Peter Seale's weblog

Saturday, June 28, 2008 11:25:00 PM UTC 

Yesterday and today I attended the SUGDC Summer Regional SharePoint Conference. And by "Regional", we mean Washington, DC and surrounding provinces and territories. Telling the story via graphics:

I'll point out I didn't drive, I flew, though the flying experience probably took longer on the way up than driving would have. Yes, I'm aware that driving can take quite a while; yes, my flight up was nightmarish.

People

As I've been told before, the most important thing about attending a conference is not its sessions; it's the people you meet. I'm not going to call out names, but it was great to be able to meet a bunch of people of differing skillsets and backgrounds. And by differing skillsets, I mean "expert," "expert PLUS," and "Super expert plus, TURBO"—we're all pros here. Of course, of course; me too.

Fun Tidbits in the Sessions

Since I did dutifully take notes, I'll share the fun bits here:

• Errin (whose company is based out of Houston) presented an excellent overview of SharePoint's various capabilities and what projects they're doing. A good throwaway example is the slide that declared: "Documentum: $1.2M annual license. SharePoint: $400K one time fee." …the point being, even if you have to pay to customize, SharePoint is still the cheaper choice.
  ANYWAY, the thing that made this interesting (and different) is that he has done the projects—they're real, they're not all marketing hype. Believe the SharePoint pie chart! Well, kinda anyway, we'll get to that below.
• Errin also mentioned the importance of getting 'quick wins' in selling your SharePoint deployment. Throughout the weekend several others hammered this home as well, and it makes good sense: Step 1: find something that is a good match for SharePoint and is generally easy to do; Step 2: do that thing; Step 3: profit! Funny enough, I hear the same thing spoken about SOA implementations, although the guidance I heard was more like "3-5 projects." Since parts of SharePoint are designed to solve common business problems, you'll find it's, gasp, actually useful for your organization too!
• Interesting: he says the magic # to extract your storage requirements from your raw data is about 3.5. So if you have 100GB of files sitting on a shared drive that you plan to get into SharePoint, then you will need roughly 350GB of storage to accommodate.
• My Site governance: if we get the slide deck, I'll recommend looking at it to find a list of all the things that can go wrong with your My Sites. We're all aware of the big offenses, wait, let me capitalize that: Big Offenses—but we're not sure what else to look out for. Check his slide deck, there's a good summary there.
• Onto the next session! The Red Cross folk presented on their Communities of Practice, AKA their "Neighborhoods", which I'm loosely defining as "small targeted online communities." E.g. for the Red Cross, something many people are interested in is Measles. I don't know why either, something to do with saving lives. Anyway, my take on this whole thing is that the technical problem is solved, and has been since Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita started doing this sort of thing for corporations in the 90s. The only thing that remains is the human factors—getting people to, you know, use the stuff that's out there.
• Morbid tidbit: one of our presenters (I will withhold company) mentioned that one of the great catalysts spurring people to adopt SharePoint for knowledge management was a big pending layoff (RIF). Knowledge transfer was a real, immediate problem for them, and SharePoint provided a good solution. Takeaway: big layoffs drive SharePoint adoption! Slap that on the side of a bus and drive it around at the next conference!
• Hilarious quote: "You want to use a wiki? How much do you use the discussion lists you have on your site? None? Ok."
• As an aside: for the record, you are no longer allowed to use the term "wikis and blogs," as if they belong together. Small wikis are great. Wikipedia is great. Content tied to RSS feeds, which also allows comments, are great. Blogs that you can find on Technorati and can add to your subscriptions in Google Reader are great.  But in none of the 5 situations above, are you combining both "wikis" and "blogs" into one solution. You're not. Furthermore, nowhere are you even combining your intranet-facing content with your public-facing content. "Wikis and blogs" is a meaningless term, and it's growing ever more popular as the Enterprise 2.0 cloud blows in. I will talk about Enterprise 2.0 some other time; the summary is "part duh, part new good things, part money/hype/vendor."
• Also driven home: the fact that SharePoint implementations should not be "hardware + software + configuration + customization" only. It should include a great deal of effort on PEOPLE, PROCESS, and TRAINING. I'm with you there 100%. Training is always a good choice.
• Awesome nugget: when asked how to prevent sensitive or covered-under-regulation documents from being uploaded to SharePoint, Melvin's response was "what do you do for email?" Their inevitable answer is "nothing; we can't control email." The implication then, is that "oh, then why am I suddenly required to control SharePoint?" Melvin claims we can tell people that we will only hold SharePoint to the same standards to which we hold our email systems. I don't know about you, but this is an awesome "organizational hack" and I'm going to try it out.
