blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

July 31, 2011

[SharePoint] Check permissions the easy way

Filed under: SharePoint — Tags: — frederique @ 20:45

Sometimes simple features can make your life a lot easier. What makes me happy just now, is the option to check easily if a particular person has access to the documents I want her to read.

In older versions of SharePoint, I have to look manually, to see if the person is listed in the permissions overview. But that may require a lot of clicking and digging, if the permission structure of the site is complex: opening a dozen site groups to see if the person is in one of them.

In SharePoint 2010 there simply is a button Check Permissions that tells me exactly what permissions the person has in at the level where I am checking, because they are a member of which site groups.

As a site owner, click in the ribbon Page > Library Permissions

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon: Library Permissions

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon: Library Permissions

Click Check Permissions

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon: Check Permissions

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon: Check PermissionsSharePoint 2010 Pop-Up: Check Permissions

Enter the name of the person and click Check Now. Then you’ll get an overview of the person levels given to that person, and through which group they were given that permission.

SharePoint 2010 Pop-Up: Check Permissions

What dampens my spirits a bit, is that I still don’t see an overview at the site level of the separate permissions the user has on ‘disinherited’, specifically secured lists and libraries. The result of the Check Permission just mentions a Limited access, which implies that the group has specific access to a particular list or library. But it does not tell me which library and what permissions. Oh well…

June 16, 2011

Oops, ECM would have been handy here…

Filed under: ECM — frederique @ 10:20

Sometimes I see things in organizations that make me think “Oops, that was not how it was supposed to go…”.

Enterprises have content, that they should manage properly, so that everyone can find and use it effectively and efficiently and so that their processes run smoothly. In real life however, that is not always the case. Even if the organizations do have some enterprise content management system in place. Having an enterprise content management system is definitely not the same as managing your enterprise content.

The anecdotes below fortunately do not include any serious disasters. But they do represent situations where time and energy were wasted needlessly. Actually managing the enterprise content would have been handy here…

Relevant content cannot be found
Someone in a medium-sized organization tried to find an old proposal for a project she had not been involved in herself, to re-use some relevant information. She was unable to find it by searching the intranet, which included project sites and customer sites, or by browsing the likely sections. This was not caused by the fact that the proposal was confidential or specifically secured; it just could not be found. In the end, she received a copy from a colleague who found it on his own computer. By then, a lot of time had been wasted and only some of the potentially re-usable information had been found. Oops.

And yet, they had a SharePoint platform for collaboration and enterprise content management. But that only works if, firstly, the content is actually entered in the system and tagged properly with metadata. If the enterprise does not put its content in the system, then the seeker won’t find anything. Secondly, the search functionality has to do its job, so that it appears in the search results when the user, who has permission to see the content, searches for these tags.

So: Stop bypassing the system and just upload & tag content to share it. And if the search is broken, fix it, because you need a good search engine.

Spam with multi-megabyte attachments
The marketing department of a large company proudly presented their latest commercial by sending an e-mail to all employees. With a video file of several MB as an attachment. It was great they share this news, and the employees liked to see the nice commercial. But not on in their already overflowing mailboxes. And the IT team managing the infrastructure was not happy with this overload either.

And yet, they had a SharePoint platform for collaboration and enterprise content management. But the habit of sending e-mail to communicate apparently was stronger than common sense.

So: Store, manage and publish this multimedia content in the enterprise content management system , in this case: in a SharePoint site. Then you can draw everybody’s attention to it by way of a news item or an e-mail notification that contains a link to the video. In this way, you not only avoid annoying most employees and crashing the e-mail system, but you also ensure the video can be found afterwards, when the people have deleted their e-mail about the subject.

Documentation required by the auditor is lost
To keep its ISO certification, an organization had to make its documentation for quality, health, safety and environment available to the employees and to the auditor who came in to check this. As they were preparing for a visit from the auditor, they realized that the person who had always managed that documentation was not available anymore and that the documentation was equally unavailable, as it was stored on his personal computer. And maybe as a print-out somewhere, but where? Major oops…

And yet, they have a SharePoint platform for collaboration and enterprise content management. It just hadn’t occurred to them to use it for their purpose; their mindset was more paper-oriented: documents are printed and stored in some cupboard.

So: Put this documentation in a team site, where all stakeholders can find it and where the documents can be managed officially, with security, versioning and an audit trail. The site is backed-up automatically, so in case of some technical disaster, the documents can still be recovered.

