Business Process Automation involves the conversion of manual, paper-based processes to an electronic system that removes most of their inherent lag times, variability and human errors. Most people already understand the benefits of automation, but they may not know what types of processes can be automated – or how to automate them. 

In many cases, businesses can achieve a great deal of automation with the software they’re already using. This is where SharePoint and Office 365 come into play. In this blog, we’ll begin by discussing some of the simpler automation processes and progress to more complex solutions.

Surveys and Data Collection 

We’re often asked to collect information from colleagues, team members and vendors, and that information may range from lunch orders to preferred meeting times. Collection is always a hassle. With manual and paper-based processes, someone’s got to type the survey, print multiple copies and drop them off on everyone’s desks. They also have to keep a written list of responders, so they know who has yet to reply. Email has improved this process, but manual data collection still requires a manual tally. 

Fortunately, survey data can easily be captured and stored in a single SharePoint list. SharePoint and Office 365 also allow for automatic sorting, filtering and email notifications. Depending on the number of people involved and complexity of your survey, you might be able to accomplish this traditionally time-consuming task in under an hour. 

Time Tracking 

Enterprises often struggle to collect time-based information from their employees. This type of data is the lifeblood of a company, yet it’s often managed manually with Excel spreadsheets or even on paper. To make this process easier and more reliable, SharePoint includes datasheet capabilities in every list. You can build custom forms to collect specific content from employees’ timesheets – when they clock in or log in, how long they work, when they leave and more. To ensure timely submission, SharePoint’s Workflows function can also remind employees that their timesheets are soon to be due. 

The automation of time tracking process ranges from simple to extremely complex, depending upon the types of data you need to collect and the rules governing the relevant business processes. The more requirements you can list for your automated process, the better the resulting solution will be. 

Specialized Document Tracking 

Document approval is one of the most commonly automated business processes. Instead of sending emails with attachments to several parties – and then nagging them to reply – you can click a button and let SharePoint handle it all for you. 

Once you’ve completed your document and need feedback or approval, you simply select the appropriate Workflow from the document library in SharePoint. That Workflow will have been pre-programmed to send the right types of documents, email instructions and links to the appropriate personnel. Those personnel are then reminded of their tasks at regular intervals until they’re completed. Changes, notes and updates are kept in one location for review, and all revisions and versions are consolidated into a clean, easy-to-edit presentation. 

Employee Onboarding 

Given their focus on documents, forms and data collection, human resources departments are often the heaviest SharePoint users. Their multi-step, multifaceted projects can also be more complex than the simpler tasks other departments need to perform. 

One example is employee onboarding, a process that typically requires the hiring manager, HR personnel and potential new hire to fill out several forms.  These forms also need to be completed during several stages of the hiring and onboarding processes, and they all require multiple parties to be notified when their tasks need completion.

 SharePoint really shines here because it allows non-technical owners – the HR department – to view document statuses, review submitted materials and learn which tasks have yet to be completed. With the right manipulation of permissions and access, all of this information can be made available to other interested stakeholders, as well. By the end of the onboarding process, HR has a history of all the information collected from specific personnel, as well as when it was received through SharePoint – not email. 

Project Management 

Getting a little more complex still, project management tends to involve several layers of requirements based on company or PM policies. As with other complex tasks, it’s important to stop and think about those requirements before you beginning automating the process. Just like building a house, it’s much easier to make changes in the blueprint stage than when you’ve already begun construction. In most cases, back-to-front thinking is best. Determine which data you’ll need to report on each day, week, month, quarter and year, and then plan how you’re going to collect, calculate and aggregate that data once the process has been automated. Every company and every solution is different, but the following list of considerations will guide the process of project management automation:

• Project initiation: Resources, budgeting, vision alignment and kickoff.
• Information search and storage: Creating suitable locations and search functions for pertinent data.
• Accessibility: What parties inside and outside of your organization can view specific types of data?
• Planning: How can you use traditional project management tools to connect to a widely accessible location for updates and information?
• Communication: What alternatives to email will work for communicating and storing information about projects, problems, event calendars and tasks?
• Budgeting: Providing ongoing access to financial personnel.
• Closeout and Archive: Storing complete project data in an accessible, read-only location 

Portfolio Management 

SharePoint will streamline all of the aforementioned processes, but they can also be managed with a combination of Excel, Word, email and Microsoft Project – applications which simply produce content. Portfolio management, on the other hand, is a major undertaking which requires process, usability and reporting and really showcases the extensive capabilities of SharePoint and Office 365. 

