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Forrester’s latest Wave for Enterprise Social software

Forrester has just published their latest research on Enterprise Social software systems. The Wave chart shown here indicates that Jive, IBM, NewsGator and Telligent lead the list of vendors. You can get the entire report at forrester.com.
In analyzing the top four leaders in the Enterprise Social Software space, Forrester says:

• Jive SBS: “… continues to drive to establish and lead “social business” as a new software category.”
• IBM Connections: “… continues to move fast and exploit early bets on social. The company is now actively integrating Connections with its broader portfolio — including its portal, content, and business intelligence product lines”
• Telligent Enterprise: “… maintains a razor-sharp focus on analytics, a platform designed from the ground up for extension, and a growing and impressive stable of partners.”
• NewsGator Social Sites 2.0: “…takes SharePoint’s social offering to higher levels through its close partnership with the software giant. “

SharePoint Implementation Checklist: Aligning People, Technology & Process

By Dux Raymond Sy
SharePoint adoption in the enterprise is growing at a rapid pace, but many organizations are still struggling to achieve the proper mix of “people,” “technology” and “process.” In the midst of just trying to figure out the technology side of SharePoint, many organizations overlook the people and process side of an implementation.
Pushed even further to the backburner are the “business value” considerations of SharePoint.
What is the purpose of implementing SharePoint in the first place?
How will SharePoint improve operations and drive overall business results?

Here’s a 30-point checklist that covers the business, people, technology and process components of a SharePoint implementation. Use this checklist to make sure that you have all of the correct elements in place during the planning phase of your SharePoint implementation which can apply to a brand new rollout, migration or even custom solution development. If you have already implemented SharePoint, you can use this list to uncover possible gaps and identify areas in need of improvement.

30-Point SharePoint Checklist

Business Drivers

• What are the quantifiable top 3-5 objectives of the implementation? This means defining the value and scope for which all other questions will be framed.
• Does the implementation have a sponsor from senior leadership that will champion the objectives mentioned above? Is there enough support at the right level to prevent starts/stops/restarts?
• Will the implementation be funded out of IT or through the departments or divisions receiving the technology? Are there other major stakeholders that can change scope?
• Is there a critical target date that cannot be missed? What resource costs will be involved to reach the target date? 

People

• Who will define and steer the SharePoint platform as a service? How will this implementation impact other stakeholders and sustain the direction/funding for the project?
• How many potential users will be using the system? Estimate by periods over time such as 200 Q1, 800 Q2, 5000 Q4, etc. to help project support resource needs.
• What support model does the company currently use (e.g. help desk, train power users, online knowledge bases, etc.)?
• How much excess capacity/budget is available for adding SharePoint to the current support mix? What is the resource bandwidth availability and required augmentation?
• Do you have IT professionals in Microsoft Windows Server, Web technologies, Microsoft SQL Server, e-mail, network load balancing, etc.? What additional training or augmentation might be needed?
• Do these IT professionals have sufficient bandwidth for the early peak of activity? Will they be able to sustain the system long-term? Do you need to add personnel for the peak of activity?
• Is organizational change a managed process? If so, is there bandwidth for promotion, training, etc., to make the implementation successful in the organization? Are additional contract resources needed to help with the rollout?
• How are IT policies enforced? More time might be needed to align security if enforcement mechanisms aren’t in place.
• Have you done a stakeholder analysis to understand the change effort? How much time will need to be spent to convince opponents of the implementation?

Technology

• Is your organization already running 64bit hardware/software in your data center? What possible hardware/software costs exist?
• Are your environments virtual and/or full hardware based? Will hardware need to be purchased if the farm needs to expand beyond projections?
• Is this implementation planned to offset current file storage? If so, what does current storage size look like in projection against SP storage (e.g. "we plan to move fileserver based storage to SP to take advantage of versioning and document/record management aspects and today we have 2TB of file shares which we want to condense to 1TB through use of this technology")?
• Thinking about the objectives, what would the number of page visits look like after one year? How many times a day would someone access the system and how many files/lists would they interact with? This projects the farm configuration.
• What SharePoint services are being projected to be used in the first year (Excel Services, PerformancePoint, InfoPath, Access Services, etc.)? This might increase the amount of support and training required.
• Is there sufficient storage and server capacity to support this implementation for at least one year (2-3 years would be preferable)?
• Is the Microsoft stack of products currently well used in the environment (Start-up, training, support costs)?
• If Microsoft Office is currently being used on the desktop, what version(s) are supported and will there be a desktop rollout component?
• Will there be non-Microsoft computing platforms used with this implementation (e.g. Mac, iPad, Android devices, non-Microsoft smart phones, etc.)? If so, how knowledgeable are your current development/branding resources in supporting multiple browsers (support, UI development and training costs)?

