Month: April 2012

The Unanswerable Question
The Unanswerable Question
Blog Posts

One of the most-asked SharePoint questions has absolutely nothing to do with technology: How do we get started? Whether I am presenting on managed metadata and taxonomy, social computing, governance, or migration planning, someone in the audience inevitably asks this question. It happened again this weekend while presenting my session ‘How SharePoint 2010 Stacks up to Your End User Social Media Requirements’ at the 3rd annual SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles event. I shared vignettes into a SharePoint environment where search is optimized, where taxonomy management and proactive governance take center ring, and where end users have been trained on how to use the platform and how to request changes.

Improving SharePoint Search: How to Increase Content Findability in 5 Simple Steps
Improving SharePoint Search: How to Increase Content Findability in 5 Simple Steps
Blog Posts

SharePoint is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in organizations as a method to manage content. Of course, no content management system is complete without an excellent search function whereby the model always serves up the exact set of relevant documents demanded by the user. While this ideal is not always attainable in practice, SharePoint’s search functionalities can be customized to achieve vast improvements in the overall search experience.

How to Improve SharePoint Search with Best Bets in SharePoint 2010
How to Improve SharePoint Search with Best Bets in SharePoint 2010
Blog Posts

SharePoint has become an integral part of many enterprise content management solutions, with a reported adoption rate of 78% percent of Fortune 500 companies as of this writing. The software is attractive due to its clean UI, collaboration tools, seamless integration with Microsoft Office, and the ability it gives IT administrators to deploy and securely manage intranet, extranet and Internet sites from one centralized platform.

Who are the SharePoint End Users?
Who are the SharePoint End Users?
Blog Posts

Who are the end users in the SharePoint world? This answer differs from time to time when I poll the attendees in my conference sessions and classes. Here are the three choices for you:

Responsive Web Design
Responsive Web Design
Blog Posts

Responsive web design is about making your web site adapt the layout to the viewing context, typically the browser window or the device that renders it. In other words, whether I watch the web site on a mobile, a tablet or a pc, and no matter what resolution I use, I should see something useful. It should respond to the context. Lately I’ve redesigned my blog to make it responsive, and here is what I’ve done.

Deciphering SharePoint Platitudes
Deciphering SharePoint Platitudes
Blog Posts

The best part of my job as an evangelist is that I am able to connect and talk with some of the brightest minds in the SharePoint community, tapping into their extensive backgrounds to better understand their unique perspectives to some of the more difficult business problems facing SharePoint teams. One of the more common problems — which sounds simple, and yet it sits at the core of the majority of failed enterprise application deployments — is the failure of the organization to have a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished.

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade - Important Updates
SharePoint 2010 Upgrade – Important Updates
Blog Posts

SharePoint 2010 Upgrade is not over yet. While some estimates recently put it at 50% I get a different picture from my recent visit to Bulgaria. I had a nearly full theatre room with those interested in SharePoint 2010 upgrade. There are still a number of customers waiting and looking at SharePoint 2010 and trying to decide when they should do it. I have done a number of posts on Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 both for IT and Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade for End Users. Any post on issues in 2010 or browser and ActiveX controls should not discourage you. It’s definitely worth it.

Future of Business Processes – State Workflows
Future of Business Processes – State Workflows
Blog Posts

The concept of workflows comes from the time when work was rather mechanical. People (and later machines) were supposed to repeat precisely defined steps in a fixed order (or sequence). Any deviation from prescribed path, any thinking and improvising was not welcome. Assembly lines or microprocessors – they were all realizing rigid sequences.