Even so, portfolio management doesn’t necessarily require you or an outside consultant to write new code. It’s really all about the metadata and management that surface from your projects. If your projects are your trees, so to speak, the portfolio is your forest. If you can’t see the forest through the trees, you’ll run into problems. This applies to tentative projects, as well, which may include internal initiatives and external tasks for your customers. Overall, some governing set of rules and information has to sit above all of your projects to provide the business intelligence and data to make good decisions. 

Of course, good decisions require accurate, pertinent information. Automated portfolio management probably won’t automate these decisions, but it will help you to gather and present that information in a clear, non-subjective manner. For example, automatically identifying the availability of necessary resources allows you to determine the viability, timeframe and cost of certain projects. Automation may also help to compare individual projects to your organization’s overall objectives, possibly with the application of a weighted value. Higher value projects would then receive priority in the form of earlier start dates and greater resource allocation. 

All in all, SharePoint and its associated platforms can help you collect and sift through a variety of details before you make critical business decisions. In fact, the availability and clean presentation of those details may lead you to think harder about each of those decisions. Major projects often require significant assessments and stakeholder interviews to get right, but careful planning yields the best results. 

SharePoint is a powerful tool for business process automation, but it takes an experienced team to fully leverage its capabilities. To implement faster, more efficient professes in your enterprise, consider our Professional SharePoint Consulting and Development services.

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According to a recent report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the Computer and Information Technology industries is projected to grow by 12.5 percent over the next 10 years. Still, finding, hiring and retaining top software development talent is one of the biggest challenges facing the IT staffing industry. Quality candidates are tough to find, especially when they’re needed to perform specialized tasks. Based on our experience, the following 5 tips will help you to find and retain these elusive, high-quality employees.

1. Create accurate, specific job descriptions by understanding the position’s most critical skills and qualities.

Timlin has written and reviewed thousands of resumes, and we’ve worked with more than a few customers who needed to recruit niche talent. Unfortunately, we’ve often seen clients draft job descriptions (JDs) that actually limit the talent they find. In order to attract the best technical candidates, you need a job description that accurately depicts the key qualities for success.

This does not mean you should solely solicit individuals with 12+ years of .NET experience or decades-long IT backgrounds. In fact, the sharp engineer with a few years of solid experience is often a better hire. To keep these candidates in the running, make sure your JD focuses more on key traits and qualitative experiences, rather than arbitrary numbers.

1. Network, network, network! To find top technical talent in today’s market, it’s not enough to use old fashioned job boards, online posts and advertisements. Those media can still be useful for IT staffing, but it’s far more important for your executives, recruiters, managers and technical teams to continuously network. You’re selling yourself to prospects just as much as they’re selling themselves to you, and you need to effectively hype your job openings, culture and the benefits of a long-term career at your company.

What’s more, you need to network whether you have open positions or not. You never know when an important player is going to leave, and growth periods always lead to the creation of new, critical positions. To keep quality candidates flowing through your doors, you need to create a consistent buzz about working for your organization.

1. During interviews, look for a balance between technical expertise, people skills and business acumen. Whether we’re interviewing for a customer-facing or internal development role, we balance our interviews between technical skills and “soft” skills – the skills needed to effectively communicate, adapt and solve problems in a team setting. 

In assessing the technical skillset, it’s important to engage third-party resources who can put a candidate through a solid screening process. Credentials and experience are important, of course, but we want to observe a candidate’s software skills firsthand. HR teams rarely understand technology well enough to do such a high-level screen. 

As for the soft skills, it’s likewise important to “screen” a candidate with probing questions and complex scenarios. There’s rarely one right way to handle a situation, but a candidate’s thought processes and communication skills within an interview can indicate how they’ll perform on your team.

1. Sell the candidate on the job and culture. A solid company culture is critical to attracting the type of talent you want to stick around for the long haul. And, while casual Fridays and company outings can help to foster a great culture, they’re not enough. Top technical performers want to work with other talented individuals, and they want to be able to creatively address new challenges on an ongoing basis. Simply put, the best candidates have options, and you need to let them know why working for your company is in their best interests.

