Managing Expectations When Making Your SharePoint Team Sites Look Pretty | Views from Veronique

Another great read from

Once you’ve started to get SharePoint around your head a bit, you will want to make your site look prettier. It’s sometimes hard to justify to your bosses what you’ve been doing all day long when you’ve been working on SharePoint the whole day – it may not look like you’ve done much right? It’s even harder when the bosses have no idea how SharePoint works, they think you’ve been messing around all day. People don’t understand how long it takes to do certain things. If that happens, I hope this blog post will help you justify that. I’ve been redesigning the Lets Collaborate website yet again – I get bored with it so easily. Five site pages took me nearly 8 hours to do, 5 site pages! And I’ve been doing SharePoint full-time for 7 years this year! And this is just done using PowerPoint, not even code anywhere. And I’m not finished. So don’t be disheartened if things are taking you a while, that’s just how it goes. Especially when you need to do the pretty stuff. Just remember, before you get to the pretty stuff, you have to build the backbone first, your lists and libraries.

 

If that happens, I hope this blog post will help you justify that.  I’ve been redesigning the Lets Collaborate website yet again – I get bored with it so easily. :)  Five site pages took me nearly 8 hours to do, 5 site pages!  And I’ve been doing SharePoint full-time for 7 years this year! And this is just done using PowerPoint, not even code anywhere. And I’m not finished.  So don’t be disheartened if things are taking you a while, that’s just how it goes. Especially when you need to do the pretty stuff.  Just remember, before you get to the pretty stuff, you have to build the backbone first, your lists and libraries.

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New Community Sites in SharePoint 2013

Just like all global companies, Axceler uses many pieces of software to communicate and collaborate. SharePoint, SkyDrive, Twitter, Yammer, Jira, Zendesk, Chatter, etc. are used daily. With so many choices, it’s easy to decide on the wrong platform for a project. Last week, a client asked me how Axceler submits new feature ideas to the product team.  The client is also a product company and wasn’t sure which platform would be best. Spoiler alert: we chose SharePoint because of the new community site template in 2013.

Our client wanted to encourage all departments to submit ideas to make their products better. But there was never any incentive to submit new feature ideas, nor was there an easy and clean way for the entire company to view and respond to them. Making the feature requests visible to the entire company was a key requirement. SharePoint’s discussion boards, blog, and wiki capability were just not able to centralize all of the conversations the way our client wanted, and did not support their recently articulated gamification strategies with which they hoped to improve employee engagement on their portal. There were no built in ways to track who submitted the most ideas, which ones were useful, and what were the most popular. They really wanted something similar to stackoverflow.com so that that the best comments would automatically move to the top. No platform they owned provided an easy way to build this type of forum — until they looked at SharePoint 2013 community sites.

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Why are SharePoint projects so complex? – End User – NothingButSharePoint.com

Editor’s note: Contributor Ant Clay is the Founder, CEO & Tummeler of Soulsailor Consulting. Follow him @soulsailor

 

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing excerpts from Ant’s new book “The SharePoint Governance Manifesto” Grab your ebook discount code here: http://www.soulsailorconsulting.com/euspbookoffer

My experience, over the last decade is that in way too many instances, SharePoint projects fail to deliver true business value. They’re delivered as though they are just another Microsoft Office productivity solution, implemented as a technology project with a huge and catastrophic assumption that “If you build it, they will come” (Field of Dreams, 1989).

 

Dave Snowden’s ‘Cynefin Framework’ (Snowden, 2012, http://bit.ly/Cynefin) is immensely useful in sense making the complexity of delivering collaborative and social solutions, such as SharePoint, to my clients. I apply the Cynefin Framework to demonstrate why we can’t just assume that a technology solution on its own will deliver value and solve our organizations business problems.

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SharePoint 2013: Challenges and questions for CIOs

Mobile and social media functionality is not yet  up to the mark

By Juan Carlos Perez | CIO US | Published 15:06, 08 March 13

The new 2013 version of SharePoint, Microsoft’s all-purpose enterprise collaboration server, packs many new and improved features, including a redesign of the user interface, the addition of SkyDrive Pro for enhanced storage and sync of documents, better task management, a revamped search engine and sharper e-discovery features.

SharePoint, used primarily by enterprises to build intranets, public sites, forums, blogs and wikis, as well as for storing, searching and managing documents, now generates about $2 billion in annual revenue, and Microsoft is naturally pushing this new version hard.  Read more

A Definitive Guide To SharePoint Governance: Whitepaper

Courtesy of Richard Harbridge  http://www.rharbridge.com/

Working with Jeremy Thake and Randy Williams we have published a 40 page guide to SharePoint Governance that is now available on AvePoint’s website. The guide is meant to help many organizations trying to get a grasp and understanding on Microsoft SharePoint and is freely available (so no need to buy a book). Be sure to check out the Governance activities outlined within it, and please let us know if you would like to see additional resources or material.

The Whitepaper: SharePoint Governance: A Definitive Guide – Read our white paper to understand best practices and strategies necessary for planning and enforcing governance policies for Microsoft SharePoint.

If you are looking for more SharePoint Governance resources be sure to check out SharePoint Standards at http://www.SPStandards.com, the SharePoint Governance document listing (update and more samples coming soon), and for a slightly different approach “the 5 teams you need for effective SharePoint Governance”.

I’m presenting on “auto metadata extraction with Pingar” at SFVSP

http://www.meetup.com/San-Fernando-Vally-SharePoint-Professionals/events/96455862/

When: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 6:30 PM

Where: New Horizons Computer Learning
333 North Glenoaks Boulevard #400
Burbank, CA 91501

Join us for a night of metadata fun. Jim Ehrenberg, Managing Partner at SharePoint Pros, will demonstrate an employee resource center. He’ll discuss how using metadata and tools like Pingar could be used to help make searching and organizing data more powerful. This demonstration will help drive an understanding of how Pingar is configured and how it empowers users as well as showing a real business scenario.

Food and refreshments will be provided!

This Meetup repeats on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.