| Tuesday, February 16, 2010 | | Microsoft Morning Perk Presentation Recap |
Earlier this morning I presented a revised version of my Social Computing with SharePoint 2010 presentation at the local Microsoft office as part of their "Morning Perk" series which highlights new technology paired with customer case studies. I had the honor of once again sharing the stage with long-time customer and friend Dr. Ron Thieme, VP and CIO of AIT Laboratories.
Although breakfast was late, we ended up with a full house and overall a great event. As I promised in my session, you can grab a full sized copy of my mindmap by clicking on the thumbnail below.
I think I also mentioned in the presentation, that for those that would prefer a more traditional presentation of this information, you can find a PDF of my slides that I used at SharePoint Saturday a few weeks back in this blog post (scroll to the bottom, and click on the title slide image).
 Ron's presentation can be downloaded (in PDF form) by clicking on his title slide to the right. You can also visit AIT Labs corporate website to find out more about this dynamic and growing company.
Thanks again to all that attended and those that helped in organizing the event. As always, please feel free to contact me with questions/comments or if you are interested learning more about these topics and how Ambassador Solutions can help, we're ready and waiting. | |
| | Friday, February 05, 2010 | | SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis Recap |
We also had a great group of volunteers that really helped with all the logistics of the day including: Andy Bradley, Tuong Do, Keith Oswalt, Karyn Williams, John Boomershine, and Mike Ticker. The folks at our facility, the Gene Glick Junior Achievement Center, were also great all day long!
I also heard from all the sponsors that they really felt appreciated by both the organizers and the attendees and were looking forward to future opportunities to be involved in similar community events in Indianapolis! Support these folks because without them “free” events just can’t happen!
For my part, in addition to having a speaking slot (more on that below), I was put in charge of speaker management and service. This was certainly the most rewarding part of the entire experience for me as I got to meet and interact with a lot of great folks from the SharePoint community, both local and from other regions. In addition to the event on Saturday, we all had a great time out at Scotty’s Brewhouse for the speaker dinner on Friday night. I have a few pictures from that here. All the speakers did an outstanding job, both inside the walls of their sessions, as well as outside in the hallways. I saw numerous side conversations going on as our expert community played good-will ambassadors to all. Please join me in thanking all the speakers including: Andy Hoffman, Chris Geier, Daniel Galant, Darrin Bishop, David Petersen, Enrique Lima, Fabian Williams, Hope Foley, James Curtis, Jeff Willinger, Jennifer Martinez, Jennifer Mason, Jim Grabinski, Joe Mack, John Ferringer, Kevin Dostalek, Marcy Kellar, Ram Gopinathan, Rob Wilson, Sean McDonough, Steve Pietrek, and Woody Windischman. If you want to follow all these fine SharePoint experts easily on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list that you can follow here. A few statistics that we have about the event:
- Registrations – 372
- Attendees - 250
- Sponsors – 10
- Speakers – 22
- Sessions – 20 (in 4 tracks of 5 each, then we also had a welcome and closing session)
My Session:
So I presented “Social Computing with SharePoint 2010”. Unlike my nSpin presentation from a few weeks ago which was developer focused, this presentation was in the “Business and End User Track” and so was a bit less technical. I had a pretty experienced SharePoint audience, however not very experienced when it came to “social” especially inside the enterprise. I love this topic because it virtually presents itself and demo’s very well. To add a little bit of fun to the demos I mocked up the Dunder Mifflin corporate organization, complete with about 30 of “The Office” profiles as employees (all under the Fair Use Copyright exemption for Educational use only of course :) This was pretty well appreciated by the audience, but it also made putting in all those status updates, social tags, and comments much more self-entertaining as well [that’s what she said].
 Thank you to everyone that attended the session. For those that missed it, I’m doing a slightly altered version of it along with a customer on February 16th at the Microsoft offices. Go here for more information. If you’d like a copy of my slides, you can download them by clicking on the thumbnail on the right- although about 50% of the presentation was demo.
