Great post by Rai from Unique World

Rai has put together a great post on IM in a SharePoint world – well worth a read:

http://raiumair.wordpress.com/2007/03/04/of-information-management-consulting-and-sharepoint/

MOSS 2007 Governance

More and more businesses I speak with are  struggling with ways to successfully deploy all of the applications and business requirements that can be delivered in a MOSS platform without some structure and process.

To help you succeed Microsoft has recently published a specific Governance and Information Architecture page on TechNet to help organize these key materials.

• Information architecture in SharePoint Server 2007 – Scott Case of Interknowlogy, in this case study describes the process by which a fictitious company plans, customizes and deploys an Office SharePoint Server 2007 installation in a large organization.
• SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy – Sean Livingston, then of MS IT, now the PM for upgrade in WSS for the next version (hint, hint).  He explains his thoughts on supportability of customizations in 3 levels of service, a plan that MS IT uses to manage it’s hosted offerings of SharePoint internally.
• Sample governance plan – Mark Wagner, MCS lays out an easy to fill out enterprise governance plan, including defining governance roles and responsibilities, operations policies, training, and resources.
• SharePoint Server 2007 governance checklist guide – this handy reference guide takes information from Robert Bogues article as well as information from Joel Oleson’s TechEd Governance talk and articles being published on this landing page in the coming weeks.  This is exactly the same as the Governance checklist given out at TechEd.
• Logical architecture model: Corporate deployment – Brenda Carter of the Technical Documentation team for TechNet SharePoint IT Pro, lays out an easy to use, fresh take on “logical architectures” which goes into examples of construction of farms, SSPs, Web Applications, and Site Collections. 
• Governance Workspace – This codeplex workspace on governance focuses on free tools and information sharing in the community.  Two tools, both from MS IT currently are available here.  The MS IT Site Delete capture, and the the IT Site Life cycle management.  Both designed to help save the IT Pro time and money.

Beyond these great documents from Microsoft we at Unique World are also putting together a Governance Toolkit that will cover:

• The Managing and traking of business requirements for applications developed in MOSS 2007;
• Development Standards and Code reuse processes in MOSS 2007;
• Deployment and migration advice;
• Operational issues eg. Monitoring, Backup and Restore;
• Change Management; And
• UAT and testing processes.

We would love to hear from you if you think the above list is missing anything or if you’d like to be a beta site for the program just get in contact with me via the links on this page.

Using Technology to challenge business models – what’s the tiping point?

New technologies often present an interesting choice around its application to existing and new business models.

Generally most buinesses I talk with see technology change as a driver to create more productivity and faster results in thier workforce, or as I define it:

“A more sophisticated/automated way of doing things that spares us the difficulty of a task and speeds up the process most of the time, only to present us with occasional bursts of extreme difficulty.”

The problem is that although the technology change can bring about much higher productivity when you have gotten up the learning curve, but it’s a much steeper learning curve. You can’t progress from simple tasks to hard tasks, if the technology has already captured all the simple tasks.

And hence the paradigm – we can as technologist can quickly introduce a new technology but at what point does it reach the tiping point where it is not only is those that have a great depth of understanding the technology are able to use it very effectively quickly, but that the general user population are able to use and leverage the technology.

It’s these questions that really interest me, as the gap is closing between those who spend a lot of time ‘catching up’ to the curve and those who are able to master and manage the applications quickly – where will we find the productivity advances and how will the applications keep pace with the end users needs, rather then the other way round? 

With this in mind it’s my view that if and application is not user centred and maps to thier individual way of doing things then it is unlikley to be well recieved by those that are able to quickly master it.

If the application is from an ‘old’ world and dictates the process and the ways it must be used, then it will be cast aside by those power users.

Some of the more traditional ECM and Records vendors seem to me to be very challenged by this concept – it will be interesting to see how they react – before it’s too late.

Microsoft announces further details on DOD 5015.2 Add-on pack

Microsoft has just made a further set of annoucments around the 5015.2, in an earlier post I’d mentioined that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), MOSS was recently submitted to take the DoD 5015.2 certification test and now has been awarded certification of 5015.2. 

Well now Microsoft has released further details and has a new web page on the Office site entitled “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 receives DoD 5015.2 certification” that provides some frequently asked questions regarding the DoD 5015.2 certification of SharePoint 2007.