Chapter 11. Tools and Final Thoughts
Putting together the pieces of SharePoint to deploy an ECM solution can be overwhelming. There are three primary aspects we advise you to remember so that you can minimize the daunting nature of the project. First and most important is the ECM team that is formed; together you will be able to collectively take on the various complexities and pressures of the project. Second, we believe that you should start with a grand vision, making sure that everything and everyone is taken into consideration. Make sure that you set expectations so that everyone knows you are setting a vision for the project, that it is a part of the overall business plan, and that their efforts (adoption, usage, feedback) will help the company run more efficiently. You also want to make sure that they understand that the plan will be to implement a small and manageable design, essentially picking off key areas of ECM success one piece at a time.
Start off with the very basics, and remember that it’s OK to start with an overly simplistic version of the design and plan in the earliest versions of your drafts for how the SharePoint farm implementation will occur. Sometimes this is easier to modify and build on than trying to put on paper all things you want the ECM platform to be. As you gain more insight and feedback, you and the team will become more familiar with how you will achieve success in your project. Iteration is a good thing, so make sure that you are open to change and addressing needs as they uncover themselves.
The final way to keep everything on a level playing field is to incorporate the use of a few tools that are available to you and the SharePoint community at large.
Tools
In Chapter 10, we mentioned quite a few tools to help you with your ECM application and adoption. But what about the tools that are available to help you build, test, and evaluate your ECM system designs?
There are two very powerful tools that we recommend all SharePoint project teams leverage to help them throughout the life cycle of the project. These tools will be useful even after the SharePoint ECM solution is live, so becoming familiar with them early will give you a big advantage over others who have not used them. The tools are CloudShare and the SharePoint community, respectively.
CloudShare
CloudShare is a public cloud provider that has built a service specifically for organizations to configure, test, and deploy their SharePoint line-of-business applications. They are not a production cloud provider, so this is not where you will host your SharePoint application, but it is where you can do quick tests, have an iterative deployment built, and avoid all the acquisition and configuration of physical infrastructure that the project team will require.
To get you started, we have created a simple single-server farm configuration on CloudShare. You can obtain it by visiting http://hoardinginformation.com/ecmbook/.
When you select the CloudShare link, you will be given a copy of your own virtual machine with SharePoint 2013, SQL Server, and basic ECM configurations we outlined in this book. They are based on the Information Architecture (IA) and configurations for a large organization that we described in Chapter 4. This SharePoint configuration will be distributed among site collections versus sites. All readers of the book receive a 14-day trial of the environment and can choose to subscribe to CloudShare if they want to have it longer.
We recommend using this environment to explore the IA and configurations mentioned in this book. It will also be useful to make some changes and configurations of your own to mimic a proposed design of your SharePoint environment. You will be able to do all of this without acquiring any hardware, software or spending the time it takes to perform the installation of a SharePoint farm.
When you are ready to start the ECM project and you have a high-level design, you can create your own environment. All environments that customers of CloudShare create are independent from everyone else, which means that you don’t have to worry about breaking it.
The goal of the new environment should be to implement your ECM application in a sandbox iteratively. You can make changes and run tests to determine exactly how a specific design or feature will effect the overall SharePoint deployment. When you have 90 percent of the implementation done, use this as a tool to share with internal users, get them used to the system, test adoption, and get an idea of any changes that are needed based on feedback.
No matter how many sandbox environments you kick around to build and test your idea, there will be times when you and your team just get stuck. It’s times like these that you should turn to the extremely powerful and diverse SharePoint community.
SharePoint community
The SharePoint community is like no other for line-of-business applications. They are an audience of very skilled professionals who are active with social media and local SharePoint groups. The best way to access this pool of skills is to use the hash tag #SPHelp and the various user groups.
#SPHelp is a Twitter hash tag used for communicating about various questions around the platform and configurations. If you tweet a question on SharePoint by using the hash tag #SPHelp, you can expect that within a day you will receive a collection of responses. Some will be direct answers, clarification for further information, or links to articles and blogs written by SharePoint professionals and enthusiasts. In addition, Microsoft SharePoint MVPs and professionals monitor the Twitter stream on a regular basis.
Because the community is so close knit and nearly all the leaders in the space are all acquainted with one another, you will also see a very strong local element to the SharePoint groups.
The local elements manifest themselves as either user group meetings called SharePoint User Groups (SPUGs) or SharePoint Saturday. You will find that most SharePoint Saturday events are planned and hosted by local SPUG leaders. The difference is in format. Where a typical SPUG meeting is single-topic focused and usually draws between 30–50 individuals focused on the topic, SharePoint Saturday events can have as many as 500 individuals and there are tracks covering various topics. SharePoint Saturday events draw out-of-state speakers and professionals for each of those topics and provide a great source of information. It is very common for you to be able to meet them face to face and discuss any particular issue you might be having.
Do a web search for your local SPUG group. The leadership of this group will be able to connect you with all the local events and talent in the SharePoint market.
Successful SPUG meetings and SharePoint Saturday events are usually followed by a casual get together at a local pub. These are called SharePint events, an obvious pun on having a beverage together and engaging in conversations about SharePoint.