1. Use an agile hiring process. During a typical hiring process, senior management approves a new requisition based on company growth or the need to replace an existing employee. A hiring manager or HR professional writes a job description, and the recruiting process begins.

However, the hiring manager can modify that description once candidates begin to apply. These modifications may be minor, but in some cases an applicant will impress upon the manager the need to think differently about the role they’re trying to fill. A well-qualified candidate that doesn’t quite match the original JD may even be a great fit for a new position – one that combines two or more unfilled roles. 

Overall, this type of fluid hiring process is a positive for companies with niche IT staffing needs. It may frustrate your HR team, but they need to understand that everything is subject to change; that the IT industry moves quickly; and that your hiring process must be agile enough to adapt.

Hopefully these tips will help as you seek new IT personnel for your organization. To gain a leg up on the competition – and to ensure you attract top-quality candidates – consider us for your IT staffing needs.

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In talking with clients and partners about the options for organizations moving to the cloud, there has been some confusion as to what the different offerings are and what they mean.  The focus of this post is to point out a misconception.  This may be obvious for some, but it has become clear that the use of the term “Cloud” has generated so much enthusiasm and marketing hype that it’s used very generically.  I get the terminology mixed up sometimes as well. 

Cloud / Private Cloud vs Cloud Services 

Since I operate in the Microsoft ecosystem, it is easier to use them as the example.  Microsoft’s Azure platform offers a lot of services within this framework.  When talking with potential customers, many immediately think of the cloud as the place to move all their physical servers and infrastructure (or at least most of them), replacing them with virtual servers in the cloud.  They price this out and then compare that to all the marketing materials for cloud-based services they see advertised and think something is amiss.  They wonder why this is still pretty expensive.  There are two problems here: 

1. Moving all your physical or virtual machines to an identical hosted environment in the cloud is not what most people are doing to take advantage of the cloud. (Although this is a very viable and often desirable approach for many organizations for some of their infrastructure)
2. The full cost analysis is not being performed to understand what on premise costs really are, but that isn’t the focus of this article 

The real misunderstanding is that the cost-savings and value are derived from replacing those servers and the software installed on them with cloud services (not servers) meant to duplicate this functionality via a shared service, not just a virtual machine.  For example, let’s assume you run Exchange servers, a Lync Server, SharePoint Servers, a Phone System, use GoToMeeting accounts for everyone, buy Office Client, run a bunch of SQL Servers and applications, and more, all internally on physical or virtual machines.  Simply moving those machines to the cloud isn’t where the magic happens.  The savings and headaches are removed when you migrate all the functionality of those applications to their equivalent multi-tenant solutions in the cloud like Office 365, and let Microsoft manage all the infrastructure.  You are now free to spend your resources on making those applications work better for your organization, instead of spending 75% of the costs just keeping the servers running and patched.  You stop paying for software, maintenance, assurance, technical refreshes, and just start paying for features, functionality, and services, not virtual machines. 

As I mentioned before, this may seem obvious to many folks who have gone down the path, but this confusion has come up enough times to warrant a quick explanation of what moving to the cloud is really all about:  It’s what didn’t take off 15 years ago:  “Software as a Service”.  Everything as a service these days. 

The next time you talk to someone about moving to the cloud, or using the cloud, make sure you understand what they are talking about.  Cloud infrastructure, Private Cloud or cloud-based services.

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As discussed in Part 2:  Building a Governance Plan that works for YOU, the most successful governance plans are those that achieve the right blend of control vs freedom to meet your business requirements without inhibiting productivity.  In this installment, we will examine the details of building out your governance plan in a way that meets your business requirements while striking the balance that ensures a successful adoption.

Understand Your Business Content

By now you should have formed your governance committee.  Representatives on that team have in-depth knowledge of your business, its processes and collateral.  The next step is defining your information architecture and that requires an understanding of your business content, how it needs to be organized, presented, secured, managed, who the content owners are and any regulatory compliance or information rights management needs that surround it.

