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Open Document Formats, Religion & Democracy

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Two of the topics in the title are things we normally don’t touch in this blog. However, the tempest over Massachusetts’s OpenDocumentFormat decision is inflaming passions almost as much as religious and political issues do. In fact, I am writing about it because I woke up irritated at how ill-informed and irrelevant so much of the discussion about the state’s decision is. (Not a good way to start a blog entry!) I promised myself not to go on for more than the length of a reasonable blog-entry, so rather than dig into all the weeds, here is a short history lesson to bring out the big picture, and hopefully keep the debate focused on the real issue for Massachusetts’s and others contemplating similar decisions.
When we (in the standards community) debated open document standards 20 years ago, there was a religious and political fervor fueling the arguments of both sides. Our side (the SGML side, which included Tim Bray and Jean Paoli, now the chief XML people at Sun and Microsoft respectively), argued that nobody’s content should be held hostage by being stuck in a vendor’s proprietary format, and that the solution was a standard set of rules for describing whatever kind format was necessary that vendors were free to implement. The other side (the ODA “Office Document Architecture” side) agreed with that, however they thought the solution was for a bunch of vendors to get together and agree on a format that, instead of being proprietary to a single vendor, was proprietary to a self-defined group of vendors. This solution was even worse than the status quo for lots of reasons (lowest common denominator functionality, enhancements by slow international committee, unhealthy cabal-like motivations, …). At the time I thought of ODA as the soviet approach, and the SGML approach as the democratic approach. Fortunately, the SGML approach won, and that set in motion the developments that have given us XML today.
You can tell where I am going with this. But there is one more relevant aspect of this history to mention. One of the main arguments behind ODA was that the SGML approach was just too difficult to implement. They had a point, you have to pay for the freedom of flexibility. Their mistake was thinking there was an alternative that could anticipate all reasonable requirements. It can cost even more when you just can’t implement what you need to.
The situation today is a little different, but the need for organizations to be able to do whatever they want with their own content is exactly the same. The imposition of any single schema/format on all documents in any organization simply won’t work. Anybody who has been involved in helping organizations build IT applications knows that exceptions are the rule, and you can’t legislate them out of existence even in authoritarian corporate environments. A good decision for the state would be to simply require all documents to conform to one of a number of publicly documented and freely available XML Schemas – who cares what software did or did not create the content or did or did not design the schema? Certainly there are some complex details to work out, but there is no mystery.
We have had debates on this topic at our Boston conference last year and in San Francisco in the Spring, where there was more agreement than disagreement between Microsoft (Jean) and Sun (Tim) and the issues raised were refreshingly free from politics. It’s too bad we didn’t record it.
There is plenty of coverage on this topic. We have more comments and pointers, but also see Jon Udell and David Berlind.

Office Documents and eXtensibility

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Jon Udell wrote yesterday that we should really be getting beyond the office document format debate swirling around the Massachusetts decision, because all heavy footprint authoring applications are headed for oblivion in our increasingly net-software-as-service world. (David Berlind also weighs in on the death of fat clients apps.) Tim Bray is skeptical because “… authoring software is hard.” While my view of the ODF debate is much closer to Jon’s than Tim’s, I agree with Tim’s caution here. While my coding skills were never in the league of either of these guys I have spent a lot of time working on authoring software, and more importantly, collecting requirements from users. Admittedly this was well before the Web existed, but what hasn’t changed one bit, is the need for authoring software to meet a staggering array of complex user requirements. Authoring software has to be flexible and extendable to meet the always unanticipated user needs. Authoring software is hard, and differing formatting and integration requirements will keep it that way.
Note that extending software functionality is not unrelated to extending the encoding of the content, which reminds me that…
Ironically, the reason I agree with Tim here is exactly why I disagree with the ODF decision: extensibility should be the first requirement of a government decision on an open document standard, and ODF looks uncomfortably like a limited implementation. From a practical point of view, scope is critical, but as Jon says, “In theory, governments should mandate standards, not implementations.” Perhaps the way to think about it is that governments should mandate standards (XML) but adopt implementations (form OASIS and Microsoft and perhaps others). Realistically there will be multiple versions (implementations) of each anyway, so a single implementation will never be enough.

David Berlind ACT Interview on the Massachusetts ODF Decision Video

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Bob Doyle at CMSReview has once again generously devoted his time and resources to record and produce one of the events at our recent Boston conference. David Berlind from ZDNet, who has tracked the controversial Massachusetts decision to standardize on OASIS‘s ODF on Between the Lines (a blog you should subscribe to) in more detail than anyone, interviewed lobbyist Morgan Reed from the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) before a live audience at Gilbane Boston. ACT, who lobbies for small businesses, but also Microsoft, is against the Massachusetts decision – Morgan was gracious enough to submit to David’s penetrating skepticism. Bob Doyle says he keeps this interview on his video iPod! Bob says you should use the QuickTime player. Here is the full interview, or you can choose chapters below:
Frank Gilbane – the Background    
The Debaters – Morgan Reed and David Berlind    
Lobbyist for Microsoft (MS) and Small ISVs    
How Much Money Spent Lobbying Open Formats?    
MS to Mass: Do you respect IP?    
MS Press Release: Mass ODF Plan has failed!    
By 2007 only ODF-compliant applications?    
Does Massachusetts have any leverage with OASIS?    
What if MS OpenOffice was chosen as standard?    
Do MS and Internet Explorer encourage non-standard HTML?    