Individuals like you who share their knowledge for the sake of all who implement SharePoint drive the power of the community. If you have a specific area of expertise or even just practical experience of pitfalls, it is always useful for the community to learn from your experiences. Consider volunteering for SPUG or SharePoint Saturday events as a speaker or organizer. You will find that giving back to the SharePoint community is the best way to build relationships with experts, and learn even more.
As we mentioned in Chapter 10, in the section “System integrators,” always keep in mind that not all SharePoint experts are created equal. SharePoint experts will tend to be either more strategic or more technical. They will also be either more platform specific or more application specific. When considering an expert to help you implement your SharePoint ECM solution, you will be looking for someone who is both technical and platform specific. When you are looking for an expert to help you design your SharePoint implementation, you are looking for someone who is more strategic and ECM application specific.
It is very important to identify exactly what area of expertise a SharePoint professional is focused on and where they have had successful experiences, because all experts will want to tell you that they are good at everything. In some cases, it might take multiple subject matter experts who are familiar with various aspects of SharePoint facilitate to learn what is needed for your ECM solution. We believe that knowing a professional’s area of expertise is critical because it’s very easy to trust and believe an expert, and they will tend to always have a good response. Therefore, a poorly chosen expert can quickly lead you down a path that is either against your goals or contrary to your requirements. It will not be uncommon for organizations to have many SharePoint experts participating in different aspects of the farm deployment and design strategy.
In additional to the community and user groups, there is also a community around ECM and records management. For ECM, the trade organization AIIM (www.AIIM.org) is a great place to meet experts in ECM. Their community site has a whole section dedicated to SharePoint. For records management standards and practices, visit ARMA (www.ARMA.org). They hold the standards for all records management regulations and best practices.
Conclusion
Many elements of this book might have surprised you. If your background is more from a pure IT perspective, you probably were surprised that ECM applications cannot be solved by technology alone. If you have experience in the ECM and records management industry, you might have been surprised at how subjective the platform implementation can really be.
Always in the back of your ECM team’s collective mind should be the notion that SharePoint is a platform, not an application, and ECM is a set of principles and a methodology, not a technology.
For the authors of this book, it took more than five years of experience in ECM and two solid years of implementing ECM principles using SharePoint technology before we each got to this level of understanding.
It is the rushed ECM project or the project with the wrong objectives, like moving all network file shares to SharePoint, that are doomed to fail. If you find yourself in this situation now, it’s best to fail quickly so that you can establish a project restart sooner rather than later.
To provide a conclusion to SharePoint 2013: Enterprise Content Management, we have created the following short list of the high-level points we want all readers of this book to take away:
It all starts with a solid team, and SharePoint projects are a team effort. A single individual should not drive your organization’s ECM project.
Find a naysayer, and bring them onto the team.
Build a pre-mortem practice of reviewing how things might fail and then trying to mitigate their failure.
Make sure that your team is diverse and includes IT and users as part of the ECM group.
When it comes to building an ECM application, IA is perhaps the single biggest element that demands most of your project team’s time and attention. Keep the following points in mind:
SharePoint is a platform, not an application. Your team will be molding SharePoint features into the ideal ECM solution. Keep the following points in mind:
Start with out-of-the-box features until they no longer meet the needed requirement.
Think about what you need now and in the future.
There is no 100 percent template that is a fit for your organization or industry, so do not waste your time trying to find it.
You should be able to fully architect the features and concepts of your SharePoint ECM application without ever touching SharePoint.
The best implementations are done where the ECM team fully plans the implementation. Therefore, when it comes time to work with the platform, it’s just a matter of executing the design.
Start adoption of ECM now, before it’s deployed in SharePoint, using the following guidelines:
Internally crowd-source a cleanup of shared drives to match the proposed IA.
Start educating users about how much time is wasted and how much risk network file shares pose to the organization.
Start showing SharePoint and the possibilities in small, quick demos. Focus on the end result and what is possible—for example, faster navigation and filtering with a taxonomy, or search with better results.
Records Management and eDiscovery is for everyone. Don’t ignore these features and principles just because you don’t have a mandate. Not all organizations need to implement records management, but all organizations can be subject to it in the future. So, at the very least, you need to understand it, even if you don’t implement it right away.
SharePoint ECM projects take time, and the bulk of the time is usually spent outside of SharePoint working out policy and handling the plethora of people, politics, and personality issues that arise in any project.
Successfully implemented ECM has been proven to make organizations more efficient and more stable when it comes to compliance and legal risk. What is often not realized is that great ECM implementations become a transparent tool. When this happens, not only are organizations eliminating the frustrations of creating and consuming critical line of business content, but they are spending more time on their core business objectives, which makes them more profitable and opens the doors to goals that previously seemed unattainable.
By this point in the book, you might not yet be an ECM expert. You probably thought twice about how you’ve organized your content, perhaps became more aware of how much time you spend with the management of your documents over creating and using them. At this point, our goal as authors is for you to understand what it takes to be successful in evaluating, planning for, designing, and implementing the ideal ECM solution in SharePoint 2013.