For each department or team in the organization, you will identify the types of content they work with in their day to day activities.  This includes content that they produce and share with others and content that others share with them.  Throughout these discussions you will begin to lay out the structure of your sites and a picture of what types of permissions and access will be permitted or required based on answers to questions like the following:

It is helpful to establish a baseline plan for taxonomy and tagging during your Information architecture discovery discussions.  Taxonomies are used to classify or “tag” your organization’s content. Identify your most critical content; and at a minimum address these 2 important questions:  “What is the Risk of Corporate Exposure?” and “What are the Availability Requirements?”  For instance, it may be enough to begin by identifying “internal”, “need to know – external” and “public” content.  Even this little piece of information allows you to begin to identify what sites this content can live in, who owns the content, permissions around it and whether it should fall under information rights management policies.

Information gathered in these discussions allows you to determine the availability and security needs for all business content as well as its classification.   Now that you have gone through this cataloging exercise, you can identify which site types this content will live in; specifically where it can live and where it must not live.

Microsoft has published a guideline for determining governance Levels needed based on site type.  While this is helpful to use as a guide, it is not always enough.  For instance, though My Sites are typically lightly governed, your governance plan will specify the types of content that should not be shared in those sites.

Service Level Agreements

Quite often you will find a direct correlation between the level of governance needed and the SLA (Service Level Agreement) needs around availability.  For instance, personal sites and community sites typically require less governance, and have lower availability needs, whereas department sites with information critical to running the business, as well as the intranet home pages that communicate critical information across the organization will have tighter governance and a more secure SLA that guarantees higher availability.  Content shared outside of your organization with business partners or vendors may have a more stringent SLA as well due to the need for that communication mechanism to be of higher availability.

IT governance provides the details needed to guarantee the service level agreements identified for your different business content are met.  Topics that are typically covered are:

• Policies around problem resolution through a support team i.e. Helpdesk
• Backup and restore policies and disaster recovery plans – these differ according to the SLAs you offer for each site type
• Update schedules and code deployment processes – code review, test, signoff
• Quotas
• Life Cycle Policies – How will you handle stale or inactive sites?

Site Management Policies

Each site will have a site owner who is responsible and accountable for all content published in their site.  Site Management Policies should be established that specify how tightly controlled the site or site collection is and indicates the rights given to the site owner.  For instance:

• Can they grant permissions to other users?
• Can they create and delete subsites?
• Can they add apps? – Is there an approval process and if so who governs that?
• Can they create pages, lists, libraries, site columns, content types?
• Can they create SharePoint groups and are they required to be based on active directory groups?
• Can they modify permissions of their sites or is approval required?

Site Customizations

SharePoint is a highly customizable platform and the number of 3rd party applications that can be used to augment the out of the box functionality grows every day.  In addition, tools like SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio can be used to build customizations and deploy them to your sites and site collections; this can include Branding and custom Master Pages, or full-fledged custom code.  Further, code can be placed directly in SharePoint pages, and the list of ways to customize your sites goes on.

Your governance plan should include details on which types of customizations you will support in your organization, any approval processes required and relevant change management policies.  For instance, where are these customizations developed and tested prior to deployment in your production environment?  A schedule can also be included for production update windows that support these activities.

In Summary

There are a fair number of topics that should be covered in your governance plan, but not all of these topics require paragraphs of information.  The best and most adopted governance plans are concise, to the point and under 3 pages long.  It’s important to remember that unless you can think of a reason why something should be governed, it likely shouldn’t be governed.  Contact us for help with your governance plan!

Tune in next for Part 4:  Training, Adoption & Measuring the Success of your Governance Plan.

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Pencil me in as one of the original skeptics of SharePoint Online.  It wasn’t very good.  As a person and company dedicated to Microsoft Collaboration software services and support, I really wanted to like it.  Maybe that jaded my thoughts to the onslaught of cloud services to follow, but all that means is that if Microsoft could convert me, they have done some pretty amazing things.  They have.

