Brian on Collaboration

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Conference Successful

So perhaps a new look and feel will revive my interest in bloggin'.

The Microsoft MOSS 2007 conference is a success for Habanero...we sent 8 folks down to the conference, and as a collective, we've learned a lot. We've also had a great time hanging with our clients, and seeing their eyes light up on cool stuff. Some of the highlights include:

Microsoft blueprint for Silverlight announced. The keynote showed some stuff that General Mills was doing with Silverlight and search. I am convinced this is the future of the enterprise search experience, and I'm going to avidly pursue figuring this out.

Community Kit for SharePoint. It's interesting. Clients don't like 3rd party products (to extend SharePoint). They're concerned about company longevity & pains related to installing, configuring and sustaining a 3rd party product. But boy, are they excited about free code. The community kit presentation highlighted some exciting upcoming features that are extending SharePoint's out of the box experience around blogs, wikis and other social, web 2.0ish kind of features. Export to and import from Word in the "upgraded wiki" features are pretty damn hot lookin'.

Advanced Search. There's a lot of buzz around search here. Not only because the free search was announced, but because of the crazy stuff that people are doing on MOSS search and the recent acquisition of FAST from Microsoft. As soon as that deal is final, expect some amazing stuff. Did you know that for enterprise users (not home users) google, yahoo and msn only own 30% of the Internet enterprise search market [Chris got this out of a analyst presentation]? This means products such as FAST make up the majority of searches that users within companies perform. INTERESTING.

Social Web 2.0 Tools. It's great to see a broader user community get excited about these tools in the workplace. I did a presentation to a bunch of Records Managers a few weeks ago to talk about social networking and collaboration tools and how we are seeing them used in the enterprise (and the RM challenges they cause), and I thought...holy cow...get up to speed on this stuff people! It's good to see some excited big ticket executives talk about the importance of these technologies within their companies.

Records Management on SharePoint 2007. I'm not crazy. There is a HUGE market here. General Mills, DAFRA, and some other big organizations gave presentations on what they are doing within SharePoint specifically around Records Management. One person in the audience asked "so are you locking down fileshares then?". Ahrg...some people just don't GET it. If you're creating a solution that is so bad that it forces people to want to use their old stuff, then perhaps it's your solution that's the problem, not the fact that the old stuff is still available. Anyway, I digress. I'm really happy about the progress we've made in this area and confident there's a good message on how these two play nice together. Certainly a blog topic to kill all blog topics.

Dude, Habanero rocks. Yet more validation we are rocking at Habanero. Besides sending more people than any other consulting company in the world (a guess, but I'm pretty sure this is accurate). We are WAY, WAY ahead of the general user community in SharePoint Information Architecture, designing a brand within the MOSS framework, architecting for large scale inter-continental deployments, user training, governance and having a kick ass framework for developing custom code solutions [see press release on Habaneros.com].

How do we communicate our lessons learned?

How do we get this information out to customers, future customers, and the general public at large?

Did you know, for example, that while SharePoint can run on a 64 bit server, there is no Adobe PDF ifilter available for a 64 bit machine to allow SharePoint to index pdf's?

or how about:

Did you know that if you're creating an external website on the MOSS platform, you should edit down the JS file that comes with SharePoint so external website users are not needing the nearly 1mb file when they browse your site?

or

Telerik's free MOSS 2007 editing control is all but required for MOSS sites that are going to support non IE browsers? The in browser editing controls for MOSS 2007 do not support Safari or Firefox!

How do we get this news to you?

A revivial

In the interest of starting a wave of Blogging effort at Habanero around the topic of Collaboration, I'm reviving my blog until we get a shared author "Collaboration Blog" going here.

Soon, my friends. Soon.

