Michael Sampson

Writing a Book: Key IT Enablers

Much of the past couple of months have been spent in getting Seamless Teamwork completed. There have been 5 key IT enablers that I am very grateful for.

First, my Lenovo X60 Tablet PC, running Vista Business, and connected to a 22" monitor. I have written the final edition of the book on the X60, and it has performed admirably. It could do with a speed bump, particularly when starting up, but once it is going, it has been great. This is the first Lenovo I have purchased for myself, and I hope to get one of their top-of-the-line laptops at some point, and perhaps even an IdeaPad. The machines feel solid and reliable, and perform the same too.

Second, SugarSync (www.sugarsync.com). I have a common set of files across three computers -- my MacBook Pro, my Lenovo X60 Tablet, and my Dell XPS laptop. Anytime I make a change in any file on any of those three computers, the updated file is automatically and immediately synchronized to the other three. Finally I have found an application that enables such seamless commonalization of files across computers and platforms. I have used it mainly in this way: using the Dell (which hosts my SharePoint Server), I have taken a screen shot for the book, saved it to a file directory on the Dell, and then a couple of minutes later, it has appeared on the Lenovo for inclusion in the text. If you are not using SugarSync and need access to your files across multiple computers, I can not recommend it high enough. I have a paid subscription.

Third, TechSmith SnagIt 9 is the most awesome screen capture program I have ever used, including the ones I have used on my Mac. All of the screen shots in Seamless Teamwork are taken using SnagIt 9, and in particular, the ability to create a profile for a screen shot and use it repeatably is fantastic. Thank you TechSmith! I purchased a copy this week ... and I recommend that if taking screen shots is something you need to do (and you use a PC), check out SnagIt.

Four, ActiveWords. Although ActiveWords can do a lot more than I have used it for -- and I need to explore all of those capabilities -- the ability to type "sp" and have it automatically expand to "SharePoint" after pressing the space bar is very helpful. This is called text expansion, and works across all applications on the PC, not just one application. Another text expansion I have is "mse", which transforms to "michael@michaelsampson.net". If you don't have a tool for text expansion, I highly recommend ActiveWords.

Finally, thanks to Mail2Web in the UK for a highly reliable hosted Windows SharePoint Services v3 offering. Until Chan built me a SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Edition instance for the office, all of my research and writing was undertaken against Mail2Web, and it has also been the SharePoint instance I have used in my workshops and seminars. That will change going forward, since I will take my SharePoint server to workshops going forward (including to my KMWorld talk in 4 weeks). If you are looking for a hosted SharePoint place for collaboration, look at Mail2Web.

So that's it ... 5 tools of great use to an author. My thanks to each.

The First Bound Copy ...

I had my manuscript for Seamless Teamwork bound yesterday. At 250 pages, 75,000 words and 150 or so screenshots, it is starting to feel real.

October 6 ... Amazon ... it's coming ...

Thanks Chan!

I have the rest of this week to finish Seamless Teamwork ... so there's a lot of plates spinning here at the moment. But I must interrupt what I'm doing and shout out a big thanks to Chan Kulathilake from Knowledge Cue for his work in getting my Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise Edition (!) up-and-running in time for screen shots for the book.

Thanks for your due professional care and attention to this project Chan, and over your weekend too! Your customization of SharePoint for the book was delightful. Thank you!

And to those of you that don't know, Chan is a SharePoint MVP, and has recently started his own SharePoint consultancy business called Knowledge Cue. As he writes on the site:

"We understand that getting over the first hurdles of adopting SharePoint can be challenging. Our main goal is to provide you with our years of knowledge and best practice for the deployment and adoption of SharePoint for business growth. You may be just starting out with SharePoint or have already adopted SharePoint - whichever the case we can assist you by providing guidance and training."

Workshop on SharePoint for Collaboration: An Independent Evaluation

My three hour workshop on SharePoint for Collaboration at the Open Publish Conference is done. There were about 18 people in attendance, with some organizations having 2 people here, and others up to 5. There was a good mix of SharePoint experience, from those that are currently using SharePoint for collaboration, to those that came to learn more.

There was a real split of opinion on my 7 Pillars Analysis of SharePoint, on which the workshop was based. Some people said "It's good to get a fuller picture of SharePoint", and others were (really) upset that I didn't talk more about how to leverage the best of SharePoint for collaboration.