Blog posting from Word 2007

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Looks like Microsoft is adding blog posting support to Word 2007 in a way that not only does not screw up your HTML, but attempts to take advantage of Word features bloggers care about without other features getting in the way. This is more appealing than it may sound at first, and may be useful when building enterprise blog applications where Office is entrenched and familiar. It will be in Office 2007 Beta 2. Learn more from the developers.

Adobe & Microsoft headed for battle over PDF

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The Wall Street Journal reported today that talks between Adobe and Microsoft over the inclusion of PDF creation in the upcoming release of Office have broken down, and they speculate that Adobe will file an antitrust suit as a result. The issue is that MS was planning to include PDF creation for free, which is obviously a direct hit at Adobe’s Acrobat revenue. If you have been following Microsoft’s XPS (XML Paper Specification) development as we reported here, you won’t be too surprised.
It is too early to know exactly how this will play out, but anyone with applications or workflows that depend on heavy use of both Office and PDF needs to keep this on their radar!
UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has more info on this.

Gilbane Boston Keynote Press Release: The Future of Content Management

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For Immediate Release:

Gilbane Boston Keynote Panel to Debate the Future of Content Management
Largest Collection of Industry Analysts, Researchers, and Practitioners Gather to Provide Unique Balanced Market Perspective

Contact:
Jeffrey V. Arcuri
508-759-8180
jeff@lighthouseseminars.com

Boston MA, October 10, 2006. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars today announced the opening keynote panel for the 3rd Annual Gilbane Boston Conference will take place November 28th – 30th, 8:30am, at The Westin Copley Place in Boston, Massachusetts. The dynamic keynote panel “The Future of Content Management Technologies & Solutionswill be moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc. panelists include: Jared Spataro, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Office Servers, Information Worker PMG, Microsoft; David Nelson-Gal, Senior Vice President, Engineering, Interwoven; Detlef Kamps, President, RedDot Solutions; Jim Howard, CEO, CrownPeak, and John Newton, Co-founder & CTO, Alfresco.

The Gilbane Conference opens each of its events with a panel of content technology and market experts that is completely interactive (i.e., no presentations). The experts include industry analysts, consultants, enterprise IT and business senior managers, and technologists. This years Boston conference has a cross section of different categories of content technology vendors, including a large ECM vendor, a mid-tier second generation vendor, a hosted CM vendor, an open source ECM vendor, and an infrastructure supplier. Each of these types of vendor could provide some, or all, of an organizations content and information management needs, but how do you decide which? Which of these approaches point towards the future and which will be legacy approaches? Do they complement each other or compete? What do they have in common? What do each of these technology experts think the future of content management and content-oriented applications will look like? This will prove to be a lively and educational debate!

This annual event brings together thought leaders and practitioners to provide attendees with actionable advice, techniques, best practices, and case studies to help successfully implement content technologies critical to their businesses. The topics to be covered in-depth in the conference program will include:

  • Web Content Management (WCM)
  • Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
  • Collaboration, Enterprise Wikis & Blogs
  • Enterprise Search & Information Access Applications
  • Enterprise Digital Rights Management (eDRM)
  • Automated Publishing

The event includes:

  • 34 sessions and panel discussions
  • 4 pre-conference tutorials
  • Technology demonstration area with more than 50 of the leading vendors
  • Special events
  • Co-located with the Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros) Fall Summit

We have once again built a program anchored by a cross-section of industry thought leaders that provides independent analysis and balanced market perspectives that cant be found at any other event, said Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair. “We are focused on hosting an educational conference that includes everything IT strategists and project teams need to know in a hype-free environment that offers insights into existing and upcoming technologies necessary to implement content-oriented applications.

Learn more:

http://gilbaneboston.com/

Google and Microsoft debate Enterprise Search in keynote at Gilbane San Francisco

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Join us on April 11, 8:30am at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco for Gilbane San Francisco 2007

We have expanded our opening keynote to include a special debate between Microsoft and Google on Enterprise Search and Information Access, in addition to our discussion on all content technologies with IBM, Oracle & Adobe.

You still have time to join us for this important and lively debate at the Palace Hotel, April 11. The keynote is open to all attendees, even those only planning to visit the technology showcase. The full keynote runs from 8:30am to 10:15am followed by a coffee break and the opening of the technology showcase, and now includes:

Keynote Panel: Content Technology Industry Update PART 2
Google and Microsoft are competing in many areas on many levels. One area which both are ramping-up quickly is enterprise search. In this part of the opening keynote, we bring the senior product managers face to face to answer our questions about their plans and what this means for enterprise information access and content management strategies.

