Remain Calm You’re Still a CIP

Picture Gildna Radner’s SNL character Emily Litella starting a monologue about wanting to bring an end to AIIM’s “see, I pee” promotion. Picture her rambling on until someone points out that “it’s CIP, as in Certified Information Professional.” Picture her offering up her classic: “never mind” and the skit would end.

As much as it would be comforting, I can’t hide behind a misunderstanding. When I wrote my previous post “Ding Dong the CIP,” I knew what I was doing. I was trying to come to the aid of an association that I have great respect for, and to show support for a decision that I was party to making.

I am writing this today, to acknowledge that the CIP is not dead. We don’t have the witch’s broom in our possession and we’re not going back to Kansas. The scarecrow can keep his brain, the tin man his heart, and the cowardly lion need not cower in the shadows of the forest, because, well, we’ve caused enough confusion, and besides, Christmas is only a week away.

Seriously, I’d love to explore all things CIP in this post but, being mindful of the rapidly approaching holidays, I’ll do my best to be brief, and I’ll try to stick to the facts.

Fact – The CIP is back. Again, you can read John Mancini’s explanation of why the Association made this decision. I will summarize this from the point of view of someone who was in the room when the mistake was made:

We misjudged the importance of the CIP within the industry. We heard, loud and clear, from passionate members of our community that the CIP has value and we decided to work to fix the CIP instead of getting rid of it.

I have no problem announcing this mea culpa because, I’d rather take the position of having been wrong than be accused of being obstinate after having been wrong.

Fact – AIIM is working to meet the demands of a community of professionals that is rapidly growing beyond the ranks or ECM and ERM folk. The things I wrote about in my earlier post are also true. More and more people are dealing with more and more issues around managing information, and many of them don’t identify with Information Management as a profession. AIIM will now work to adapt the CIP to fit a broader and growing body of knowledge. Fact – no organization is more capable of meeting that challenge.

Fact – AIIM is a viable and vitally important source for information about information. To the pundits that suggested that AIIM has had nothing to offer without the CIP, I would say “you couldn’t be more wrong.” The CIP is important, apparently more important than we realized. However, the CIP is far from the only good thing AIIM has to offer to the community of information professionals.

Hopefully, the CIP can grow as the body of knowledge that it is designed to certify one in, grows. Hopefully, AIIM, the AIIM community and the industry that AIIM serves can help focus attention on the CIP going forward. Hopefully, this will cause more people to see the value in holding that certification, and hopefully those people will realize that AIIM remains the preeminent source of research, standards, education and communication around that growing body of knowledge.

It’s a lot to hope for, but my history with AIIM tells me that it can all happen. I received, and accordingly I still hold a CIP. I have an ECM^m and an ERM^m. I still value the later designations more than the certification. The important thing is that when I needed to learn about handling information that doesn’t respond to a SQL query, I turned to AIIM and AIIM delivered. As that information grew in importance in my workplace, I continued to turn to AIIM for insight and guidance and AIIM continued to deliver. As that information worked its way onto multiple platforms, into the Cloud and onto my phone, I didn’t even have to turn to AIIM. People in the AIIM community had already prepared me for those changes. I heard them at Chapter meetings, at the AIIM Conference and, by proxy, through AIIM’s research, whitepapers and webinars.

Whatever your feelings about the CIP, don’t confuse the certification with the Association. Don’t look upon the CIP as an end point that, once achieved lets you walk away from the community. AIIM has much to offer me, you and the entire community of information professionals and the industries that serve those professionals.

Once good thing came from this mistake, the AIIM community showed that they can still get excited. More than ever, I am looking forward to the AIIM Conference in New Orleans and I hope to see you there.

What – No SharePoint?

Earlier this week a group of volunteers gathered in Woburn, MA to chart the educational course of the AIIM New England Chapter. We’ve been working for several years to “put the program on rails” but we decided to derail a couple of old standards. One of those appears to be the notion that we should have one event every year dedicated to SharePoint.

This used to be a slam-dunk event for the Chapter; in its heyday, tossing the word “SharePoint” after anything was an immediate win.

