Seradigm: Knowledge Management

In this fourth post on information management trends in NZ, I look at the phenomenon that is SharePoint.

NB. In this article I focus specifically on the use of SharePoint for Intranets, Collaboration, and team based Document Management. SharePoint can also be used for Enterprise Document Management, Records Management, and as an application development platform, but I don’t explore those in depth here.

The key trend I’m picking is that given the sheer number of deployments we’re seeing in NZ, and the capability of some of the solution partners and consultants, by 2010/11 we’re going to continue to see lots of very bad implementations of SharePoint, and some very good ones.

Here’s why.

I’ve been observing SharePoint implementations since the product first debuted in 2001. The software company I used to be part owner of used SharePoint’s predecessor, Microsoft Site Server, to build the first Intranet for one of NZ’s largest insurance companies. They then (after we sold the company and I went out consulting), built an Intranet product on top of the first version of SharePoint and deployed it with a number of large corporate customers.

Like most Microsoft products, SharePoint wasn’t very good in its first couple of versions. By SharePoint 2007 however, there seemed to be general consensus in the industry that the product had reached maturity, and was starting to be very good. It was feature rich, stable, and very well integrated with Microsoft Office 2007.

Why then, am I predicting there will continue to be lots of bad implementations in 2010/11? Firstly, the background context. New Zealand, by international standards has only a handful of real ‘enterprise’ size organisations (5,000-50,000 staff). Most ‘large’ NZ organisations are between 500-5,000 staff, with relatively few above the 2,000 person mark. As such the deployments of ‘Enterprise Content Management’ products and stacks (such as those from Stellent, Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, Lotus) have been proportionally fewer than in countries with larger organisations, due in part at least to cost. Many NZ organisations have therefore struggled along with shared drives, and Exchange Public Folders (shudder) for longer than their Australian, US and British counterparts. Perhaps recognising this challenge, New Zealand passed the Public Records Act in 2005. Audits begin in 2010. A lot of public sector organisations (in particular the smaller ones) are implementing SharePoint to meet their records keeping obligations. A lot of corporates are implementing SharePoint because of its strengths in collaborative workspaces, and the fact it provides a platform to on which to build useful systems and services (that is much cheaper than the big ECM stacks).

Because of NZ’s smaller scale, Microsoft has a greater penetration in the back office server space in NZ than in larger countries, where Sun, IBM and Oracle products are proportionately more pervasive. Many of the organisations in NZ that had Novell infrastructure have shifted to Windows servers and Exchange in the last few years. That means that in NZ, there are proportionally more Windows servers, and more people with experience deploying Windows infrastructure and developing solutions for the Microsoft platform, than in larger countries.

As many people will know, SharePoint comes in two ‘flavours’. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS), which is free with Windows servers, and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) for which Microsoft charges licence fees. Because WSS is ‘free’, and relatively easy to implement, it is to content/document management this decade what MS Access was to data management in the 90′s. MS Access was fantastic in that database applications could be built cheaply and quickly, and awful in that those applications proliferated almost uncontrollably in some organisations, becoming a management nightmare for IT and the business alike. In a similar way, where organisations implement WSS sites without some centralised strategy, governance, and configuration management (or for that matter use MOSS to do the same thing), it’s the same recipe for chaos. SharePoint is a complicated product, and it’s easy to implement poorly, from a usability, content discovery, scalability, and manageability point of view. Because of this, and the reasons above, I predict we will continue to see a great many SharePoint implementations done organically, hurriedly, or just put in by IT, without appropriate user testing, configuration management, and governance processes. This will lead to inconsistencies across SharePoint sites, silo-ed information, and user frustration. Darryl Burling, the SharePoint product manager for Microsoft New Zealand provides some views on how SharePoint skills shortages (both technical and business) in NZ are contributing to this problem.

That’s the bad news. So what’s the good news?