At Timlin we eat our own dogfood.  A term in the software world referring to people, organizations, and teams that use the software or products they build, support, service, and consult on to run their own businesses.  We use Office 365 across the board to run our own services business.  This includes an Intranet, team sites, communities, socialization, document management, search, and even some deeper usage as well:  Project Server Online with Project Lite for resource planning, timesheets, and connected systems to our Project Management site collection containing our home-grown SharePoint project management capabilities.  We use this system entirely for our SharePoint and Office 365 Managed Services for ticketing, external customer access, reporting, and business process automation with workflows.  The cherry on top is Power BI connected to this information to visualize resource management, project costing, and overall company health via additional data source connections to QuickBooks Online.  WOW!

The key for us is that if we were required to have on-premises installations, we would be shut out of these technologies due to the steep investment of resources required to get us there.

Here’s my real secret though, the value is in the integration.  Microsoft is doing a substantial job of adapting traditional tools and platforms into pieces of a puzzle that form together in different ways to create a very specialized solution for us (and you).  A recent example of this is the upcoming Skype for Business enhancements.  As a Microsoft partner and avid user of Office 365 we worked our way into this program, soon to be released as part of the E5 license.  We had been using Skype for IM, video calls, screen-sharing and intra-team calling, and still relying on external tools and phones for traditional conference and voice calls.  This piece of the puzzle allowed us to outfit the entire team with real phone numbers and replace our existing conference calling reliance on external phone systems (which can be costly) in an afternoon.  It’s an added capability to an already familiar application.  It required no training and minimal configuration.  Now we use it every day.

To continue the compelling argument, the integration creates new capabilities that would be very difficult to obtain with discreet applications.  Office Graph / Delve and the machine-learning search used to surface information most important to you needs to have access to a full index of content.  Power BI needs data sources to connect and create visually appealing business intelligence.  The new Outlook web application with the search connectivity to groups, people, and tasks are all there because the data that drives it lives in a single ecosystem.  The inter-connectivity creates the possibilities, and those possibilities have become reality. 

The total has now exceeded the sum of the parts, and that’s when innovation and transformation happen.  As a company, we at Timlin have been able to use this technology to achieve business goals that were unattainable with these tools until now.  The present is bright and the future is blinding.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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It dawned on me recently that everything “as a service” has turned these times in to the “Age of the Monthly Fee”.  My dad always taught me not to borrow money to buy things, learn to save up to buy it outright.  Don’t pay interest or “owe” people.  My dad was very successful and has never been a payment buyer.

This made me think a little more about that philosophy relative to how our personal and business lives run on a daily basis in 2015.  Could my Dad start and run his business successfully and competitively with that same philosophy right now?  I don’t think so.  The competitive edge with cloud, monthly services, and access to technology is too great to overcome.

Consumers have been on the “As a Service” train for a while now. Leasing cars, cable bills, cell phone bills, Netflix, gym memberships.  The goal of the business is to get you on the hook and keep you there.  The name of the game is Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).  It is highly valued and sought  after by many modern businesses.  It offers predictability in their sales revenue and doesn’t require constant reselling to maintain the momentum.

The best part is if they can make it hard to cancel then they have a much higher opportunity to keep that MRR even if you’re an unhappy or at least apathetic customer.  I had the same 3 DVD rentals at my house for 14 months while paying for Netflix.  I only used it for streaming.  What does that tell you?  The good news is Netflix made it very easy to downgrade my subscription, unlike the gym that shames you like Game of Thrones if you want to cancel.  And that’s the rub.  Which services still care about you as a customer?  Make sure you know what you’re getting into, and most importantly, how to get out of it if you don’t like or it doesn’t work.  And know how to get your data back.  How will my cloud or Managed Services provider handle the situation if I want to cancel.  If they have integrity then they will help you.  Try to figure this out first.

I’m not on my soapbox here, we offer a monthly service for SharePoint support with a fixed price.  This is not about a positive or negative viewpoint, but more about the changing trends and philosophies that have shifted and our relative “newness” to trying to figure it all out.  It was not that long ago that it would be unheard of to outsource your datacenter to a 3rd party.  Rent your copy of Microsoft Office or instance of Project Server?  Personally, these services have allowed me and our small business to have access to capabilities that would been out of reach as much as 5 years ago.  Wow. 

On the flipside, I have found myself making monthly payments on services that I don’t really use much anymore, or don’t really use effectively.  One of my Dad’s points was that payment buying makes you feel like you can afford something that you might not actually be able to, but it also makes the barrier to the initial purchase so much smaller that you might buy and keep services you don’t really need while you continue to pay for them.