Time-wasting business process
A rather large department of a company was moving to another location. In order to determine which equipment needed to be moved by the facility services team, the department coordinator sent a request form to all employees: an excel sheet, attached to an e-mail. As a result, she ended up with about 70 separate excel sheets, which she then had to merge and process. Pfff…

And yet, they have a SharePoint platform for collaboration and content management. To make matters worse, this was the IT department, which includes the team that manages and promotes the platform. But if the stakeholders do not realize that the platform offers them an easy way to manage and run the process, they keep wasting time in copying and pasting and in trying to keep track of e-mail responses.

So: Next time they want such a large group of people to fill in a request form that needs to be compiled into a complete list, just use a list in one of the many the SharePoint team sites they have at their disposal. Everybody enters their own item, and the coordinator immediately sees the total of what has to be done.

May 31, 2011

Sightseeing in intranet land

Filed under: Usability — frederique @ 23:00

When I was working on internet sites, I could just explore the web to see what others were doing. Now that I am in the world of intranets, it is more complicated to get inspired and sanity checked by others. Intranets are for insiders only and not accessible for tourists who want to take a look. Of course I have worked on different intranets, for different kinds of organizations, and I can share knowledge with my colleagues about our projects. But I also like to see what happens in other intranets, as a busman’s holiday.

Fortunately, there are ways of sightseeing other intranets.

Recently I attended part of IBF24: 24 hours of non-stop intranet tours and discussions, organized by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum. I caught about half of it, manoeuvring around the rest of my work, which also implied I had to catch some sleep at some point… Most of it consisted of guided tours where the presenters clicked through their intranets and explained what worked well and what didn’t. Very nice; I’ll definitely try and attend next year’s session too.
See http://www.ibforum.com/ibf-24/

I’ve also been browsing the Intranet Annual 2011, The Year’s 10 Best Intranets by the Nielsen Norman Group. As every year, it is a huge report (433 pages) on the usability of the winning intranets, with plenty of screenshot and detailed explanations that allow us tourists to see what these intranets and intranet teams are all about.
See http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/2011/

What I saw on my sightseeing trips

Some textual snapshots of interesting landmarks I saw while sightseeing in the IBF24 tours and the report – unfortunately I cannot include screenshots, as they don’t belong to me:

  • “No longer is the intranet a place to simply receive information. Intranets are interactive, inviting employees to participate and share knowledge. […] These participatory sites let employees who might be physically located half a world away inspire, answer, challenge, and support one another.” [Intranet Annual 2011, Nielsen Norman Group].
    Quite so! Some of the intranets I saw in the IBF24 tours did seem a bit old school: communication departments publishing corporate news. But to others the intranet is a virtual workplace and that is how I use our intranet and treat my clients’ intranets as well.
  • Intranets are getting more mobile: 60% of the winning intranets in the Intranet Annual have a mobile version. The best of them don’t try and squeeze their entire intranet on a tiny mobile screen, but they focus on functionality that is really useful to employees on the move: such as the company directory, timetable of the shuttle bus, news, task management and gathering ideas.
    In our New World of Work, we want to do our job where and when it suits us best. That doesn’t mean that I want to read a huge document (say, a 443 page Nielsen report) on my Smartphone while waiting for the bus. But I do want to browse some news, check which tasks I need to do by tomorrow – and then find out why that bus hasn’t arrived yet….
  • Knowledge management may sound cheesy, but that just means that it has moved beyond the hype into real solutions in intranets. All that social networking stuff is particularly useful on intranets, where we don’t have the on-the-internet-nobody-knows-you’re-a-dog syndrome. “An organization’s greatest assets are its employees.” (Nielsen et al). These employees can share information, develop ideas, judge them via ratings for instance and comment on them.
    For me personally this is the main way of sharing knowledge, as I am hardly ever in the same office as the colleagues with whom I share it. The same goes for collaboration.
  • Search is still a hot topic. Users have to be able to find useful content and functionality quickly and easily. The search tool should help them, but is often is more of a pain than a gain. So I was very interested to see the IBF24 tour of Google’s own intranet, where search is the intranet. Their collection of different tools is accessible via one point of entry: a search page which looks very familiar…
  • Users do not always have to look manually for the content that is relevant for them, as it can be brought together from different parts of the intranet, in personalized dashboards, collections, communities of practices. Many intranets are portals that integrate other, existing systems.
    Even on a lower level, I like to create overview pages in multi-page team sites and site collections, that immediately show the users what’s new and what’s hot for them in particular: the latest documents that they have access to, the active tasks and issues assigned to them. Users should not have to dig for their content and tools, and they should certainly not have to keep checking every corner of the intranet if anything important has been added.
  • Video is used more and more: communication departments publish official videos and some companies allow their employees to share their own.
    Conveying content in video can be very engaging: reading the CEO’s explanation of our latest plans is not the same as seeing and hearing her explain. And some content just is moving pictures by nature: don’t try to describe the dancing robot you have built with your R&D team, just show it (I can’t remember who had that, but it was a real life example mentioned in IBF24)
  • You’ll need some serious change management and education to get the people to use the intranet in such a way that they benefit from it – or use it at all: “They say: that’s great, that’s what we want. And then they don’t use it” (Dianne Wentworth, AT&T at IBF24).
    I’ve seen the same problem: Don’t think you are getting anywhere if you just build what the clients or the users ask. Just tossing your system over the wall does not mean that it will land properly and that it will be used.
  • Change management is important, but that won’t help you if the intranet itself is no good. “The intranet just has to work. If I have to hand out candybars to get the people to use it, I failed” (Walton Smith, Booz Allen Hamilton at IBF24).
    You need to create an intranet that provides solutions to real problems, not just features that look cool. The concept has to be appropriate, the interface has to be usable and the technology has to be bug-free.