Microsoft Releases 2007 Office System Licensing

Microsoft has released its Office System 2007 Licensing. Some interesting things to note:

a) Current Office Professional users will migrate to Office Professional Plus under SA's and EA's.

b) Forms Server (InfoPath forms via the web) will be released as a separate server offering, but also included in the new Enterprise CAL introduced by Microsoft. This will have a separate licensing structure for external website use.

c) The new Enterprise CAL (which will be an upgrade to the Core CAL many companies already own) will include:

• Business data exposure via the Business Data Catalog
• Forms Server
• Excel Services (Not sure what this is going to be called)
• Rights Management Services
• MOM licensing
• Security licensing (don't know exactly what this is yet)
• Communicator licensing

d) A new desktop suite called Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 will include the laptop friendly tools Groove & OneNote.

e) A product acquired from a company called UMT (www.umt.com) is being re-branded and included in the 2007 server lineup as: Microsoft Project Portfolio Server 2007.

References:
Microsoft.com: Client Suite Licensing
Microsoft.com: Pricing Overview (Including Servers)
Microsoft.com (Word Doc): Pricing FAQ Sheet - Includes Great details about each individual server.

What's Hot in Office 12

Here's what I'm excited about in the next release of Office (Currently called Office 12).

Enterprise Content Management

Nearly every organization we work with is using a different technology to work with external web content and internal portal content. The reason for this, I believe, is that in the past, managing web content has always been a different beast than managing documents, collaborative workspaces and enterprise content and applications. These differences, however, are cleverly addressed in the next version of Office 12, and I think the following worlds are finally coming together in a very cohesive way:

• Records Management
• Document Management
• Web Content Management
• Form Based Content Collection & Management
• LOB Data Management

More details on the Microsoft direction for this merger of technologies can be found here:
Microsoft's ECM Vision

Business Intelligence Improvements

To me, BI suffers in one key area: How do users SEE the data that has been painstakingly optimized for reporting. This has caused some major problems for organizations:

• High costs of 3rd party BI visualization products, which don't really integrate with tools like excel for complex reporting
• Painful development time for creating rich drill down reports that have good user interfaces
• Frustrated managers and executives that have to muddle over excel or pivot table complexity to see their data

There's a TON coming to improve this in Office 12:

• Much much better data visualization in Excel (such as being able to quickly apply color shading visualization)
• Improved Pivot Table Reports (create excel documents that have the functionality of Pivot Tables but are disconnected from the awkwardness of the Pivot Table user interface) (See an example of both new Pivot table UI and Visualization in the Excel O12 Blog)
• Rich Visio integration for super data visualization
• Excel Services (You've got to visit this Microsoft Excel Blog)
• Better web based management of the "report and BI dashboard"
• KPI management & Business Scorecard features built into the products

Richer access to Line of Business Data

So you're typing up a contract for a client. Ideally you'd attach that client name as meta data to the document so you could find it better later. In Office 12, connecting to data stored in a line of business system is, well, easy. Office 12 deals with this. From a business perspective, imaging surfacing data stored in Line of Business systems to your portal so that all users in your organization can see that data. I'm anxious to connect this to our CRM at Habanero so we can see contacts, opportunities, activities, and project details for our clients one one cohesive SharePoint page. Keep your ear out for this term:

• Business Data Catalog

From a technical perspective, I couldn't do this as much justice about this new technology as Eli Robillard does in his blog. 

Much Much Better Search

The way we think about Enterprise search has been flipped 180 degrees in Office 12, and in a good way. Besides better algorithms, look for:

• The ability to search structured data out of the box
• Social networking searches
• A flexible search user interface
• General feature improvement (hit highlighting, "did you mean" spelling checker, etc.)

Greater access to content in Documents and Spreadsheets

Our Single Source Publishing Solutions are specifically targeting reusing content that sits in Word Documents for reuse on the web, PDA, phone, etc. or for LOB data integration. In some ways, our solutions are only relevant and successful because the technology is still a bit weak at addressing the need to separate content from presentation logic. Office 12 and the new XML based file formats address this head on, allowing a much better separation between content and styling (and improved ways of manipulating both).

Better Accessibility

Office 12 is really looking to gain broader reach. We see this in:

• Web based forms created by InfoPath
• Support for greater authentication mechanisms
• Broader reach of SharePoint functionality into Internets & Extranets
• Improved UI

This one is going to come up so much in future blogs, I'll stop there.