Do you have a favorite memory from SPSIndy or any other feedback for the organizing committee? If so, please post it below!
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| | Wednesday, September 23, 2009 | | Benefits of Micro-Blogging in the Enterprise |
It’s been about a year since I first wrote about micro-blogging within the context of Web 2.0 technologies that could provide value on the corporate intranet portal. Since that time, the explosion of platforms such as Twitter have highlighted the value of this type of communication in an open public context. Other major platforms such as Facebook have revamped their primary information aggregation user interfaces (the “wall”) to be decidedly more micro-blogging-like, proving that this type of rich “status update” stream can be valuable within smaller communities as well. Niche players have emerged such as Yammer and Present.ly to fill the micro-blogging gap in the current best-of-breed intranet portal solutions. I’ve decided to take many of the lessons learned in the past year, primarily from our corporate use of both Twitter and Yammer to describe some of the benefits that micro-blogging can allow an enterprise to realize and capitalize upon.
Before I get ahead of myself, for those of you that may not be familiar with micro-blogging, it is essentially a way of sharing small bits of information usually from one-to-many (think of an email distribution list). Most micro-blogging platforms represent these “small bits of content” in streams. There is generally an author’s stream (everything you’ve posted) and also your aggregated stream which will be a filtered view of everyone else’s streams. Many platforms, like Twitter, use the concept of “following” that provides the main filtering mechanism on your twitter stream, but other filtering concepts such as by keyword, group, hashtag, etc. can be used. Note here the main difference between a micro-blog and an email system: in the email system it is the author that decides who will receive the messages; in a micro-blogging system, it is primarily the recipients that have control over what they receive. This plays an interesting role in the dynamics of spam, relevancy, and attention—but that is a post for another time. One of the best introductions to micro-blogging may be Common Craft’s “ Twitter in Plain English” (note that this is not enterprise-focused).
The rest of this article will cover some of the benefits of micro-blogging in the enterprise including:
- Mass Content Distribution
- Expert/Connector Location
- Trust Building / Culture
- Knowledge Management / Relevancy
- Training / Information Radiation
- Idea Exchange / Suggestion Box / Employee Voice
Mass Content Distribution
There are many times within an enterprise when you want to get a piece of information out to either all of the employees or a subset group of employees quickly. Today the primary way of accomplishing this task would be an email distribution list (either company-wide or a department list). This works fine, except today our email boxes are overwhelmed with chatter both from the inside and certainly from outside (even with modern spam filters). It is quite possible that a critical email sent from the CEO company-wide may not get read by some for hours or days. This is not to say that a micro-blog will fix this problem completely or eliminate the need for “author-based recipient control” that an email provides, however, the fact that recipients have greater control over what they choose to listen to also means that will pay special attention to what they’ve opted into.
Micro-blogging also has a distinct advantage over group emails when the intent of the communiqué is to elicit a discussion amongst the recipients. Email “reply-to-all’s” are incredibly difficult to follow, especially as the replies create split branches and varying “quoted” chains below them. In fact, the next version of Outlook even contains a feature to “mute” an email thread you’ve been placed on so that you don’t have to bother reading them :)
Expert/Connector Location
By reading about what people are talking about in a stream you can start to get a better feel for what they are expert in. This might include knowing who would make a good target for your pick-up game of basketball tomorrow evening, but more importantly, it will tell you who is knowledgeable, helpful, and passionate about various areas you need to complete your job! Most micro-blogging systems also let each author create self-edited profiles that are searchable for areas of expertise, experience, and interests. Some also have creative features that tag users (either by system analysis of posts, or by other users opinions of them) and track various “reputation” scores allowing those searching for expertise to get potentially more relevant and unbiased filter criteria for the so-called experts.