I also predict we are going to start seeing some stunningly good SharePoint implementations in NZ. The reasons for this are:

1. The capabilities of some SharePoint solution partners,
2. The SharePoint Elite initiative,
3. A maturing user community,
4. The work on the human and business sides of SharePoint implementation being done by a small number of NZ consultants.

A small number of solution companies that implement SharePoint have been doing so for quite a number of years. Intergen and Provoke in particular have learned the hard way, made most of the mistakes there are to make, and are now very good at tailoring SharePoint solutions to client needs, and implementing them in a usable, manageable and scalable way. Intergen also has a ‘Rapid Results‘ service where they’ve configured an implementation of SharePoint for very fast, high quality, deployments of SharePoint for intranets with up to 500 users.

In order to validate the growing sophistication and competence of a number of SharePoint implementers, Microsoft New Zealand has launched the SharePoint Elite initiative. This is a certification and training scheme to provide ‘SharePoint Elite Partner’ status to those who meet the standard. Datacom, Fujitsu, Information Leadership, Intergen and Provoke are the first companies in NZ to do this training.

There are now SharePoint user groups in a number of centres, and 2009 saw the first national SharePoint conference (for which there’ll be a followup next year). Knowledge sharing through these fora should increase the comunities’ capabilities. Ian Oliver of Provoke discusses the changing face of the implementation community and ‘raising of the bar’ of customer expections in this blog post.

Last, but not least, there are a small number of people working on the ‘softer’ aspects of SharePoint. Information Leadership provide a number of assessment methods, information design, records compliance, and training services for SharePoint. Michael Sampson, a global expert in using SharePoint for collaboration, lives in NZ. He’s written two books on SharePoint – ‘Seamless Teamwork‘ and ‘SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration‘. In both books he provides a very critical and rigorous analysis of SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses. Even more importantly, Chapters ‘4. Governance Structure, Process and Themes‘ and ‘5. Engaging the Business‘ from his second book, provide, I believe, extremely valuable guidance on how to manage the human and business aspects of implementing and using SharePoint. If followed, this guidance will help organisations avoid many of the pitfalls I predict above.

So, that’s my prediction. In 2010/11 we’ll see a proliferation of awful to barely mediocre implementations of SharePoint, a number of extremely good implementations, and not much in the middle. As to whether the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 will make any difference to the above, I’ll let others comment.

Sidenote and disclaimer: I am not a SharePoint consultant, I’m an IM/KM/IS Strategist, so my arguments above are based on what I’ve seen in the industry, rather than through ‘hands-on’ experience implementing SharePoint. In addition, I don’t receive money or consulting work from any of the organisations mentioned above. I try, as much as is possible, to be technology and vendor agnostic. 

This is the fourth in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

Next up, Structured Content.

One of the big challenges for Enterprise Content Management in the last few years has been the sharing of different content types. ECM covers records, documents, images, emails, forum posts, web content, lists, people profiles, and more recently blog posts, wiki pages, and microblogging. These content types were managed in different stores. Traditionally the only way to get single sourcing of content and sharing/reuse/blending of different content types across different stores was to buy all of the solution components from one vendor. Because of the fast moving nature of the industry even that was problematic as most of the players grew by acquisition, picking up different pieces of the ECM stack from companies they bought. Sometimes they weren’t well integrated in, and compatibility/reuse was only at a very surface level, or was technically difficult to implement.

For organisations that couldn’t afford large integrated ECM stacks (which includes the very large majority of NZ organisations), the promise of single sourcing and content reuse seemed a far off dream.

Enter CMIS – the Content Management Interoperability Services standard. Think of it in the same light as the way major database vendors standardised on SQL in the 1980s. CMIS was formally initiated in October 2008 by OASIS, following work by EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco and others on the proposed standard. It is now governed by a multi-vendor technical commitee that works to:

“standardize a Web services interface specification that will enable greater interoperability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. CMIS uses Web services and Web 2.0 interfaces to enable rich information to be shared across Internet protocols in vendor-neutral formats, among document systems, publishers and repositories, within one enterprise and between companies.”

