Fear of Folksonomy

I'm a big believer in the saying that some things are better left unsaid, but in the age of Twitter, Facebook and teenagers running up thousand dollar phone bills by texting, I seems that everyone wants a chance to say what's on their mind (even bloggers...).

I had the opportunity to deliver presentations and demos in a SharePoint 2010 SDPS (SharePoint Deployment Planning Service offering) for a customer who was very interested in the new social networking and communities features as a way to get physicians to collaborate on specialties and practices.  I deployed the 2010 RTM bits on my Hyper-V environment and built an 'Org Chart' out of reporting relationships in Active Directory, and imported some managed meta data from a company in Germany that provides meta data... check out their offerings here.  Very cool!

We demonstrated document and page tagging, document rating, and 'tag cloud' features (among other things), and then one of the participants started to look a little worried.

It never fails - a 'cool feature' to one customer is an absolute nightmare to another...

The discussion started with a question on how to control the ability to tag pages and documents, so that search wouldn't be influenced by people randomly tagging pages, and led to a discussion of the managed meta data service and ways to 'lock down' taxonomy facets and allow business subject matter experts to manage taxonomy.  There was a great concern that some employee might decide to tag a document with something like 'this sucks' (pardon the language), and this led to a discussion on whether the use of Microsoft Forefront could help police language used in social tagging.

I absolutely understood and sympathized with their concerns - nobody wants to demonstrate a great new collaboration tool to an executive, bring up the tags and notes associated with a press release announcing the executive's recent promotion and read a tag that says 'idiot'... that would be the definition of a bad demo.

So, how do we introduce the full set of social networking capabilities and benefits into an organization that wants some structure and ground rules?  As I always say, the technology is the easy part.  One approach would be to prohibit people (all, or selectively) from tagging pages and documents. The social tagging features of SharePoint 2010 are enabled by default, but you can disable them by removing the Use Social Features permission through the User Profile service.  See here and here for more information.

Another, more complicated approach is to undertake the change management needed to educate and train users, and think through just how this type of information might be monitored and harvested for the benefit of the organization.  If tagging is introduced as a way to help the organization understand and gather employee feedback, and it's made clear that the feedback is *not* anonymous and no inappropriate comments will be tolerated, there will always be the random 'this sucks', but those tags can be traced directly to the author for a 'heart to heart' follow up discussion with HR...

And just imagine, what if these features were available at Enron and Goldman Sachs, and small handfuls of employees started tagging financial information or trading reports with things like 'unethical?' ?

Maybe we're not ready to hear everything that everyone has to say, but maybe we could be...  I'm interested in seeing where social networking can take hold in Corporate America and seeing where it leads.  Remember, the technology is the easy part.

Iron Anniversary

So, my husband and I are both married to big geeks.  Now *that's* over with, I have to say I'm really excited about running SharePoint 2007 and now SharePoint 2010 (beta) at home.

By home, I mean that since hubby and I are both in 'the business' (product development, tech consulting) he wound up putting a tower rack in our basement some years ago.  We run more servers at home than I've seen deployed at many small companies (or possibly, some small countries).

Since we are both notoriously hard to buy gifts for, when our anniversary rolled around last year I told him what I really wanted.  A server in the rack that was hefty enough to run several virtual servers under Hyper-V.  Being a guy, I'm sure he thought this was almost (but not quite) as good as me saying I'd really like a busty woman to come to our house and give us both backrubs, so I did get a really awesome Hyper-V server for our anniversary.

I was amazed at how much iron you can get for your money these days.  Since we lived in Boston some years ago we've purchased servers from PC's For Everyone, and our new dual-quad-proc (eight core) 1U server with 16GB RAM was just a little over two grand.  That really floored me, coming from environments that typically budgeted tens of thousands of dollars for that class of compute power.

Of course, I failed to anticipate how busy I was going to be last year.  I finished my last few classes in night school, consulting by day and studying on nights and weekends.  Hubby set up the Hyper-V server and moved our domain controller to a virtual server, but the Iron Giant was not put to much use last year.  Sigh.

But, I finished my MBA at the end of the year, and re-focused my brain cells on our server infrastructure.  Before long I had our home portal up on SharePoint 2007, just in time to post the kids' summer activities schedules to the family calendar.  Then, last week I took the plunge and set up the SharePoint 2010 beta in a separate virtual server, with the databases for both the 2007 and 2010 farms on an instance of SQL2008 (SP1, CU2) running in yet another virtual server.  My virtual SharePoint kingdom is running like a top.

Having my first 'hands on' look at SharePoint 2010, the first things that jumped out while poking around the home page of my portal were:

• Pulldowns on the left, pulldowns on the right.  Site actions was moved to the left on the default home page.
• The inescapable ribbon.  Although you have to click on the 'Page' tab to see it, things like editing the page or setting permissions and properties are now exposed as big icons on an Office-style ribbon.
• Top-tabs and Uber-breadcrumbs (not the Microsoft sanctioned terms for these things, by the way). I created a document library for OneNote Pages (new!), and from the top 'Browse' tab you can see the normal bread crumb path, but the end of the breadcrumb path now shows your current view.  There's a dropdown off the end of the breadcrumb path that provides actions to create/modify views.  This is easier to find than the old view dropdown on the upper right corner of the screen.
• Other 'Top-tabs' for Custom Commands and Library Tools follow the default 'Browse' tab, and, there's a little folder with an 'Up' arrow that gives you a folder type of breadcrumb navigation if you need it.  I'm thinking this might help people who are still using directories on a shared fileserver understand SharePoint navigation if they haven't yet made the leap.
• More 'page oriented', like a multi-page website that has neat document and list management capabilities.  I have to say SharePoint 2007 has awesome document and list capabilities, but you sometimes wonder if the 'web page / web site' side of it was an afterthought.
• Selections of themes includes heading and body font selections - one small step in the direction of more 'point and click' customization on the look and feel front.

And so much more - but, I'm rambling.  Overall, I'm pretty excited about what I see - and am looking forward to digging in with SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio 2010 to have even more fun.

I wonder what I should ask for as an anniversary gift next year....

System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, Blog!");

It's a great feeling to jot the first lines into a pristine new blog.  Nothing but potential....

Now that's over with, I can get on with the whys and wherefores.  I created this nook in the blogosphere to capture thoughts and stories about adventures with Microsoft SharePoint and related technologies.  I've been connected to SharePoint as a business customer and technology consultant since its early incarnations, but I don't consider myself a technical guru - perhaps more a a technical tourist...  Technology has a way of constantly leveling the playing field, and with the release of SharePoint 2010 we're all back near square one.  I'm looking forward to climbing the learning curve again.

The area in which I do claim some chops is finding interesting and simple ways to apply tools and platforms like SharePoint in the workplace.  Or, at least it's what I enjoy best about working with technology - working with people who have to get a job done, and finding ways that I can make things easier or more interesting using technology.

I was inspired to get on this blog-wagon by an old friend, and a new friend.  My new friend is Dan Lewis, already a bright star in the SharePoint universe, who blogs as the SharePoint Comic.  And, because of a recent adventure in SharePoint, I reconnected with an old friend, Marc Anderson at Sympraxis Consulting, who blogs about bending SharePoint to his will in all sorts of ways, including jQuery and xsl.  Marc helped me out of a jam with his jQuery library (but more about that in another post).

So, with thanks to my inspirations, I hereby christen this blog -
Stay tuned for more SharePoint adventures (I know I will)!