Process

• If this implementation is to enhance current processes, how stable and defined are those processes (how crisp will workflows or custom code be defined)?
• Has a gap analysis been done to map the processes to the technology to see if customization will be required? What is the potential amount of custom development?
• Is branding important for this implementation (look and feel customization)?
• Will this implementation support custom programming (multiple environments and lifecycle processes)?
• How does this implementation fit into your current data security and disaster recovery processes? Will you need additional offline storage and recovery?
• Will there be external company resources that will need to access this implementation (firewall and additional environments and security considerations)?
• Are there compliance regulations that must be met (SOx, HIPAA, etc.)? This can add additional levels of configuration complexity.
• Are there IT Audit requirements? Will there need to be additional storage for logs to support the detail required?

a “solution” means just that—a solution to a problem

After your SharePoint implementation is up and running, users start to discover its capabilities and to demand solutions to business problems. How do you help users solve business problems with In fact, many solutions can be built with no code, using browser-configured functionality of lists, libraries, and content types, along with SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, Access, Excel, and other Office client applications.
From my point of view, There are three “best practices”—that create a trifecta for success.

Self-Help

Much of SharePoint’s powerful functionality is easily accessible to end users through the browser-based UI, SharePoint Designer, InfoPath and Office clients. Just because it’s easily accessible does not, unfortunately, mean that it’s easy to figure out how to build a specific solution—such as a form or a workflow to support a business process.
Even fundamental components—lists, libraries, content types, and metadata (columns)—are not necessarily straightforward to end users, particularly as they are focused on addressing a yet-unsolved business problem with SharePoint.

I am not a fan of the following statement:
“We sent our users to a five-day course on SharePoint.”
I’m a MCT. So for me to say, “Do NOT train users to use SharePoint” may seem surprising.

I do believe that users need various levels of training on SharePoint—at least a fundamental understanding of some of the core components and concepts. But my experience is that it is not effective—or at least not efficient—to teach a new user “everything they need to know” about things like workflows and forms and the inner workings of SharePoint because, simply, it’s too much.
What’s more important, in my opinion, is that users see the potential of SharePoint as a business problem solver, and that they know where to go for help.

When a user needs to create a solution—a form with a workflow for example—they only need to know the steps for doing so with InfoPath and SharePoint Designer for a couple of minutes or an hour. It’s at that moment that you must have resources ready to help the user succeed in helping themselves.
Google and Bing are not the best answer. There’s a tsunami of information much of which is irrelevant to your specific business, poorly written, or inaccurate.

Point users to specific resources, including the Microsoft Office website and to other selected resources that you find accurate, helpful, and relevant.
I also recommend two specific sets of resources as an internal training and knowledge base. Fellow MVP Asif Rehmani’s SharePoint Videos provides hundreds of short video clips that are excellent at providing just-in-time guidance to specific SharePoint tasks, including and importantly SharePoint Designer and InfoPath. Another MVP, Rob Bogue, offers the SharePoint Shepherd resources which tend to be more “text-and-picture” (versus video) based, and which cover many of the core concepts and functionality.

Community

Your users are the best sources of knowledge about how to use SharePoint in your environment, to solve your problems. You are missing out on a golden opportunity if you don’t capture this resource from Day 1.
Create a discussion forum about SharePoint usage. Keep it focused on usage—have a separate forum for technical support. Spotlight your internal evangelists and success stories.
A build a library of solutions. Again I mean this in the broadest sense.
Find a way to collect the knowledge that your users build about using SharePoint in your environment. A wiki and a library where they can drop documentation about “How I built X” is a start. Create a gallery where templates and other solutions can be found.

Escalation

Above all, there needs to be someone—or a team of people—to whom SharePoint usage questions can be addressed.
Someone who really knows how to use SharePoint and the tools listed earlier—or at least someone who is capable of “figuring it out” on demand.
Ideally, this person is highly skilled with no-code development (browser, SPD, InfoPath and Office) and has a knack for business analysis—for eliciting real requirements.
Even more ideally, this person or team can drive the development of self-help resources and community, so that as your SharePoint implementation scales, you do not need to scale the escalation resource, but rather escalation needs start being filled by self-help and community.
Most ideally, the escalation resource ends up putting themselves out of business by effectively integrating their knowledge and experience into evolving self-help and community resources.
At several clients' locations, I’ve worked with the person in this role. Honestly, these people tend to be among the most vibrant and exciting people I work with.
They’re expert, enthusiastic, and deeply aware that SharePoint doesn’t really matter—the business matters. And that focus on business first means that business problems do get solved.