Connectors are people within the enterprise that connect people to others. While the gist of the above paragraph is that a micro-blogging platform may reduce the need for these individuals making it easier to find experts within the enterprise, it will never eliminate it. This is because as most seasoned networkers will tell you, these connections are built upon shared trust, which takes time to establish (see next section and also my article “ Discovering Your Relationship Topology”). These connectors play a critical role in how your business gets done and should be the targets of both succession planning and process optimization strategies. Micro-blogging platforms easily expose these individuals through follower counts, interaction counts, and reputation scores.
Trust Building / Culture
At first the idea of micro-blogging is crazy to people. I hear “why would anybody care about what I’m eating for lunch?” when explaining twitter to first time users (note of course a typical prompt in an enterprise micro-blog is “what are you currently working on?” not “what are you currently doing?” like with Twitter). However, think about how you interact with people in real life. When you see a colleague on a Monday morning do you immediately ask them “what’s our revenue forecast for the week?” or do you ask them if they did anything interesting over the weekend? Oh you went downtown to that new restaurant with your wife? How was it? What did you have to eat?
The point is that to build trust between individuals (which collectively can be extrapolated to an entire corporate culture) we absolutely MUST have these types of trust-building small-talk conversations to establish personal connections which can then lead to more meaningful relationships and deeper discussions. For more details on this idea of trust building, pick up Chris Brogan’s new book Trust Agents or Shel Israel’s Twitterville.
Knowledge Management / Relevancy
Since micro-blogs are content streams themselves, they by default become a knowledge repository, which as long as items of interest can be located, either by keyword or metadata search, then this alone qualifies it as a viable knowledge management strategy. However, this is not really the main way micro-blogging can benefit a larger knowledge management strategy. We already have big huge systems with taxonomies and formalized metadata for capturing and archiving documents. And we also have big huge systems that capture our structured line of business data. These two pillars are certainly enough to capture any and all data – sometimes to the point at which it has no chance of ever escaping (snark).
These systems do a good job of storing the information, and some are even pretty good at helping you find it again. However, once you start amassing a lot of it, relevancy becomes a problem. That is, how quickly can I find the piece of information that is most relevant *to me* based on my specific need and ability level to consume the information? Be honest, if you could, you’d probably just go ask the internal subject matter expert and have them direct you to the best information. What micro-blogs allow (as well as other social media technologies like social-tagging and folksonomies) is that it provides a way for individuals to point at (with a hyperlink) subjectively high quality content which provides a means to store “tacit relevancy” metadata about the most important topics within your enterprise.
Micro-blogs also do a better job of capturing conversation context (the who, when, what aspects) around content than many other mechanisms, thus shedding light on the sometimes elusive “why” or intent questions. A very important point to micro-blogs and knowledge management that I want to underscore is that sometimes the content IS the conversation, but often the conversion is about OTHER content (hyperlinked in the post) and thus serves an important role in a larger enterprise content management strategy.
Training / Information Radiation
New hire training can be accelerated by Micro-blogs especially in the realm of “how we do things around here”. Often we find that it takes longer for new folks to internalize this aspect of their job than the actual technical or business skills required to execute the mechanics of their job. This is especially true if you have either a unique culture (positive) or a dysfunctional one (and lord help you if you have a uniquely dysfunctional one).
Seeing folks from across the enterprise share their content and helpful “finds” will also aid in the continuous learning and training for all employees. In Alistair Cockburn’s Agile Software Development he describes information radiation and osmotic communication as the natural and efficient way knowledge travels across a co-located project team performing software development. Micro-blogging platforms extend this concept so that the co-located aspect (both physical and temporal proximity) is no longer a necessary component for this knowledge sharing.