“Join the parishioners of the Triple Rock Baptist Church for a day of preaching and music, followed by a bake sale, potluck dinner and some SharePoint – Jake; get wise, you get to church”

We always tried to give our SharePoint events an AIIM-ish twist. We explored ‘Usability’ in SharePoint. We explored ‘Governance’ in SharePoint. We teamed up with the folks over at ARMA Boston to explore ‘Records Management’ in SharePoint and we tried to figure out what people are really doing with SharePoint. We had some success, but two things seem clear. OK, one thing seems clear and one seems a little fuzzy. Clearly, interest in SharePoint as a subject is waning among our members. Fuzzily, (oh my goodness, that is a word), the direction in which SharePoint is moving, or trying to move, is getting hard to predict. I’m not suggesting a doom and gloom scenario, but if we try to build an event around a product, we need to have a clear picture of the road ahead.

So, rather that market a “message for SharePoint” that has benefit to the broader masses of Information Professionals, we are going to offer a series of messages for that broader group that we hope will attract people from the SharePoint community, too.

Now that I’ve let AIIM NE’s agenda co-opt my blog space for a few hundred words, I think I’ll give you a break and bring this to a quick end. I would ask for a little help though. As many of you know, I am the Program Director for AIIM New England. We are trying to chart a different course this year, partly because, like many professional associations, we are struggling to find the right mix of topics that you (information professionals) will find interesting.

If you have a few minutes, would you please fill out this survey? I promise you that it will only take a few minutes of your time and the results are very important to us. We, by the way, are a small group of like-minded information professionals (well, maybe not entirely like-minded) who volunteer our time to spread the word and provide meaningful educational events at a ridiculously low price to the broad community of (say it with me now) information professionals.

Note: if you have problems with that survey link, for example, if WuFoo asks you to open an account, paste the URL below into your browser. We don’t care if you become a WuFoo customer (although we like them) but we really do want your input – https://aiimne.wufoo.com/forms/aiim-ne-2014-program-survey/

Will You Be Able to Tell Your Stories?

I want to make this a short post. It’s a holiday weekend here in the US and I’m trying very hard not to do anything that reminds me of work. No SharePoint, no ECM, no AIIM. No metadata, governance and no search. OK, there’s going to be a tiny little bit of AIIM, but just as background material.

One of the friends of the AIIM New England Chapter is the National Archives and Record Center of Boston (NARA). We have had two recent events at their beautiful facility in Waltham, MA. Lately, they have been running a series commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Cape Cod Canal. NARA shares various interesting bits of their archive (our archives) fairly regularly on their Facebook page. They have a ton of content and they have proven to be very good storytellers. Along with the story of the US, they have also shared a little history of the National Archives.

I’ve been fascinated by NARA’s presentation of US history but I’ve also been wondering if the future employees of our company will be able to tell our company’s story – our history. If your company is in and out of business in the span of 10 – 50 years, maybe nobody will ever care to hear your story. But, if you’ve been around a long time or if you’re planning to be around a while, someone will probably have to tell that story at some point. Do you know it? Will your successors know it? Will they be able to tell it accurately? Will they be able to make it interesting?

You know what you need to tell that story? You need the facts. You need the images. You need the people’s names and the key events. You need the video, the audio, and the presentations. In other words, you need the information.

For my readers in the US, I hope you’re enjoying a long weekend.

Empower the Future Users of Your Stuff

Early last week I received a request to help someone update a PowerPoint slide. A single slide. The slide was complicated. It included a bar graph that scaled up sharply on the right side and a table in the empty space above the bars on the left side that added some explanation. All in all, it was a nice slide. The thinking at the moment was:

“Person A would like to learn how to edit charts but realized that that would take time. Person B (me) could probably do this in a few minutes.”

Of course, the person requesting the slide was in a hurry. Someone is always in a hurry for things like this. So, I agreed to make the changes. I immediately regretted that decision.

The “chart” wasn’t based on data – This happens a lot in business. Someone wants to illustrate a point, but the numbers don’t lend themselves to a nice chart because some are very small and some are very large. 100 million as part of 10 billion for example, is hard to see on a stacked bar chart. What lots of people do in that situation is make up numbers that illustrate the relative proportion but aren’t numerically accurate. I’m good with that – that’s fair and that works. However, it would be nice if you left behind the ratio that you used.