• Job roundtable: it is clear that a) there's a lot of demand, b) there are at least three distinct roles for SharePoint, c) the "talent shortage" problem is only going to get worse. My advice: train up someone with no SharePoint-specific experience, almost as an intern-type situation. As you may imagine, this was a rowdy session and had lots of crowd feedback.
• Greg Galipeau - attended this intro to SharePoint site definitions development. What's fun is sitting next to a total newbie to SharePoint who is asking, "now what do I do to start a SharePoint project? Which project do I pick?" What was not fun was to realize that, while I was sleeping, WSPBuilder (my tool of choice) went out and added a bunch of features of which I'm unaware. So I'm out of touch. Also out of touch with: STSDEV. Also out of touch with: VSeWSS v1.2 specifically.
• Tony Byrne of CMSWatch, presenting portions of the CMSWatch report as his presentation. I want to talk about this one for a long time. I just want to focus on three things in his presentation:
• One: take a look at what you need, before deciding on SharePoint. I know a lot of us back into SharePoint and then look around, after having purchased the product, and say, "okay, let's try implementing <feature A>! I read it works great!" If you get nothing else from his presentation/report, it's that SharePoint is not equally good at everything. His quote was "it can do anything, more or less."
• Two: The other thing that's unique is that he focuses on the actual product we have today. This is where I think a big disconnect exists: even outside of marketing influence, people believe SharePoint will somehow get better, and assume that improvement is 'inevitable'. If you take away this second thing, just think for a second: what do we have, now, today? Not what we believe the product will look like in the future—what do we have now. Biggest example for me: Don't look at Silverlight 2.0 seriously, yet.
• Third: He claims that "SharePoint is a guild". Which is offensive, but, when you think about it long enough, yeah, it kinda fits. One quick rebuttal: if SharePoint's a guild (which I'm admitting), then it's the easiest guild to enter of all the enterprise systems. If you want to take something positive out of this, let it be: we still have a long way to go before picking up SharePoint is 'easy'. I could talk a long time about this, but will cut short.
• I want to do a separate post on his presentation. Summary: even if you're offended at times, he offers perspective, based on real research/investigation—which is something unique.
• Day 2: Sahil Malik presented on .NET 3.5 topics. I think I have an aversion to developing advanced customizations in SharePoint. This includes basically everything he presented, including hosting WCF in SharePoint 2007, using .NET 3.5 in SharePoint (requires some server config to enable .NET 3.5), and AJAX (Atlas). If I can see it working, even in a demo, I start to believe it can work; until then I'm skeptical. So, anyway, I now (as of ~11AM this morning) believe WCF can work in SharePoint 2007.
• Also interesting, Sahil points out you should use a single "big honkin'" (that's technical jargon for large) physical SQL Server, in conjunction with dev VMs. The more obvious/default choice would be to host your SQL Server instance on each VM; his setup combines all the SQL instances. He says this is best for performance reasons, which, now that I think about it, works.
• SharePoint for small businesses - actually I'm just writing this bullet point to apologize: I came in halfway through and zoned out for the rest. I blame my stomach, I was starving.
• Random quote: "if you don't have policies, you're up a crik."
• Implementing a PMO (and using SharePoint)
• This was an interesting talk because it focused more on the human factors than SharePoint. Something that should be obvious is that if you don't have the process down, installing MOSS or MOPS will not fix your process for you.
• Quote: "…PMO is not a project site [in SharePoint], it's not just rolling up all your project sites."
• Tip: access disparate data, don't recreate it
• Tip: "if I can see everything I need in one place, then … (handwriting is slow…general idea of "I'll be effective)"
• "Transparency" - sometimes there are fights because people don't want to be transparent. Ooh, I feel that one.
• Speaker prefers Lean, but wisely didn't use the word "Lean" anywhere in his presentation. :) He just said "The Toyota model"
• Fun quote for my PMI coworkers: "PMBOK is starting to get stale." This is fun because I can imagine their response.

I just read that, that was a lot of text

Wow, I need to learn to edit, bad me. Well, no way I'm going back and attempting to edit that behemoth; if you made it this far, then there must have been something good in there to keep you reading. Or you're a skimmer.

A+ would buy again

I do generally recommend this conference, especially to those of you in the area, as:

a) It's on a Friday/Saturday, which means you only lose one workday and one weekend day; (strikes a compromise between missing work and hating life)

b) The management track was excellent and had tidbits you can find nowhere else…well, nowhere else besides another conference or a $1400 report;

c) There was no "Intro to Silverlight" session.