These are my notes from Chapter 1 of Essential SharePoint 2007. I have read a few more chapters that I haven’t summarized yet, but so far I highly recommend this book!

Organizational acceptance factors

MOSS users typically have other options for accomplishing the tasks that MOSS enables. That is a threat to the organization adopting/embracing SP.

Process and people strategies are more important to successful deployment than the technology. It isn‘t logical, but it’s true. Planning those strategies are important to success.

SharePoint learning curve – Introduce features slowly. You could have rapid development with multiple releases (For example, your first rollout would launch a home page, executive dashboard, and one “collection” of content, such as HR.)

Getting business user buy-in: show value

Sell SP to users – tell them what’s in it for them.

What are the critical business objectives for the key stakeholders? How can MOSS address them? It’s easy for techie types to get caught up in all the cool things SharePoint is, but ultimately it is just another tool. Focus on delivering actual business value.

Tie the specific objectives of MOSS to one or more of the strategic objectives of the company. I can’t emphasize enough how much business users will love this.

The book lists examples of specific objectives that could be tied into the company’s strategic objectives. (I only typed out the ones that were relevant to my situation.)

• - Provide easier and timelier access to the information employees need to get their work done
• - Provide an organized one-stop shop for information by making it easier to find authoritative information
• - Improve the ability to share and exchange informationa cross the organization by providing an electronic publishing method that is easy for users to leverage
• - Improve the ‘time to talent’ the speed with which new employees become productive
• - Improve organizational learning by providing easier access to critical information and organizational memory
• - Improve project execution by providing an opportunity for work teams to collaborate and to electronically store project information in fully searchable, organized team sites

Articulate the long-term vision of your solution.

Content must be relevant to your user’s daily activities.

Personalization will make the intranet more valuable to users. (Audience targeting and content change alerts are the first two personalization features I would want to deploy.)

Roles & responsibilities for managing content

Make sure you have governance processes in place. Users should be aware of and accept their roles and responsibilities.

You need a plan for reviewing site content to keep it relevant over time. Consider using publishing sites because they allow you to schedule when content will be live, and you can set up a workflow to delete or retain expired content.

MOSS is only as good as the quality, timeliness and relevance of the content and data. Those are largely business user responsibilities, so it’s important to make sure the business stakeholders are engaged.

If possible, get content management responsibilities incorproated into individual performance goals.

Levels of Review and Approval

For each type of content, decide how much review and approval it needs before going live. For example, HR content or company polices would require a more formal review/approval process. (Who can submit changes? Who can approve those changes?) An in-progress project team site might have an informal or non-existent review/approval process.

Content Migration

• - Create strategy for converting existing content and launching the new solution.
• - Evaluate the value of existing intranet content and clean it up before migration.
• - Consider adopting a “no automated content migration” policy. Users have incentive to only migrate content that is still valid and useful. Bonus: The process of migration will ensure users learn how to use MOSS.
• - Users should be tagging metadata on existing content as they migrate it.
• - A contact person should be identified on every page – can use “Contact Details web part”

Make SharePoint the easiest way to find content

• - Create a logical and organized content taxonomy. Content classification strategy needs to support navigation and browsing! A good taxonomy guides users to what they are looking for without having to search.
• - Monitor search results to find and fix user stumbling blocks
• - Use search keywords/synonyms
• - Monitor usability with user focus groups
• - Conduct focus groups and usability tests – ease of use and logical content positioning
• - Ensure content creators/owners provide enough meta data and description… but balance the burden of entering that info with the importance of people finding it.

Preparing for the launch…

Communication surrounding Rollout:

• - Use newsletters, business unit meetings, demo it
• - Draft an email for your CEO to send out right before you launch – makes users get over reluctance to try something new
• - Tailor messages to specific target audiences
• - A fun activity – such as an intranet scavenger hunt (find answers to 10 questions)

Training

• - Identify initial candidates to become ‘power users’ of MOSS
• - Timing is important – train immediately before the launch.
• - Visitors will need minimal training – how to browse and search, site organization
• - Contributors need more significant training – posting content, applying metadata, etc.
• - Helpdesk may need training to assist users with SharePoint tasks
• - Owners would need even more training, but for now I’m the only owner.

After Roll-Out

Measure success – use usage statistics, solicit user feedback (ex: rapidly accessing previously hard to find information) and include quantitative value estimate (ex: took 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes)

Consider lunch & learn sessions on a weekly basis after launch.

Conduct periodic end-user surveys for continual improvement.

Encouraging good citizenship/participation

• - Make sure authors are credited, by Marla, updated by Bob, updated by Roger
• - Recognize content contributors or put MOSS success stories in the company newsletter

Croikey!