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Conference Chair, CEO, Gilbane Group, Inc.
Panelists:
Jared Spataro, Group Product Manager, Enterprise Search, Microsoft
Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Search Appliance, Google

See the complete keynote description.

Gilbane San Francisco 2007
Content management, enterprise search, localization, collaboration, wikis, publishing …
Complete conference information is at http://gilbanesf.com/07/conference_grid.html

http://gilbanesf.com/07/


Be one of the first to see, and touch, SharePoint 2010

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With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 “The business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web”, Microsoft is hoping to accelerate the already dramatic growth of SharePoint. The SharePoint partner ecosystem is clearly excited, and even sceptics agree it is a major release. But how do you decide whether SharePoint is right for you, or which parts of SharePoint could meet your needs, either on their own or in conjunction with other enterprise applications? Should you use it for collaboration? for search? and what about web content management – a major focus of SharePoint 2010?

With SharePoint 2010 just entering public beta and scheduled for release in the first half of the year, it is time to make sure you know what its capabilities are so you can make informed near term or strategic decisions. And, you need to get the full story, and the way to do this is to see it, and play with it, for yourself, and talk to sceptics, evangelists, and people already using SharePoint for applications similar to yours.

Whether you are attending the full Gilbane Boston conference or just visiting the technology demonstrations, you have a unique opportunity to learn what you need to know about SharePoint content management at Gilbane Boston. As part of their rollout, Microsoft will be on-site at the conference with a classroom setup with PCs loaded with SharePoint 2010, and will show you how the new content management capabilities work.

Get the full story on SharePoint 2010 for content management at Gilbane Boston:

Don’t miss your chance to be one of the first see and touch SharePoint 2010!

Semantic Search – Ready for Prime Time?

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E3. Semantic Search – Ready for Prime Time?

Where: Gilbane Boston Conference, Westin Copley
When: Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 2:40pm – 4:00pm

The experience of search that most of us are familiar with is still a “Search 1.0″ experience that continues to rely heavily on the keyword technology developed as long ago as the 60s & 70s. But making a smarter search experience, a new “Search 2.0″ generation, will rely heavily on a keener intelligence about the nature and context of the content being searched and the intentions of the searcher. Analysts have long forecast that semantic search and text analytics would bring about this smarter search, but the reality is that semantics have made few inroads in popular search experience. In this session, you will hear from leading practitioners about how they are engineering content enhancement, semantic search techniques, and user interaction designs to craft the next generation of search.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Panelists:
Lynda Moulton, Analyst & Consultant, Enterprise Search, Gilbane Group
Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
Chris Lamb, Senior VP, Thomson Reuters

Main conference program: http://gilbaneboston.com/conference_program.html

Register today!

Microsoft Releases Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system

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Microsoft announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for the 2007 Microsoft Office system. The service pack includes major performance enhancements for Office applications, most notably Microsoft Office Outlook, as well as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. With SP2, Office 2007 now has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats that were already supported in Office 2007. In addition to the support for additional file formats, SP2 also includes the Open XML Format External File Converter. This allows developers to make any third-party document format a first-class citizen in Office. This means Office will support most government-preferred formats, and can easily be made to support any others that come along. This release offers enhanced stability for Outlook, calendaring reliability, and more improvements to applications that run on both PCs and servers. Users should notice the improved performance and stability of Outlook, better charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics. On the server side, IT professionals will notice several enhancements to the security and performance of SharePoint Server 2007, including support for read-only content databases, improvements to forms-based authentication, and an STSADM command-line utility that enables administrators to scan sites that use the variations feature for errors. SharePoint Server will also feature better support for newer versions of the Firefox browser. Customers can download SP2 right away. In addition, Microsoft will release SP2 via Microsoft Update’s automatic update mechanism no sooner than three months from now, and with at least 30 days notice. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

The SharePoint Backend- What are the Headaches – What are the benefits

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As I pointed out in my first post (SharePoint: Without the Headaches – A Discussion of What is Available in the Cloud,) you don’t necessarily need to host SharePoint in your own organization.  Although I believe that most businesses should focus on leveraging the front end of SharePoint to its full extent, it is important for non-technical users to have an understanding of what it takes to host SharePoint and why one might want to do so.  Therefore, this post provides a discussion of what it takes to host SharePoint and the driving factors for hosting SharePoint.

 

Microsoft’s original intent was to build a tool that was easy to leverage by non-technical users.  Microsoft thought of this as the natural extension of Office to the web[1].  That being said, the complexities got away from Microsoft, and in order to leverage a number of features one needs access to the back end.

Before delving into the SharePoint back end, let me point out that many businesses hire SharePoint development staff, both permanent and on a consulting basis. I think that developing custom SharePoint code should be done only after thoroughly justifying the expense.  It is often a mistake.  Instead, organizations should clearly define their requirements and then leverage a high quality third party add-on.  I will mention some of these at the end of the post.

