Designed for one million users! Including Orlando, FL)

Conservation.org – Conservation International

Energizer.com – Top recognized brand

If you happened to miss the report of top Intranet’s of 2009.  Six of the 10 winners used SharePoint in their deployments. I highly recommend reading the report.  Here’s some highlights from the report.  I was very impressed by the findings.  Great insights into ROI, scenarios, and usability.

Compliments: Jakob Nielsen‘s Alertbox, January 5, 2009

useit.com Alertbox Jan. 2009 Intranet Design Annual  

Summary:
”Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint.”

Congratulations to the winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009:

• Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
• BASF SE, the world’s leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
• COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
• Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
• Environmental Resources Management (ERM), one of the world’s leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
• HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
• Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
• L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
• McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Kudos to Intranets for providing jobs:

“One of the strongest trends over the years that we’ve run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.”

This area was very insightful… list of Intranet “best practices.”  What do you do with your intranet???  (List quoted from Jakob Neilson’s Intranet design.)

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies
• Intranet budgets and staffing

Note the summaries are available, but the PDF is $224.  I’d consider buying this, especially if you are struggling with your Intranet designs.

Beyond the User Groups in Europe and Egypt, I’m back on tour in the U.S. for the DC and Atlanta SharePoint Saturday before I go on my mandated June Paternal Leave.  Yep, my baby is due June 1st and I’ve committed to not traveling after Tech Ed (yep, I’ve got a SQL & SharePoint session) to July 1st when I fly out for NZ SharePoint Conference.  I’m now looking at India, Singapore, China? for something this fall possibly combined UG tour with Michael Noel.

I’ve committed to some events to put on your calendar.

Apr 16 – Birmingham, Alabama SharePoint User Group

Apr 18 – Atlanta SharePoint Saturday

Apr 23 – Comunidad SharePoint Mexico City (Darse de alta como usuario en el user group de la comunidad.)

Apr 29 – Richmond User Group Luncheon (Signup) / Hampton Roads User Group (details)

Apr 30 – Special UG session

May 2 – DC SharePoint Saturday

I love this Vanilla Ice reference:

Stop, Collaborate and Listen!

“SharePoint has rapidly become one of the most popular technology platforms for information workers through out New Zealand so it’s about time we all got together and shared our experiences and expertise as the community that we are.

This will be the New Zealand conference to learn about SharePoint 2007 with expert local and international speakers presenting on topics that will help you understand and succeed with your SharePoint implementations and add real value to your organization and businesses.

In addition to the session content you’ll have ample opportunities to network with your peers in the community and technical and industry experts including local and international Microsoft Most Valued Professionals and New Zealand’s top Certified Partners.

Don’t miss out on New Zealand’s biggest SharePoint event of the year! Come and join the excitement of the first dedicated SharePoint conference in New Zealand!”

I’ve committed to this group, and look forward to speaking at this amazing conference in Wellington on July 2nd and 3rd.

Register Today!

This event is sure to sell out so register early to secure your attendance.
Discounts are available for group books of 5 or more attendees. Details are on the Registration Page.

I hear there’s a problem these days of people saying…. I’ve got the governance doc, so I’m now good to deploy.  I’m now going to have a successful deployment.

Have I created a monster?  In my attempts at addressing the lack of planning and of awareness around designing a SharePoint service not just installing software, I find more and more are now realizing that “Governance” is something they were missing.  More than that it really that they were missing a service definition, missing an exec sponsor, missing roles and responsibilities.  Governance has become a buzzword, and the original definition is being lost despite my attempts at defining it as designing a service offering. 

Governance uses people, process and technology to define a service [offering], mitigate conflict within an organization [and across multiple organizations]. – Craig Roth, Burton Group

(I just added the offering to add more context and the multiple organizations piece to include extranets. -Joel)

Paul Culmsee (my Governance arch nemesis and friend) uses the word “assurance,” but I find that it lacks legs.  That word lives in the support world around optimization and SLAs, but lacks the comprehensiveness required in providing the describing the service and addressing the conflicting requirements that come from the business. I can’t do anything about the fact that Governance has become a buzzword.  (By the way, you have to look at the IBIS issue based mapping on the site definition debate encapsulated into a series on one best practice to rule them all.  Incredible work Paul!)

How do you address or prevent SharePoint Chaos? How do you address or prevent SharePoint Anarchy?  You address it by creating not just a document, but start by ensuring you are creating the relevant roles responsibilities and service offering that will ultimately allow you to achieve the ultimate goal of economies of scale to govern your deployment.  If you’re overwhelmed you MUST start with the checklist.  It simplifies this whole governance thing, and takes the thousands of planning content pages into a 30 tiny page deployment essentials checklist.  Use that as a tool when writing your plans.