I take on board some learning points for future workshops. Thank you to everyone who came and participated.

10 Tips on Establishing Your Profile in SharePoint My Site

The My Profile component of My Site is absolutely critical to the effective use of SharePoint for recruiting a project team. Here are 10 tips on establishing your profile for maximum effect:

1. Make your areas of expertise interesting, not generic. A rich description of who you are and what you are interested in is much better than using generic terms. So don’t write "Marketing" as an area of expertise; write "Marketing strategy for expanding into new international markets". Someone doing a search on the term "marketing" will still find you, but you will have provided much more at-a-glance information than the person just writing "Marketing".
2. Be exhaustive and list everything. One of the real powers of your profile is the matching that happens between you and your visitors, to show things that they hold in common with you. If you only list 3 or 4 items in each area, the possibilities that matches are found are greatly reduced. Err on the side of more, not less.
3. View your profile as your online resume. We used to keep our resume locked inside a text document, but those days are gone. Your My Site profile is going to become the most up-to-date and most widely looked at statement of who you are.
4. Be professional. Your colleagues and managers in your firm will be reading your profile, so keep it professional. By all means list personal interests, but only if they are socially acceptable within your firm.
5. Actively seek new colleagues. Who you know, and by implication who knows about you, is really important to the effectiveness of your work in the firm and the opportunities that will come you way. Look out for people that share common interests with you, and reach out to them. Learn about their work, their perspectives and their challenges. Get to know them, and earn the right to call them a colleague.
6. Ask a trusted colleague—or your manager—to review your profile. They will notice where you have left out things about yourself that should be there, and will give insightful feedback on how to best describe your accomplishments.
7. Don’t be bland. Don’t settle for doing the minimum with your My Site profile—listing a few words and phrases here and there. Go for the top! Aim to make your profile the best statement of who you are.
8. Keep your profile up-to-date. Make a recurring appointment with yourself to revisit and update your profile every month. If you have projects that change on a weekly basis—as in projects where you are making a good contribution, update it more regularly.
9. Become a My Site champion! Encourage other people you meet in the firm to establish their profile in My Site, and to keep it up-to-date.

What would you list as number 10?

Notes on SharePoint for Knowledge Management (July 1, 2008)

Mark Ginnever from Intergen is presenting tonight on Knowledge Management and SharePoint, at the Christchurch SharePoint User Group Meeting. Mark thinks that SharePoint offers an opportunity for the re-birth of knowledge management, following on from the early ideas and then the death of KM in the 1990s (because senior managers didn't understand it). Mark's work in the KM area started with his MBA in the UK and associated papers on KM, and consulting work in KM.

The key area of focus tonight is "Knowledge Management within Customer Services -- could SharePoint be your Enabler?" The session was jointly run with the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Knowledge Management Network.

Agenda:
- Business pains and goals
- Understanding the term KM
- Components of a KM strategy
- IT's role within the strategy
- SharePoint as your Knowledge Enabler
- Microsoft Initiatives

Business Pains and Goals
A new person arrives at a bank, and asks which customers are eligible for a 'Quick Loan'? The answer is fairly fragmented ... Look in the shared drive, see the loan process manager, or wait until the conference later in the year.

Typical answers ... Getting a new system to store and surface information about the customer (really information management), delivering enhanced customer value (really process management), or let's hire a new person (really role management).

Knowledge Management Strategy Enablers
- HR strategy
- Business process
- IT platform
- Culture
- Measurement

Customer service business goals:
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Deliver a consistent, effective services across all channels. They have to sit in between the customer and the people inside the organization.
- Provide fast resolution to queries. Who is the right person to deal with?
- Understand and communicate status, actions and alerts. Perhaps handle this through a dashboard.
- Produce a barometer of customer thinking. These are the people with the real knowledge of what can help the organization service customers better.

Knowledge Management Theory
Definitions:
- "An improvement of the organizational capabilities on all levels of the organization through better handling of knowledge as a resource" (Probst and Romhardt, 1997)
- " ... creating market value through an intangible asset -- knowledge -- that is held within and between individuals" (Swart et al, 2001)
- "information that is defined further by context or experience or both" (Mark Ginnever)

Terminology:
- Tacit and Explicit Knowledge ... From Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995 ... Tacit knowledge is in someone's head and is difficult to codify, vs, Explicit knowledge is something that can be written down and taught and is less reliant on the context or experience.
- or Sticky and Leaky Knowledge ... Brown and Duguid, 1998 ... Sticky knowledge is generated from interaction of practitioners, and Leaky knowledge can be used easily in another context.