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Databases

There are three areas of changes - architecutre changes, new databases and new tables.
Architecture Changes
SharePoint 2007 stored all content in large tables (for example lists, site collects end etc were represented as a huge table), and the performance were affected by SQL Server locks, especially in the large collaborative projects, when a lot of people use the same content and SQL Server locked the table, so no one can work till person generated the lock release the content (SQL Server 2005 suffered from this very much, because its internal behavior tends to lock table when 2000+ items are selected). I posted several tips, explaining such behavior
Thus, you were limited with 2000 items in List and should use several Site Collections in case of large collaborative community.
SharePoint 2010 changes solved those issue - moving content from the singe tables into different tables. Such changes allows you to store million items in the lists
100 GB "recommendation" on the Content Database size is not an issue any longer.
New Databases
SharePoint Shared Services became deprecated in SharePoint 2010, and instead we have new Services architecture, where all services are independent from each other. Such architecture affected the way information and configuration are stored and each services has it's own database.
Previously, with SharePoint 2007 we had at least 6 databases for each installation

1. Central Administration - [SharePoint_AdminContent]
2. Configuration - [SharePoint_Config]
3. SSP - 3 databases for SSP settings, MySites, and Search
4. Web Application - custom database

With SharePoint 2010 model we still have Central Administration and other databases, but instead of point 3 we end up with the separate database for each Service, for example [AccessServices], [MetadataServices], [WebAnalyticsReporting] and etc. So, we can easity have 15 databases only for the simple SharePoint 2010 solution.
User Profiles use 3 databases: [Profiles] - for the actual profile content, [Syncronization] to keep configurations of the extenal data and [Social Tagging] to store tags and noted created by users
SharePoint Configuration Database Changes
There are several changes of the tables in the SharePoint Configuration database. The following tables have been added:

1.  AllFileFragments
2. AllListAux
3. AllListPlus
4. AllListUniqueFields
5. AllLookupRelationships
6. AllWebParts (Renamed from WebParts)
7. CustomActions
8. Resources
9. SharedAccessRequest
10. SiteDeletion
11. SolutionResourceUsageDaily
12. SolutionResourceUsageDailyOriginal
13. SolutionResourceUsageLog
14. SolutionResourceUsageLogWindowed
15. Solutions
16. WebsPlus

Removed Tables:

1. Categories
2. Image0x
3. WebCat

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Maintenance

1. New upgrade scenarios - SharePoint Server 2010 has several features that have been introduced that allow for upgrade scenarios to occur with little to no outages and at the same time allow for quicker upgrade windows. 
   The first feature is the use of read-only databases which was made available starting with Office SharePoint Server 2007 service pack 2. SharePoint Server 2010 now recognizes a content database has been made read-only from with-in SQL Server and will trim the UI as if all site collections were marked read-only. This allows users read access to the content while the upgrade takes place.
2. Patching improvements. The patch management UI and patch reporting cmdlet allow for the monitoring of patches throughout the farm. There are also patch status health rules that will alert an administrator to inconsistencies
3. Granular Backup/Restore from Central Administration (not only vis STSADM) – including recovery single document
4. Recover data from unattached content database - you don't need to attach content database backup to the SQL Server to recover data from there
5. Browse the content of a content database that is attached to a SQL server but not associated with SharePoint Server
6. Automatic Failover
7. Workflows are not Imported/Exported - when you export/import your Site  WorkFlows won't be included, you need to move them manually

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Lists

SharePoint 2010 introduces the following changes to the List:

• New events - WebAdding, WebProvisioning, ListAdding, ListAdded, ListDeleting, ListDeleted
• Site Collection events
• Synchronous "after" events to perform post-processing
• Custom error pages
• New property PSEventPropertiesBase to store the user name and token of the person who triggered the effective action
• New integrity constraints based on the lookup
• Projected Fields - fields from the parent which are referenced and displayed in the child list
• Max 50M items under the read scenario
• List query size threshold - return warning or exception of query result exceeds threshold number of records
• Threshold pre-set is 5000 items for the normal user and 20000 items for the Super User
• List Administrators are notified when lists exceed threshold
• List constraints - max 8kb of data per list item (excluding attachments), 6 projected fields on joins (except using the view fields)
• Columns can be flagged as UNIQUE (must be indexed)
• Columns can be validated using custom field or by other fields

MS3Arab Community Launch

I was honored to host the Ms3arab community at my company, the Egyptian Banking Institute, the launch was on 4th November at Microsoft Egypt, and the second gathering was at EBI yesterday, around 40 participants has attended this second gathering,

MS3Arab Co-Founders are:

· Dr.Ahmed Bahaa, Ph.D, MVP, and RD

· Mohamed Rafaat Samy, MVP.

