A few quotes:

If an IT department is using SharePoint as a development platform for business applications, costs will increase because developers and quality assurance testers will be needed.

Time and effort needs to be put toward developing and maintaining a SharePoint governance plan that outlines the type of content that should be loaded into the system, records policies, standard processes and metadata constructs, and guidelines for approaching and supporting SharePoint projects. (Read: solid information architecture — hire an IA, dammit).

Even if your users are familiar with SharePoint, using it to solve a specific business problem (such as automating a contract management or accounts payable process) typically requires some training.

After deploying SharePoint, users will need to change their approaches to creating and managing information. Given people’s reluctance to change, a proactive change management program is recommended.

Most of the organizations out there just launch CMS systems without any thought to a lot of issues. It’s like any other software product, and should be treated as such.Similar Posts:

• CMS Fridays: Showing Progress And Managing Content In A SharePoint Implementation
• CMS Fridays: Why Should You Use A Content Management System?
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• CMS Fridays: Do End Users Really Care It’s SharePoint?
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It’s one of those tools that I wish did more, and while it’s simple, it’s too simple. By the time you figure that out, you’re kind of stuck, because migrating files is a pain in the neck.

It focuses way too much on Web 2.0

Look, you can drag and drop!

Look at the nifty hover-overs!

Look, wiki’s, but not really!

It’s cool for us web types that love that kind of stuff, but have you ever tried watching a corporate user use BaseCamp? It’s painful. They don’t get most of those little features and touches because 1) they aren’t Web 2.0 experts, and 2) the features aren’t documented in a way that any user would really know how to use them. It would be nicer if they spent some of that time on the next point…

It’s missing features — lots of features

This is a discussion that a friend of mine and I have about the product. We’re using it, and it’s a nice little file sharing tool, but there’s a lot of features we wish it had. Like…

• True prioritization that could be editable
• A better navigation structure
• A more sophisticated governance structure
• More consistent formatting tools (instead of me having to insert HTML)

…and the list goes on.

Seriously, a few of these features would be really, really easy to implement, and wouldn’t take a full feature release.

Simplicity is one thing. Limiting your feature set and telling the users it’s good for them is another.

The pricing isn’t really that competitive

I’m using Basecamp on a few projects, and am paying the $24.95 a month. That might not seem like much, but hosted, that’s roughly $300 a year. I can write that off (and I do) as part of running a business as a consultant, but still, that seems like a lot, and I’m using it on really small projects.

For example, here are some prices for SharePoint (which is the same pricing plans with more features as BaseCamp). Outside of some configuration issues, is a much superior product, and is gaining more acceptance in the corporate community. There’s some great templates to get you started, and quite frankly, I could set up a template in a week that replicates much of the functionality of BaseCamp. I’m lazy because I have more important things to do (like bill clients), and MOSS doesn’t have very good Apple support.

That said, if I were working in an environment that was mostly Microsoft, and had time to setup a SharePoint instance, I’d be all over it in a heartbeat.

They seem to be more about marketing

Sometimes marketing and a cult takes over. Good examples of this are Apple and eBay. Apple products are wonderful (I own enough of them), but they aren’t the most usable in the world. Same with eBay. eBay’s gotten much better over the years about user experience, but the reason it’s big is that they provided a marketplace, had that cult factor and marketed effectively, not because it ws the best product on the market.

The same goes here. If you tell the right people how good you are, and you have the right public relations professionals, you’ll get sales. It’s about the cult, sometimes, especially in the Web space.

They say they listen to their users, but do they?

This post is kind of old, but still, why did they publish this?

I’ve been a product manager, and laughing at your customer base was something that you did over a couple of beers with your customer service representives, not in a blog post. We all agree users in the end are stupid, but you aren’t supposed to make them feel that way.

I remember the days of the users doing something stupid, and then correcting the issue through a better feature development or more help text. This is like airing your dirty laundry, and what’s a bit more troubling about this is that it’s not like this is a free service — users are paying for this product.

They don’t hesitate to take shots at other sites — and yet seems reticient to deal with listening to their users. Let’s face it, the only person that can get away with that is Steve Jobs, and I don’t see him working anytime soon at 37signals.Similar Posts:

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Let’s be frank: they are all buzzwords, and the person speaking to using that system usually has an ulterior motive outside of what’s best for the users. It’s like that Linux guy that likes Linux because it’s easy for him and no one else. Does that really serve the office?