SharePoint is a fragile product and therefore custom code for SharePoint is very expensive to develop, test, and deploy. Furthermore, custom code often needs to be rewritten when migrating to the next release of SharePoint.  Finally, SharePoint is a rapidly growing product, and chances are good that custom code may soon become obsolete by new features in the next generation.

In my first post, I pointed out that inexpensive SharePoint hosting options are available in the cloud. These options tend to be limited.  For example, the inexpensive rentals do not provide much security, only provide WSS (not MOSS), and do not allow one to add third party add-ins.  It is possible to lease custom environments that don’t surrender to any of these limitations, but they come at a cost.  (Typically starting at $500 per month[2].)  I believe that robust MOSS offerings with third party add-ons will be available at competitive prices within two years. 

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[1] SharePoint is developed by the Office division.

[2] For example, FPWeb offers a SharePoint hosted environment with the CorasWorks Workplace Suite included starting at $495 per month.

SharePoint Hosting: What are the Headaches?

Hosting SharePoint comes with a number of headaches. In fact a number of very large companies have started the process of out sourcing their SharePoint environments to cloud based solution providers.

For the purposes of this discussion, you can think of the SharePoint server as a single entity, although it is really a collection of numerous different types of servers, which are often run on more than one machine.  Microsoft refers to the group of servers as a SharePoint farm.  The person who cares and feeds for these servers is the SharePoint administrator.  Depending upon the type and size of the SharePoint Farm this is usually a non-trivial job.  Microsoft downplays the complexity of this job, claiming it is often a part time job.  Competent SharePoint administrators are difficult to hire and expensive. SharePoint installations can quickly become critical to the business, so having a robust and reliable SharePoint platform is important.

What do SharePoint Administrators do?

  • Standup the original system
  •  Implement authentication: Almost always Active Directory
  • Implement security policies
  • Integrate with the email system
  • Ensure that the system and network are healthy
  • Troubleshoot the system: Often includes: firewalls, networks, SQL database, SharePoint, etc.
  • Backup the system, and perform dry-run recoveries, to ensure that recovery really works
  • Provide help to end users (Unless you have a SharePoint help desk)
  • Apply Microsoft patches to the various servers (This can be non-trivial)
  • Deploy Third Party Add-ins: The administrator must apply extreme caution, since this process can often cause instability to SharePoint.
  • Deploy Custom Software: If custom SharePoint development is going on in the organization, then the administrator must Install and configure the software.
  • When an organization upgrades between major versions of SharePoint, the administrator is intimately involved[3].

SharePoint Hosting: What are the Benefits?

This section should be named, “Why do you Need Control Over The SharePoint Backend?”  Today, access to the back end and hosting are almost synonymous.  There are a few hosting vendors that will do it all.  As I stated earlier, I believe that this type of offering will be much more ubiquitous in the coming years.

Having control over the backend server does afford some key benefits.  Most importantly:

  1. A Secure SharePoint Environment: The ability to secure the SharePoint environment in a private network setting.[4]  I am not convinced that SharePoint has been battlefield tested on the open Internet.  In my opinion, it is therefore best to standup SharePoint in a protected environment.
     
  2. Useful MOSS Features: As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft’s intent was to target all useful functionality at the end users.  In the end, they had to rush some features and one needs access to the back end to leverage these features.  As an example, SharePoint has the ability to provide a content deployment model from on environment to another.  This is useful in a large scale web site, where a staging environment is required.  MOSS provides a feature set called Content Deployment.  This allows a staging environment to be setup, and when it is ready for public exposure, the content can be deployed to the production environment.  Access to the backend is needed for the publication process.
     
  3. An Environment that Allows Third Party Add-ins: There are numerous third party add-ins that empower business users to make far greater use of SharePoint without needing a developer.  I mention just a few:
    1. CorasWorks Work Place Suite and Data Integration Toolset: Both of these packages can easily extend the functionality of both WSS and MOSS.  Many customers find that they can use the free version (WSS) of SharePoint together with the CorasWorks tools.

      Once these packages are installed, these tools allow business users to easily add sophisticated aggregate views of tables and charts that gather data from many lists throughout an entire SharePoint farm.  (Native SharePoint views only allow for data to be extracted from one list and that list needs to be in the same site as the view.)

      The Data Integration Toolset empowers end users to access data in a large variety of external data sources, including Oracle, SAP, SQL.  Again this can be done with WSS, no need for the expensive MOSS enterprise license.  In addition, if you wanted to implement this functionality using SharePoint, you would need to leverage the Business Data Catalog (BDC) which almost always involves custom software development.
       

    2. K2 and Nintex: Business users can write elementary Workflows in SharePoint (WSS and MOSS) using the free Microsoft tool “SharePoint Designer”.  However, as soon as the workflows become a little complex, the native SharePoint tools require that a developer get involved and write custom code. Two companies, K2 and Nintext, sell add-ons that allow business users to write sophisticated workflows.  These tools are well worth looking into.
       
    3. Password resets: The most common reason for calls to support is a password reset.  There are a large number of vendors providing software that allow end users to reset their own password.  To install and configure any of these, we need access to the back end.
       