I like sightseeing in intranet land. I get to see inspiring new vistas, be reassured that I’m not the only one with particular problems, recognize familiar solutions in different surroundings, and bring home some ideas as souvenirs. It’s even better if I can meet the locals and talk with them: IBF24 is interactive. This interaction is not quite possible when I’m wandering through a Nielsen report. But this report is so big, that it will keep me involved for quite a while anyway.

April 29, 2011

State of the ECM industry: We want to reduce our content chaos

Filed under: ECM — Tags: — frederique @ 12:35

In my previous blog post I’ve talked informally about our need to manage enterprise content. Now my colleague Walter Grabner pointed out this AIIM research report that has some interesting quantitative data: State of the ECM Industry 2011 – How well is It meeting business needs? (thanks Walter!).

One of the things that struck me, is that ECM is moving from an ‘administrative’ role into our daily work. ECM used to be all about compliance: records management, archiving records for legal reasons. But now organizations get a new Enterprise Content Management system to improve collaboration and processes. Especially information workers cannot do their jobs efficiently if the organization’s content is in chaos.

Unfortunately many organizations do experience content chaos: 50% of all respondents say their management of instant messages is “chaotic,” 31% for emails and 28% for Office documents. But fortunately organizations that do adopt a full ECM system feel a lot more confident that they can find and trust their information (62% of the organizations that do not have an ECM feel that lack of confidence but only 20% of the organizations that do have ECM).

Management of e-mails and their attachments is worse than that of electronic information in general. Only some of the new social information types – external blog posts, IM and tweets – are more chaotic, but these may not play a role that is important as e-mail yet. Unfortunately few organizations capture e-mail into a shared system and the most common way (39%) of dealing with important e-mails is to archive them in personal Outlook folders, where nobody can find them. Let’s hope these people store their important information in – for example – a SharePoint team site and only use e-mail to invite the stakeholders to read it there.

Maybe this is not just wishful thinking, because SharePoint is actually very popular: 58% of all companies and even 70% of the largest companies use SharePoint. Unfortunately 27% indicate that while they do store valuable content in SharePoint, they do not have policies on what to store and how. So they’re not there yet.

In the report you will find the full set of findings and recommendations.

AIIM graph: Content chaos

How well managed are the following types of information in your organization? (page 7 of the report)

March 31, 2011

Do we need to manage our enterprise content?

Filed under: ECM — frederique @ 22:50

One of the subjects that I touched upon in my exploration of intranet governance is content: information published in – in my case – an intranet environment.

What are we talking about?
In the olden days, when company internet sites were basically on-screen brochures and intranets were digital company handbooks, content was fairly static and clear-cut: somebody published information about the company on the site. And if the information changed, somebody went in to update the page, preferably by simply retyping the text on the spot.

But when your site becomes more important, when it contains more information of more types and its value gets higher, then you need to manage your content more systematically. Within an enterprise, that is Enterprise Content Management: ECM.

I don’t think anyone just sat down to invent Enterprise Content Management for the sake of the content itself. The content on the intranet – or more generically in the enterprise information systems – is there for a reason. And we can only achieve the goals we have in putting the content out there, when we manage the content properly. For example:


  • The HR department publishes a description of the employee benefits, so that all employees can find and consult them without bothering the HR people all the time. Because the employees need to be able to absolutely trust this information, the HR department makes sure that this content is updated whenever anything changes, and the HR department head checks and approves it before it is published.