If you have a Microsoft Gold Partner sitting in your office, he’s going to say SharePoint fits the needs for anything short of curing cancer even if MOSS is completely the wrong system. And frankly, all developers have their favorites, and sales people sell, regardless of what the product is. Mac vs. PC. Windows vs. Unix. Drupal vs. Joomla. They’re all religious wars, wars I’m especially tired of.

Every product has it’s merits, and should be judged on them alone, not on a salesperson’s preference. End of sentence.

What do you do?

Picking the right content management system is a make or break situation: it can cost you hundreds of hours in development time, and may result in a poorly done implementation that costs you business. I hear of horror stories where one CMS was ripped out in favor of another, because the first selection was made for reasons other than what’s best for the implementation. Yet time and time again, companies don’t correctly assess the requirements, and the content management system doesn’t even come close to meeting the needs of the client.

I’m suggesting the following points. These are basic product management type processes, but seem to be done in very few instances.

Collect The Requirements Before Selecting A System

What do you need? Is it an intranet? Do you require e-commerce? Are blogs a necessary feature?

Collecting the requirements before selecting the system is very important, because the requirements are going to drive which CMS to select. In fact, you should do this for every pre-packaged system: figure out what you need before you select the package.

That doesn’t mean that you should wireframe out every page; make a bulleted list of what features you need, and then rank them in importance. The truth of the matter is no matter what CMS you select, none of them are going to fit your needs 100 percent, so you are making a best guess selection.

Compare The Feature Set You Need To The Systems Available

All of the content management systems have a specialty: Joomla and SilverStripe good for smaller sites, Drupal is easily configurable, and MOSS handles governance very well.There are even sites dedicated to trying them out — Open Source CMS is a great start — so there’s no excuse to see what’s out there. The truth is that content management is the kitchen sink of web applications, and the feature set among them varies so widely that calling SilverStripe, SharePoint, and Documentum the same application is a farce.

Download the demonstration examples of each of the systems, and play with them a bit. Read the documentation. Talk to experts. Bring some of them in for a day and pay them. I know this will take a little more time, but this will be time well spent instead of the usual “we’re stuck with it because we paid for it.”

The reality is that whatever system you choose will have a certain cost, and that estimated cost at the beginning will be off by 20 to 50 percent, because you won’t know the real development costs until the system is selected and the feature set nailed down. Think of it as a highway construction project: bid just low enough to get the work, and then live with the overages.

Outside og using a Documentum or an Interwoven (and if you have that kind of cash, I’m available for consulting gigs tomorrow), remember when considering feature sets is that open source doesn’t mean free and a lower cost, it just means you’ll probably spend more time configuring it. It might mean no licensing costs, but more development costs. And some organizations might need a licensed product because with that, there’s this implied support system you don’t see with open source products.

Figuring out what you need is very important, because that will lead you to the next step.

Select The System That Best Fits Your Needs, And Design To It

Why do people use content management systems? Because there’s a bunch of built in functionality that normally would take years to build, and even longer to test. For example, no one wants to write blog software anymore because there are several CMS applications that do a very good job. Why re-invent the wheel?

And the price for that functionality?

You have to do things in a way that are CMS specific. Every CMS has peculiarities that you wouldn’t expect (SharePoint’s CSS is heavy, Joomla’s UI is difficult, WordPress plays with a lot of content outside of the editor), and you should plan for them. They’re all frameworks, and frameworks have specific requirements, which means you sometimes have keep the requirements loose.

Or, wireframe to the feature set, and spend a little extra time evaluating the software, because it isn’t custom that can be built to almost any requirement.

I know this sounds weird coming from a User Experience professional, but you are wasting everyone’s time if you throw a temper tantrum when designing a feature that takes three times as long as using out of box functionality because the feature isn’t exactly how you want it. Especially if it’s an extranet or intranet. So don’t waste everyone’s time.

One of the things I did while working on SharePoint sites was designing page templates that worked with content types, and specifically called out web parts that occured over multiple pages. For SilverStripe, you might have to call out the navigation in a particular place, but form design is easy because it does the validation for you. For Plone, you might have to stay with a three column layout. It just depends.

