Long time no post. Yes, I've been very busy indeed.
Well, it’s finally time to move this blog to its new home that’s powered by Office SharePoint Server. The URL is http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/lliu. Although it’s slightly longer to type than http://blogs.technet.com/lliu, you just have to agree that it’s a much cooler looking/sounding URL. J
Anyway, my RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/lliu) will start pulling content from the new blog very shortly, so subscribe to it now, and you won’t miss a thing.
Personally, I believe that screencasts will quickly become the de facto way for many people to learn how to use a new piece of software like Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. In today’s fast paced, YouTube crazed world, it’s often times more efficient and almost always more effective to learn how to use a software feature by watching a short video than by reading a “how to” text article. A key aspect of my concept of the SharePointPedia is that 1) it would contain community annotations and supplementary content similar to what the MSDNwiki currently provides for the .NET Framework SDK, and 2) it would support the storage/streaming or embedding of screencasts that complement a description of a feature or a how to article.
Coincidentally, here are 4 recently posted screencasts of MOSS features, which were developed by the SharePoint User Assistance group, and there may very well be more forthcoming:
· Configure a SharePoint Server 2007 site to receive e-mail
· Deploy an administrator-approved form template
· Add a library to a Records Center site
· Enable Excel Services and data connections for a SharePoint team site
While these screencasts are extremely well done, I feel that they’re a bit too lengthy and probably too costly to produce to be able to cover the many hundreds of features in MOSS. Typically, a feature or use case centric screencast should be no longer than 2 minutes. That way, the viewer can watch it quickly and get immediately back to work. Since I continue to fall behind on publishing my Vision/Scope document for the SharePointPedia, I thought that it would be worthwhile to publish the “Recording a Screencast Demo with Camtasia Studio” whitepaper (it's here) that I had drafted a couple of months ago as supplemental guidance on how to create screencast-based content for the SharePointPedia, and since TechSmith, the makers of Camtasia Studio graciously provides free licenses to the MVPs, I want to give them a well deserved plug because the software is indeed very easy to use and quite flexible -- you can get more info here.
Many of the SharePoint MVPs are planning to create short screencasts in the coming months. In the absence of the SharePointPedia (implementation timeframe still TBD), you can use the SharePoint Community Search to find the latest SharePoint screencasts. If you’ve created a screencast, please leave a comment here with a URL that links to it. If you feel strongly about a MOSS feature that is unintuitive and urgently needs a screencast, please leave a comment about that, too.
[11/18 update: Just found a very well done screencast that provides a tour of key features in WSS 3.0.]
A lot of buzz for “Enterprise 2.0” was generated last week from Socialtext’s announcement of SocialPoint for SharePoint. As usual with new and exciting “the next big thing” announcements related to Microsoft products and technologies like this, my colleague Don Dodge was quick to provide an excellent write-up. There was also an enlightening Port 25 video interview with Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext. Since then, a bunch of people have pinged me privately for my perspective, and I finally have some free time to blog about it now.
In short, I am extremely excited about this! What’s most interesting to me is that Socialtext runs on the LAMP stack while SocialPoint is a bundle of webparts that run on SharePoint. This shows that integration between applications on very different technology platforms can now be achieved with relative ease and enables customers to choose best of breed solutions while maintaining an integrated user experience on SharePoint.
From an Enterprise 2.0 standpoint, the key advantage of SharePoint Server 2007 is that its blog and wiki functionality is available OOTB on a common technology infrastructure that includes other collaboration, portal, content management, enterprise search, business process and forms, and business intelligence capabilities. (My manager, Arpan, had blogged about this previously.) SharePoint’s other Enterprise 2.0 features include discussion boards, My Sites, and people search while Knowledge Network provides a unique value add to SharePoint by significantly enhancing people search. Having tightly integrated features eases deployment and improves usability and will continue to be one of SharePoint’s primary advantages. However, some customers require best of breed features that go above and beyond what SharePoint provides. More often than not, these niche solutions do not have any integration with SharePoint, which is why I’m so excited about Socialtext’s announcement of SocialPoint. I expect to see at least several other Enterprise 2.0 focused ISVs jump on the SharePoint bandwagon over the next 4-6 months. What 3rd party Enterprise 2.0 products would you like to see integrated with SharePoint?
Yup, it’s the real Steve Ballmer! His son was playing on the other side of the court – we split a full regular court into two half courts. I could hear his booming voice cheering his kid on throughout the game. J
I think his son’s 2-3 years older than mine, but his team plays in the same timeslot as my son’s. We have 6-7 more games to go in the season, so I’m going to find some excuse to at least say “Hi!” to him at one of the games.
I knew that by using WSS 3.0 to host the SharePoint Community Champions team site, I would run into scenarios that would challenge some of the design assumptions that went into the development of the out-of-the-box webparts in SharePoint. In particular, I have not been able to configure the Survey webpart or any of the List type webparts (e.g. Contacts) to support the scenario where I want the anonymous site visitor to fill out something and submit it without being able to see anyone else’s submissions. This scenario is essential for any Internet facing community site that wants to encourage visitors to register for membership. I was hoping that I could utilize either the Survey webpart or the Contacts webpart as my site’s registration module, but I’ve had to resort to instructing visitors to simply send me an e-mail as their membership request. Hence, I would love to see a custom Registration webpart developed by someone in the community. J
Why would I reveal these findings when I’m trying to convince customers to deploy WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 for their Internet facing community sites? Because I’d rather that they hear it directly from me than someone else. I will be open and candid about SharePoint’s out-of-the-box limitations as much as I will be promoting SharePoint’s advantages. I believe that this is the only way to earn the trust and respect of the community and of the growing number of customers, who have followed my advice on seriously evaluating SharePoint as an integrated solution platform for online communities.
[Updated 10/14: After doing more tweaking of webpart config settings and getting some guidance from a couple of SharePoint Program Managers, I was able to get Survey webpart to support my scenario! No need for a solution like Nick’s FBA Registration webpart. Here’s how to get the Survey webpart working to support the submission of site membership requests by anonymous users.
1. Create an instance of the Survey webpart. You can leave the default settings, but I chose to not display the (link to the) Membership Request survey on the Quick Launch bar because I didn’t want curious visitors to click on it.
Then click the [Next] button, configure the desired questions, and click the [Finish] button to complete the creation of the survey.
2. On the survey’s Settings page, click on the “Permissions for this survey” link. On the Permissions page, click on Actions | Edit Permissions. When prompted to confirm that “you are about to create unique permissions for this list”, click on the [OK] button. (By default, instances of webparts inherit permissions from the site.) Once the page refreshes, click on Settings | Anonymous Access.
Ensure that only the “Add Items” and “View Items” options are selected. Then click on the [OK] button.
3. Click on the “Settings” link in the breadcrumb navbar to get back to the survey’s Settings page. Then click on the “Advanced settings” link.
Ensure that the “Only their own” option under “Read access” and the “Only their own” option under “Write access” are selected. Also select the “No” option under “Allow items from this survey to appear in search results”. Then click on the [OK] button.
At this point, you’re done! This survey webpart will allow an anonymous user to complete and submit a questionnaire but not be able to see the response or anyone else’s response, which is exactly what I want. However, the solution is not perfect. For instance, the Overview page, which contains the number of responses submitted, is viewable by the anonymous user, and I don’t think the page should be.
When the anonymous user clicks on “Respond to this Survey” menu command, the NewForm page will be displayed with the following URL as the address: http://sharepointchamps.officeisp.net/Lists/Membership%20Request/NewForm.aspx?Source=http%3A%2F%2Fsharepointchamps%2Eofficeisp%2Enet%2FLists%2FMembership%2520Request%2Foverview%2Easpx. What’s interesting about this URL is two-fold:
· The first part of the URL (http://sharepointchamps.officeisp.net/Lists/Membership%20Request/NewForm.aspx) can be given to an anonymous user, so the NewForm page can be opened from a different page or webpart than the Overview page. I chose to include the link in the Announcement item on my site.
· The second part of the URL (Source=http%3A%2F%2Fsharepointchamps%2Eofficeisp%2Enet%2FLists%2FMembership%2520Request%2Foverview%2Easpx) specifies the return page that will be displayed after the survey has been submitted. I chose to create a custom “Thank You” page to display to the user upon submitting the survey. So, my final URL looks like this: http://sharepointchamps.officeisp.net/Lists/Membership%20Request/NewForm.aspx?Source=http%3A%2F%2Fsharepointchamps%2Eofficeisp%2Enet%2FSite%20Files/Membership%20Request%20-%20Thank%20You.aspx.
What’s also interesting (and most likely a bug) is that I had to do Step #2 ahead of Step #3 in the procedure above because when I go back to the webpart’s Settings | Anonymous Access page, I can no longer see or change any of the options. If I go back to "Advanced settings" in Step #3 and selected the “All responses” option under “Read access”, the Anonymous Access Settings page would then show the previously selected options and let me change them. Weird.
Lastly, for an instance of the Contacts webpart or the Custom List webpart, which would be a viable alternative to the Survey webpart for a Membership Request questionnaire, the trick of setting the Source= parameter in the URL to display a different return page than the default AllItems page is essential because the AllItems page will not allow anonymous access when the webpart is configured with the same options described in the procedure above.
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Some people have told me that I have a tendency to talk about online communities and social networking with such zeal that it sounds a bit like hype, which is why I feel very fortunate to have recently discovered someone who can convey the importance and impact of these phenomena so much more eloquently, comprehensively, and convincingly than I ever could. The following blog entries by Ellyssa Kroski are the best that I’ve read on their respective topics:
· Community 2.0
· Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging
The following blog entries by Ellyssa gave me many of the ideas that led to my conceptualization of SharePointPedia, which I’ll blog about very soon:
· Online Community and Libraries, Parts I & II
· Online Community and Libraries, Parts III & IV
Now that our Internet facing “dogfood” infrastructure has been upgraded to WSS 3.0, I can finally launch to the SharePoint Community Champions team site. The URL is http://sharepointchamps.officeisp.net. I am very disappointed (mostly in myself) that it has taken almost 4 months since I had posted this teaser blog entry to get the program kicked off. Those of you, who had sent me “membership request” e-mails in the past, should be receiving autogenerated e-mails with your login credentials from the team site very soon.
The team site not only provides a resource for the Champs to collaborate on ideas and initiatives that will grow and advance the SharePoint community, but it acts as an ideal test bed for how an online community site with both public and private areas can be effectively implemented and maintained with WSS 3.0. For starters, I created a root site and enabled it for Anonymous Access and then created three SharePoint Groups -- 1) SharePoint Community Champions, 2) SharePoint MVPs, and 3) Microsoft Employees – with the first two having Read permissions and the third having Contribute permissions as shown below. I also changed the site theme from Default to Verdant so that the site would be visually distinctive from the private subsite that I would create next.
For the private “Members Only” subsite, instead of creating the default site groups (Members Only Visitors, Members Only Members, and Members Only Owners), I leveraged the groups from the root site but gave them slightly different permissions as shown below.
[Update: The "Members Only" tab on the top nav bar of the root site should be hidden for anonymous users. It was showing in the screenshot above because I had not configured the Members Only subsite to disallow Anonymous Access.]
My colleague, Korby Parnell, recently decided to withdraw from speaking on the “Microsoft Blogs: Pioneering Corporate Transparency” panel discussion that’s been scheduled for the upcoming Business Blogging Summit conference on Oct. 25-27 in Seattle, WA. I’m very honored that Korby recommended me as his replacement and even more so that the conference people agreed to accept me. This will be my first real blogging oriented conference, and I’m very excitedly looking forward to it.
Shortly after that, I will be at the SharePoint Connections conference on Nov. 6-9 in Las Vegas, NV to present a couple of sessions: one on “Building Collaboration and Community Solutions Using the 2007 Microsoft Office System” and the other on “Ten Ways to Become a Hero with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0”. This will be the biggest SharePoint oriented event in the U.S. within the next several months, so I’d strongly encourage you to attend while there are still some tickets remaining. For those of you, who will be attending the conference, we’ll have a demo booth in the Expo area, so please stop by.
Then, early next year, I’ll be at the Microsoft European SharePoint Conference on Feb 12-14 in Berlin, Germany. Fitz and Arpan have already committed to attend as well, so I’m sure that I’ll have a wonderful time. The session agenda and schedule are still being planned, but most likely, I will be presenting at least one session if not two.
Wallop launched its private beta this morning, and the blogosphere is yet again abuzz with excitement about social networking. My fellow MS blogger, Don Dodge, provided a good summary of Wallop. By pure coincidence, Wallop’s Web Operations Manager is a good ol’ buddy of mine, so I got an e-invite from him to give Wallop a try. Overall, I found Wallop to be more functional and refined than the internal version that I had used about 2 years ago. Still, I get the feeling that Wallop is targeted more at the NetGen/GenY crowd then a GenX'er like myself. You can access my Wallop site at http://www.wallop.com/LL.
Naturally, many of our corporate customers, especially those who have deployed SharePoint products and technologies for collaboration, are paying close attention to the recent surge in technological and cultural advances in social networking and online communities and hoping to leverage some of those advances within their intranet environments, preferably as integrated features within or on top of SharePoint.
With this post, I’m starting a series of blog entries to look at how the 2007 version of SharePoint products and technologies can be used for social networking and online communities within the enterprise. For starters, let’s do a quick comparison between FaceBook and SharePoint Server of the features that help you stay in touch with or keep track of your social network of friends and colleagues. In FaceBook, the following actions/events can be made visible or not for others to see:
In SharePoint Server, you can see the following actions/events of your colleagues:
And you can set the visibility of specific personal profile attributes based on the following social networking group levels: Only Me, My Manager, My Workgroup, My Colleagues, and Everyone. Here is a couple of screenshots of the attributes that you can configure (notice the several custom profile attributes that MS IT has added -- one of the key benefits of SharePoint is its ease of extensibility throughout):
For completeness, the following is a screenshot of the default user profile attributes in MOSS::
I’ve often joked with my colleagues and the SharePoint MVPs that my most productive working hours are 9 PM to 5 AM rather than during the normal 9 AM to 5 PM work day when I’m jumping back and forth between meetings, phone calls, e-mail threads, dropping my kids off at school, and taking them to their after school activities, etc. Lately, that’s more of a reality for me than not. Although I don’t stay up until 5 AM every day night, many people who have me in their IM friends list can attest that I’m up fairly late these days. It’s not that I really want to, but there are just way too many things going on in my life right now, and they’re not all related to work. I’m very fortunate to have a job that provides such flexibility and a manager who understands my need for such work/life balance. I tend to be a night owl because there are far fewer distractions during the late evening and early morning hours, and I can actually concentrate for more than an hour without disruption, so I can diligently review or draft important documents, e-mails, or slidedecks.
However, my body can’t always keep up, so from time to time, I find myself (or more embarrassingly, my wife, my kids, or my coworkers do) slumped over my desk and totally asleep. Once awakened, I’m so startled or disoriented that I don’t pay much attention to what I inadvertently typed on the screen while I was asleep. However, on two separate occasions this past week, I consciously took notice of the screen after being awakened by those familiar beeping sounds caused by having fallen asleep with my hands on the keyboard.
And I discovered 3 things:
1. On both occasions, I typed the letter “k” repeatedly after falling asleep. I posit that this happened mainly because I’m right handed (so it’s slightly heavier and involuntarily depresses the keyboard more so than my left hand) and my middle finger is the longest though I wouldn’t be surprised if I type the letter “l” with my right forth finger while asleep on some other occasions.
2. The repeating key function in Windows Vista stops as soon as another key (“d” in my case) is pressed even if the initial key continues to be depressed. I haven’t confirmed whether Windows XP works the same way or not, but this may just be one of the many improvements in Windows Vista! :-)
3. Outlook 2007 B2TR doesn’t wordwrap like Word does when the contiguous characters are about to go beyond the right border of the application window. Outlook lets the characters continue for about 1.5X the length of the window before wrapping around to the next line. I guess this is because Word has “hard” margins and Outlook doesn’t. Still, I think it would be better for Outlook to treat the borders of its application window as hard margins for contiguous characters because they do appear to act as hard margins for normal length words. That way, the user experience would be consistent. Oh well, perhaps “typing hundreds of contiguous characters” just wasn’t a high priority test case for the Outlook product group. :-)
Since much of my work with the SharePoint community is externally facing, many of my colleagues don’t have any visibility to the things that I do as part of my job. So, it wasn’t too surprising that one of them recently asked me, “Hey, you’re a technical marketing guy by title, but you’re a community lead by role. What is it that you actually do?” My answer: “My job is to improve the various channels and modes of communication for anyone who wants to interact with someone else about SharePoint. That’s the key difference between community (omnidirectional) and marketing (unidirectional).” I notice that some traditional marketing professionals even in my own organization are apprehensive if not downright reluctant to embrace community because they fear that they would lose control of their message or positioning.
While it’s certainly true that one cannot control what the community does or says, if one finds an effective way to influence the community, then the community can become a huge amplifier for one’s message, it can more precisely target that message by providing the appropriate context to a specific audience within the community, and it can increase the credibility of the message by communicating it as a piece of friendly advice rather than a form of direct marketing. Of course, it’s a two way street because you simply cannot trick the community into buying a piece of bread when you only have flour to sell. :-) In this era of blogs and powerful search engines, news (especially the bad and ugly variety) travels extremely fast. In order to fully embrace the community, you must be prepared to deal quickly and honestly with reality rather than to try to cover it up with marketing spin.
However, it’s simply impossible for a single person like me to effectively influence an entire community of tens of millions of people who sell, use, develop, implement, and administer SharePoint-based solutions. Therefore, I think of community in terms of concentric circles of people as well as overlapping circles of people. At the core of both models are the passionate leaders and influencers within the community. These are the people whom I recruit into the SharePoint MVP program (active members are listed here, here, and here). Admittedly, I’ve been spending the majority of my time interacting with the MVPs during the past couple of weeks in preparation for the public availability of the Beta 2 Technical Refresh release of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. I can tell you right now that the installation process will be tricky and that you must read the installation documentation prior to attempting an install. Keep an eye on the SharePoint Team Blog for an important announcement very soon. While it will be very exciting to see the uptake of interest in SharePoint within the community immediately after B2TR is released, what would be even more exciting for me is to witness just how influential and effective the SharePoint MVPs will be in helping those in the community, who are evaluating SharePoint 2007, to get past their potential difficulties in upgrading to B2TR.
[Update 09/11: B2TR installation information has just been posted on the SharePoint Team Blog.]
After I posted my previous entry about “Associating multiple categories in a SharePoint blog,” I started to wonder what else people would do almost immediately after creating a site with SharePoint 2007’s Blog site template (see screenshot below), but then I got busy with other things.
That was the same feeling that became the impetus for the overall concept of the Community Kit for SharePoint, which would provide templates and optional add-ons for the many types of common community oriented sites that people would try to implement by configuring, designing, and/or extending the sites created with SharePoint’s out of the box templates.