  • A technical specialist figures out how we could use a new tool to solve some problems. Her colleagues in the field do not have to re-invent the same wheel, so they should see this information, dive into it, comment on it and add to it. Once the dust has settled down, the senior specialists put a stamp of approval on it and it becomes a best practice. Until a better practices comes along.

  • The finance department has records that are uninteresting and even forbidden for ordinary users but that we need to show the auditors, or else we’ll get into legal trouble.

A definition
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM , the worldwide association for enterprise content management) defines ECM as follows:
“Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

Actually, they go on to say that it concerns the complete lifecycle of content, birth to death. So it doesn’t stop at the delivery of the content, but it also includes retention policies and the disposal of content when it has died or is supposed to die.

This definition looks at the content from the perspective of the offer, more than the perpective of the demand. But of course we capture, manage, store, preserve, deliver, retain and dispose of content only because somebody needs to find, consult, use, re-use and be freed of the content.

So that is why we need to manage our enterprise content: We need findable, readable, correct, up-to-date and complete enterprise content to do our jobs and keep our enterprise afloat, so we’d better manage it properly.

February 28, 2011

Exploring intranet governance

Filed under: Governance — frederique @ 02:30

When we build an intranet, collaboration environment or any other system, we don’t just want it to look good when we launch it. Cracking open the bottle of champagne on the bow of our gleaming new intranet is one thing. But what happens once she has set sail and is navigating the shoals of real life usage?

We’ve build the intranet – or whatever other system we built – to achieve a goal: to increase productivity and employee satisfaction, be compliant with legal rules, save money by saving time, travel and paperwork …
Therefore we firstly have to build the intranet in such a way that it can reach that goal: it needs a steering wheel, a compass, streamlining, a good engine or sails, or it won’t be able to get anywhere. It needs to be governable.
And secondly we have to set up processes  and organizational structures  to direct the intranet: who takes the wheel, where will we navigate, who takes care of the engines, anybody watching out for icebergs in the middle of the night? It needs governance.

Let me explore some aspects of an intranet, what we launched, what can go wrong afterwards and how we can govern that.


What does the intranet offer the user: functionality

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed, such as…

Required: We determined what functionality was needed and made sure that worked when we launched it

Is it all still working?

Find out: Set up a contact for users to report issues
(please note: users don’t know if something actually is a bug in the intranet. They just see that it is not working as they expected)

Decide and plan: Appoint an intranet management person or team who prioritizes big issues.

Do it: Set up tech support who fixes bugs

Understandable: We made everything as user-friendly as possible and included Help and training in the launched intranet.

Do the users know what they can do and how to do it?
Is it really as understandable as it is supposed to be?

Find out: Appoint champions and set up a helpdesk who can answer the users’ questions, and let them capture the questions. Conduct usability tests.

Decide and plan: Determine who is responsible for help and training. Make a communication plan and training plan, and guidelines for the help and training content.

Do it: The champions and helpdesk answer the questions. An editor (role) updates and adds to the help and training content. A trainer gives real life training, remotely or in class. A communicator points out interesting functionality in blogs, newsletters etc.

We may have postponed part of the functionality to a later phase, or we may have missed something that turns out to be important.

Is something important missing, at the highest level, for all users?

Find out: Conduct user research. The helpdesk and champions know what is asked or complained about.

Decide and plan: The intranet owner / steering committee decides at a high level what major changes or additions will be carried out, in a release planning. A general guideline is that it has to fit the vision and current functionality of the intranet, and it has to be done with the standard development method.

Do it: A development team does a project for this.

 

Is something missing at a lower level (e.g the level of a teamsite) for a small group of users?

Find out: These users request a functional solution.

Decide and plan: A solutions manager decides, based on a business case. Guidelines: For this, stick to no code solutions that do not need anyone directly on the server. And follow the best practices that have been established for such solutions on this intranet.

Do it: A business solutions team carries out the project at the front end.

 

Is the current functionality still relevant?

Find out:Statistics and user research.

Decide and plan: The day-to-day intranet manager or the high level intranet owner (depending on the importance) decide what can be removed or made less prominent.

Do it: A tech support or functional support team carries out the change.


What does the intranet offer the users: content

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

On launch, the intranet does not have that much content yet. The contributors add that later.

Is the relevant content available and up-to-date?

Find out: Allow the user to contact the owner of the section where content is missing or outdated (by clicking a button or by calling the listed contact person). Periodically check the most important content. Check the search statistics for missing content.

Decide and plan: Determine who owns the content, in particular important central content, who is allowed to add or edit it, and which content requires approval by whom. This very much depends on the content and the section of the intranet. Is anyone supervising at a higher level, via a reminder and escalation mechanism?