The chart was edited in PowerPoint, not Excel – That’s not ok. When I added a new column to the chart in Excel, I lost the format. I had to print the original chart out, and create the format to Excel so that I could add the bar that I needed. Among the things that were overridden were:

• The bar and segment colors
• The legend text
• The axis titles
• The bar width

Other than that, we were good.

The table wasn’t a table – It was an image of a table. That’s OK. In fact, it was probably necessary since PowerPoint tries to not let you create a table inside a chart. Visually this was a nice idea, but whoever did it failed on execution. The table didn’t exist. Anywhere. No table to edit. I had to recreate the entire table, including the new row.

In addition to the above issues, there were some things about this slide that were curious. The activity being illustrated wasn’t complete. The start and end data points were correct, but 3 data points along the way had been omitted. I know enough about our business to guess why the author chose to leave those three points out. They would clutter the chart and make the table too big and you could easily talk to those points, but I am guessing. It would be nice to know what the original purpose of this slide was.

When I corrected the chart, I changed it in Excel so that if anyone ever has to edit this in the future, they can add a row, change a string or select a new color. I created the table on another (hidden) slide in the presentation. Now, if we need to edit the table, we are editing a table. Then we can do the whole copy and paste as an image thing. I also left a few breadcrumbs behind to explain things like the ratio that I used on the bars and the instructions for editing that table.

If we want the information artifacts that we create to have value to people in the future, we have to help them. We have to allow for change. Simple things like the company logo can change. If you are illustrating company data over time, you should expect that people will want to continue the progression in the future. If you used a special technique to analyze or manipulate the data, you should describe that technique or at least include a link to a Wikipedia site, I mean how hard is that? Most important, a short summary of what your slide was used for, what you added by way of description and who your intended audience was would be helpful. You can easily add stuff like that to the speaker notes section.

The happy ending to this story is that starting Monday, we are getting an intern. His primary task will be to help us move the contents of a public-facing SharePoint site into Citrix ShareFile. If he finishes that, or if he gets bored, he can set up a slide and presentation library for us in SharePoint. Hopefully, he can polish the diamonds in the rough like this, and organize those presentations I found a few weeks ago.

Information Stories

That will soon be the title of this blog. I’ve registered the domain. I’ve mulled it around in my head and that’s the best I could come up with. Well, it’s not the best but technologyStories.com is a premium domain and GoDaddy wants $2,588.00 for it. Sorry. Not happening. Besides, it’s not about technology, it’s about information. Really, it’s about people, but this isn’t where I want to write about people. The fact of the matter is that it’s about inflection points.

SharePoint is at an inflection point. It went from being a hot new product to a must have product to, or at least it’s approaching being a legacy product. I should have known better when I named this blog. I’ve been in this industry for my entire career and technology is ongoing, but no single technology really has the staying power worthy of a domain name. It’s OK, the name had a good ride and if I manage the transition well enough, I’ll keep a few of you as readers. After all, you didn’t come here for my SharePoint knowledge. My favorite comment ever on this blog is “I like that you explore the ‘why’ behind the solutions.” The ‘why’ by the way is people.

I write about ECM and content a lot, but Content Management is at an inflection point. Some people say that it is past the inflection point. But, those are marketing types. Marketing types are always ahead of the curve with regard to change. Marketing types want to use terms at the moment of peak hype and then relegate them to the dustbin of ‘legacy’. Marketing types have had SharePoint and ECM in the rearview mirror for quite some time. I can tell ECM is in the mirror because ecmStories.com is available for 12 bucks.

I also write about process. People, process and technology are the things I’m told we need to focus on, and specifically in that order. I know that. I’ve always known that. OK, I haven’t always known that but I was told that when I asked:

“Why do I have to take The Psychology of Business when I’m studying Operations Research?” The answer was: “Because you’re going to be dealing with people.”

Operations Research, by the way, was all about process. I love process but the instructor was right, it really is about people. ProcessStories.com is available, but is has those 3 s’s in a row and it sounds dumb. And really, who wants to read about process. Process is boring and belongs behind the scenes where it can’t hurt anybody.

So, Dan, why don’t you call it peopleStories.com? Well, there are two reasons: 1) peopleStories.com is not available. peopleStories.info is but, again, dumb. 2) I’m not qualified to write about people. 3) Wait, you said there were two reasons. I know, but 3) I write about people and my thoughts and ideas as they relate to people on No Facilities. See, I needed a third point to plug my other blog.