Slight shift in blog content

I'm anxious to start to share cool details about Microsoft's next version of SharePoint, CMS and other Office products (Called Office 12 or O12). Officially, the O12 client software is no longer under NDA (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Visio, Access, Outlook). The O12 "servers" are. That said, I've decided I'm going to do two things with this blog until O12 becomes fully public.

a) I'll point you to the best resources on Office 12 and Microsoft's next wave of their collaboration, Enterprise content Management, Business Intelligence, Portal and Desktop Publishing suite.

and

b) I'll try to summarize the publically available details of Office 12 in a manner that makes sense to me :)

O12 is slated for release in the second half of 2006. There are no official details available yet on product pricing or how the server or client products are going to be packaged, which is probably the biggest annoyance, but as soon as we find out, I'll post it.

Follow the Office 12 Release

Get up to date info on the next release of Office (remember "Office" now loosely refers to the package of products that integrate with or complement the desktop suite (Word, Power Point, Excel) : CMS / SharePoint / Excel Server / InfoPath Server / Project Server / Project Professional / InfoPath / Visio.

What's coming?

Built in PDF support, a new User Interface, Records Management, new XML based file formats, revived Content Management, a customizable User Interface for SharePoint, integration with Windows Workflow foundation, an enhanced Information Bridge Framework (Business Data Catalog), Item Level Security, enhanced Rights Management, Recycle Bins. And that's only the stuff that's been publicly announced...

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

Alrighty, I recognize I have a clear Microsoft bias right now.

Creating a breadcrumb trail in SharePoint without modifying templates

Background - Editing SharePoint Templates a Headache

In 2003 we created a customized SharePoint Portal site for a customer that pretty much had us changing every template under SharePoint. We added custom navigation, a breadcrumb trail, moved the search to the top of the page, and pretty much completely resurfaced SharePoint. If you're familiar with the architecture of SharePoint, there are nearly 100 templates that make up a SharePoint area (one for the default page, and up to 5 more each for every list and library allowed in that area). Consider also that SharePoint Portal Server has about 7 out of the box templates each with its own corresponding set of 100 list and library pages, My Sites and WSS Sites have about 100 templates each and you'll find there are a LOT of pages to modify (and that's not including Administrative pages).

Recommendation: Use CSS for Most Visual Customizations

So, we learned our lesson and started customizing SharePoint using CSS. You can do some amazing things with CSS including moving complete page elements around (you can, for example move the search to the top of the page using css).

Leverage Javascript if CSS is Not Enough

But sometimes CSS just isn't enough. Sometimes we want to add a page element to every page that isn't a "web part". For this, we started using the owsbrows.js file to "pop" items into the page onload. The owsbrows.js file is loaded with with every page in SharePoint (Portal Areas, My Site & Team Sites) Basically, you can add items to a SharePoint page by running a JS / DHTML function when the page loads. It's a pretty cool technique for adding or modifying the SharePoint page without changing every template (for example, you can use this to remove the "My Site" link from users...)

Adding Dynamic Data to the Page using AJAX (Such as a Breadcrumb Trail)

If your customization includes dynamic data such as a breadcrumb trail, navigation, stock quote, etc. You can use AJAX concepts to add dynamic data to the page.

To add a Breadcrumb trail to SharePoint without editing every SharePoint template (or having the breadcrumb sit in a web part zone, which is just strange placement):

1) Create a server side web app that will get an XML structure of the breadcrumb using the URL as a parameter (this web app should sit in the SharePoint _layouts folder).
2) Edit the owsbrows.js file and create an onload function (attach to the onload event)
3) Create a XMLHTTP javascript call to the server side web app in the onload event. Pass the current page URL to the URL in this call
4) Format the returned xml into HMTL or DIV's
5) Using Javascript "pop" your formatted code onto the page using the DOM.

There *may* be a slight lag in the breadcrumb loading on the page, but it's generally unnoticeable if your server is fast enough. I'd publish the code, but there are so many variables it's best if you create it yourself. If you're not using CSS you may want to format the breadcrumb using tables, if you are, you should use DIV's. You may want to format the structure of the breadcrumb on the server instead of on the client. If you're using Team Sites in addition to Portal Areas, your code will need to take into consideration that Portal Area's have bucket web's (e.g. C1, C2) , which means you can't simply crawl up a web collection in your code, but on team (WSS) sites you can.