More specifically, CMIS provides standards for a set of Web Services and RESTful APIs to allow different content repositories and systems to:

• search for and discover what different content types (Object Type definitions in CMIS language) and capabilities exist in a repository
• create, read, update and delete content objects
• file and categorise content objects
• navigate and traverse a hierarchy of folders in a repository
• create versions of content objects and see their version history
• query to retrieve content objects by specific criteria

Currently the specification is at version 0.63 and is actively being worked on. It provides a Domain Model, a Schema, and sets of bindings for RESTful AtomPub, and Web Services. These are available here.

So what does this mean in practice? Once implemented it will be a way to break down the silos, and enable reuse of content amongst multiple systems. It should allow ECM applications, portals, and intranets to be built that aggregate content from a range of CMIS compliant repositories, and allow them to be mixed and mashed up in a ‘loosely coupled’ way. You’ll be able to have best of breed repositories/content applications, from different vendors, and join them together seamlessly.

Let’s look at some practical examples.

Scenario 1

Imagine you’re a government agency with a web site built in Drupal, and you’ve implemented Alfresco for records and document management. You’ve got a set of policy documents that you need to publish on the web. The traditional method would have been to work on the documents in the document management system, create a final version, send it to your web manager who’d upload it to the web site’s document repository, delete the old version, and make sure the new version appears in the right places on the site.

With CMIS you’d be able to have a content store for published documents in Alfresco, with appropriate metadata describing them. You’d then have a live query from Drupal to Alfresco using CMIS to retrieve those documents and display them. No going through the web manager, no uploading and deleting documents to and from the web site, just the completion of a controlled publication process, with the documents automatically displaying on the site. This example is already achievable with the CMIS Drupal-Alfresco module, and Alfresco’s draft CMIS implementation in Alfresco Community 3.1 and above.

Scenario 2

Let’s say you’re a University and you’ve implemented Microsoft Sharepoint to manage structured content including course information, news items, and staff profiles. You love Sharepoint’s handling of content workflows for news production and editing, and its ease of integration with Microsoft Office, but you want to publish the news items in multiple places including the public web site, the staff Intranet, and the learning management system. For various reasons these are built in EpiServer, Plone, and Moodle respectively. You’d also like some news items to be published to the new research collaboration system built in Sakai. Through CMIS you could have the news items stored in Sharepoint, and accessible from each of these systems, again with simple queries via REST or SOAP. Let’s say you’re also using Sharepoint for your records management solution. You could then have documents that are put into Moodle and Sakai automatically result in copies of correct versions being stored in Sharepoint for appropriate retention and disposal.

While this example isn’t all achievable yet, you can already use Sharepoint Server 2007 to access external content repositories using CMIS. Here’s how.

Conclusions

CMIS will open up the enterprise content management space to more innovation, remixing, and creative solutions than we’ve ever seen before. Organisations will be able to choose best of breed components, and glue them together with relatively minimal effort. Solutions won’t be restricted by vendor lock-in, but will be responsive to real business/user needs.

This is the second in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

Next to come, Enterprise Social Networking

I’ve just been asked to Chair the Brightstar Information Management conference in Wellington in March next year. As such, I’ve consolidated my mental meanderings on IM trends into something a bit more cohesive. Here’s what I’m seeing coming:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

I’ll write about the first trend in this post, then the others in subsequent posts.

OpenSource Enterprise Content Management

It’s been a big year for the ECM marketplace.  Two of the major pure play ECM vendors Interwoven and Vignette were acquired by other players (Autonomy and OpenText). Other major players Stellent, Documentum and Filenet were acquired by bigger multi-solution vendors over the last three years.

