In what appears to be his inaugural blog posting, chiqnlips has delved into the madness that is a calculated column and described a solution to a common SharePoint Designer workflow email activity problem: How to display a person’s real name in an email instead of "domain\username."
I haven’t tested it myself, but it looks promising. Check it out.
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I’ve read a few retrospectives on 2008 and this has got me to thinking about 2009. Here are my guesses at the future of SharePoint in 2009.
I’m a SharePoint MVP and as a result, I sometimes get a little advance information before it’s public. I am NOT making any such information public. I really haven’t been around long enough to be entrusted with that kind of stuff anyway.
With that out of the way, on to the predictions …
I believe that FAST will become a very hot topic in 2009. It’s already well known in the enterprise search community. However, everyone that plays around with SharePoint in 2009 will soon be interested in this product and what it can do for them. New consulting companies will spring up around it and existing partners will work and scramble to add it to its portfolio. This time next year, almost everyone in the SharePoint community will have heard of and have an opinion about FAST.
FAST is targeted at large companies and that will continue. I think there’s at least an outside chance that Microsoft will release a more focused version of the product that is accessible to smaller companies. Failing that, they will open up the SharePoint search engine so that it can be customized along the lines that FAST can be customized. For example, FAST uses pipeline architecture for consuming content and indexing it. FAST admins and developers can assemble pipeline components per data source and even create new pipeline components. We don’t have this flexibility with SharePoint today. If FAST remains firmly targeted at very large companies, SharePoint search will adopt some of FAST’s features.
I believe it will come out in 2009.
I believe that it will provide us the ability to secure views on a list or document library. This may be more of a hope than a belief 🙂
I hope it will provide some better support for end users in SharePoint Designer and particularly workflow.
I don’t know much else, I have been actively tracking what I do find here: http://delicious.com/pagalvin/SharePoint_O14.
Today, most SharePoint vendors seem to be gadget oriented. Take Bamboo or Corasworks for example. They have a huge following and great portfolio of products. However, they seem sort of gadgety to me or developer / tool focused. Admin tools, workflow tools, etc. That’s not a criticism at all because SharePoint can definitely use some gadgets.
In 2009, some vendors (and very possibly Bamboo themselves, if I read this correctly) will put together verticalized business applications in the form of templates, features, solutions, etc. I’m thinking about the fabulous forty templates today but tailored to specific industries. I’m sort of surprised it’s not already exploited this way. SharePoint is a platform for delivering these kinds of things. What’s everyone waiting for? They won’t wait any longer in 2009.
At the same time, Silverlight and other cool .NET stuff will fuel new, better and more interesting gadgets.
Sharepointreviews.com will become the essential community catalog of these products.
2009 will see the emergence of the End User as a major focus for bloggers, organizations and Microsoft themselves. Mark Miller’s End User SharePoint.Com played a big role in 2008 and will continue to do so in 2009. End Users will begin to blog, help to transform user groups into less technical venues and even convince someone or organization to launch a pure End User focused conference.
Speaking of conferences – they will continue to expand and grow in number and focus. Aside from end user content, they will continue to cater to developers and administrators.
Virtual conferences will start to pick up and existing conferences will provide live feeds to remote attendees who cannot or choose not to attend in person.
Free venues will expand, such as Mike Lotter’s (et al) SharePoint Saturday.
This is going to be very important because there will continue to be a large influx of new developers, admins and end users who will be craving the kind of information these groups provide.
Demand for social computing features will rise. All things being equal, companies that implement effective social computing strategies will do better and be stronger than their competitors.
Smaller companies will adopt these features more quickly and effectively than large companies.
Large companies: beware 🙂
In 2008, a lot of SharePoint bloggers and organizations and Microsoft themselves spent a lot of time figuring out the best way to solve certain problems (usually technical problems).
There are still opportunities to define and foster adoption of best practices. However, while we’ve been figuring out the best way to install, configure and manage SharePoint, hundreds and thousands of companies have been installing, configuring and managing SharePoint without those best practices at hand.
In 2009, a lot of companies are going to realize they have some deeply rooted problems to solve and will be looking to the elite members of the SharePoint community and Microsoft for help to fix them. I think this will extend well into 2010 and possibly spawn a cottage industry providing remediation services for companies that really need and use SharePoint, but are hurting badly because of poor decisions made early in their implementation.
In 2009, the Mother Ship will return and bring Bob Fox home.
I didn’t start working with SharePoint myself in any real way until January 2007. It seems to me that SharePoint has really taken off and proven itself capable of delivering a lot of value in these two years. I think that in many ways, it didn’t really straighten itself out until the infrastructure update. It still has its bugs and problems, but we’ve all come along way since 01/2007. 2009 is going to be a banner year for SharePoint.
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I’ll be doing two presentations at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference this February in San Diego.
I haven’t been doing this thing long enough to get jaded by it, so every conference I attend is a, frankly, awesome. However, I do think this conference is special. There is zero marketing focus and the whole thing is about offering real-world practical advice on how to untangle some of the thorniest issues we face dealing with SharePoint. It’s not gigantic, so all of the speakers are very accessible (at least when they are not putting out fires back home). This means that in addition to the great formal presentations, you can have some great conversations and debates with virtually every speaker at almost any time, starting with communal breakfast up to late night imbibing at the hotel bar.
Beyond the speakers, you’ll have great opportunities to build and cement networks of other SharePoint users in the community. By the end of the last session and conference wrap-up, you’ll be energized and full of good ideas to bring back to work to help improve your SharePoint environment.
It’s well worth the investment.