The branding for my site involves reverse print (light text on a darker background, as opposed to black on white.) When I went to edit a list in datasheet mode, it used my dark background, but the default black and blue text. See:

Hello, can you read this? Ouch, my eyes!

Talk about a holy terror for your poor little eyeballs!

I couldn’t find the CSS (if it even exists) for any part of the datasheet, but I did eventually find a hack. It involves changing the body’s background to white, and then using other css to override that with your actual background.  ActiveX controls just use the background color, so viola! Your datasheet now has a white background and your eyeballs are only mildly perturbed. See:

Hello, can you read this? Ouch, my eyes!

This post was helpful:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/31532908/edit-in-datasheet-css.aspx 

What a good little net citizen to post a question, have no one answer it, and then post the solution you ended up finding!

The only issue I’ve found with this is that you will sometimes get random white areas if you’re viewing a list and then expand a collapsed node. I haven’t played with that much, and I did notice it in IE6, so… maybe it’ll turn out OK.

From Brian Granowitz’s post on Microsoft’s Get The ‘Point blog:

“Ever wonder why, when you go to one SharePoint site and then another, you see different options? Then, you open Help, and you’re told to click a menu option that isn’t there?”

 Yep, I think that is a point of much frustration for a typical SharePoint newbie. Hopefully when we deploy this to our users, they won’t have any options until they have been trained on how to use them. And even then, only options they will actually use.

Standard mode means it will render using new W3 standards, quirks mode means it will render using the rules as they were before there was a standard.

This site has a pretty good explanation and links for more detail:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/7975.htm

Based on that, I would think that new content should be created in standard mode. I will keep researching to find out if there is any reason to use quirks mode, and why SharePoint Designer is defaulting to quirks. (Maybe because I’m using IE6 for previewing?)

I looked all over the internets for this little gem…

In default.master, add ItemWrap=”True” inside the <SharePoint:AspMenu> tag that has an ID of “TopNavigationMenu”.

Like this:

 Mucho thanks-o to The Mossman for answering a post in the MSDN forums.

I read this…

There are two ways to create groups in Active Directory -

1.) domain…right click…new group

2.) domain…users..right click…new group.

SharePoint cannot correctly use groups where one of the CNs is “users” as is the case in the latter scenario above.

The right way to build groups in order to have SharePoint “like them” is by creating groups from the domain level.

http://drewmace.blogspot.com/2008/02/sharepoint-and-active-directory-groups.html

CN might stand for ‘common name.’ I will have to ask one of my little networking buddies. I’m pretty vague on this whole “AD” thing, as they say. I read the Active Directory wikipedia entry and now I feel slightly smarter. In the most non-technical way possible, here is my interpretation of what it all means:

Active Directory is what the network admins use to organize all their users, services (ex: email) and resources (printers, scanners, web cams, etc). It’s a windows thing. It’s not really a program, it’s a framework. (Like how having folders isn’t a program, it’s just part of the operating system. )

In AD, you can set up groups of users, and SharePoint can use those existing groups for assigning permissions.

More info on SharePoint groups, common problems, trouble shooting and best practices:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/06/29/sharepoint-groups-permissions-site-security-and-depreciated-site-groups.aspx

http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/default.aspx I love this website because it has tons of useful information, AND you can clearly see how SharePoint is being used.

http://www.wssdemo.com/default.aspx This is a good example of moderate customization

https://www.sqlpass.org/Pages/Default.aspx And this one you’d probably have no idea it was SharePoint.

A good article on document approval, versioning, check in and check out.. lots of screen shots too.

http://itfootprint.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/140/

Source control is old hat to developers, but it’s a totally new concept for business users. I just have to remember that when I’m trying to explain this.

This explains Excel Services pretty well:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA101054761033.aspx

Excel Services is part of MOSS 2007.

In short, there are three parts of Excel Services:

1. Excel Calculation Services – this is under the hood, does the math and formulas and stuff
2. Excel Web Access – this allows you to see a workbook in a web part that looks and acts similar to excel
3. Excel Web Services – this is for developers to make custom stuff

Web Part – Components that display content on a page and are the primary means for users to customize/personalize pages.

Web Part Zone – Container for Web Parts. 

Page – Container for Web Part zones, and Web Parts. 

Site – Container for child sites, pages, and content such as lists and document libraries.

Site Collection - Container for SharePoint sites, which exists within a specific content database. A site collection contains a top-level site and optional child sites, and is the unit of ownership, securability, and recoverability.

Web Application – IIS Web site, extended to use SharePoint, which can host site collections.

Farm – Installation of one or more load-balanced Web servers, and back-end servers, with a configuration database. 

Update: I just now realized that this blog was written by Mauro Cardarelli, one of the authors of a book I’m reading called Essential SharePoint 2007.