How Unisys Used the Power of SharePoint to Socially Enable a Global Workforce #spc12

Fresh from the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, my overview of a great session looking at how one multi-national company created a vibrant knowledge sharing culture using SharePoint.

I think that along with the analyst sessions, the customer showcase sessions at SharePoint conferences are the most valuable. I was particularly looking forward to this session as Unisys has long been at the forefront of collaboration and social computing with SharePoint.

I covered a session on Communities at Unisys at last year's SharePoint conference here on CMSWire. In this session, Gloria Burke, Director of Knowledge and Collaboration Strategy and Governance, took us through the three year journey to develop a global social intranet at Unisys.

To add a little extra spice, Gloria had this week been named as one of the top 7 Social Business Leaders of 2012. The stage was set.

Challenges

Speaking to an audience of over 300 people, Gloria opened the session by setting the scene at Unisys, a worldwide IT Services company with over 22,500 employees in 100 countries, dealing with both commercial and government clients.

The challenges that the business faced in 2010 would probably be very familiar, Gloria told us. They included knowledge silos, employees struggling to locate subject matter experts, an inefficient on-boarding system, a disconnect between ideas and innovation, and an inconsistent approach to the capture and re-use of knowledge. Everyone seemed to agree that this sounded all too familiar.

Vision

Gloria described her approach to dealing with these challenges. She had begun with a series of leadership interviews to assess internal views. For the external view, she had engaged analyst organizations such as Forrester Research and Gartner who provided external benchmarking. She used these inputs to define an end state vision for both tools and culture over a three year period.

The key elements of that vision included the development of a knowledge sharing culture, enabling employees to build a professional online persona, leveraging social tools to streamline access to information, integrating social tools into core business processes and empowering employees.  To realize the vision, the program would have to have five key work streams:

1. connection and collaboration
2. intellectual capital capture, repurpose and reuse
3. knowledge access, management and governance
4. infrastructure and application
5. culture and transformation.

Tools

We were shown a timeline which illustrated the Unisys journey over the past three years. The journey began in June 2010 with the deployment of SharePoint MySites, which included integration to import skills from employees from PeopleSoft into MySite Profiles.

This was followed by the launch of a center for Communities of practice. The center provided information and features to help users find, join and organize communities, and included a community manager tool. Gloria emphasized that there had been a focus on both strategic — or top-down communities, and organic — or bottom-up communities.

Communities at Unisys are categorized as know what, know how, know who, and know more. Variations on classic knowledge management definitions I noted. Employees are hard aligned to communities relating to their business unit, but also have the option to self-subscribe to communities in which they are interested.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 3 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Summary of 'Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud' #spc12

Fresh from my first developer session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, "Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud," I'm here to share a few of presenters Randy Drisgill and John Ross's tips for building a branded website in SharePoint 2013.

I was afraid entering the session that it would be code heavy, but was assured early on that there wasn't much code involved.

Agenda:

• Intro Branding On Premises and Online
• Low Effort branding
• Medium Effort branding
• High Effort branding
• SharePoint Online

Introduction

The talk begins with examples of branding, showing Microsoft logos that have changed over the years. Branding applies to all of your company's marketing and websites and can involve images, logos, CSS, etc.

Microsoft offers two plans, each with separate branding capabilities: small business plan and enterprise plan. It is interesting to see that Microsoft has different abilities on branding in the different plans.

The approach to branding is Low, Medium, High and apparently there is a fair amount of change beginning with the Medium Effort. When you reach the medium effort, it's time to bring in design manager.

Low Effort Branding

Page editor in SharePoint 2013 is pretty much the same as it was in SharePoint 2010: it still has the ribbon where you can add video, images, web parts, etc. I usually think that content publishing is important to get branding to look nice and create a good user experience.

Some of the new capabilities include composed looks — the themes have evolved and enable you to create themes with custom images and colors, master pages, etc.

My observation is that the default themes are pretty ugly. They actually looks a bit like editing a WordPress theme, but with less functionality, you choose your theme location, image url’s, master page url, and more. You can choose which fonts can be available in the editor, not sure that it's useful, but it's an option.

Medium Effort Branding

Medium effort branding brings the design manager into play. The design manager can be found in the site actions, but you need to have publishing activated on the site in order to locate it.

Basically you get your HTML and CSS uploaded to the design manager, then apply SharePoint objects like search. SharePoint designer is optional when using design manager, you are free to use whatever web tool to create your branding: notepad, Coda etc.

Both the master page and the page layouts can be edited with your web tools.

You can use the snippets gallery to get your navigation, breadcrumbs, search boxes, title, logo, etc. into the HTML design by copying the snippet code from the snippet gallery into the HTML code, then adding your own CSS and branding to it.

All of this can be done in a sandbox solution before publishing.

In your master page gallery folder you can create a subfolder to store all of your branding assets. Keep it nice and simple so that it is easy to understand and manage. A good practice is to document what you do as well; you may need it if your servers crash.

Before you start adding snippets, publish a version of the HTML file, this will give you a master page in the theme folder. When you've done this, you can go into the snippets gallery and change the options on the snippets you want, copy the snippets code and add to the HTML file in the place you want it. When you click save the HTML file will update the master file automatically. Pretty sweet!

Important to remember here is that you need to brand all of your site templates that you use, if you don’t you will get an unbranded page when you search or similar.

 

Continue reading this article:

1 2 Next Page >

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com