The web site is top notch. Check it out for dates, registration, topics and speakers.
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This past summer, while I was working on two chapters for the best SharePoint social computing book ever, I began to get very far behind in my blog reading. I use Google Reader for my RSS stuff and when you have more than 1000 unread items, it just says, "1000+".
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sitting down and systematically reading them and tagging them as I go for future reference (I use Delicious.com).
This past weekend I watched all of Lost, season four in a couple of sittings and catching up on 1000+ blog entries feels the same way.
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Mark Miller over at www.endusersharepoint.com posted my latest article on SharePoint Designer workflow here (http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1037).
I describe the basic approach for moving a workflow you create in one list to another list. The other list can be in the same site, same site collection or an entirely different farm (e.g. from development to production).
This is a complicated subject so I only covered a very basic scenario. Next week, I’ll write up a more useful real world example.
Check it out and share any comments there.
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Mark Miller has posted my latest End User oriented SharePoint Designer Workflow article up on his site here: http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1008
I attempt to provide a straight-forward answer to the question, "Why can’t I easily port a SharePoint designer workflow from development to test?" In the process, I also give some insight into what SPD is actually doing behind the scenes when we use it to create a workflow solution.
Next week, I describe an End User friendly way to port SPD workflow from one server to another, or at least as End User friendly a solution as is possible given the state of the tool set.
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I had the good fortune of attending some partner training from FAST last spring. I was really impressed with the product and was looking forward to working with it. Unfortunately, one project fell through and then EMC acquired my company. Predictably, a certain amount of chaos ensued while we learned about EMC and EMC learned about us. FAST technology dropped a few points on the priority scale during that period. However, I never lost my interest in the product and, more interestingly, the bigger problem of findability.
I really don’t like that word, but I’m trying to get used to it 🙂 Despite it’s awkwardness, findability is a real (or at least, emerging) term. Do a live search if you’re interested in finding more technical definitions, but the way I explain it around the office is like this:
Intellectual capital that cannot be found may as well not exist.
It’s almost as true to say this:
Intellectual capital that cannot be found quickly and easily may as well not exist.
Intellectual capital (IC) starts as an idea in a person’s head and is then refined via collaboration with colleagues and interactions with various communities. To be truly useful, these resulting ideas must be recorded. This is where the trouble begins 🙂
These days, recording normally means that the idea is documented in the form of an MS Word doc, Excel workbook, etc. and eventually stuck in electronic format on a hard drive somewhere. IC obviously takes other forms like, like images, videos, highly informative blogs, wikis … it’s impossible to list them all. At the same time, IC is stored in a variety of places like file systems, databases, line of business applications (ERP, CRM, SharePoint, Documentum), etc.
This is the findability problem: how can quickly and easily find IC that is stored in dozens or hundreds of formats in dozens or hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands (dare I say hundreds of thousands) of locations in an organization?
It’s a difficult problem to solve. Bill English has been writing about findability from a very grand perspective in what I have come to think of as the Panama Canal approach. The history of the Panama Canal is amazing. In a nut shell, a crazy Frenchman (Ferdinand de Lesseps) started a private company to build the canal, the project was abandoned for some years, picked up again and finally finished by the American government under President Roosevelt. This reminds me of Bill’s approach because as he rightly points out, solving the findability is both hard and never stops. It took years and years of effort from the some of the hardest working humans on the planet to start, continue, and finally finish). And yet, it’s still not truly finished. As far as I know, the canal’s banks have never met their angle of repose, meaning that they have to be shored up and otherwise maintained even to this day. Solving findability is the same way. I definitely recommend that you read Bill’s series and subscribe to his blog for his point of view on findability, particularly as it relates to SharePoint.
I too am interested in this problem. Due to my exposure to FAST and on-going discussions on this subject with my brilliant EMC colleagues, I have some more ideas I plan to write about over the coming weeks and months. In my next article on this little series, I’m going to try and put a box around the problem to show how awful it really is (it’s more awful than you think 🙂 ). It’s awful, but at least it does fit inside a box.
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One of the … side effects … of working for a giant corporation is that I get a lot press releases in my inbox every month. I’m still new to the EMC world, so a lot of these press releases are, basically, inscrutable. This or that company purchased these or those EMC products, blah blah blah. I’m not complaining. I actually take this as an incentive to learn more about EMC as time goes by so that I better understand the big picture of what EMC is all about (hint: it’s about Information).
Some times, those press releases are quite easy to understand and one of them was about Mozy. Mozy is an on-line backup tool. You install a lightweight client on your workstation (laptop in my case), you tell it what you want to back up and when and then it does it by sending your data to some server(s) on the cloud. It does it in the background.
My initial backup ran in just under 4 hours and according to Mozy is 550MB or so of data. I only backed up "My Documents" (hence, the relatively small amount of data).
It ran again (I think 24 hours later), backed up some more stuff in about 8 minutes. I never noticed it happen. There was no obvious impact on any work I was doing at the time.
I did a test restore and it provides a decent enough user interface to select the file(s) you want to restore. It was quick, snappy, informative … I don’t know how it could be any better.
I spoke to one of my colleagues about it who has more experience with online backup. He said that Mozy is good but that it lacks an ability to tell Mozy to do the equivalent of "restore files that I deleted." This is to say that if you don’t know you deleted a fie, or if you do but don’t remember its name, Mozy may not help you much in terms of easily finding it to restore.
They impose a 2GB limit if you just want to use the service for free. It looks like it’s $5/month for unlimited storage.
Bottom line, if someone asks me if they should use Mozy for online backup, my answer right now is, "Hell, yes."
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