Do it: Editiorial teams for central content (such as corporate news, HR info). Give enough people contributor permission.

Is the new content readable?

Find out: Allow the users to give feedback via a rating system. Conduct research.

Decide and plan: The authors and editorial teams are responsible for their own content. Is there some overall editorial board that checks the quality of the content? The authors get guidelines for writing on the intranet.

Do it: The authors and editiorial teams make sure their content is readable, by following the guidelines and using tools like a spell checker, wysisyg layout editors, Flesch readability index etc.

Records management: records are a special case. We may have included special functionality like automated document ID and policy management when we built for compliance

In practice, are the records created and managed according to the rules?

Find out: Records owners or managers will have to check before the auditor arrives.

Decide and plan: A records management plan guides the record manager – in general or for a specific domain .

Do it: Check and perform the tasks that the automated routing, archiving and disposal actions generate.


What does the intranet offer the users: team sites

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

We work with SharePoint and that allows the users to create new sites after the launch, without involving a developer. We provide templates for that.

Is the new site necessary or is there already a site available for that purpose?

Does the new team site fit the rest of the intranet /collaboration environment?

Find out: Let users request a new site instead of directly create it. Check if it is necessary.

Decide and plan: Make a Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) plan. The day-to-day intranet management team approves the request, following the CLM plan. The owner of the new site then has to adhere to the guidelines or best practices for site use.

Do it: Create sites automatically from the selected template after the request has been approved. The new site owner configures the site to fit the needs of his team, adhering to the guidelines. The day-to-day intranet management teams monitors this.

Is the site still relevant, or is it just cluttering up the intranet?

Find out: Periodic automated check for sites that have nog been used a specified period (e.g. 6 months).

Decide and plan: A house keeping plan that allows the day-to-day intranet team to do these checks, and to deal with exceptions.

Do it: For example, the day-to-day intranet management team every 6 months gets a list of ‘dead sites’, contacts the site owners and delete sites that are not explicitly said to be still useful.


How do they find it: findability

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

It only makes sense to offer the users anything if they can find it. So in the development project, we paid serious attention to the findability

Can the users really find the functionality and content?

Find out: Conduct user research and check the statistics (If a site that we think is important never gets visited, the reason may be that the users cannot find it. Or it is just not that important after all).

Decide and plan: The intranet owner is ultimately responsible for the findability. The could ask the day-to-day intranet management team or a specific “findability expert” to monitor and fix it.

Do it: Who does what to improve the findability depends on the solution for the problem.It should, as much as possible, be something that can be done at the front-end, by non-developers.


How do they find it: information architecture

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

During development we’ve designed and implemented a good, user-friendly IA: a clear and efficient structure where the most important items are most prominent and everything fits in a category that makes sense.

Do new items (sites, articles, functionality) fit in the information architecture?
Does the information architecture still fit reality (naming, structure)? For instance, elements that reflect the organisational structure are no longer correct after a reorganisation. New k knowledge domains or products need to be added.

Find out: Conduct user research to check for clarity. Check if people who add items know where to put them. Keep an eye on developements in the organisation.

Decide and plan: The intranet owner decides on major changes or additions in the (portal) structure. The could ask the day-to-day intranet management team or a specific “findability expert” to monitor and fix it.

Do it: Who does what to improve the findability depends on the solution for the problem.It should, as much as possible, be something that can be done at the front-end, by non-developers.


How do they find it: search

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

We provide the search functionality when we launch the intranet.

Can users (still) find what they are looking for using the search functionality?

Find out: Conduct user research and check the search statistics.

Decide and plan: So do we have a “findability expert” or search manager who monitor and fix the search settings?

Do it: The search experts add and update the keywords in the taxonomy, and maybe tweak the relevance criteria of the search engine.


How do they find it: taxonomy

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

The taxonomy is the basis for the information architecture and the search keyword. We launch the intranet with a basic taxonomy for the main navigation and, sometimes, with the main keywords for the search.

Are terms missing from the taxonomy?
Do the terms in the taxonomy correspond with the reality of the users, or do we need changes or additional synonyms?
Is the hierarchy correct or do we need to reorganise the terms?

Find out: Conduct user research and check the search statistics.

Decide and plan: We allow an uncontrolled folksonomy in the intranet or in some specific sections of it, but somebody needs to be the owner of the official taxonomy: the “findability expert” and utlimately the intranet owner for high level decisions. We need a plan lay down which changes can be approved and carried out by who.

Do it: In SharePoint 2010 you can change the taxonomy in the Central Admin, and promote terms from the folksonomy to the taxonomy.