Idea Exchange / Suggestion Box / Employee Voice
Micro-blogging has the effect of giving all employees a voice and you’d be surprised at the wonderful ideas and tips some have to share that otherwise would not be surfaced either due to their personality or perceived “place”. Employers are sometimes afraid of giving their employees this voice, but most of the fears are not well founded. One of these fears is that employees will use the platform to spread negative thoughts to their peers. Generally, if these ideas are not based in truth, you will see other employees “setting the record straight” in a much more transparent fashion than you would get in hallway/water cooler talks. Also, people will generally not be dramatically nasty in a micro-blogging setting since their comments are recorded, attributed to them, and usable against them if disciplinary action is called for. If the ideas are based in truth, then you can be thankful that you have an early warning mechanism for problems in time to take proactive measures to address them.
Another fear employers often have is that it feels like they
are giving up some measure of control. This is actually true to a degree, but it is only by giving up control that you gain trust. This is the crux of the cultural change happening right now both inside and outside the enterprise. The shift from traditional advertising (corporate controlled) to social media (consumer controlled) epitomizes this statement. Those new employees that have grown up in the digital age are now starting to move into high level leadership positions within many organizations and fill out the majority of the workforce. They understand and demand this change in dynamic so companies would do well to embrace it. For more reading on this topic, please pick up Dan Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital.
There are probably other areas of benefit that I’ve missed here (let me hear about them), but I based these 6 primary areas on actual observations over the past year. For each of the above areas I have more specific anecdotes I can share, and may do that over the next few months. Other than mentioning a few platforms at the beginning of this article, I tried to stay away from a technical/tools discussion, but obviously once you are sold on the need for micro-blogging within the enterprise or at least willing to experiment, there are a universe of choices in the form of platforms and add-on products to platforms to consider.
Please tell me about your experiences with micro-blogging within your enterprise either in comments below, on my blog, or catch me on twitter! | |
| | Thursday, August 20, 2009 | | DevLink 2009 Thanks! |
 Well I attended DevLink down in Nashville, TN last week. It was my first time, but certainly won't be my last. John Kellar and all the volunteers did a great job pulling off a super conference that felt more like a huge extended community code camp than what I traditional think of as an "industry conference" (e.g. TechEd, SxSW, PDC, etc...). Don't read that as a negative in any way- it was a great experience, and by far one of the best values all year (it was $100).
The sessions were great and they had even added a SharePoint track this year, so there was no shortage of good stuff happening each day. One thing that I do regret is not checking out the Open Spaces stuff (sorry Alan, the timing just never worked out). As is often the case with conferences though, it was the networking that happens informally in the evenings that really provides the incalculable value. From the quiet lobby-bar chats to the loud parties out at the Honky Tonks ( Tootsie's Orchid Lounge was a favorite) I made a ton of new friends that I'm sure I'll keep in touch with and see again and again.
Lastly, let me post a quick soundbite from the closing panel. It's Richard Campbell telling his Goliath story. Seriously, this guy is a great story-teller- I can just imagine him on NPR or something listening to this. | |
| | Tuesday, August 18, 2009 | | SharePoint Search Crawler Content Access Issue |
I just recently had a bout with my MOSS search service. After a couple faithful years of service our SSP got a tick and so we decided the best thing to do was rebuild it (pretty easy really, only a few BDC apps to port, etc...) Unfortunately once everything was done we could not get the search service to crawl the "All Local Sites" content source. Here were the symptoms:
- Crawler Log indicated "Access Denied" when it tried to crawl the root of our intranet or mysites.
- Crawling of the sps:// people content source was fine.
- Content Access account had the proper policy (Read All), and actually even had rights to the site. You could log in as that user and browse all around the site from another computer.
- When a crawl was started (and thus ended very quickly with the one access denied log event) you could no longer open up the content source edit page in search administration (returned a .net "object not found" error).
- If you cleared all indexed content, then you could get back into the content source edit page, so long as you didn't actually attempt a crawl.
- Nothing else really significant in the windows logs (except a failure audit).
- Trying to navigate to the intranet root from the server with the content access account returned a 403 error <--- WHOA... BIG RED FLAG / HINT HERE.