The reality is, as an information architect or business analyst, you’re going to get 80 percent of what you want. If that means a 50 percent reduction in development costs for the client, that’s a good deal, because that means more projects. Sure, there’s less billable time for writing meta data documents and test plans, but a happy client is a good client, right?

I’m by no means a CMS expert (but I’m sure I’ll be launching into my four or fifth one this year). Here are some more resources:

• Content Here has a great series of posts of selecting one.
• Top 10 mistakes when selecting a CMS.

Similar Posts:

• CMS Fridays: Content Management Isn’t Cheap
• CMS Fridays: Showing Progress And Managing Content In A SharePoint Implementation
• CMS Fridays: More About Them, What The Sales Person Won’t Tell The Client, And Vice Versa
• CMS Fridays: Say No Is Hard To Do, But The Right Thing
• CMS Fridays: Picking The Right Content Management System

An international specialty technology company is looking for an on-site full time Information Architect with at least two years of experience designing SharePoint (MOSS) Solutions to champion its SharePoint internet among the employees of the company. This position will ensure the proper governance structures are in place to define the administration, maintenance, and support of content through the information lifecycle. The Information Architect will work closely with business users and the Solutions Architect to develop business requirements for more complex team site applications.

Tasks

• Working within a cross-company team, define the organization, presentation, and navigation of content for the intranet site.
• Conduct one-on-one and group training for team sites. Working with individual departments to establish their team site. Work with business users and Solutions Architects to develop more complex solutions.
• Conduct group training for my sites. Develop workshops to help users establish their my sites.
• Develop and implement the governance and guidelines for how Sharepoint is utilized (content publishing, information security, archiving of content) along with the roles and responsibilities.
• Completes special projects and other duties as assigned.

Skills

• Two years experience as a Sharepoint Information Architect.
• Three years of experience managing projects with documented business benefits by leveraging collaboration technologies.

Background

• Four-year college degree, preferably in computer science or software engineering, or equivalent level of experience.
• Must be a self starter with good interpersonal and analytical skills.
• Must be able to work with both technical and non-technical employees.
• Must be detail oriented, creativity, experience working with multi-disiplinary teams.
• Ability to understand business requirements, analyze business processes and develop technical solutions to support the enterprise

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• Six Revisions has a list of the 10 promising systems it has selected
• Open Source CMS is the mack daddy of CMS lists, and a lot of them have online demos
• CMS Watch is a bit more techie, and is a news portal covering the major systems
• Sometimes a blog engine is just what you need, and Smashing Magazine has reviewed 10 of them

In the coming weeks, I’ll go through some of the implementations I’ve been doing to make Wordpress and SilverStripe sing. Stay tuned!Similar Posts:

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The answer is no.

They’re looking for something that saves them time, backs up their data, makes it easier to share information with their co-workers, and that will work. They don’t necessarily care about the name of it, all they really want it to do is work, and for it to make their life easier.

That’s one of the points information technology departments miss in dealing with end users: the users at the end don’t really care what the name of the software is, because whatever they get, it’s imposed on them. From the email software they use to the word processing software they write up reports in, almost every piece of software is selected and standardized on across departments. Very few end users get to pick what their software is, and if they do get to pick, the information technology departments don’t support it.

So what’s my point?

To the information technology departments, specifically: whatever you do, make sure it doesn’t impose extra restrictions or demands on the end users. Whatever you build into SharePoint, take in consideration that the easier to use it is, the more users that will use it. Imposing extra governance and workflows to it doesn’t make sense.

For example, Groove is a great tool when paired with SharePoint, because you can have files on your local system sync with SharePoint document libraries automatically and seamlessly. What that meant for me is I lost a bunch of files in a system crash, but all of the files were backed up to SharePoint. I didn’t lose anything.

And it was so easy to use, I didn’t even know I was using it.

Can you say the same about your SharePoint implementation?Similar Posts:

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• What is the purpose for developing the application?
• What functionality does the platform provide?
• How is the platform received in the market?
• Can you justify the cost?

Read on…Similar Posts:

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So what do you do?

Microsoft to the rescue! They’ve released a new site called SharePoint Guidance. It’s a portal that covers all stages of development, from requirements gathering to unit testing and user acceptance. They also have a bunch of links to software that makes the job of developing for MOSS easier.Similar Posts:

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Projects fail for a number of reasons, but the main point here was the lack of high level systems thinking. Sometimes, it’s best to figure out ways to simplify the complexity, and that isn’t always an easyr thing to do.Similar Posts:

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(That may be part of the reason why there’s so many awful SharePoint implementations.)