How do they experience it: stability and performance

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

In our development project, we have chosen a technical architecture that ensures stability and performance.

Is the intranet still as stable and fast as it was when it was launched, now that it has filled up with content and users?
Users refuse to work with an intranet that is too slow or unstable.

Find out: Check the user complaints and perform objective measurements.

Decide and plan: The Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the hosting party specifies what is acceptable.

Do it: The tech support team handles the servers, but the functional support people can also optimize the configuration of bottlenecks in solutions. Site owners have to take care of their own sites, guided by best practices about performance killers.


How do they experience it: look & feel

In our development project

Issues after launch

Governance needed

When we developed the intranet, we branded it properly and created the appropriate styles and templates.

Are the (new) content and sites (still) branded correctly?

Find out: Check the sites, especially important central content.

Decide and plan: Document what is allowed in which section of the intranet in a styleguide. The day-to-day intranet management team can enforce compliance, if site owners do not adhere to the styleguide. Or is that a job for the marketing & communication team?

Do it: Stick to the predefined styles and templates. Give the site owners a styleguide and material like images that they can use.

January 31, 2011

Why governance? Some thoughts

Filed under: Governance — frederique @ 22:57

Lately we have been discussing governance in our Colleagues Club (mostly with people like Jason Sindram, Willem Oosterhof, Mike Fortgens and Maarten van den Dungen). The funny thing is that we notice that many others see governance as bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy. Yes, the term does sound a bit pompous. But that does not mean that governance is useless.

Instead of diving into the exact definition of the term and the meaning of governance, let me just address a few issues I’ve recently encountered in my projects.  Most of these actually turned out quite well, because we do have governance in place. I’m working in intranets these days, so that is what I focus on.

  • “Aha, we can just upload those documents? Cool!”
    The HR department in one of the countries of our multinational still hasn’t put any of its information on the intranet, although the intranet has been available for more than five years. Today I had a meeting with the trainee they delegated to find out if they could actually upload documents into this intranet thingy and avoid all these phone calls from employees looking for information. Well, yes…. And not just upload them, but also update them when the information changes, which it will certainly do.
    Seasoned intranetters and intranet developers hardly believe it. But unfortunately, the intuitive interface and the available materials are not enough to help all users understand what’s the use of the intranet and how to get the most value out of it. Fortunately we do have a team that they can contact if they want to know more. And this team has a communication specialist, although apparently she hasn’t reached everybody yet.
  • “So how do I upload a document again?”
    Some users had found out that I could help them and responded by phoning me for any button click they hesitated about. Very sociable, but highly inefficient for me.
    Fortunately I could point them specifically to the live training sessions we organize, the quick reference cards and the rest of the Help Center. RTFM…
  • “No we cannot risk losing this information!”
    One of the team sites had grown far beyond the official size limit. At that size, we could not guarantee that a back-up of that site could be restored properly. And this site contained important documents and process information that the company has to safeguard for legal reasons.
    Fortunately, the Portal Management Team does regular housekeeping sessions to check for overweight sites. So they became aware of this and we secured the information before any accidents happened.
  • “My colleague has already set up a site for that?”
    The Europeans and the Americans in the multinational both came up with the idea to create a site for the standards for efficiency. Do these need to be separate? Or can they join forces or at least connect to each other?
    Fortunately, we have Content Life Cycle Management in place for team sites. The users cannot directly create a new teamsite, but they request one. The intranet team checks if the site would not be redundant with another site and if the requester has picked the right template before they create the site. Also, we regularly check for ‘dead sites’, where nothing has happened for ages and that just clutter up the intranet.
  • “But the big photo I put on the homepage looks great”
    I regularly see team site homepages torn apart by overlarge images or other content that literally pushes the limits of the page. Usually the creative site owner has designed the page on a large screen, without realizing that the innocent user with his 1024×768 screen gets terrible scrollbars and an unreadable page.
    Fortunately, we have a team that can intervene and tell – or even help – the site owner to fix this. And we have a help center and a best practices blog that give the site owner information and tips on how to do this.
  • “Can we get a team site that really facilitates our request process?”
    Many teams in the organisation have processes in place, for requests for example. And they need something to deal with those in a more efficient, reliable and systematic way than just sending some e-mails and picking up the phone.  Their needs were not catered for in the intranet as we originally set it up. But now we can give them a tool tailored for their process.
    Fortunately we have a Solutions team that can create solutions for collaboration, processing or information sharing problems for which a standard team site template is not enough. This team does not develop code that needs to be rolled-out to the server. But you can do a lot on the front end with SharePoint and some third party tools. We don’t just go ahead and start configuring, but we set up a simple project, based on a business case, and we start by analysing their needs and determining what features would meet those needs.
  • “Intranet not available? Waaaaa!!!”
    A few weeks ago, I could not use the intranet in our office building due to a technical failure. It was hopeless, I could not get any work done there. So I went to the other office complex – 30 minutes of cycling – where to my relief the intranet was available.
    Fortunately we do have a technical support team that fixes the intranet as soon as possible when it breaks.