    4. Creating a Good SharePoint Experience Outside of Internet Explorer: A number of key SharePoint features just don’t work on non-Microsoft platforms (OS and Browser.)  There are third party tools that help with this.  For example Telerik makes sells an excellent Rich Text Editor Component, which is a must if your users are using Safari and Firefox.

 In this post, I have summarized some of the reasons one might need access to the SharePoint back end and what sorts of headaches to expect.  In the next set of posts, I will focus on how to leverage the native front end of SharePoint, and show just how far one can go with this. 

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[3] The migration path from SharePoint 2003 to 2007, was extremely painful.  The smartest decision I saw in this space was made by Fidelity.  The IT organization told the business users that new 2007 sites would be created.  Users could continue to use both the old 2003 and the new 2007 platforms.  Users were told that they should migrate whatever data they wanted to on their own timetable.  Most users wound up using the 2003 platform without migrating data to the new platform.  Mostly new data was stored on the 2007 platform.   After a while business users had migrated themselves.

[4] This type of hosting can still take place in the cloud, it is just important that the appropriate secure tunnels are designed and deployed.
 

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

SharePoint – Migrating the Office Franchise to the Web

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Microsoft has a lot to lose if they are unable to coax customers to continue to use and invest in Office.  Google is trying to woo people away by providing a complete online experience with Google Docs, Email, and Wave.  Microsoft is taking a different tact.  They are easing Office users into a Web 2.0-like experience by creating a hybrid environment, in which people can continue to use the rich Office tools they know and love, and mix this with a browser experience.  I use the term Web 2.0 here to mean that users can contribute important content to the site.

SharePoint leverages Office to allow users to create, modify, and display “deep[1]” content, while leveraging the browser to navigate, view, discover, and modify “shallow[1]” content.  SharePoint is not limited to this narrow hybrid feature set, but in this post I  examine and illustrate how Microsoft is focusing its attention on the Office users.  The feature set that I concentrate on in this post is referred to as the “Collaboration” portion of SharePoint.  This is depicted in Microsoft’s canonical six segmented wheel shown in Figure 1.  This is the most mature part of SharePoint and works quite well, as long as the client machine requirements outlined below are met.

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

Figure 1: The canonical SharePoint Marketing Tool – Today’s post focuses on the Collaboration Segment

Preliminaries:   Client Machine Requirements

SharePoint out-of-the-box works well if all client machines adhere to the following constraints:

  1. The client machines must be running Windows OS (XP, Vista, or WIndows 7)
    NOTE: The experience for users who are using MAC OS, Linux, iPhones, and Google phones is poor. [2]
  2. The only truly supported browser is Internet Explorer (7 and 8.) [2]
    NOTE: Firefox, Safari, and Opera can be used, but the experience is poor.
  3. The client machines need to have Office installed, and  as implied by bullet 1 above, the MAC version of Office doesn’t work well with SharePoint 2007.
  4. All the clients should have the same version of Office.  Office 2007 is optimal, but Office 2003 can be used.  A mixed version of Office can cause issues.
  5. A number of tweaks need to be made to the security settings of the browser so that the client machine works seamlessly with SharePoint.

I refer to this as a “Microsoft Friendly Client Environment.”

Some consequences of these constraints are:

  • SharePoint is not a good choice for a publicly facing Web 2.0 environment (More on this below)
  • SharePoint can be okay for a publicly facing brochureware site, but it wouldn’t be my first choice.
  • SharePoint works well as an extranet environment, if all the users are in a Microsoft Friendly Client Environment, and significant attention has been paid to securing the site.

A key take-away of these constraints is that a polished end user experience relies on:

  1. A carefully managed computing environment for end users (Microsoft Friendly Client Environment)
    and / or
  2. A great deal of customization to SharePoint.

This is not to say that one cannot deploy a publicly facing site with SharePoint.  In fact, Microsoft has made a point of showcasing numerous publicly facing SharePoint sites [3].

What you should know about these SharePoint sites is:

  • A nice looking publicly facing SharePoint site that works well on multiple Operating Systems and browsers has been carefully tuned with custom CSS files and master pages.  This type of work tends to be expensive, because it is difficult to find people who have a good eye for aesthetics, understand CSS, and understand SharePoint master pages and publishing.
  • A publicly facing SharePoint site that provides rich Web 2.0 functionality requires a good deal of custom .NET code and probably some third party vendor software.  This can add up to considerably more costs than originally budgeted.

An important consideration, before investing in custom UI (CSS & master pages) , third party tools, and custom .NET code is that they will most likely be painful to migrate when the underlying SharePoint platform is upgraded to the next version, SharePoint 2010. [4]

By the sound of these introductory paragraphs, you might get the wrong idea that I am opposed to using SharePoint.  I actually think SharePoint can be a very useful tool, assuming that one applies it to the appropriate business problems.  In this post I will describe how Microsoft is transitioning people from a pure Office environment to an integrated Office and browser (SharePoint) environment.

