Joe Shepley News & Articles

In my last post, I sketched out at a high level what I see working at organizations trying to move off of older repositories onto SharePoint. 

What I want to do in the next few posts is walk through a process that, while by no means a silver bullet, gives you a better chance of success than the typical approach.

In my last post, I outlined the decision point that the SharePoint user community faces right now. I caught some flak after the post that I want to address here head-on: some folks pointed out that whatever SharePoint can or can’t do in theory, in practice SharePoint implementations frequently fail to provide improved document management…and organizations find themselves with as big (or bigger) of a mess as they had with shared drives, Lotus Notes or whatever else was in place before SharePoint came along.

As you would expect, Microsoft is being predictably tight-lipped about the next release of SharePoint, but that doesn’t mean we’re not all anxiously awaiting SharePoint 2013/14. In January 2012, two years after the release of 2010 and five years after the release of MOSS, dynamic document management is at an interesting crossroads.

Last post, I began looking at my picks for noteworthy enterprise CMS 2012 trends:

1. The rise of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
2. The evolving relationship between compliance and social media
3. ECM goes viral
4. Realistic retention
5. Mainstream Enterprise 2.0
6. Mid-tier ECM steps up to the plate
7. SharePoint decision time

I’ve covered #1 - #3 already (so start there if you missed it). Let’s turn now to the rest of them…

Here in Chicago, our Lite Rock radio station has completed its annual transformation into The Holiday Lite, playing Christmas music round the clock, so it’s definitely not too soon to begin the annual litany of analyst prediction posts…

In my last post, I walked through some of the reasons why compliant social business is so challenging. In this post, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social.

I recently attended JiveWorld11, where a key theme in many of the presentations, as well as most of my conversations, was compliant communities. I’ll admit to being a little bit surprised, because to date, Enterprise 2.0 and social media practitioners seem to be, if not completely unconcerned with compliance, at least less concerned than they should be.

In my last post (Making Money Off Social Media: Nothing Else Matters), I used Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI as a jumping off point to argue that the only reason a business should get involved in social media is to generate more revenue, increase margins, or save money (or some combination of the three). And actually, there’s nothing peculiar to social media in all this: In general, businesses do stuff in order to influence (directly or indirectly) one of these three things.

I’m excited about this month’s theme, because, to me, it gets at the heart of the matter for all organizations that want to take social media seriously: if using social media doesn’t lead directly to tangible financial gains for the organization (making more money or saving more money), then scrap it and do something else. Likes, followers, shares, positive mentions, blah blah blah -- none of these are valuable in and of themselves; they only have value if they lead to selling more stuff or making more money off the stuff you already sell.

This month’s theme is from social media to social business, and while I’ve got my regularly scheduled articles in the queue, I wanted to put together a little something extra and review Olivier Blanchard’s Social Media ROI, because I think this is the most important book out there for folks trying to use social media (SM) in a business context.

SharePoint best practices and advice are nothing new -- consultants like me have been inundating SharePoint users out there with our tips, tricks, advice, admonishments and so on for years. You could make a whole career out of doing nothing more than telling people what to do and what not to do with SharePoint…and lots of people do.

So you may have experienced the good, the bad and the ugly around SharePoint information architecture (IA). In this post, I’ll address common concerns surrounding SharePoint IA and discuss how a better understanding of IA can help you to improve the effectiveness of your SharePoint environment.

In my last post, I talked about some of the ways that the iPad and social business software (SBS) both had tremendous opportunities to outflank Microsoft's dominance in the desktop document creation and document management space, respectively. Based on the responses to the article, it seems like lots of folks out there are wondering the same things about Microsoft's ability to maintain their dominance in these areas.

But, like any consultant worth their salt, I like to have it both ways, so in this post I want to consider the very real ways that Apple and SBS vendors could fail in their attempts to knock Microsoft out of the game, because their long-term success is far from assured.

First things first: before you all accuse me of cooking up a title that incorporates both SharePoint 2010 and the iPad in a shameless attempt to get more clicks than Barb Mosher’s What is SharePoint 2010? Vision and Reality, let me give some back story on my interest in the topic…

Although Enterprise 2.0 and social business have been hot topics among practitioners and more forward-thinking organizations for some time now, it seems like we’ve crossed a tipping point of sorts: I’ve encountered very few organizations in any industry over the last few months that aren’t at least beginning to dabble in E2.0.