With an intranet – or another site – it is not enough to build the system and then just toss it at the users and hope for the best. Why? Because we have set up the intranet to achieve some purpose – like increased productivity of our information workers . And it can only achieve and keep achieving that purpose if we manage it properly.

  • Intranet = ‘living system‘
    Our intranet is not a book that we write, send to the printers and then it is finished. The intranet is meant to evolve with the latest content, with our organization itself and with the latest insights. Otherwise we should just print the company handbook and have done with it. But this living system will not necessarily grow in the right direction, if we don’t water it, fertilize it and prune it where needed.
  • Intranet = open
    Modern intranets are not filled by a small editorial team. The intranet is more lively and certainly more useful if all users can contribute something somewhere and if many users can add lists, design pages and perform other decentralized site management tasks. This can get completely out of hand, if we don’t give some directions and lock down the really sensitive parts.
  • Intranet = indispensable
    We cannot risk our intranet getting completely out of hand, because it is indispensable for our company, as a collaboration platform for our knowledge workers, and a self-service tool and an information source for all employees. So we’d better make sure our intranet remains in peak condition, up-to-date, fully functional and meeting our latest needs.

So just set up some governance to make sure your intranet reaches its full potential and keeps making your and your users’ lives better…

December 31, 2010

Last day of 2010

Filed under: New world of work — frederique @ 15:22

This is the last day of 2010. Ok, I am talking about the year 2010. I wish you all an enjoyable new year’s eve – champagne and all – and then of course all the best for 2011!

This definitely not the last day of “twenty-ten”, 2010 as in SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and what have we. Twenty-ten is full swing: launched officially, used in real life and talked about a lot.

Actually, what is making my day this last day of 2010 is not twenty-ten as such. It is The New World of Work, which allows me to work from home.

We don’t need the latest & greatest technology for that. The client who I work for today is not using twenty-ten, but SharePoint and Office 2003. But I have a laptop that connects me to their network. And we have an agreement that working from home is perfectly fine, as long we get the job done.

In any case, most of my project contacts at this multinational client are based in other countries. So we work in team sites rather than in physical locations. We discuss our projects in Live Meeting rather than real life meetings. We talk via e-mail, communicator and, when things get complicated, over the phone.

Today our conversations mostly pertain to champagne, fireworks and other holiday related subjects. I could easily interrupt that to open the door for the delivery guy who brought me my party ingredients for tonight. But over the last weeks I have been working from home more seriously. The bad weather blocked the trains or at the very least delayed them substantially. And I was extremely pleased to be able to work from home and actually get things done, instead of wasting my time on freezing platforms, waiting for trains that did not arrive.

So I’m all set for the new year, even if we get more snow and ice. And I have interesting things to look forward to in 2011: my client is going to leap from 2003 straight to 2010 in 2011, and we’ll have a huge new productivity platform to conceive, create and get adopted.

Happy New Year!

November 30, 2010

Business Taxonomy. Just Do It.

Filed under: Governance,Information Architecture — Tags: , — frederique @ 22:53

Taxonomy. Scary word. Biologists classifying the animal kingdom? Lots of old school librarians or latter day information scientists setting up huge and complicated structures? Not necessarily.

In the context of websites or intranets, we have business taxonomies that are the schemes for organizing the content, usually in categories and subcategories, so that the users of the site can find it more easily.

Recently, I’ve attended a series of taxonomy webinars organized by the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) and given by people from Project Performance Corporation. In that series, they discussed detailed best practices for getting a taxonomy. But they also emphasized some very basic key notions that tend to be overlooked.

First of all: A taxonomy is a means to an end and not a goal in itself.