· AymanEL-Hattab, MVP.

· Mohamed Bahaa, M.Sc.

· Mahmoud Ghoz.

· Shady Naguib

The coming sessions will be as follows:

• Sherief Talaat, MVP 24th November 2010 Windows PowerShell
• Ayman El-Hattab, MVP 29th December 2010 SharePoint2010, ECM
• Ahmed Bahaa, PH.D, MVP and RD Mohamed Samy, MVP 29th December 2010 Visual Studio Team System, AX Integration
• Mohamed Bahaa 26th January 2011 Microsoft Business Intelligence

What's new in SharePoint 2010 Sites

1. Role/Rule based Audience Targeting – added rules-based audiences, WSS groups and distribution list membership.
2. Sites are collection of pages - SharePoint 2010 sites became more page-focused rather than a collection a lists. Sites still contain the same list and libraries as previous versions of SharePoint, but the site is now a collection of pages.
3. Pages are optimized for Reading – all WCM pages are optimized for the reading, rather than for the writing, thus performance is increased significantly
4. Status updates and activity feeds of My Sites – SharePoint 2010 changes of My Site enhanced dramatically to be the social networking hub. One of such changes is ability to update your status, similar to Facebook. See the following screenshot
5. Social tagging - assignment of descriptor words or categories to that content.  There are two types of tagging, social tagging and expertise tagging.  Social tagging refers to content and adds metadata to content to describe what it is, what it contains, or what it does.  Expertise tagging is related to a person and describes the person, such as what they do, which projects they work on or what skills they have.  Where social tagging of content allows users to organically flex and grow a portal’s information architecture over time, expertise tagging helps build relationships and connections to other people in the organization.
6. Team blogs which allows multiple people to publish blog posts together
7. New Lists - Assets Library (list to share and manage rich media assets such as image, audio and video files) , External List (list whose data source is an Enterprise Entity)
8. Site templates are deprecated in SP2010. But, "Save Site as Template" will create a solution package with a .wsp file name extension
9. Improved performance and management of large lists.  List item limitation has been removed – 1 million items for 3 secs. Windows SharePoint Services "14" and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 apply a default query threshold of 5,000 items. Any custom code that relies on query result sets that can exceed this maximum will not behave as expected. Queries on lists consisting of more than 5,000 items that include non-indexed fields in their query conditions will also fail, because those queries must scan all rows in a list. You can increase this limit or enable the object model to override it on the Central Administration site (under Application Management, click Manage Web Applications, click General Settings, and then click Resource Throttling
10. Lists support external data, can return results as DataTable; support calculated field rule validation and no more even’t receivers

8 Things You Wanted to Know About SharePoint - From AIIM

 SharePoint is transforming the ECM landscape. With the release of SharePoint 2010, the already significant adoption rates initiated with MOSS will escalate. This e-book explores some of the issues associated with SharePoint implementations, particularly in the context of integration/competition with other ECM solutions.

•8 Way to Control Your SharePoint Infrastructure

•8 Things to Consider When it Comes to Getting Paper into SharePoint

•8 Things You Need to Know About Taxonomy, Metadata, and Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

•8 Features in SharePoint 2010 That Rock

•8 Reasons SharePoint Looks Like a True ECM System

•8 Ways to Make Things Easy for Your SharePoint Development Team

•8 Ways IT Politics Can Wreck a SharePoint Project

•8 Things You Need to Know About SharePoint Governance

•8 More Things You Need to Know About SharePoint
•8 Things to Consider when Implementing SharePoint with Another ECM Engine
•8 Ways to Use SharePoint for Social Computing
•8 Reasons You Should Consider Automatic Classification and Metadata Tagging in SharePoint
•8 Things to do to Make Content More Findable in SharePoint
•8 Ways SharePoint Helps in Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance
•8 Things to Consider When Selecting an Application to Scan or Capture into SharePoint
•8 Things You Should Know About Transactional Processing in SharePoint

Productivity Hub 2010 - Training for End-Users

Microsoft has developed the Productivity Hub to help support your ongoing end user training efforts.
The Hub is a SharePoint Server site collection for 2007 and 2010 that serves as a learning community and is fully customizable. It provides a central place for your training efforts, and includes training content from Microsoft’s core products. Microsoft also provides ongoing and updated content packs.