MOSS is more of a framework of “Where do you want to go today” without needing to build the system from scratch and requiring money and time to do all that testing on what really should be out-of-the-box compnents.

SharePoint can do a lot of things, and sometimes almost anything, but SharePoint implemented incorrectly can equal months of pain and believe me, I’ve seen it. SharePoint however positions itself very well against the Documentums and Vignettes of the world in providing a solution that provides extensive control over workflow and document management but doesn’t break the bank.

It doesn’t mean it’s any easier to implement; it just means that you probably need three or four MOSS Architects when building a system with Vignette or Documentum might need 10 or more consultants who would cost twice as much per hour.

Here’s a few tips to make your life easier:

What Are You Trying To Do?

Figure it out — what’s the purpose of the SharePoint implementation? There’s a lot of things that it does well, and there’s also a lot of things that it doesn’t do well. SharePoint is excellent at document management, collaboration and other internal intranet needs. It’s blog and message board tools, however, aren’t as effective as they could be. The list might make SharePoint a deal maker or breaker.

List what you need out of any content management solution, and prioritize what’s more versus less important. This will help you evaluate how close SharePoint gets you to the final product.

What Does SharePoint Provide “Almost Out Of The Box”?

There’s a lot of functionality in SharePoint that gets you 90 percent of the way to where you want to be. Figure out what functionality you need out of SharePoint, and look for web parts and configurations that gets you almost all the way there.

If it’s not quite what you need, but close, either consider the time it takes to customize it, or consider changing your requirement so it fits the tool. This may seem like a backwards thing to do things, but if it saves

What Are The Gaps That Need To Be Filled, And How Do I Fill Them?

There are a ton of companies to provide tools that play well with SharePoint, and fill in some of the gaps where SharePoint falls short.

For example:

• Telligent has a product called Evolution, which fills in collaboration gaps where SharePoint isn’t as effective as it could be. Evolution is a complete social media package with blogging, message boards and social network components that includes web parts the integrate directly into SharePoint.
• Telerik provides a lot of smaller web parts like a totally configurable HTML editor that plugs directly into SharePoint. It comes with a bunch of other tools, but the editor is what sold one of our clients on how much control (or lack thereof) they could give end users editing SharePoint content.
• Infragistics also builds presentation layer controls that helps give end users a top notch User Experience in using SharePoint. Remember, some of those gaps aren’t just product-driven, they may be UI Driven.

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The irony is that I saw the system, and what I like most about their approach was how they attached a return on investment to the project, and the project received its funding through reduction of travel budgets. The establishes a very real value and the users know they have to use the system to replace other methods of communication.

And it worked, as their statistics showed. It’s too bad they couldn’t have had a few years to let the experiment grow.Similar Posts:

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Looking forward to more companies going social!Similar Posts:

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With some of our clients, we’ve been talking to them about using SharePoint as the source of truth and establishing governance as part of that, and really analyzing their culture.

Just put it this way — MOSS isn’t just about intranets.Similar Posts:

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This article walks through step-by-step how the Microsoft Partner Provoke created a series of custom lists so documents could be tagged by any number of categories across different groups. While there was a more controlled structure than a folksonomy (the IA’s were driving the bus), this is the ultimate flexible system.

The benefits are:

• Quick information architecture process — what would take months only took a few weeks
• Extensible information architecture structure — just add a new tag!
• Popular tags would bubble up organically, and be displayed on the home page

I’m guessing that the document library lives at the top level.

Ironically, they went with tag lists and filtering because tag could usability is still up in the air — hmmph!Similar Posts:

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Clever Workarounds has published parts 2, 3 and 4 on their blog, and I’m sure it’s going to continue for some time. My favorite of the Part 4 is the square peg, round hole illustration.

Here’s the complete list:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

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• CMS Fridays: SharePoint’s Complexity Translates To Organizational Risk
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CleverWorkarounds has a good article about it, comparing it to a drinking game which I think is classic. Again, it’s not the tool. They also have another article about selling MOSS that’s pretty “interesting”.Similar Posts:

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