My main point is that we recognize what’s happening, evaluate your specific situation for value, ensure the companies you deal with are honest and reputable, and do the math on it.  Know your exit strategy, and monitor it for ongoing value at regular intervals.

-Ryan

There have already been plenty of posts on the specifics of Microsoft changing the policy on unlimited storage in OneDrive for some products.  I’m not here to go through the SKUs and limitations, but just wanted to tell you my thoughts and let you know that I’d like to hear any feedback from you as well.  

In my experience I was unable to effectively use the storage so I stopped trying to leverage OneDrive for more than standard business use (Document collaboration, storage, etc.)  I abandoned trying to store photos and videos due to the bandwidth constraints.  At the time I was annoyed.

From my understading, Microsoft made this change because some small number of people were dilligent enough to store 75+ TB of video, music, etc.  Part of me says that these “bad apples” as they are being referred to have ruined it for the rest of us.  The other part of me is pointing out that the service offered unlimited storage.  Does that mean that when people take advantage of your offering that you take it away from them?  Is it really abuse if you marketed it, offered it, and sold it?  

I get annoyed when organizations use a marketing tactic to sell a product and then won’t back it up when people use it as advertised.  The reality is that they made it hard to use a TB or more, and never expected anyone (or many) to really take advantage, but the marketing of unlimited helped get a lot of market share in the past year.  

What bothers me the most about this announcement is the timing.  Microsoft has been doing a lot of really good business lately.  After some years of taking a beating, their cloud and mobility platforms (Office 365, Windows 10, Surface Pro / Book, etc) have been getting REALLY good.  Between Gartner’s magic quadrant success, independent gushing, and sales growth, Google and Apple are not the bells of the ball anymore.  So why give yourself a black eye right when you have clawed your way back to the top.  Let this slide for a while until you have put the final nail in the coffin of your cloud competitors.  It’s only been a year, what’s one more?

I’d love to hear what you think.

Thanks,

-Ryan

As discussed in “Part 1:  What the heck is a SharePoint Governance Plan?” a successful governance plan is one that allows the platform to be leveraged in an organized and thoughtful way, based on an understanding of the business information and requirements, environments and processes that work best with the team members in your organization.  In this post, we will walk through the steps involved in developing a governance plan that is tailored to your organization.

Form a Governance Committee

A governance committee is a group of people from across your company who understand the needs and inner-workings of your organization and works together to build your governance plan.

Typically, this committee consists of the following types of people:

• Executive stakeholders who hold the corporate vision
• Department stakeholders from representative business Units. For example: human resources, finance, legal, research, and of course IT
• Compliance and information security representatives who can represent any mandated compliance over your content based upon your business and associated regulatory control. For example PCI, HIPAA and FedRAMP

Together, this combination of members represents an understanding of your business content, how it is used, its logical groupings, and any related security or regulation and control it requires.

It’s important to remember that even if you are not in a business that falls under regulatory control, there are important business documents that require different levels of security such as:

• Human Resources: Employee reviews, confidential employee benefits information
• Finance: Accounts receivable and payable, payroll records, client references
• Research: Competitive intelligence and other information that if “leaked” could compromise corporate goals

Establish a Governance Plan

Determine initial principles and goals

Your governance committee should develop a governance vision, policies, and standards that can be measured to track compliance and to validate the benefit of your plan to your organization. Periodic audits can be performed using out of the box SharePoint audit capabilities for basic auditing, or 3^rd party tools such as Metalogix ControlPoint for more detailed audit and tracking.  Audit data can be used to identify what’s working and what’s not working in your governance plan and where additional user training may be required.

Classify your business information

Taxonomies are used to identify and classify or “tag” your organization’s content.   This step can be overwhelming but it’s important to remember that you will start basic and build upon this over time.  Identifying your most critical content – remember those 2 questions – risk of corporate exposure and availability requirements – is a good place to start.

For instance, it may be enough to begin by identifying “internal”, “need to know – external” and “public” content.  Even this little piece of information allows you to begin to identify your information architecture – what sites this content can live in, who owns the content, permissions around it and whether it should fall under information rights management policies for expiration, archiving, eDiscovery or restrictions on print or email.

