SharePoint Conference Day Two

Today was a bit more fragmented because I had some Microsoft meetings and some EMC partner meetings but I got to some good sessions regardless…

Attended the EMC consulting best practices session "EMC: Good, better, best: Understanding Enterprise SharePoint Deployment Best Practices". The EMC team acted out a scenario that represented a typical customer/consulting engagement. This worked well and the audience seemed engaged as they moved through their demo. The size of the crowd suggests that there are a lot of people out there who are looking for more information and best practices. Not a surprise given the changes in 2010.

My next session was Revolutionizing the SAP user experience… with SharePoint. Truthfully, most of this session was way above my head as I am new to the SAP world but the rest of the audience seemed to be enthralled! The heart of the session seemed to be that if you've chosen to use SAP then SharePoint has a place in exposing the SAP systems to end users. They showed examples of taking 7 SAP screens and creating a single SharePoint-based view with only a subset of data available.

The most interesting session of the day for sure was the Document Management Deep Dive with Ryan Duguid. The following are notes from that session...

High-level Messages

• SharePoint is all about "Traditional ECM" and collaboration brought together.
• Primary tag line - "ECM for the Masses"

Ryan showed a graph that shows how Traditional ECM is typically aimed at small number of types of content in a typical organization but not aimed at the larger number of non-controlled types of content. SharePoint is focused on that latter class of content types and on the breadth of content.

A bit of random marketing in the deck...

ECM Tenets: 3 'E's

• Easy to Use
• Everyone Participates
• Enterprise Ready

The Importance of Disposition

Ryan spent a considerable length of time talking about disposition. FWIW I agree entirely with this position. He had a graph that showed that starting today, with a 40% annual increase in data you will have 45TB of content in 10 years. If you dispose of just 10% of content each year you'll drop that to 25TB…dispose of 20% per year and it goes to 10TB…30% gets you 4TB. This shows how important it is to have a real disposition policy.

What's added in 2010 for ECM?

• They added unique document IDs to all objects - this seems like such a fundamental component that I do not understand how they managed previously without it - maybe it was hidden. The doc ID is optional in a site, they can be reset across all the site which is very odd and you can provide a prefix to ensure uniqueness, (which suggests that maybe they are only unique within a site or perhaps farm - this needs checking out).
• Ratings (click on a star - 1 through 5 to say how lovely something is) on any object in the site is being sold as a a big deal although this is something a bit alien to me. I could see it being popular in many cases…I'd just never given it any thought. The more I think about it the more I like this concept…
• Tagging - this one I get. Being able to create tags, apply them to an object and manage them. This is how navigation is going to be driven moving forwards. The model that I see SharePoint moving towards is one where the physical location of an object is there for the application of policies and security but not for navigation. You can optionally include the folder location as a navigation tag so it can also be a navigation factor but that’s incidental in this model.
• Drag and drop from Windows explorer into the multi file upload component – useful.
• Multi-select operations – again, great to see this and hard to imagine how SharePoint got away without having it.
• The ability to view compliance details of an object from the drop down menu. See if there's any retention, disposition, etc. applied to that document. Nice feature, very useful for admins, records managers and end users.
• Send To - used to be able to send to one record center, now you can reroute to multiple record centers or even just to another site, (I believe that all the functions previously associated with record centers can now be applied to any site). Ryan showed how you would set up a new record center. Looks like the decision to Copy, Move or Move and leave Stub seems to be per record center.
• Can apply retention policies to folders not just content types.
  • Within a folder you can define whether the objects declared as records are treated differently then other objects in the folder. This explains how it is they can simply select an object and click 'declare as record' without answering any other questions. The rules to determine the behavior once something is tagged as a record are defined in this way.

• Folders are a way of applying security, retention, disposition rules, etc on a location centric basis. I suspect that Microsoft are going to push faceted search/navigation as the way forward and folders as being a back end mechanism. This makes a lot of sense so long as the tagging is done correctly…a big risk perhaps?

Managed Metadata Service

• Supports type-ahead when adding a tag to an item - this is fully qualified so if you type a term that exists in many places in the taxonomy it will allow you to see the one that is in the right location.
• Want to support a folksonomy maturing in to the managed taxonomy. For example, you can send a message to the taxonomy owner to suggest new terms all from within SharePoint 2010
• Ryan showed how easy it was to create new taxonomy values…of course creating an agreed-upon taxonomy in the first place is the real challenge!!
• Note that the Managed Metadata Service can be shared across sites – this is a huge deal.
• It also supports multi language support so you can switch to a new language and see localized tags, (they don’t translate terms but allow you to enter multilingual tags.
• The hierarchy is "Groups, term sets, terms" this allows you to set rules across the hierarchy including ownership of the terms.
• Seems like there's been a lot of thought put in to this feature. Especially around making it easy to move things around and turn on/off the individual terms.

Navigation by metadata is probably the most significant feature that I've seen in a long time. I was going to say 'if it works' but if data continues to grow as predicted then maybe it has to.

One very important point is that Microsoft believe that in order to get users to invest in the effort of tagging content in the first place then they need to see a 3x return on that investment. Faceted navigation is that return…spend the time tagging today and find the content in whatever way you prefer tomorrow.

Document Sets

• Like an intelligent folder, they wanted it to look familiar so they make it look like a folder
• The set can have a landing screen which looks like a wiki - more than just a relationship object, it allows for collaboration around a collection of documents.
• It looks like a document can only live in one Document Set which might be a real problem. This needs validating.
• Ryan described it as a "Foundation for document assembly"

Content Type Syndication

Share objects, metadata, workflow, between farms.

Ryan demoed this - He opened the admin screen and defined where the content type hub was. He went to that site and provisioned a new content type just as you would in any farm/site. He then managed the publishing for that content type. He published it, waited for a sync job to run and then went back to a remote site where the new content type was available to be provisioned from the hub for local use.

Content Organizer

In site settings there are rules that can route content to specific locations. He set up a new rule that says for a specific content type for content that has a specific metadata value it would be moved to one location. It can provision a new folder based on the value of a specific piece of metadata. For compliance this would be a very compelling feature – especially if you can get metadata tagging done accurately at the right time.

Comments

[twitter.com/piewords]

The disposition math is all wrong. He seems to lower the growth rate because there is less content the year before. Last I checked, people are more prone to create content if there is more room out there, not the other way around.

Plus, following the trend, if you dispose of 50%, you'll have negative content. Not likely.

Okay, to fix it, say you have 1.5TB to start, which is a best guess for where he started to get to 45 TB. At a creation rate of 40% of the content out there, fixing the faulty disposition rate, you'll create 12 TB in the final year. So you can't drop below that.

When I worked it out I get the following:

10%: 35 TB
20%: 29 TB
30%: 25 TB

All very nice and better than 45%. There are major flaws in that schedule. I would gather that after 5 years, 95-99% of an organizations content can be disposed of. Using his metrics, he only disposes of 65%. There are cliffs in disposition. No content may be disposed of in year 2, but 75% in year 5.

The point is that it isn't so dramatic.

-Pie