So what documents do you need for a deployment?  Does it stop at Governance plan?  No. That’s where it all begins.  You know you want to design something that you have a vision for, now you can start planning.

TechNet and MSDN are on a continuous publishing model, maybe you should be too!  That’s one reason SharePoint documentation stinks!  It never ends.  You must continuously update and document your changes, let alone update your plans as the scope changes.  The service offering will change, and you need to know where you’re going. 

Plan, Deploy, Operate, Optimize

• Governance Plan – Defines the service offering, roles and responsibilities, vision/mission, high level technical and business requirements.  This needs to be clear and concise and is a living document.  Much of what is in here can be broken out including service definition, service management functions, change control processes, Metrics and measures, reporting requirements, etc… I’ve now got a good filled out Collaboration Governance Plan (Required)
• Planning Guide – Next level of detail around planning, the project manager show work with operations and the business to own this document.  Appendix should include links to the deployment project plans including timelines.
• Operations and Support Guide – Operations break down of roles and responsibilities to the task level.  This also includes detail on backup restore, troubleshooting which may be broken into multiple troubleshooting guides for Tier 1, 2, 3, etc…  Disaster Recovery may be broken out into its own document.
• Maintenance Guide – While this information may be part of the Operations guide, there are some common ongoing changes around disk optimization such as DBCC, Defrag, Reorganization of databases and information architecture structural changes.  This guide helps define the ongoing maintenance and frequencies and OLAs. (Optional)
• Security Guide – This document should include from authentication, authorization, permissions, hardening, information policies, penetration plans, OLAs with security team, ISA and firewall rules, IAG settings and plans.  Any recurring review processes for service reviews and testing (hotfixes, patching, service packs).  Also should include kerberos considerations, web parts, SSO, and so on.  Document Management systems may have guidance around data retention policies that get broken off into an information policy document.  Anti virus software and policies around desktop browser and OS requirements and levels. (Required)
• Development/Customization Guide – This should take what is outlined in the Governance Plan to a much more detailed level including break down on Dev –> Test –> Production.  Development team may have their own set of documents breaking down Developers vs. Testers including SCRUM models, and documentation around the projects
• Testing Guide – Along with the Development lifecycle the roles  of the test team and their SLAs and OLAs should clearly be defined.  This may fit into a Development Guide.  Outlining the test planning requirement and tools to be used might help to provide consistency.
• Communications Guide – This should include planned and unplanned downtime notification templates including policies and SLAs to be communicated around the service.  Is there a website for communication, where are the FAQs, training brown bags, community plans, how do you contact support?  Support should be involved in this.  If the IT organization is supporting the business by building solutions and identifying needs, these should be captured in an engagement plan.
• Monitoring Guide – Uptime SLAs, performance SLAs, and monitoring software to be used.  Synthetic transactions?  SCOM?
• Others? Third Party solution guides, Consulting engagement policies and processes…  How about a roadmap guide!  or a SharePoint Guide to the Guides.

As an Ops guy I use to HATE writing documentation.  No one read it, so why write it.  Ultimately as I look through these guides, most of it is simply capturing decisions that are made, and capturing the processes, technologies, and resources outlined for the service backed by SLAs and Metrics.  Are we succeeding?  These docs would help guide us.

The operations and troubleshooting guides as well are living documents that more clearly identify the support tiers and levels.  Do you need 1000 pages to execute?  Maybe, but probably not.  You simply need to capture the decisions being made and ensure the processes are optimized as the service matures from pilot to production and beyond.

Deployment is not over at launch!  While these docs may be required in some organizations to be flushed out over the first 3 months of a pilot, these should become living documents reviewed by the respective teams that are governed by them.  Don’t forget the requirements around optimization and verification post launch.

Some people may hate me for listing these not only because now they are really going to have to do more documentation, but others will praise there being a list.  Many, many, many consultants consider this list and their own custom lists to be proprietary and part of their SharePoint Practice.  If you sign up for SDPS, you’ll find it’s about identifying what information needs to be gathered to define the SharePoint service.  That’s what these guides are really about.  If seeing this list encourages you to hire smart/experienced consultants or those with experience to help you be successful, then I’ve done my job.  Not all of these documents may need to be completely flushed out at launch, but you can see the value in having answers around these areas prior.