So, What is SharePoint Good at?

When SharePoint is coupled closely with a Microsoft Friendly Client Environment, non-technical users can increase their productivity significantly by leveraging the Web 2.0 additive nature of SharePoint to their Office documents.

Two big problems exist with the deep content stored inside Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access,)

  • Hidden Content: Office documents can pack a great deal of complex content in them.  Accessing the content can be done by opening each file individually or by executing a well formulated search. This is an issue!  The former is human intensive, and the latter is not guaranteed to show consistent results.
  • Many Versions of the Truth: There are many versions of the same files floating around.  It is difficult if not impossible to know which file represents the “truth.”

SharePoint 2007 can make a significant impact on these issues.

Document Taxonomies

Go into any organization with more than 5 people, and chances are there will be a shared drive with thousands of files, Microsoft and non-Microsoft format, (Word, Excel, Acrobat, PowerPoint, Illustrator, JPEG, InfoPath etc..) that have important content.  Yet the content is difficult to discover as well as extract in an aggregate fashion.  For example, a folder that contains sales documents, may contain a number of key pieces of information that would be nice to have in a report:

  • Customer
  • Date of sale
  • Items sold
  • Total Sale in $’s

Categorizing documents by these attributes is often referred to as defining a taxonomy.  SharePoint provides a spectrum of ways to associate taxonomies with documents.  I mention spectrum here, because non-microsoft file formats can have this information loosely coupled, while some Office 2007 file formats can have this information bound tightly to the contents of the document.  This is a deep subject, and it is not my goal to provide a tutorial, but I will shine some light on the topic.

SharePoint uses the term “Document Library” to be a metaphor for a folder on a shared drive.  It was Microsoft’s intent that a business user should be able to create a document library and add a taxonomy for important contents.  In the vernacular of SharePoint, the taxonomy is stored in “columns” and they allow users to extract important information from files that reside inside the library.  For example, “Customer”,  “Date of Sale,” or “Total Sale in $’s” in the previous example.  The document library can then be sorted or filtered based on values that are present in these columns.  One can even provide aggregate computations based the column values, for example total sales can be added for a specific date or customer.

The reason I carefully worded this as a “spectrum”  is because the quality of the solution that Microsoft offers is dependent upon the document file format and its associated application.  The solution is most elegant for Word 2007 and InfoPath 2007, less so for Excel and PowerPoint 2007 formats, and even less for the remainder of the formats that are non-Microsoft products..  The degree to which the taxonomy can be bound to actual file contents is not SharePoint dependent, rather it is dependent upon how well the application has implemented the SharePoint standard around “file properties.”

I believe that Microsoft had intended for the solution to be deployed equally well for all the Office applications, but time ran out for the Office team.  I expect to see a much better implementation when Office 2010 arrives. As mentioned above, the implementation is best for Word 2007.  It is possible to tag any content inside a Word document or template as one that should “bleed” through to the SharePoint taxonomy.  Thus key pieces of content in Word 2007 documents can actually be viewed in aggregate by users without having to open individual Word documents.

It seems clear that Microsoft had the same intention for the other Office products, because the product documentation states that you can do the same for most Office products.  However, my own research into this shows that only Word 2007 works.  A surprising work-around for Excel is that if one sticks to the Excel 2003 file format, then one can also get the same functionality to work!

The next level of the spectrum operates as designed for all Office 2007 applications.  In this case, all columns that are added as part of the SharePoint taxonomy can penetrate through to a panel of the office application.  Thus users can be forced to fill in information about the document before saving the document.  Figure 2 illustrates this.  Microsoft  refers to this as the “Document Information Panel” (DIP).  Figure 3 shows how a mixture of document formats (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) have all the columns populated with information.  The disadvantage of this type of content binding is that a user must explicitly fill out the information in the DIP, instead of the information being bound and automatically populating based on the content available inside the document.

 

Figure 2: Illustrates the “Document Information Panel” that is visible in PowerPoint.  This panel shows up because there are three columns that have been setup in the Document library: Title, testText, and testNum.  testText and testNum have been populated by the user and can be seen in the Document Library, see figure 3.

 

Figure 3: Illustrates that the SharePoint Document Library showing the data from the Document Information Panel  (DIP)  “bleeding through.”  For example the PowerPoint document has testText = fifty eight, testNum = 58.

 

Finally the last level on the taxonomy feature spectrum is for Non-Microsoft documents.  SharePoint allows one to associate column values with any kind of document.  For example, a jpeg file can have SharePoint metadata that indicates who the copyright owner is of the jpeg.  However this metadata is not embedded in the document itself.  Thus if the file is moved to another document library or downloaded from SharePoint, the metadata is lost.

A Single Version of the Truth

This is the feature set that SharePoint implements the best.  A key issue in organizations is that files are often emailed around and no one knows where the truly current version is and what the history of a file was.  SharePoint Document libraries allow organizations to improve this process significantly by making it easy for a user to email a link to  a document, rather than email the actual document.  (See figure 4.)