So after searching around (sorry I'd link the blogs here, but the search was quite far and wide and I didn't properly keep track) I discovered that in Windows Server 2003 SP1 they introduced this new feature called "Loopback Check Security Feature". Essentially this means that any attempt by that machine to access an FQDN from the console (or apparently from services running on the box) will fail if it resolves back to itself. I presume the little scriptkiddie hack goes something like this: 1) trick an admin into installing your worm, 2) modify the hosts file or proxy settings so that some official site, say Paypal or your HR payrole system for example, gets redirected back to a local hacked up version of the site, 3) continue with man-in-middle attack, except without the middle man....
Anyway, you may be wonder why FQDN's were involved here since SharePoint by default pops in http://servername as the default "All Local Sites" content source. Well apparently we had changed the default access mapping for these sites a while back (typical) to their FQDN's. When we went to recreate the new SSP it just picked these up and used them.
SO-- the solution can be found at this KB article. Rather than turning off this loopback check (method 2) even though the scenario that it protects against seems pretty far fetched to me, I decided to use method 1, which worked great and didn't require a server reboot :) I've reproduced it below:
Method 1: Specify host names
Note We recommend that you use this method.
To specify the host names that are mapped to the loopback address and can connect to Web sites on your computer, follow these steps:
- Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
- In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0
- Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value.
- Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER.
- Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify.
- In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK.
- Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service.
And that dear friends concludes this edition of "why is search not working...today (there is hope!)" | |
| | Monday, August 17, 2009 | | JS-Kit Echo on SharePoint |
Well as some of you may notice, I've replaced the blog comment system here on The Kick Board as well as the Technology Blog on the Ambassador Corporate website (which had both been using a standard SP-Based List previously) with JS-Kit Echo (the free version at present). So far it seems to be working pretty well although I did have to play around with the order I'm loading and running scripts, but this is more just an issue with my crazy design than any other JS components. Why? Why did I do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons, the primary one is that I was tired of dealing with spam. Even though I was using Akismet with the CKS:EBE, it seemed that the spammers had found lots of ways around that. I considered going to an "authenticated only" comment system, but obviously to be effective I couldn't just make people sign up for my blog- so I would have had to use a third party identity provider. I actually got an open facebook widget working in sharepoint, but I wasn't really sure that many visitors to my website would bother auth'ing to FB just to leave a comment. For now I'm going to leave anonymous comments on for Echo and see how it goes, but if things get spammy, then I'll just require authentication-- luckily Echo supports auth'ing to 5 or 6 different open systems. The secondary reason I really wanted to try Echo out is that it supports a lot of real-time social network connectivity (for example, it can show tweets about your post). This does require an upgrade to the paid version of the control (it's only $12/year), so as soon as I get the free version stable and working consistently then I'll do this. Really I'm using this as a proof of concept platform for an idea I have related to bringing social media content into the SharePoint collaboration space. For more information about JS-Kit Echo go check out their site at http://js-kit.com and please give it a whirl here and leave me some comments so I can shake all the integration bugs out. Thanks! [update 8/17 11:00PM] Ok, I just couldn't resist... so I sprang for the Echo Live upgrade on The Kick Board so I could test the social aggregation features. Also I decided that I'm not going to try and port any of my old comments in-- sorry to everyone that commented here in the past, but I just don't know how I'd do it. | |
| | Sunday, November 16, 2008 | | Technical Blog Posts? |
Hello everyone. We're been working on new ways to actively engaged our website visitors with current technical posts. While we do have some new projects along these lines in the works, we did want to make sure you are aware that one of our Vice Presidents, Kevin Dostalek (yes that would be me), has a recently taken his internal corporate blog and made it publically available. You can get to it here:
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| | Wednesday, August 29, 2007 | | Creating a Base PowerShell Profile for SharePoint |
If you haven't yet started using PowerShell with SharePoint to manipulate administrative and developer tasks (especially when trying to debug things) you really should. It's a nice replacement for all of those things that in the past you might write a ton of little command line apps for. Additionally, if there are repetative tasks (such as with administration) that you do repeatedly, you can use this as a means for automating them easily with PS scripts.
