It's all about UI

Wiki is to Document Management Systems as Graphical User Interface is to Command Line

People create silo's not technology

A couple of recent posts by Thomas Van Wal, SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools, and Dion Hinchcliffe, SharePoint andEnterprise 2.0: The good, the bad and the ugly seem to have re-started the SharePoint it's not really Enterprise 2.0 meme. These are both balanced articles and I agree with a lot of the points raised in them and certainly as with any application SharePoint has its strengths and weakness's. However one of the common criticisms of SharePoint is the rapid proliferation of sites upon deployment and I can confirm this from my own experiences, that in a large enterprise, within one year you can be looking at 1000's of SharePoint sites. But is this the fault of SharePoint? No this is a failure of deployment, it is a user failure.
SharePoint is no different to any other content management system and I've seen this same issue in every large content management I've worked with. There are two main reasons this occurs, firstly if someone does not manage the structure users will proliferate folders/sites in an uncontrolled fashion. In general people simply create what they need in that moment for their project. Secondly they restrict the access permissions, the assumption is that if they don't restrict access then someone will delete it/change it. Nothing creates silo's quicker than allowing users to control permission settings.
The implication in the 'proliferation of Sharepoint sites' comments is that if the companies had implemented a 'proper' Enterprise 2.0 tool set then this would not of happened. Sorry I don't buy this. It doesn't matter what the tool is if you don't invest resources in defining structure and allow users to manage permissions then you end up with a proliferation of silo's. I've heard of the same sort of proliferation of silo's occurring within wiki's based on Socailtext and Confluence, both of which allow user to create silo'ed wiki spaces. Even when the ability to set permission is inactivated or is not available, such as in MediaWiki, then you still need invest in wiki gardening to introduce and maintain structure as the wiki grows.
In the end it is not the tools but rather that those implementing social computing need to understand what they are trying to do. I'd guess that in many of the companies where silo's have proliferated it is more because the tools were introduced by people who understand technology not people/communities. In the end the whole social computing thing is not about the technology it is about the culture. If you don't understand the culture you are trying to create then don't be surprised if you end up with a mass of silo's.

Amplified08

This week rather than attend a wiki Wednesday gathering I attended Amplified08. This was a gathering of various 'social media' networks from across the UK. Details of what happened can be read over on the Amplified08 wiki and blog. What did I think of it? I met some interesting people had some interesting conversation but left not really any the wiser as to the aim of the meeting beyond a desire to connect people. The interesting thing is that when I attend a wiki Wednesday meeting I go along with the expectation of meeting interesting people and having interesting conversations. Why did I expect something different? Maybe my issues is that I'm too preconditioned to expect meetings to be focused around producing a product. Maybe it's because I'm interested in wiki's and I share that in common with those who attend wiki Wednesday's, I'd describe this as a strong tie. However in the case of Amplified08 the thing we all had in common was an interest in social media and that we belonged to at least one networking group, for me this is a weak tie. If I had to choose between attending a wiki Wednesday or another Amplified session then wiki Wednesday wins. What would make me change my mind? A higher purpose. One reason community's band together is to speak with a unified voice. The old adage "we are stronger if we stand together than stand alone". So what could that higher purpose be? Net Neutrality, Defending the freedom of the network, Defining standards, Influencing government, Taking back ownership of our identity data. What would you choose?

OnePoint: Revolutionising team collaboration

OneNote is widely recognised as a gold standard personal knowledge management tool. It is an application with an intuitive user-friendly interface that readily enables a user to aggregate information together from multiple sources and arrange it in a familiar notebook format. One of the less well known features of OneNote is the capacity to create shared notebooks. We have combined OneNote 2007 with SharePoint 2007 to create an excellent team knowledge management tool, which we refer to as 'OnePoint'. This implementation provides an intuitive user-friendly interface onto a SharePoint document library with automatically managed online/offline capability. In addition to this the ability to add hyperlinks, text and pictures alongside these document files adds significant value to a team - users doesn't always have to open a document to find information. OnePoint has enabled project teams to move seamlessly into working in a collaborative fashion resulting in increased engagement and cohesion. An added bonus, probably related to the facile fashion in which information can be collated, is that we are seeing teams aggregate not just the data/information they are using but also including the context, rational and decisions they are making on it. OnePoint is not only revolutionising team collaboration, but also reducing email traffic, eliminating information silos and being demanded by users of all technical ability!