Develop an education strategy

The best written governance plans have fallen on their sword because of the lack of training around them.  At the end of the day, the consumers of your governance plan need to understand it in order to apply it to their day to day corporate lives.

When a governance plan is too complicated, it has a negative impact on user adoption.  Folks will resort to using file shares or emails to share content because they are worried about making a mistake, or worse, confused as to where to put things.  Alternatively, they can store content in the wrong places and make it difficult to find, which results in the consumers of their content throwing up their hands and requesting email copies to be sent.  Frustration is the key to failed adoption and frustration is often the product of a failed training program.

A comprehensive training plan should show how to use SharePoint according to the standards and practices that you are implementing and explain why those standards and practices are important.

Your education strategy should be included in your plan and should include auditing and periodic refresher training as you identify areas that are not gaining adoption.   Keep in mind that different user groups in your organization will require different levels of training, and different methods.  Site and content owners will need training in the policies and practices of creating sites, editing pages, and modifying permissions.  End users will need training in how to use the applications in your sites; document libraries and metadata tagging and search.

You can make use of training tools, FAQ’s, wikis and videos for these different user groups and these elements can be factored into your information architecture.  You can also use SharePoint surveys and social features of SharePoint to gather important feedback from the consumers of your training to improve your delivery of these important topics.

Develop an ongoing plan

A governance plan is a living, breathing document that will evolve over time.  Refinement of the plan and its associated training will be ongoing.  You will likely add members to your governance committee as adoption increases and you identify gaps in your committee’s representation of your business needs.

In support of this, your governance committee should meet with regularity to review potential new requirements, reevaluate and adjust governance policies based upon usage, feedback and audit reports. Refresher training should be available to your end users as well.

My recommendation is that during the initial months of deployment, the governance committee should meet several times a month, and as time goes on the frequency of this can drop down to monthly and then quarterly, or several times a year.  Once again, this schedule will be highly individual to your company and based completely on what your audit and tracking and user feedback is telling you about what is needed.

In Summary

SharePoint is a highly customizable and flexible platform, and collaboration at its root, is highly individual.  Because of this, when forming policies for how SharePoint can be used, and moderating that based upon the business criticality of the different types of business content, its important to tailor these policies to your users and business needs.

There is a very balanced relationship between governance and adoption.  Your governance committee, in understanding your business and your users, is best suited to come up with a governance plan that meets the business requirements without inhibiting productivity.  My recommendation is to start small, and through the evolution of the plan over time, you will identify the areas that need refinement.

In Part 3:  Building your Governance Plan – A Deeper Dive I will lead you through more detailed discussion of building out your governance plan to address the different areas of governance called out in Part 1 (IT Governance, Information Management, Application Management).  See you soon!

With the 4th Quarter in full swing for most organizations there is the usual pressure to complete fiscal year 2015 projects that many of us have on our plans and goals for the year.  These goals are important to both our organizations and to us personally for various reasons as we often have financial incentives to meet or exceed expectations. 

This also the time of year that our clients and partners start reaching out to begin planning for 2016.  I really enjoy these exercises because we have the opportunity to sit down and work on the strategic roadmap for the upcoming year and get to discuss business challenges we need to solve to reach an organization’s goal for the next 12 months and beyond.  We get to hear about the initiatives and talk about options for how we can solve problems with technology projects but it stays high enough that we don’t get caught designing solutions.  I love helping to put the pieces together until it becomes a picture and a plan.  This collaboration really helps us be a better partner and vendor to our clients.

I wanted to write this post as a reminder to those out there that it’s worth it to take some time to sit down with your strategic (and tactical) partners to work with them on what you want to get done in 2016.  If you rely on those partners and vendors to accomplish your goals, it makes good sense to include them in the budgeting process.  This serves a few key points:

1. When you ask your partners to take on projects, allowing them to help estimate those efforts in advance will get you more accurate budget numbers.
2. Your partners now have some accountability in the process which helps to align your interest with theirs when it comes to finalization of cost and delivery.
3. Since you want your partners to be successful along with your own organization, a roadmap of activities helps them plan for resources, skillsets, and their own internal growth for the next year.  This only benefits you in allowing them to be more responsive to your needs as their client.
4. Assuming your partners are specialists, they work on projects and planning within their niche all the time.  They will have some advice and options to bring to the table that you may not have thought of without their expertise.

