Joe Shepley News & Articles

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.

Previously, I spent some time prognosticating about three broad Enterprise Information Management (EIM) trends that I think will be important for the balance of 2011, given how I’ve seen them develop over the last 12 months:

• Good enough solutions and approaches -- the decline of best practices
• Business pull instead of IT push -- the decline of IT-centric ECM deployments/platforms
• Vertical orientation -- the decline of broad platforms or generic ECM stack capabilities

In this post, I want to look at where EIM is headed in the rest of 2011 from a marketplace perspective, i.e., the significant shift I’m seeing lately in the kinds of organizations getting involved in EIM.

This month’s theme is Enterprise Information Management in 2011 - How the Field is Shifting, Is Disruption Coming? This kind of topic is lot harder than the obligatory “Future of EIM” posts us analyst types like to write every December, because it has a time horizon: the remainder of 2011.

So this month I can’t just muse about what might happen in THE FUTURE. I have to confine myself to things that might reasonably happen (or at least begin to happen) in the next seven months. Bummer.

But I’m a team player, so I’ll give it the old college try.
 

In my last post, I spent some time giving advice on how to get SharePoint right the first time at your organization. In this post, I want to roll up my sleeves and dig in to the details on how to get SharePoint right the first time and step you all through the kinds of activities you need to do to adhere to the six things we discussed in the last post.

In my experience, you need to keep six things in mind to get SharePoint right the first time:

1. There’s no such thing as out of the box SharePoint
2. One size does not fit all
3. If you build it, they will not come
4. It’s never just about SharePoint
5. SharePoint is not an IT thing
6. SharePoint is not an Office product

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these in turn.

I’m in the middle of a series on SharePoint collaboration. In the first two posts, I focused on why SharePoint collaboration fails and how you can take steps to ensure that it succeeds.

In this post, I want to step back a bit and ask a more existential question: should you even be using SharePoint 2010 for your collaboration platform in the first place?
 

In the last post, I talked about the if we build it, they will come mentality, i.e., give people something, anything, to use, and they’ll use it. After all, they have no dedicated tool now to use for collaboration, so whatever we give them will be better than nothing, right? 

The number one reason I see out in the trenches for failed implementations of SharePoint as a collaboration platform isn’t picking the wrong technology or architecting it poorly -- two things most organizations spend the lion’s share of their project time trying to avoid.

Rather, it’s adopting the if we build it, they will come approach to SharePoint, i.e., give people something, anything, to use, and they’ll use it. After all, they have no dedicated tool now to use for collaboration, so whatever we give them will be better than nothing, right? 

In my last post, I talked about some of the most significant people-process challenges facing folks looking to enable a mobile enterprise, the goal being to counterbalance the over-emphasis on mobile technology in discussions of mobility.

In this post, I want to expand out from there to talk about the central organizational design challenge facing the creation of a mobile enterprise -- openness.

When folks talk about mobility and the enterprise, they most often mean mobile technology -- smartphones, mobile-enabled websites, downloadable apps and so on.

But mobility should be viewed much more broadly than this, because mobile technology is not an end in itself, it’s simply the means to an end (i.e. enabling a mobile workforce).

In my last post, I hazarded my best guess at what 2011 will bring for SharePoint. In this post, I want to sketch out the SharePoint New Year’s resolutions I think every organization should adopt.

You've heard many predictions on enterprise content management in 2011 from the tools and technology perspective. Now let's step back and examine what's to come from a business-centric perspective.