I write from my experience. My most recent experience is being collected at ANI. ANI is at an inflection point. We are planning for the retirement of a bunch of senior folks who have information in their heads. We are simultaneously planning to support a bunch of younger folks who want to be able to find that information without having to live in it. But, I can’t really talk that much about ANI.

So then, Information?

Yes, information. Because that’s what people need most, and that’s what I do. That’s what I’ve always done. I have spent over 35 years finding ways to put data into context in order to create information and then to give people access to that information in a way that helps them to perform their business process.

Technology will continue to morph itself from file shares to SharePoint to a different kind of file share (DropBox, Box, ShareFile, OneDrive, iCloud – I have one of each of these) and onto other things once people discover (again) that file shares don’t really work and that search (alone) doesn’t really work. Dropbox and all the Dropbox wanna-be’s of the world will add metadata to their product, and the marketing folks will give it a clever sounding name and some dumb kid will create a blog using that word. A few months later, the marketers will tag the word as passé and a few years later, the industry will be calling it legacy and the dumb kid will be searching GoDaddy.

Thanks for reading this blog for over 5 years. I’ll be making the turn soon, and I hope to keep you on board.

Business – not SharePoint Solutions

Two recent projects have caused me to realize that SharePoint has finally arrived in our small organization. I don’t mean that it’s here and in use, it’s been here since 2006. I don’t even think I’m talking about “adoption” the way that word is often used with respect to SharePoint. It’s arrived in that it’s now part of the permanent landscape and that’s a good thing. It’s good because people aren’t fighting the idea of SharePoint. On the other hand, SharePoint has only managed to shove itself into the mix. It isn’t the dominant player. It isn’t calling the shots. It’s on the team but it has to play by the same rules as everything else.

One of the projects we are close to completing has SharePoint in the leading role. The application is a portion of our payables process and people are now creating payment requests in SharePoint. Other people are reviewing those requests, adding comments and still other people are approving those requests. If all of this lived in SharePoint, SharePoint would rule the day. However, the back-end of this process is a desktop application that takes those approved requests and prints checks. That application also creates ACH transactions and wire-transfers. Eventually SharePoint will be the starting point for all those transactions, but everything SharePoint does has to feed that system.

Other processes are involved too. For example, we can’t present a payable for payment without making sure that the person / company we are trying to pay isn’t a terrorist. In that case, the back-end process is actually the starting point. We check vendors before we authorize them to be paid and we continue to check to make sure they don’t become terrorists. I suppose the back-end stuff could be done in SharePoint but it’s easier the way we’ve done it.

Note: All of those processes involve data that is stored in SQL Server and my crew had to battle with every imaginable issue (all of them permissions) to get those connections working reliably.

The second system we are working on is a storage system for some very important information. In order to make sure this stuff is available when we need it, it will exist in SharePoint on premises, some of it will be replicated in SharePoint Online and some will be replicated on a bunch of iPads. In this case, SharePoint is cast in the boring supporting actor role. Yes, SharePoint is holding all the stuff in house and holding all the stuff online, but the iPad app is the cool kid. Accordingly, SharePoint has to try to fit in.

We decided that the way the content is organized in the iOS app will determine the way it is organized in SharePoint. In other words, the list and library structure in SharePoint will correspond to the structure of root categories and detail topics in the iPad app. The app design is intuitive, something that SharePoint struggles with out of the box. The design is simple enough that it won’t take much work to make SharePoint look and feel consistent with the iPad. Still, a few years ago, this wouldn’t have been a consideration.

SharePoint and SQL Server was an arranged marriage and like many of those, it works, but it’s weak on love. We are making the connections work, the connections do work, but they all seemed to have taken more effort than should have been required. SharePoint and iPads? I’m pretty sure that was never part of anybody’s plan, but it has to work. We have to build a solution that spans those platforms and looks like it was meant to be.

Welcome to the real world SharePoint.

Leaving SharePoint

No, we’re not leaving SharePoint. We are reducing our SharePoint footprint though and I thought that I’d start a periodic mini-series on this subject. The mini-series appeals to me because I don’t think I can cram enough material into a single post and still squeeze under that self-imposed 800-word limit. Raise your hand if you want me to abandon that limit…yeah, I thought so.