 

Figure 4: Illustrates how easy it is to send someone a link to the document, instead of the document itself.

 

In addition to supporting good practices around reducing content proliferation, SharePoint also promotes good versioning practices.  As figure 5 illustrates any document library can easily be setup to handle file versions and file locking.  Thus it is easy to ensure that only one person is modifying a file at a time and that the there is only one true version of the file.

 

Figure 5: Illustrates how one can look at the version history of a document in a SharePoint Document Library..

Summary

In this post I focus on the feature set of SharePoint that Microsoft uses to motivate Office users to migrate to SharePoint.  These features are often termed the “Collaboration” features in the six segmented MOSS wheel. (See figure 1)  The collaboration features of MOSS are the most mature part of SharePoint and thus the most .  Another key take-away is the “Microsoft Friendly Client Environment.”  I have worked with numerous clients that were taken by surprise, when they realized the tight restrictions on the client machines.

Finally, on  a positive note, the features that I have discussed in this post are all available in the free version of SharePoint (WSS), no need to buy MOSS.  In future posts, I will elaborate on MOSS only features.

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[1] The terms “deep” and “shallow” are my creation, and not a standard.  By “deep” content I am referring to the complex content such as a Word documents (contracts, manuscripts) or Excel documents (complex mathematical models, actuarial models, etc…)

[2] Microsoft has addressed this by stating that SharePoint 2010 would support some of these environments.  I am somewhat skeptical.

[3] Public Facing internet sItes on MOSS,  http://blogs.microsoft.nl/blogs/bartwe/archive/2007/12/12/public-facing-internet-sites-on-moss.aspx

[4] Microsoft has stated frequently that as long as one adheres to best practices, the migration to SharePoint 2010 will not be bad.  However, Microsoft does not have a good track record on this account for the SharePoint 2003 to 2007 upgrade, as well as many other products.

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

Microsoft Discontinuing eReader

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Microsoft is discontinuing Microsoft Reader effective August 30, 2012, which includes download access of the Microsoft Reader application from the Microsoft Reader website. However, customers may continue to use and access the Microsoft Reader application and any .lit materials on their PCs or devices after the discontinuation on August 30, 2012. New content for purchase from retailers in the .lit format will be discontinued on November 8, 2011. http://www.microsoft.com/reader/

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

Gilbane Advisor 9-27-17 — Killing keyboards, conquering healthcare, framework churn, GDPR

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Will Microsoft’s new augmented reality patent kill the keyboard?

Well, there is a difference between the function of a keyboard, typing, which has legs for the foreseeable future, and its physical instantiation, which will eventually be eclipsed by something virtual. There are those who think voice will replace keyboards, and perhaps even typing, but it is way too early to confidently predict the relative adoption of voice versus typing. There are use cases, limitations, and reasonable preferences for each, as experiments with chatbots illustrate. Both typing and voice will likely last until well into the future of brain-to-computer interfaces. Read More

How the personal data extraction industry ends

Doc Searls with a positive outlook on personal data protection…

Our influence will be most corrective when all personal data extraction companies become what lawyers call second parties. That’s when they agree to our terms as first parties. These terms are in development today at Customer Commons, Kantara and elsewhere. They will prevail once they get deployed in our browsers and apps, and companies start agreeing (which they will in many cases because doing so gives them instant GDPR compliance, which is required by next May, with severe fines for noncompliance). Read More

Yep, that web project should be a PWA

Whether you’re a technologist, marketer, or both, it’s difficult to keep current on web tools and technologies. A well-researched and thought-out decision made a few months ago may no longer be optimal. Less technical colleagues or executives may be mis-informed by an out of date perception or current yet incorrect article. Aaron Gustafson provides an in-depth update on the state of progressive web apps. If you haven’t considered them in a while you may be surprised. Read More

and of course there is…

Framework Churn

This is perhaps a more hopeful article, and from an interested party. Nonetheless, it is a good explanation of the problem. Ionic’s Max Lynch argues the solution to Framework Churn is web components. Read More

Apple is going after the health care industry

While no surprise to anyone paying attention, most discussion to date has focused on technical details of devices like the Apple watch, the seemingly intractable challenges around managing health care data, or the quicksand of FDA approval. In this research brief CB Insights looks at the business and market leverage Apple has over the large players in the health care industry, including reach, customer experience relationship, and revenue model. Apple is progressing on all fronts. As CB Insights says, “Other players in health care should take notice.” Read More

Apple in Health: A numbers game

Also…

Staying relevant… Java’s late flowering via RedMonk

Amazon’s approach to smart glasses sounds pretty smart, well, I would say “interesting” for now, via Axios

DYI Voice AI… Google’s Tensorflow team open-sources speech recognition dataset.  via Venturebeat

Safari in iOS 11 converts Google’s AMP links back to the original URLs, and Google approves. via 9to5mac.com

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference is focused on content and digital experience technologies and strategies for marketing, publishing, and the workplace.