The small amount of effort required to include the right people in these planning meetings can pay big dividends and increases your chances of hitting your goals for next year on time and on budget. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like any help planning for next year or finishing the required projects in 2015.  As experts in Office 365, SharePoint, and Microsoft Cloud technologies, we specialize in working with our clients to achieve their business goals with these platforms.

Thank you,

-Ryan

A couple of years or so ago Microsoft announced that InfoPath was dead, the crowd cheered. Microsoft showed some new forms technology at the SharePoint Conference – and they were all, well, terrible. Which is why a year or so later InfoPath is back, it will be fully supported in 2016. Now I’m sure they were all hoping for cheer again that it was back,  but not me. I’d like to say InfoPath is dead to me – but many clients are still using it, and need help digging themselves out of the holes that InfoPath has led them into.

Whether it’s creating a new view and edit form for a SharePoint list or creating a new form for a forms library, I see a lot people with the same issues and falling into the same traps. Where possible I like to steer my clients towards using alternate forms technology, perhaps the tools from companies like InfoWise  (http://infowisesolutions.com/) or my preferred solution, Nintex Forms (http://nintex.com). There are two major reasons I prefer Nintex: it supports a development lifecycle, and it has full extensibility capability using JavaScript. It also allows me to create truly mobile forms, OK, there are 3 reasons I prefer Nintex.

Clients have a “Forms” project and immediately decide to start using InfoPath, in the belief that the tool can do what they need. Where clients get themselves into trouble is not fully understanding the requirements and jumping into developing an InfoPath form. What happens is the requirements grow over time, and with it the complexity of the form, which InfoPath is just not great at handling. The result is often a frustrated developer playing “whack-a-mole” with bugs in the form.

So before you start an InfoPath development project ask yourself a few questions:

• Do I have ALL the requirements
• Should this be one form or several joined by workflow or another form
• Do I need all the data elements available as SharePoint columns

Then consider the following:

• InfoPath Development is single threaded – you cannot have multiple developers working on a form at the same time
• InfoPath does not really support a development lifecycle, it is hard to move a form from a development system to test to production. It can be done but it is a tricky process
• The functionality available is largely hiding controls and a few date, time, string functions
• Conditional statements can be hard to build due to the dialog driven approach

So based on the needs of the form decide if InfoPath is the right tool for the job, or should you invest in an alternate technology.

If you do decide to start a new InfoPath development project, then here are a few tips to try and ease the process:

Sections

When building a form (as opposed to a SharePoint List Form) be sure to create logical sections in the form definition.  This allows you to find data easily within the form and provides convenient places to hang rules to hide groups of controls.

Data Connections

Try to use data connection files rather than directly linking to the data source – it makes it much easier to move the form from one environment to another.

Controls

Name your controls and buttons – it’s very hard in InfoPath to discover where rules have been attached – naming the buttons for example helps you find the functionality. A button marked button_57 is not very helpful, a button marked Save_Manager_Role is much better.

Consistent

Be consistent; whether that’s in naming conventions for data elements or controls – it makes it much easier to understand and find things.

Conditions

When creating conditions for hiding sections or controls on a form the logic can be a bit confusing. I find it easier to write the “display condition” and then try to invert it to get the “hide condition”. Name your rules and be sure that the name accurately reflects what it’s doing. Sometimes you will end up playing “whack-a-mole” with your conditions – you fix the condition for scenario B and then in testing you find you broke Scenario A. So you Fix A and break B – at this point stop and brute force the conditions – more rules is preferable to broken rules.

Validation

If you have validation rules for controls – generally I prefer that they run on the save button, rather than when the control values changes. The reason for this is the post backs and flashing that can occur can be frustrating for end users.

Views

Many times clients create a form for use by multiple roles, employee versus manager for example. They try to create one view to be used by all users. The rules become complex, because you are trying to hide different controls for different roles – read versus edit for example. Create different views for each role, it will simplify the rules and make it easier to maintain.

Hopefully these tips from the trenches will help you assess if InfoPath is the right tool, and if so help you avoid some common pitfalls.

-Ian