You don’t create a taxonomy for your site just to have a beautiful taxonomy, but because you want your users to find information easily. If we keep this in mind, we see that:

  • You need to be clear about the goal
    What are you trying to achieve with the taxonomy? Sell more shoes in your webshop by allowing the users to browse through the kinds of shoes they like? Increase productivity in your information workers by enabling them to search and find the information they need?
    It helps to formulate this goal explicitly, so that you can communicate it and keep checking against it.
  • The taxonomy should be intuitive for the users, both the people entering and tagging content and the people searching for content. This implies that:
    • You have to understand the audience, keep your audience in mind when you design it, and you should involve user groups in the process, to make sure that you end up with something that makes sense to them.
      You can do that with workshops, interviews and card sorting exercises.
    • The taxonomy should be simple, not too fine-grained and consistent.
      The best practice is to use a subject-based categorization of no more than 12 to 15 subjects and no more than 2 or 3 levels of subcategories for your main navigation. Avoid jargon, avoid overdoses of metadata fields and over-long picklists . And check with real users if your taxonomy is indeed as intuitive as you think.
    • Communication is key, two-way communication.
      Listen to the users, to get their input and feedback. And talk to them, to get everybody on board and to get them to use the taxonomy properly. The users need to understand why the taxonomy is relevant and how to use it, especially when you ask them to tag content based on this taxonomy. If even 10% of them mis-tag content, the whole system gets messed up.
  • The taxonomy should evolve.
    If it does not fit the needs, it has to be changed. And this is not just a case of fixing mistakes and learning from real life. Your organisation, your users, your market and everything else changes, so your taxonomy should change along with it to stay up to date. This implies that:

    • The taxonomy should be flexible and extensible.
      Don’t carve it in stone so that you would need to demolish the entire site to make small change in the taxonomy. Don’t waste endless time chipping out details of something that probably won’t last until next month’s reorganisation.
    • You should plan an incremental process to get a working taxonomy:
      Start with the basics and build iteratively from there.
    • You need good governance.
      Another scary word, but you need to “govern” your taxonomy, so that it doesn’t grow obsolete or spin out of control as soon as it has been implemented. As a taxonomy of a site is never finished, somebody has to keep an eye on it and where necessary keep a tight rein.

So, your business taxonomy, Just Do It. You just need one. And you can just get started somewhere and let it evolve from there.

October 31, 2010

Why that default Overwrite in SharePoint 2010 Document Libraries?

Filed under: Interaction,SharePoint — Tags: , , — frederique @ 23:05

There are some things that make me go “Hmmmmm…”

What happens

When you upload a document in a Document Library in SharePoint, the option Add as a new version to existing files is checked on by default. In 2003 this was called Overwrite existing file(s)? So it is very easy to accidentally overwrite an existing document. That happened in the old SharePoint. And still happens in SharePoint 2010. Hm…

Upload document with the default option to overwrite the current file

Upload document with the default option to overwrite the current file

Why is that a problem

That accidental overwriting happens a lot, especially in large libraries, where many people contribute. The users who upload similar documents do not pay attention and give their document the same filename as an existing document.

The stakeholders of the old documents call me, to ask what happened to the metadata of their documents. They see strange descriptions, the status field is incorrect, and so on. And when they open their document, panic really sets in. Then I do some archaeology in the library, only to find out that this is another document altogether. Fortunately the version history allows me to see what happened and to retrieve the old document.

Of course we try to mitigate this problem. First and foremost, we ask the users to respect a naming convention for their files. Also, in several sites we use InfoPath with automated name fields and Excel files with macros that automatically include the date and in some cases also the time in the filename, so that we can ensure its uniqueness.

Still, users have are hard time trying to understand why they have to be so careful with their filenames. Especially the users who know that usually the Title field is displayed, while the Name remains invisible as just a technical filename.

Any old Windows Explorer will warn you when you try to save your document with an existing filename, and ask you politely whether you actually want to overwrite or if you want to save it under a new name. So why is our smart SharePoint system so stupid about this?

What do I want

The interaction that would serve me best, is for the overwrite option to be governed by a setting in the Document Library. I can determine whether or not I want content approval, versioning and many other options on my library. I want an additional setting, determining whether the overwrite option is enabled or disabled by default.

In most cases I would select the setting to disable the default overwrite option. We have trained most users that want to edit a document to actually do that within the site, via the option Edit in Microsoft Word. So they don’t upload a new version and don’t need that overwrite option anyway. This implies that the documents that most users upload are actually new documents.
The required interaction there, is that the library warns them that a file with that name already exists, allowing them to change the filename. And the last thing we want the library to do, is seamlessly overwrite the existing document. Absolutely not.

I would still want to see the checkbox on the upload page, so that power users, who know what they are doing, can deviate from the default. Most users don’t even see the checkbox, but there is always the happy few who do want something non-standard.

Well, I’ll have to figure out what will be my best practice to deal with this issue in 2010….

Document Library settings in 2010

Document Library settings in 2010

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress