Adventures in home working

Document management was really just simple check-in and out in v2.  Now it’s quite impressive:

• Alerting and RSS feeds on document libraries, as described in this post
• Custom meta-data
• Improved capture of meta-data in Office client applications
• If documents are XML, meta-data can be extracted into lists
• Creation of custom views of lists
• RSS feeds can include the documents as enclosures
• If the documents are PowerPoint slides then lots of useful functions are provided to allow customised presentations to be built up on the fly,  taken off-line but kept up to date
• Support for check out to work off-line which caches the documents in a hidden folder under my documents and then allows you to work on it off-line until you are ready to check it in again
• Ability to check-in a document and then immediately check it out again as a single action,  great for sharing work in progress snapshots with the team
• Support for minor and major versions
• Ability to only publish major versions to visitors and minor versions to owners and members of a document library, which is a simple content management function
• Support for a variety of workflows, including approval and review/comment,  native support in office 12 client for submitting documents into workflows
• Ability to take documents off-line in outlook
• Ability to edit an off-line document from Outlook without checking out, and then for managing potential conflicts arising when checking it back in later
• Document library views show workflow status
• Meta-data in document library lists can be analysed in Access and Excel, or sorted and filtered from the web UI or from Outlook
• Ability for IRM integration, see later post
• Records management, see later post

There are lots of small changes that come together to enhance the community support in SharePoint v3.  Here is an overview:

• People become first class citizens, where ever a person appears in SharePoint the information available is improved
• There is a person field type that can be added to lists and is standard in many of the bundled list types,  SharePoint knows how to do sensible things with a field that contains a person.
• The same is true of groups
• Distribution lists can now be created at the same time as a new SharePoint space,  this can be used for all sorts of email scenarios. 
• Information can be posted into SharePoint using email.  For example calendar invites emailed into a calendar list create appointments, or discussion topics in a discussion list, or documents in a document library, or email archives
• Discussions are much more powerful,  they can be flat, threaded, have rich text, be interacted with via email,  and taken off-line in outlook, and can support custom fields.
• Because discussions are lists they can be analysed in Access and Excel, which can be very useful given the custom field support.  In the web UI that can also be filtered and sorted based on custom fields as well.
• New templates are included for Blogs and Wiki’s.  Both provide all of the core functionality you would expect, but they are not best of breed.
• Blogs include posting, comments, categories, subscription and RSS.  They support customisable and per item security on posts and separate security on who can comment.

Skills and experience

• People have a rich profile
• People can record and make visible current and previous projects, memberships, skills etc in their profile which can then be searched
• Searching for experts can include information in the profile and also clues on expertise derived from evidence in SharePoint documents and lists as well as email 
• People can find other people they know, and people that people they know know.  This provides for social networking

My Sites:

• My sites provide a personal portal, with all of your documents, tasks etc but also a place to create your public face. You can control which bits of your profile are made public and to who,  so for example your home phone number might be available only to colleagues.

I always thought WSS v2 had useful alerting,  but it was let down because of the lack of good information contained in the alert.  Well the new version has superb alerting and subscription, in two forms:

• Alerts can be delivered by email at certain intervals
• Any list can be subscribed to using RSS

Lets look at some of the features,  alerting first:

• Alerts can be filtered based on a wide range of criteria,  for example only alert me when a document is completed, or a task is assigned to me,  or a task that’s assigned to me is changed – and lots more
• The filters available are sensitive to the type of list that you are subscribing to, and developers can create specialist list types and associated relevant filters
• Owners can create subscriptions for other people,  very useful for the setting up subscriptions for your boss, to stop him hassling you for status updates!
• Very complex alerts can be created by first creating a custom view and then subscribing to alerts on that view
• Delta change information is included in the subscription as well as other useful information.  So I know for example that the change to the task list was to change the estimated duration from 3 to 10 days.

RSS

• Any list has an associated RSS feed and pretty much everything in SharePoint is a list!
• The RSS feed is very customisable,  with a long pick list of meta-data that can be added to the RSS item definition
• The for some list types enclosures will be included for example the enclose for a document library is the document, for an image library its the image,  for a calendar it’s an iCal file.
• Outlook includes an RSS aggregator,  very similar to NewsGator, of course any aggregator can be used.