These deals are seen by those such as CMS Watch as being largely good for shareholders, and largely bad for users/buyers of those systems. The ECM market has become something like the ERP market, with a significant proportion of product licence costs simply paying for the expensive sales process. In New Zealand we don’t have too many organisations large enough to spend the $500k-$1M to get a fully integrated set of ECM components from those big vendors, but even so, the NZ 500-2000 person organisation market has been looking for an attractive ECM platform. The desire to be able to deliver document capture, document management, records management, intranet, digital asset management, and collaboration in an integrated way is compelling as organisations try to deal with ever mounting volumes of unstructured information.

In  2005 John Newton, co-founder of Documentum and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects founded Alfresco. They employed a number of former engineers and Employees from Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Interwoven and Vignette. Their mission was to create an open source ECM platform. They used best of breed open source Java components, including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene and MyFaces. Their business model was to have a GPL community edition, and an Enterprise edition with paid support at about a tenth of the cost of the older proprietary ECM solutions.

I first reviewed Alfresco in late 2007 as a part of a web content management (WCM) project for an NZ University. Although its WCM component was relatively underdeveloped compared to the likes of Drupal, MySource Matrix, EpiServer, Sitecore and many others, the underlying platform was sophisticated. I was sure Alfresco was going to be big. Up until the last year or so however, there’s really only been Lateral Minds in Australia who’ve been implementing Alfresco in New Zealand, with some large government ministries and private companies.

Now Catalyst IT, Solnet, Coretech, and probably a few others I don’t know about have started implementing Alfresco in NZ. I predict Alfresco will be big in NZ, soon. My reasons for this prediction are:

• Due to the Public Records Act audits starting next year, many organisations are looking for records management solutions that provide benefit above and beyond traditional RM products
• With version 3.2 Alfresco provides a robust platform for records management, document management, and digital asset management, at a price that is right for the mid-size organisations (on a global measuring scale) that we have so many of in NZ
• It has an immensely scalable Java content repository which makes for lower hardware costs, again appealing in a cost conscious market like NZ
• Its lightweight RESTful architecture for customisation means solutions will be able to be deployed quickly and cheaply
• Alfresco integrates well with the open source WCM product Drupal, which has a large installed base in NZ both in government agencies and the private sector
• Alfresco Share is an alternative to the collaborative workspace features of Microsoft Sharepoint, and while currently much less feature rich than Sharepoint, has enough to make organisations take a look at it
• There is emerging support and implementation services from NZ vendors
• Lateral Minds are trading in NZ, are providing expert services that come from several years of working with Documentum and Alfresco, and are the Certified Training Partner for Australia and New Zealand

So, that’s my prediction, Alfresco is about to take off here. We’ll see whether 2010/11 proves me right. More on the other trends in further posts this week.

Last week I chaired the Brightstar 7th Annual Strategic Intranets and Enterprise Portals conference. It was a fantastic event, with a really good atmosphere, largely due I think to the community that’s sprung up around the KiwiIntranets online group over the last year, and due to Michael Earley’s engagement with that community in planning the conference.

One of the presenters at the conference, Helen Baxter of Mohawk Media, used a new Web 2.0 mind mapping tool called MindMeister for her talk. It’s similar to Freemind, and Mind Manager, but is web based and allows collaborative authoring. I was so impressed with it I used it for my conference summary.

The key themes of the conference were, for me:

• Radical trust in users – turning Intranets into read/write collaborative spaces
• Maturity and pragmatism in Intranet development methodologies
• A strong culture of learning from each other in the Intranet professionals community
• Web 2.0 concepts moving into Intranets and creating a more open content authoring paradigm, and social networking
• Kaizen – applying the japanese philosophy of continual incremental improvement to Intranet development
• Open source is a real option now
• Sharepoint is ready

For more details on this, see the conference summary.

Michael Sampson also live blogged the entire event, his prolific effort is here.

My favourite quotes of the conference were:

“invisible rain is captured by Web 2.0 companies and turned into mighty rivers of information. Rivers that can be fished” – (I’m unsure of the source of the quote)

“a blog is an unexploded bomb” – Paul Reynolds