So, what is it exactly that we are reducing about the way we use SharePoint? We are beginning a project that will gradually eliminate our Internet-facing SharePoint site. Why are we doing this? There are lots of reasons, but I’ll limit this post to three:

It’s Complicated – Not the answer, the answer is pretty simple, but having an Internet-facing SharePoint server is complicated. That SharePoint server runs under a separate domain, so we had to build a Trust between our in-house server and the outside server. Even though this allowed us to let our employees have access with their in-house domain credentials, they still have to log in. We could eliminate that step if we designated our in-house domain as the primary domain, but then our business partners, the people we built this server for, would have to include the domain in their user name. We tried that and the results were terrible.

While we can tell our employees to “suck it up and include the domain name and the forward slash, you know, the one over the Enter key, with your user name” we can’t really tell our customers to do that.

It’s not just complicated for people, it’s complicated for software. MetaVis, Harmon.ie, Muhimbi and HarePoint all had to make tweaks to their product to let us work across the two farms. I think it’s pretty cool that they all made those tweaks, but we quickly learned that it is one of the things we have to ask vendors about their products. I look forward to not caring about that capability in the future.

It’s Expensive – When we started out, the outside SharePoint server was a separate physical box. In addition, we had a separate server acting as the domain controller for that domain. These are both virtual servers now, but they still represent two Windows Server licenses, as well as a SharePoint license as well as, well I think none of us actually we all understand Microsoft licensing. Of course there’s more to buy than licenses, those servers have to be maintained, upgraded, backed-up and tended to during power outages.

It’s not just expensive from Microsoft; it’s expensive for some of that other software as well. Add-on software vendors seem to follow weird currents in the industry. Some drift toward the “pay enough money and you can use this anywhere” model and some like the À la carte approach. Unfortunately, when stuff is priced at the “enterprise” level, the companies who benefit are the companies with hundreds of servers. Having 2 servers and paying enterprise prices is a budget story that never ends well.

It’s not what people want – This is the most significant reason of all, our business partners do not want to use SharePoint as a way to get the information they want from us. It might be a sad commentary on the state of ECM. It might be a reflection on what we did or didn’t do with SharePoint. It might just be that SharePoint was overkill, but it’s not wanted. Most of our historic (we’ve been doing this since 2006) use of SharePoint can be filed under the category of “file sharing.” People go to our site to get documents that we have, or they use SharePoint as a conduit to move documents between themselves and our employees. SharePoint worked, but there are other products and / or services that work just as well, perhaps better. These alternatives are less complicated and they are less expensive and they work the way our customers want to work.

Next up in this series, I’ll talk a little bit more about what our customers want and about some of the solutions we considered and some of the reasons we did or didn’t like them. I started off by saying that this would be a periodic series, meaning that you shouldn’t expect to see that story next week. Every time I try to plan the story I want to share next week, something interesting happens and I end up pre-empting the scheduled subject.

How Far Back?

This started out to be a few thoughts on records retention. Why we need to embrace the subject everyone wants to ignore. Don’t get me wrong, everyone thinks life would be better if we were operating under a grand all-encompassing records retention policy, but nobody, NO-Body wants to write that policy, nobody. I thought I’d take a stab at advocating the effort, but some of my reasons really didn’t support my argument, so I guess I’m just collecting random thoughts today. I wanted to address records retention for personal, selfish reasons. In the absence of comprehensive records retention policies, content management solutions are harder to build, more complicated to implement and less effective.

In my experience, building a records library in SharePoint is a straightforward task. When you’re dealing with records, the thought has already been added. You probably know all of the metadata, and if you know how long to keep the records, you simply need to decide what happens on day n+1 and implement that in your configuration. SharePoint can accommodate most anything you want to do, including nothing. Backfilling a records library with things that are already considered company records is also easy. It might be a time-consuming task but it’s not a difficult task. Again, that’s because we already know that the documents are records and we probably already have the information we need to set those metadata fields. In a conversation this week, I pointed out that we could easily build a library for a bunch of content someone has decided to keep as records. We can configure the library to accept notes, documents, email and hard copy. Email can be dragged in from Outlook via Harmon.ie, notes can be uploaded as Word Documents or typed in place and we can now scan documents directly into SharePoint – Easy!