The Hub uses SharePoint Server’s social networking capabilities, such as blogs and discussion groups. In addition, it offers the Coach program, a change management feature to help you train end users to self-help, reducing the burden on your training and IT staff. The Coach program impacts productivity in a collaborative and positive way.

The 2007 Hub contains 2007 content only (v2) with 2010 content added in v3 (to be released in June 2010). You can also add 2010 content packages to your current Hub. Watch for more document on migration from your 2007 Hub to your 2010 Hub.

What the Productivity Hub is:

•  Format: Pre-loaded SharePoint site collection, optimized for Web 2.0 functionality and easily deployed within SharePoint Server 2007 or SharePoint 2010 environment, depending on version
•  Content: Convenient end user productivity training in a variety of formats (documents, videos, podcasts, etc.). Receive free quarterly updates of content that you will learn about through the Productivity blog.
•  Blog: The Productivity blog offers tips and tricks for end user productivity. Use it as is, or your training staff can use the posts as their own to help them get started in running an internal blog.
•  Train the trainer: Includes IT/Manager section to aid with deployment of the site collection, and guidance to develop the Coach program
• Products: Office 2007 and Office 2010 (including SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint 2010), Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, Project, Visio, Live Meeting, and Communicator

You can also download additional content packages that expand the training materials you can make available through the Hub.

Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint Now Available

http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/protection-for-sharepoint/en/us/default.aspx


Forefront Protection 2010 for SharePoint is now available for download. As the next generation of Forefront Security for SharePoint, this product helps prevent users from uploading or downloading documents containing malware, out-of-policy content, or sensitive information to SharePoint libraries, uses multiple anti-malware scanning engines from industry-leading security partners to provide comprehensive protection against the latest threats, and integrates with SharePoint technologies to provide high performance, easily customized protection optimized for SharePoint collaboration environments.

SharePoint 2010 & Office 2010 Launch date on May 12th, 2010

Watch Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announce the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 11 a.m
After a long time of waiting, SharePoint 2010 will be released.
http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/proof/pages/2010-launch-events.aspx#fbid=Oykvn5mGI-9

Meeting SharePoint Experts @Tech.Ed 2010

Yesterday, I was so happy to meet two of the top SharePoint experts in the world, Joel and Noel,
I am attending the first Tech.Ed in the Middle East which is now in Dubai

SharePoint 2010 Demonstration Virtual Machine (Beta) - NOW

This download contains a two Virtual Machine set for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0c51819b-3d40-435c-a103-a5481fe0a0d2&displaylang=en

SharePoint Community Forums - My 1000 posts

I am very happy that I have reached the 1000 posts in the Microsoft SharePoint Forums
Achieving 340 answers out of 1000 means 34% of my posts have been marked as answers, for me it is great. In 5 months period of time this was a challenge.

I have started to be involved in these forums just to help and to be a part of the SharePoint Community; this helps me a lot more than I helped others.

I wish I could continue with this spirit.

Microsoft 2010 Beta Product Keys

Most application products of Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta can be activated using MAK (Multiple Activation Key) product key, including Office Professional Plus 2010, which is a suite of Office 2010 which intends for volume licensing customers. Best of all, the “generic” MAK product key (which is the same for every downloaders) can be used to activate unlimited copy of Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta, Visio Premium 2010 Beta, Project Professional 2010 Beta, and SharePoint Server 2010 Beta.


Here’s the list of all MAK product keys for Office 2010 Beta and SharePoint 2010 Beta or their related apps.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta Product Key
7XD2X-JWJ94-BCHBW-W9WXP-J2WPT
2PWHY-KT4X6-96PYW-XQR7V-HW2W9
YF79C-7Y4B4-PGM89-6BKGJ-46PBT
PYMDW-8DFY2-Y68BB-XHDGD-CT443

Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 Beta Product Key
MQQGY-6JQ3R-9M89C-F9VVT-VCCKT

Microsoft Project Professional 2010 Beta Product Key
TQHBF-DY3KV-KMFRM-P43FK-3M4DD

Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta Product Key
HRPDM-9C238-7YD9V-DBBR7-QB6BQ

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Beta Product Key
PKXTJ-DCM9D-6MM3V-G86P8-MJ8CY

Microsoft SharePoint Server for Internet Sites Enterprise 2010 Beta Product Key
BV7VC-RMR6B-26P6Y-BTQDG-DX2KQ

Live Online SharePoint Saturday EMEA - FREE

http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/emea/default.aspx

SharePoint - Setup, Upgrade, Administration and Operation Forum