Then, just yesterday, while Shane, Amanda, and I were e-mailing back and forth about some refinements that we should make to the CKS: User Group Edition, Amanda hinted that she would soon be putting in some time to develop a nifty site template that would ultimately be used to create a SharePoint based blog site as a replacement for her current blog. “Bingo! CKS: Blog Site Edition,” immediately came to my mind. I then quickly created a “Blog Site” category for the CKS Feature Ideas list, so we can start tracking a prioritized list of features that this thing should have. You’re welcome to provide ideas here by leaving a comment.
I’m very happy to announce that the Alpha release of the Community Kit for SharePoint (CKS) for review and feedback at http://cks.inetium.com/sites/sckalpha. The folks at Inetium did most of the work for free even though the company is a for profit Microsoft Certified Solution Provider partner. I applaud Eric Raarup, the VP of IT Strategy and Planning at Inetium and a member of the CKS core team, for recognizing the importance (and eventual benefits if not from increased sales then at least from better karma) of contributing to the SharePoint Community. I’m currently working with a couple of other community savvy Microsoft partners to make potential contributions to the CKS.
If you’ve been tracking the progress of the CKS for the past few months, you would’ve noticed that we changed the name slightly from the original SharePoint Community Kit (SCK). We did so primarily to avoid any expectation that this is an add-on product developed by the Microsoft SharePoint Product Group (it’s not). Hence, the project’s team site has also been renamed accordingly to http://cks.officeisp.net. And lastly, we have a cool looking logo thanks to the creative design of Shane Perran.
This Alpha release of the CKS represents a very significant milestone for the project, so the team would greatly appreciate your feedback. Our goal remains that we would release V1 of the CKS User Group Edition (UGE) by the end of September or mid October at the latest and for which WSS V3 B2TR will be a requirement. The initial version of the CKS UGE will be deployable as a simple site template (.STP) file, so any site admin will be able to upload it to the Site Template Gallery and then create a site based on the template. We realize that this method of deployment prevents us from including any custom developed webparts or features, but ease of deployment remains our top priority. If the CKS UGE can save a community leader an hour of time in not having to tweak a site created with one of the out-of-the-box WSS V3 site templates into a viable community site, then we would have achieved much of our current objectives. In subsequent versions of the CKS UGE as well as other CKS editions, we will very likely incorporate custom developed components.
I’ve enabled anonymous access to the General Discussion webpart on the CKS team site, so please post your feedback there. Thanks!
Starting tonight, the Toshiba Tecra M5 is once again my primary machine, and I will never go back to Windows XP. I have very recent builds of Windows Vista (#5520) and Office 2007 (#4414) installed on it, and I finally managed to get Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and configured – it wasn't difficult; I just didn't have time to do it until now. So, I copied over our latest MOSS Demo VM files over to the secondary HDD, added the .VMC file to Virtual Server, and turned on the VM, which appeared to run slightly faster than it had done on Windows XP on this same laptop. Most likely it's because I was able to allocate 1280 MBs of RAM to the VM whereas on XP, I could only give it 1024 MBs. I would surmise from this simple fact that Vista manages memory significantly better than XP. Running the Demo VM was the very last thing for which I had routinely booted up Windows XP, so I'm very happy to say that I won't have to do that anymore. The M400 became my primary machine for a little while since it's pure Vista, but compared to the M5, it's significantly slower and has a shorter battery life.
As for the availability of the MOSS Demo VM (I knew you would ask), my understanding is that we're going to make it available to MS Certified Partners via the Technical Demostration Toolkit (TDT) within the next 4-6 weeks. The Demo VM has been configured with a variety of SharePoint sites and prepopulated with plenty of relevant content. For example, the screenshot below shows the Records Vault feature that Ethan will be blogging about very soon on the our Record Managements Team Blog. I will be using my M5 to demo MOSS at the Advisor Summit Conference next week in Phoenix, so if you're going to be there, stop by the MOSS booth to say "Hi" and see a quick demo of whichever MOSS feature you're curious about.