What's in a Blog?

What exactly is an acceptable blog entry?

Okay...so I've only had this blog going for a few months and though I'm not blogging regularly (hell...I skipped the entire month of July), I am still interested in continuing this blog thing. As you may have noticed, I've decided to take the white-paper approach with my blog. This makes me end up with longer, less frequent blog entries, that aren't necessarily the personal rant, rave or questioning format typical of blogs, but rather I try to keep them educational and contemplative. The advantages to this versus posting a bunch of white-papers to our company website is:

• There is no editing process (notice the errors?), so things are quicker to write and not wordsmithed until I feel like killing the editor.
• They're indexed better and faster so they produce better Google (and some of those other search engine) hits.
• My views aren't necessarily those of the company. It offers me a little room to say what I think.
• Blogs are cool.

On the negative site:

• My blog entries to take more time to create (read: less frequent entries)
• They're long and require more time of the reader
• I feel like I have to stay somewhat "on topic" and can't just talk about some cool technology I just discovered unless I can relate it to collaboration

So what are your thoughts? Is it cool for blogs to be longer & less frequent, or am I abusing the technology concept? Is the "educate & provoke the reader" concept useful or would the semi-daily observation be more appropriate? Comments (or personal feedback) welcome!!

AJAX: Creating a Better User Experience

Good, usable, fast, responsive, easy products are a very important aspect of collaboration. The better the tools we use to collaborate, the more we'll use them. I don't think I have to provide a statistical connection to ease of use to actual use. That's why for today's blog, I'm copying an email circulated at Habanero...

It seems all that people are talking about these days is AJAX. It’s an important technology for a company like ours…here’s why:

First, what is it:

It stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. And it’s not really a NEW technology per se, it’s just a really interesting way of leveraging technologies that have been around the browser for quite a long time. It’s actually a combination of many technologies used in a particular way, including:

JavaScript
CSS
DOM
XMLHttpRequest

There have been AJAX applications in play since 1998 (wow!), the first known component to use HttpRequest was the Outlook Web Access team, who incorporated it into a very early version of OWA. Since 2005, however, the concepts have been getting a boom since major sites such as google (google maps, mail, etc.), Amazon and E-Bay have been incorporating the functionality into their web applications. The company Adaptive Path was credited with coining the name “AJAX” but the technologies have been around for a while. Habañero has actually used AJAX functionality in our applications before (but we didn’t call them AJAX at the time) so some of you may be familiar with the concepts.

Next, why is it important:

It’s important because AJAX type applications can create a very responsive, very usable, very rich web application. (Just to plug SharePoint, the next version of SharePoint is littered with AJAX - all improving current UE issues). It does have its drawbacks (see resources below), but you can bet we’re only at the beginning of a new era of rich applications.

Let’s explore just one use (a fun one). Visit Netflix here:
http://www.netflix.com/BrowseSelection?lnkctr=nmhbs

When you rollover a move, see the box pop up with some info about that movie and a rating? That information is not all loaded up when you visit the page…instead, it’s actually loaded when you mouse over the movie. All this is happening with a pretty seamless user experience (no page refresh, not slow, etc.). I’ve turned on IEWatch to analyze the HTTP request, and it’s actually pretty cool: when I mouse over, IE makes an additional request to the server for anything I haven’t yet requested (text, images, etc). If I rollover the SAME movie again, it doesn’t go to the server a second time, it uses the local cache for information.

What does it mean to Habañero?

We’ve got to continue to brush up or skills on DHTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM and the concepts around AJAX that can improve the applications we build. Also, we should continue to become familiar with the 3rd party tools available to create great AJAX applications. Designers will need to think of this interactivity when building user interfaces and possible start to understand the more technical nature of the web application designs we create.

Where can I get more info?

You can read adaptive paths description of the technology here:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

A general definition with some pro’s and con’s about the technology can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX

Some great examples of AJAX applications can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX#Examples_of_Ajax_applications

My favourite 3rd party .NET component vendor has a new callback control (which uses AJAX concepts) here:
http://www.telerik.com/r.a.d.controls/Callback/Examples/Demos/Accounts/DefaultCS.aspx