Conference: November 28–29
Workshops: November 30
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel

 

Frank Gilbane’s Gilbane Advisor curates content for content, computing, and digital experience professionals. More or less twice a month. See all issues

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com


Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 Available for Business Customers Today

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Microsoft has announced that the 2010 release of Office, SharePoint, Visio and Project are available to business customers worldwide. 2010 Releases are Available to Businesses after Record Beta Adoption: The beta programs for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 were the largest in the products’ history, reaching three times the size of prior Office beta programs. As a result, 8.6 million people are already using Office 2010 and related products. In addition, more than 1,000 partners are already building solutions for the 2010 set of products. Office, Project and Visio will be generally available online and in retail outlets in the U.S. on June 15th. Microsoft’s Office Web applications will be available to all Office volume licensing customers, offering productivity technologies in the cloud. In addition, customers will be able to purchase a subscription to Office Web Apps as part of Microsoft Online Services, Microsoft’s cloud-based applications. Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are available in 14 languages, and over the next few months, 80 more languages will be added. A live webcast further detailing this release can be viewed at 11 AM EST 5/12/10. www.the2010event.com

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

SharePoint 2010 – Get the Full Story

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With the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 “The business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web”, Microsoft is hoping to accelerate the already dramatic growth of SharePoint. The SharePoint partner ecosystem is clearly excited, and even sceptics agree it is a major release. But how do you decide whether SharePoint is right for you, or which parts of SharePoint could meet your needs, either on their own or in conjunction with other enterprise applications? Should you use it for collaboration? for search? and what about web content management – a major focus of SharePoint 2010?

With SharePoint 2010 just entering public beta and scheduled for release in the first half of the year, it is time to make sure you know what its capabilities are so you can make informed near term or strategic decisions. And, you need to get the full story, and the way to do this is to see it for yourself, and talk to sceptics, evangelists, and people already using it for applications similar to yours.

Whether you are attending the full conference or just visiting the technology demonstrations at Gilbane Boston, you will be able to learn what you need to know. Get the full story on SharePoint 2010 for content management at Gilbane Boston:

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

Time to re-check your mobile development strategy

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The mobile platform landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months. So much so that organizations who even recently reached decisions on a mobile development strategy should re-visit their decisions. I’m not talking about HTML5 vs app development issues – though those decisions are just as important and directly related because of continued innovation in device and operating system capabilities combined with the need to protect content development and management investments – but about which platforms will be viable, or meet your level of risk tolerance.

What has changed? To over simplify: Apple’s dominance continues to increase and is unassailable in tablets; RIM is not a contender; Microsoft is looking like an up-and-comer; and most surprising to many, Android is looking iffy and is a flop in tablets with the exception of the very Amazon-ized version in the Kindle Fire. These are pretty general statements, but if you are in charge of your company’s mobile development strategy considering their impact is a good place to start a check-up for a possible course correction.

Another place to start is to read the excellent post by Tim Bajarin Why Google Will Use Motorola To Become Vertically Integrated. I won’t summarize because the entire post and the comments are really a must-read.

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

Tablets in the Enterprise and BYOD strategies

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A couple of observations about tablets in the enterprise:

  • Tablets of all dimensions have a role in enterprise use, as do all types of personal computing devices.
  • BYOD is certainly a challenge for some organizations, but is a reminder of how we should have been managing data all along.

Tablets and other personal computing devices in the enterprise
One reaction to Apple‘s iPad mini last week was that it would change the dynamic of Apple’s market for tablets since a 7″ inch tablet is more appropriate for consumers so enterprises would stick to the 10″ versions. The only thing correct about this view is that the tablet market will change. But we don’t know how – use-cases are evolving and there are way too many variables beyond physical size. It seems just as likely that the iPad mini form-factor could grow faster in enterprises than the full size iPad. In any case there are certainly enterprise use cases for a smaller, cheaper iPad, especially since those seem to be the only significant differences, and there is no apparent app development cost or learning curve further easing enterprise adoption.

But the bigger point is that enterprises need to be able to support not only multiple tablet and smartphone form factors but a large subset of an unpredictably large set of personal device types.

This is not a new challenge, it is simply one that is accelerating because of the decreasing costs and increasing ease of device development. “Personal” devices in enterprises are not new – employees have often used their own personal computers especially as they shrunk in cost and to BYOD notebook size. Tablets and phones are the next step, but enterprises will soon be dealing with watches, wearable computing, and implants which is why…

BYOD strategies need to focus on the data not the devices
The BYOD continuum is also largely additive – employees aren’t just replacing devices but often using multiple devices to access and process much of the same data – keeping up with the variety and volume and versions of personal devices is hopeless. A BYOD management strategy that focuses on device management will at best have a negative impact on productivity, will certainly increase costs, and most likely fail. There are environments and applications where data security is critical enough to warrant the overhead of a device management strategy that approaches being fail-proof, but even in these cases the focus should be on the data itself with device control as a backup where it makes sense.

It may not be much easier to manage the data independently but that’s the ball to keep your eye on.

This post originally published on https://gilbane.com

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