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Update: I have been asked to take down the slide deck associated with this post. Hopefully I will be able to re-post it in the near future.

Update: After a bit of "anonymising" I'm free to re-post the slides to slideshare, enjoy.

OnePoint! - Combining OneNote and SharePoint

OneNote - An electronic version of my paper notebook where I can drag and drop documents onto a page and annotate. A great user interface that seamlessly allows integration and management of your emails and MS Office files with free text annotations.

SharePoint - A good project level content management system (lets be honest the wiki and blog functions are not there yet) with a classically non-intuitive Microsoft user interface.

OneNote + SharePoint - An excellent collaborative electronic project notebook. All the power of SharePoints online content management system with fantastically user friendly electronic notebook interface.

There can only be one name for this combination - OnePoint

What information storage system should I use?

This is a question I’ve been hearing more and more regularly. It is clear my colleagues are becoming confused as to which tools they should be using to store their information. This is not surprising considering the different tools that are available to them; Livelink, Documentum, SharePoint, corporate wiki, etc. All these tools can be used to support collaboration and sharing of information but which should be used? This is a question I have been contemplating for a little while now. The problem is that each of these systems have their own strengths and weaknesses, no one tool meets all the requirements. Recently I had an epiphany and the penny dropped. By thinking about collaboration from a communications perspective you are able to consider the different needs of a group broken down by the audiences they communicated with. There are essentially two types of communication:

1. Internal communication – the project is sharing transient information associated with the day to day running of the project i.e. meeting agenda, minutes, ideas, comments, etc. The key nature of much of this information is that at the time of generation it is often unclear it’s value. Only with time and additional information does the value of a piece of information become apparent. For example the value of a hypothesis cannot be judged at its conception only after testing and analysis.
2. External communication – the project is producing reports that are aimed at informing the rest of the organisation about its status/progress. This might include stage gate documentation for example.

In the first situation the project team needs to consolidate information from many different sources including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, email, PDF, images, etc. This information needs to be made available to the whole team in an environment where comments and thoughts can readily be captured, shared and updated. By its nature this information tends to be unstructured and represents a log of the evolving thinking and progress of the project team. To the team and those who are familiar with the teams working style this environment should be readily navigatable. The drawback of this environment is that many outside the project will find this environment to be non-intuitive and they will require an investment of both time and effort to allow them to navigate to the information they want. However it is worth remembering that this ‘Project eNotebook’ is a tool primarily to support internal project communication. OneNote in combination with a file-sharing environment offers a user-friendly tool that is easy to learn and meets these requirements. As described previously, in this model each team member has a copy of OneNote on their PC and utilise a common ‘notebook’ that is hosted within SharePoint.

In comparison in the second situation the team is essentially producing reports summarising the progress or status of the project. The target audience for these reports is the external environment. In many instances these reports will utilise pre-existing templates or a formal reporting style. The team are producing structured information for consumption by an audience distant to the day to day working of the project. In this case the corporate wiki and a project blog probably represent the appropriate environment for the sharing of this type of information. Hyper linking should be used to provide soft intergration between this environment and the ‘Project eNotebook’/SharePoint site. It is envisaged that only a single document is maintained in the corporate wiki and that this is a living document that evolves with the project. Hence it is likely that as a project pass significant milestones snapshots of the projects status are archived into the appropriate corporate content management system.
This is summarised in the diagram below.