Now, one of the irritating things I found as I started using PowerShell in this way is having to always "prepare" my PowerShell environment everytime I fired it up (loading the SharePoint assembly and getting my initial site object). Another peeve was that I keep forgetting to type new-object instead of simply new like I'm used to from C#. So I wrote a quick profile script to take care of these basics for me and I wanted to share that here so others can get moving more quickly.
The first thing you need to do is reset the execution policy from Restricted to RemoteSigned. Before doing this, type:
PS C:\users\kdostalek> get-help about_signing
And make sure you understand the security ramifications of making this change. If you are comfortable proceeding, type the following:
PS C:\users\kdostalek> Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Great, now we can add our own startup profile script. There are a bunch of places you can add this file... a good reference can be found here, but if you want your scripts available to any user that logs on to the server you should put it here:
c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0
Create a textfile in that directory named, profile.ps1, and open it up in notepad.
For this post, I just want to highlight 3 things to put in here that will make you life easier. The first is setting up an alias for the keyword new, and mapping it to the command new-object. The second is to automatically load the Microsoft.SharePoint assembly into the AppDomain so you can create objects from it. The third is a little helper function that takes an URL as a parameter and returns a SPSite object for you to start manipulating. Here is the script in total:
set-alias new new-object
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
function getsite {
$site = new Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite($args)
return $site
}
Save the file, then fire up PowerShell. You should see it loading the SharePoint assembly from the GAC and you are ready to go. Now if you type in something like this:
PS C:\users\kdostalek> $s=getsite(http://intranet)
You will now have an instance of an SPSite object in the variable $s, all ready for you to start hacking away at.
There is obviously much much more you could add in the way of helper functions here for things you find yourself repetedly doing in your "interactive" sessions. And of course, anything you truly need to automate can be captured in a script. I'll try and post some of my favorite and most useful functions and scripts here in the future. | |
| | Friday, June 15, 2007 | | TechEd Themes |
Having returned from TechEd last week (and recovered this week) I wanted to share with everyone some general themes from the conference.
A big theme of the conference was on "Agility". Many of us groaned at the use of this buzzword because it just confuses the definition even more, but it certainly made many appearances throughout, including the Keynote. The context this was put in was a sort of maturity model which goes something like this: COST-QUALITY-AGILITY. This maps pretty close to what Gartner and Microsoft have been talking about in the Infrastructure Optimization models this past year (CoreIO, BPIO, and AppIO). It encompasses just about every MS initiative from their virtualization strategy to people ready marketing to agile development.
Another theme was "we've got the stuff here and now, vision-speak begone". This was manifested in a cutesy Back-to-the-Future movie at the start of the keynote, culminating with an onstage appearance by Christopher Lloyd and a Delorian. Again, this relates to the first theme in that MS of course has visions, but they've been burned in the past by making them public because in today's world, technology changes so rapidly that you end up changing your visions pretty quickly (to keep your business agile).
If you want to watch the whole keynote yourself you can find it here:
Here are some timings if you are interested in only particular sections:
00:00 Back-to-the-Future Vision Movie
10:30 IT Challenges/Infrastructure Optimization
17:50 Energizer Batteries Case Study Video
21:00 Tom Bittman, Gartner - Dynamic/Agility
33:15 Areas of Focus
39:10 Virtualization
40:30 Server 2008 and SCVMM Demo
49:28 Processes and Models
53:30 SCOM Demo
60:01 Service-Enabled App Platforms
63:40 BizTalk 2008 / SQL 2008 Reporting Services Demo
70:25 User Focused Software
71:55 OBA and VS 2008 Demo
79:30 Silverlight Demo
87:00 Product Releases and Roadmaps
89:50 TechEd 15th Aniversary Video
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