Knowledge creation and proliferation:
- see the Nonaka, Toyama and Konno 2000, for the socialization, externalization, combination and internalization.

The cultural enablement:
- the aim is to provide a trusting environment where people can share knowledge
- analyze the behavior of staff and understand what support they require
- a collaborative trusting environment is required and this should extend across the boundary into the wider community
- knowledge advocates are required at all levels alongside specialist brokers and translators identified

Knowledge architecture (from Star and Greisemer, 1988):
- translator ... A participant between two groups that are exclusive (a mediator)
- broker ... A participant in overlapping groups
- boundary objects ... Objects, techniques or technologies
- business process (co-ordinated through enablement rather than coercion)

Key roles (from Brown and Duguid, 1998):
- customer service representatives ... Needs to respond to the customer agenda
- middle managers ... Crucial intersection vertically and horizontally
- chief knowledge officer ... Owner of the knowledge vision and vibe (culture)
- lurker ... Has cross organizational scope

IT As An Enabler
- needs to support the informal
- reach, reciprocity and reward
- interactivity, participation and learning
- from searching to find and interact ... Have to go beyond "findability"
- providing multi-channel communication

The Bank of SharePoint: With a Story
- Mark worked through an example, with screenshots, of where and how SharePoint can be used for knowledge management within a bank.
- Products included SharePoint, Office Communicator, Office Communications Server, some lookups to other systems, email upload to a SharePoint Document Library from Outlook, live chat within a Web browser for customer help, InfoPath Forms, Enterprise Search in SharePoint (for people and documents).
- You have to think SharePoint through correctly to get all of these benefits, My Site

Mark concluded the story by going through a checklist of knowledge management ... And concluded that we'd done them all within SharePoint.

Microsoft Initiatives
- Knowledge Network, for collaboration auto-discovery. When you lose a key person, Knowledge Network will tell you who the person was connecting to.

More from David, this time on the Book Title

Today David noted that it would be a real problem if the words in the title of my book got mixed up. It would change from being a book about the effective use of SharePoint to one about sewing: Teamless Seamwork. You know, sewing on your own!

Brief Notes on the k2 blackpoint Workflow Engine for SharePoint

K2 hosted a webinar today, introducing K2 blackpoint to the Australia and New Zealand customers. K2 blackpoint is a workflow tool for SharePoint.

K2 blackpoint is the baby brother of B2 blackpearl. The latter supports additional things like process design in Visual Studio and Visio, and deep integration into line-of-business applications such as SAP.

On the blackpoint licensing, it starts at $5000 per server for 200 users and goes up to $15,000 for unlimited users. You can upgrade to blackpearl whenever you want to.

Demo: Auto-Creating a SharePoint Site
The presenter showed a standard SharePoint library, and then the K2 Studio rich client for designing workflows. She worked through the steps involved in setting up a new workflow using the blackpoint design client (k2 studio) based on fields in an InfoPath Form that she had pre-created. The scenario was to do with a request for a new SharePoint site, and it was shown how blackpoint would take an approved request and set up the site automatically. Part of the setup was to say how the project site would be named (eg, based on a field in the InfoPath form), where it would be created (eg, in the site hierarchy), and what SharePoint template it would be based on (and although I had to step out momentarily, I guess you could base the template either on a selection on the InfoPath form or as specified by an administrator).

This was just one of the process types that could be set up.

Next Actions
There is a beta of K2 blackpoint currently available. See blackpoint.k2.com.

David on the Dedication for Seamless Teamwork

I read out the two draft dedications I have written for Seamless Teamwork to Katrina and my oldest son, David (12), yesterday. Katrina's immediate reaction to the first one was "You can't write that!", but to the second one she said "That's really cool!"

David didn't say anything about the first one, but after finishing reading the second one, with his trademark twinkle-in-his-eye he suggested that I add ... To all the people who buy this book and don't finish it because it is so boring. And then he laughed ...

Thanks David ;-)

Amazon Knows About My Book!

I was speaking with Sandra, my Project Editor at Microsoft Press, earlier today and asked if my book was up on Amazon yet. She said "Yes", and indeed it is there ... and available for pre-ordering.

And it's actually available on September 24 ... so we're getting that updated.