The next part of the conversation was where things started getting difficult. The part that began with:

 “so, how far back do you want to go?”

Of course, there was no definitive answer. In this case, the lack of a begin-point on the continuum isn’t a problem. Every bit of content that will end up in this library will be processed the same way. I am going to wire up a few connections, write a few procedures, demonstrate a few actions and be done.

If this library was like others that we have been building, the lack of that begin-point would cause us more work. When you’re working with content that is going into a workflow driven process, maybe something that’s generating statistics and driving a dashboard, you have to decide what content will be processed as if it is current and what content just needs to look like it’s always been here. We have one such system, and in order to keep backfilling operations from skewing the metrics, we had to build a separate workflow driven process to support the induction of prior documents.

If we don’t get an answer to that question, things get even more complicated. Consider the implementation of a new document management solution in SharePoint. In the worst out-of-the-box scenario possible, you point your users to a team site complete with the picture of the happy looking, albeit creepy people in the upper right corner. All of the documents that used to be in the K: drive, are in the Shared Documents library complete with the historic folder structure. You tell yourself that the folder structure is a kind of metadata (it is, we’ve done this). As bad as a site like this would be, it could be worse if you fail to consider that starting point. Your solution begins with those documents that were on the K: drive, but what about the documents that are still in file cabinets. What about the stuff on microfilm/fiche. Your users probably have copies of those documents on the C: drives and in their inboxes. In this scenario, what do you tell the new guy when he asks “how do I find everything about the accounts I’ve been assigned?” How do you rewrite procedures? How do you document the business process you just spent money (remember, time is money) building?

In my recent conversations, some people felt that we would still be ahead of the curve if we have some of our content in SharePoint? I disagree. We can’t put our arms around the body of content we might be asked to provide. We won’t have reliable search results, and we won’t have be able to say, with authority “I’m sorry, we don’t have that document.” Just so you know, you want to be able to speak with authority when an auditor or a judge asks.

Content management has to include all the content we still feel is relevant, the content we are told by authorities we have to consider relevant and the content that still adds value to our business operation. Effective content management shouldn’t include anything else.

Stories Yet to Come

This is my 250^th SharePoint Story. I have to say that back in April 2009 I never imagined that I would write so often or that so many people would care to read what I had to say. I have received numerous comments, emails and tweets that indicate that people like the focus I try to put on “what we do and why we do it” and they seem to appreciate the fact that I share our mistakes. After last week’s post, it’s clear that I have ample fodder for that kind of post. As I look forward to 2014, I see some changes coming and this seems like a good time to talk about them:

Other Subjects – You may not have noticed, but at some point in 2013, I changed the tag line to include Information Management. I did that because I really do believe that it’s more important to understand why we do things than it is to know how to do them, and why we do things doesn’t always have anything to do with SharePoint. I had the privilege of working with several people during 2013 who reminded me that SharePoint is a technology with which we can improve business processes, but that the nature of those improvements often has nothing to do with technology in general, let alone this specific technology.

Other People – One of my major objectives at work is to prepare a new generation of employees to run my portion of this railroad after I retire. My retirement isn’t imminent, but our business is rather unique and learning about all the moving parts takes a long time. I’m not a minor player in our SharePoint cast yet, but I am becoming more of an end-user of SharePoint than I was in years past. So, in the future, when I say that “we” did something, keep in mind that I probably should have said “they” did something instead. Becoming a user of SharePoint might give me a different perspective from which to write about User Experience – that might be fun. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly as comfortable writing about the mistakes others make as I am writing about my own mistakes, so, “they” might have to continue to suffer my development efforts.

Other Software – One of the first posts of 2014 will be about a content management solution that doesn’t involve SharePoint. We remain a SharePoint shop and a Microsoft-centric shop, but it’s no longer an exclusive relationship – we’ve decided to see other people. It’s OK, I told SharePoint “it’s not you; it’s me.” In a sense, this is really just a small extension of a previous theme. I’ve written numerous articles about software that we have bolted onto SharePoint, integrated inside SharePoint or used in order to affect SharePoint. I’ve also written about the stuff that we have written or paid someone else to write that runs within SharePoint but didn’t come in Microsoft’s, or anybody else’s box. I will continue to write about those things, too. In fact, I look forward to writing about a project management solution we recently purchased that runs inside SharePoint.