By the way RSS feeds, simpler than the above,  can be generated now in v2 by applying an XSLT transform to a list.

Lists were already VERY powerful in WSS v2.  They get even better in V3.

• Pretty much everything in V3 is a list
• The capabilities available in lists therefore get inherited everywhere
• The standard library of list types has been greatly improved,  previously for example the standard list type for “issues” looked like it had been developed in 10 minutes as an after thought,  now it supports notification of assignee, related issues,  comment history etc etc.  It is actually usable!  This is the case for all of the standard list types and provides evidence that Microsoft have actually started to think about real business scenarios
• The standard lists can be customised and the customisation capabilities are considerable
• A single list can contain millions of items – thats scalable!
• Considerable attention has been given to “tracking applications” implemented as lists,  for example these might include tasks, actions, issues, asset registers etc.  Great integration has been provided with Excel and Access,  see later posts
• Surveys have been improved,  its now possible to have branching based on conditions, and to include page breaks.  You don’t need survey monkey any more.  The survey results can be exported to Excel and Access for analysis
• The version history for a list shows what actually changed between versions,  the what changed is tracked at the field level
• Lists that have a Start Date and an End Date can be displayed with a gantt chart view above them.  The Gantt chart view can be used to drag list items around to change the date.  A percentage complete field is represented as shading on the gantt chart bar.  It’s not MS project but it is very useful.  The data in the list can be uploaded into Project.  There is no concept of dependency.
• When list items, for example tasks or issues are assigned to users then they can optionally get an email notification.  The standard email notification of a task allows the user to add it to their task list and to take the list off-line in Outlook.
• Microsoft access can be used to query list data,  it could in V2 as well,  but in V3 when the link is established to Access it includes a set of standard reports in Access that are appropriate to the “list type”. For example for an list of issues you might get reports that group by priority, status etc.
• Lists can be filtered, and sorted
• Views of lists can be saved,  these dynamic views can be based on data from multiple lists.  For example the “all my tasks” list draws data from many task lists to create a consolidated personal view
• Lists can be taken off-line in Outlook.  Outlook provides best support for list types that it understands for example tasks, calendars, document libraries, discussions
• All of the standard Outlook capabilities are available for example drag and drop, forward via email, search folders etc.

Here are some of the highlights

• Bread crumbs everywhere, really help users,  in the previous version it was easy to get lost, much more difficult now!
• Much cleaner UI and much easier to discover new capabilities.  Not as rich as Office client,  but getting there
• Very configurable, and data is easy to filter, sort etc
• Two level recycle bin,  pretty much anything a user can delete they can restore from a personal recycle bin,  system level recycle bin is also available to admins.  Significant DCO and TCO reduction for CSC
• Per item security
• Simpler security model.  Visitor, Member, Owner
• Improved search
• Great integration with Office client, especially for high value interactions, eg
• Work off-line
• Submit to workflow
• Complete meta-data
• Analyse and report in Excel and Access

Office System 12 is a huge improvement and represents probably the greatest opportunity for CSC.  lets quickly look at the main areas of improvement.

• Major improvements in usability and consistency
• Reductions in TCO and DCO allowing CSC to drive down costs and minimum order quantity
• Major improvements in Extranet access, mixed Intranet/Extranet access and hosting capabilities
• Major improvements in ability to support real business scenario’s.  The previous version demo’d OK but when you tried to use it for real business scenarios it failed to live up to expectations
• Major improvements in critical enterprise functionality, especially document management and workflow
• Offline support via Outlook 12
• Access from mobile devices (pretty basic, but useful)
• Emerging support for social networking, expert location, blogs and wiki’s – good enough to get started but no where near best of breed
• Great integration with Office client
• 4 Servers, in addition to Windows SharePoint Server.  Excel Server, Index Server (crawler), Search Server (user search), Project Server.

More details in separate posts, coming soon

The UI for Office 12 Client has been completely redesigned and the integration between client and server opens up many opportunities.  Fundamentally what have Microsoft tried to achieve?

20% or 80%

• People criticise Office on the basis that people only use 20% of the functionality.  I contest that although this is true people use different 20% and so Office succeeds in being a standard suite only because it satisfies everyones different 20% needs
• However Microsoft have analysed through customer usage data what people actually use in Office,  to find the 80% of features that most of the different 20%’s add up to.
• The new UI provides a task oriented interface to this 80% of capability without the need to use menu’s through a new set of activity tabs that present clustered sets of tool-bar buttons.  It’s difficult to describe,  but the demo’s show they have done an amazing job
• Using the new UI its true that a huge amount of functionality is now exposed to users in an easy to use and discover way,  and that functionality has been improved and extended to make it easier to use and to reduce the complexity of common tasks
• This one change alone may largely silence critics who claimed that they only used 20% and actually demonstrate that maybe 80% of the capability was relevant to them if only they had realised.

Client server integration

The integration between the client and server is increasingly seamless,  this will greatly enhance usability and make it much more likely that collaboration, information management and good data integrity will be become a reality.  Here are some of the examples:

• Data from XML documents can be surfaced in the WSS UI,  making it worthwhile to add that data because it becomes useful
• A relationship is maintained between documents and their “master copies” in WSS document libraries, and even individual slides incorporated in presentation from WSS slide libraries.  This means that when you work with documents or presentations locally and the master changes you are notified and able to take appropriate actions
• When you save documents to a WSS document library you see applicable work-flows surfaces in the Office client UI, that can be initiated, for example “get comments”, “approve” etc.
• If you need to work off-line then you can simply take a document library off-line in Outlook (single click) very slick and better than the similar feature provided today in Groove.

Automation and presentation

• Many of the most common tasks have been automated, especially in Excel and Powerpoint.  New graphical representations, for example diagram types and new formatting is now very easy to apply from the task centric interface
• People will spend a lot less time tinkering in these tools now
• The qualify of the presentation is also considerably improved, again making it more likely that people will just get on with the job as the default is good enough to meet nearly everyones needs

eWeek has a great mini interview with Stuart Cohen, the CEO of the Open Systems Development Labs.  Stuart describes a conversation with Martin Taylor, Microsoft Corp.’s general manager of platform strategy, who recently approached him to consider ways in which the two could conduct a joint research project to do some facts-based analysis of Linux and Windows.  Stuart’s response is priceless:

I told him that what would happen is that we’ll invest in a 100-page report, 99.9 percent of which will be great for Linux and the acceleration of open-source software, etc., and there may be one page or just one line that will talk about something negative, something critical, something that needs improvement, and [Microsoft] will then run a $100 million advertising campaign around a single sentence from one page of a 100-page document and will ignore the other 99 pages.

If you are anything like me you will have more PC’s than you have desk space for keyboards.  In particular I have a main PC and a Tablet that I use all of the time.  For many months now I have used ShareKMC to allow me to use one keyboard and mouse to control both, it toggles between the two using the scroll lock key.  However I have been annoyed that it often seems to loose the connection when I undock and redock the Tablet and needs to be restarted.

So I was keen to try out an alternative Synergy  (reviewed here), which seems to have a number of advantages:

• It works on Linux and Windows
• It doesn’t need a key to be pressed, you just move your mouse off the edge of your desktop screen and onto your tablets (as if by magic – the kids love it)
• It handles disconnection and re-connection fine
• It supports multiple monitors
• It reportedly (not tested by me) supports more than two PC’s sharing the keyboard and mouse

I have been VERY please with this utility,  its faster, more intuitive and more reliable than ShareKMC and more flexible.  I believe the only downside if that it only supports text “cut and paste”.

One little tip,  it is disabled if scroll lock is pressed, if you have been using ShareKMC there is a good chance scroll lock could be pressed, and it took me a good half an hour to realise why it wasn’t working!

Want to try out Linspire, reportedly one of the easier to use linux distro’s for people familliar with Windows?  Then for a couple of days you can download it free following the instructions here:

http://info.linspire.com/freespire/index.html

be warned the web site seems very slow!