Other Blog – This last bit is nothing more than a shameless plug. I chose the meme for this blog because I enjoy telling stories. If you enjoy the storytelling nature of this blog, you might like my other ongoing attempt at writing – No Facilities. That blog is rarely technical and almost never about SharePoint. The tag line over there is “Random thoughts, life lessons, hopes and dreams” and it grew in popularity quite nicely in 2013.

Thanks so much for visiting this blog. Have a happy and prosperous New Year!

ECM is an Activity not a Product

Last week the AIM New England Chapter held an event with the goal of trying to figure out how people are using SharePoint. You can read about the event, the discussion and the wisdom the expert speakers shared in the Event Experience Report, but I want to talk about a note found on page 6:

“One person described a decision to move a customer facing solution out of SharePoint because the customers were not interested in the features SharePoint has to offer. The solution has evolved into a ‘content publishing’ solution and management feels that there are better platforms than SharePoint on which to build such a solution.”

I’ll confess to being that person. Are we giving up on SharePoint? No. Is our content management program changing? Yes.

When we first began using SharePoint in 2006, we liked what we saw. While we were struggling to figure out how to best use the product in-house, someone asked if we could use SharePoint to exchange documents, information and perhaps collaborate with some of our customers and business partners. As you might expect, good little techies that we were / are, we jumped at the chance to add a second farm and build an Internet-facing SharePoint server.

We developed solutions. We formed pilot groups. We tested, tweaked, added and perfected features and we held training events. We met with our customers and we spoke with our coworkers and what we heard was that our customers don’t need SharePoint. Our customers want to share files, and share is 90% retrieve and 10% submit. Do the math, there’s nothing left for “collaborate on” or “construct a process around” or any of the other things we have been trying to get people interested in. That’s OK! We understand serving customers, and we don’t want to make customer service harder than it needs to be.

But wait a minute. If we already have SharePoint, why abandon it? SharePoint can certainly be used to share files with people over the Internet.

That’s true, but we’re not in 2006 any longer. SharePoint can be made to be a simple repository of shared documents and SharePoint can certainly handle segregating and protecting private documents while also providing access to public documents, but so can lots of other products. It is one thing to put some effort into SharePoint to create a solution that looks, feels and acts like a more expensive product. It’s quite another thing to put some effort into SharePoint to make it look, feel and act like a less expensive product. Sometimes, SharePoint just isn’t the right answer.

One of the problems with technology and the notion of businesses adopting technology, is that technology changes. One of the most important responsibilities of an IT group is to make and to keep other people aware of what those changes are and what those changes mean to the already adopted solutions. A critical element of that understanding is the fact that installed solutions are not free. We cannot look at something that was developed in and deployed on SharePoint and say “that’s done, let’s move on to something else” – systems, including the things we build in SharePoint, are never done.

SharePoint was the right platform in 2006 because it was just about the only affordable solution we had for securely sharing content over the Internet. We tried to take advantage of the platform, to offer more features and to entice people into turning file sharing into collaboration, but the demand isn’t there. I understand that, the underlying task isn’t a collaborative effort. The underlying task is a mature business process that doesn’t need to be “improved” by SharePoint or anything else. Now that there are simpler, less expensive solutions for securely sharing files over the Internet, it’s time to consider them. Guess what, they work and they work better than SharePoint.

They work better, and they are cheaper, because they are less capable and because they have been perfected toward a narrower goal. The solutions that we are looking at were born in the cloud; they don’t have to be migrated into the cloud. The solutions were born into a mobile world so they come with desktop apps and apps for every mobile operating system – good looking native apps! The people who built these solutions know what they are doing and they know what we need to do, so integration with Outlook is baked in, drag & drop integration with Windows is baked in, permissions, controls, auditing and reporting are all baked in. Yes, these are file-sharing only solutions, but when that’s all you need, that’s all you need.

We are still a SharePoint shop and this is still a SharePoint blog, but my focus has always been Enterprise Content Management. The title of this post is from a comment I made recently on a friend’s blog: ECM is not dead, but ECM is an activity, not a product. The ‘M’ in ECM is also a responsibility and it’s one that I take seriously.