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.

 

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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.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Tony Zingale at JiveWorld 2012: Talking Jive or Smack?

I spent last week in Las Vegas and came out a winner. No, not at the craps tables (even though I did walk away up a big $6.00). I spent my time at JiveWorld 2012 and came out ahead in my understanding of where social business is heading and how a bunch of today's sharpest enterprises are benefiting from a deeper level of employee-centric thinking.

Power to the Plums

Tony Zingale, Jive's CEO, gave a very stirring pep talk to all the attendees and leveled a rather provocative challenge to business and IT executives when he asked "What have you done for the people?".

Corporate projects for communications, collaboration and knowledge management have been around for the last two decades, but when have they been chartered around an idea where the employee should be the one in control? UX design is still treated as a luxury for consumer facing experiences and has only in the last few years become paletable for employee applications. The vast majority of employee facing applications and projects have no true UX component, and on the rare occasion when there is a design activity, it is more often than not a graphic designer for the projects where an executive has demanded that the end product "look cool".

One of the nice surprises at JiveWorld was that aside from the keynote presenters, almost every session was run by Jive customers where they briefed their audiences with insightful nuggets from their experiences in getting their enterprises to embrace the social business paradigm. Big company presenters from PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers), CSC, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, T-Mobile and others were all there and each one had a story to tell about how they were empowering their people to work in ways that made sense to them.

The people from Enterprise said it most concisely: "We believe our best ideas come from our people at the front lines." This perspective begs the question; Which comes first, social business tools or a "plum-tree" organizational culture? For those who have not seen it before, the plum tree model was described in detail in the classic corporate survival guide manual for right-brained thinkers in a left-brained world: Orbiting the Giant Hairball. This question was the one not asked, but it may have been the most important, given the philosophical shift that must take place for the value of social business tools to be fully realized within the enterprise.

Give and You Shall Receive

When Tony asked "What have you done for the people?" he was talking about all the people, even the bean counters. Referencing McKinsey's recent paper on the value of social technology and the projected return on productivity of 20 to 25% for the workforce, Tony followed up with another question: "What would you do with one more day per person?"

Knowing that many old-school companies still cling to the accounting models that put little to no value on worker productivity, Tony pivoted before the typical response to the productivity investment narrative was raised and went straight, not to the point, but to the lines; the top and bottom lines. The benefit of the extra day was never looked at with the lens of "You mean I can fire 20% of my staff?" The chosen lens was that your revenues would grow from increased effectiveness of sales and operational staffs. When not talking about the top line improvements, the bottom line was also improved with million dollar savings from call deflection. 

Zen and the art of Community Maintenance

Whether it was Tony or Jive customers talking, there was a consistent thread in every conversation or presentation. Increases in revenue and productivity did not come from imposing message control and governance models, in fact they came from the opposite. Using a more Zen like approach to messaging and content governance was the mantra of every presenter. The leaders of the PwC presentation actually told their audience that their recommendation was to roll out social business tools from Jive "irresponsibly fast". Yes, you read that right, a big five consulting firm told a live audience to be irresponsible.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Why SharePoint 2013 Isn't for You

There’s a lot of noise on the street since the announcement of SharePoint 2013. We’re headed towards the largest SharePoint conference of the year in Las Vegas this November and it’s only going to get louder. Where does that leave you, the end user of SharePoint? About where you were before the announcement came out, I would think. It should not affect you at all.

Where Is All the Noise Coming From?

If you listen closely to the groundswell, what you hear is a bunch of developer geek speak about SharePoint 2013. There is the marketing coming out of Microsoft, but the Man-on-the-Street conversation is mainly from developers and IT Pros who are talking to each other about how to set it up, how to optimize it, how it is different from 2010. This has absolutely nothing of relevance for people using SharePoint on a day to day basis.

The day to day talk is a distraction to SharePoint end users. In general, the users are not interested in the technology, they are interested in the solutions the technology can provide. This is nothing new. We had the same type of situation after the release of SharePoint 2010. At that time, I took the same position: It’s going to take two to three years for SharePoint 2013 to become relevant to the daily user.

The Current Situation

SharePoint is not an app that gets upgraded every month as part of an update cycle. It is a development platform for providing business solutions. Large clients who rolled out SharePoint 2010 in the past two years are going to find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 in the near future, unless they can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

At conferences where I speak, I ask people what SharePoint version they are currently using. Over the past year it has been mostly 2007, with half of those using a hybrid solution that combines with 2010. Those clients who are implementing SharePoint for the first time will start with 2010, but those with existing infrastructure are going to stay with that until there is a real business reason, real financial justification, to run an upgrade.

So Who is 2013 For?

With that said, who should be interested in SharePoint 2013? Why, developers of course! 2013 is still in beta. Enough said. Stop reading and get back to work. Unless you are a developer, an author or a training company, why are you concerned about SharePoint 2013?

I’m not being facetious. I think it is a real distraction for day to day users to be concerned about the “new” functionality of SharePoint 2013: Social, My Sites enhancements, Managed Navigation, the App Store. To upgrade to 2013 is a business decision that will have to be justified at a much higher level than the end user. Will the business gain enough impact to make that upgrade worthwhile?

Final Words

What’s my advice to people actually using SharePoint to get their work done? Keep your head down and out of the line of fire. SharePoint 2013 isn’t for you. For now, let the developers and IT Pros work through the bits and see what’s there. When your company is ready for it, they will let you know.

Editors Note: If you're intersted in another view on SharePoint 2013:

— SharePoint 2013: 7 Features Users are Going to Love by @andrewbish
 

About the Author

Mark Miller is recognized internationally as a Senior Storyteller, weaving engaging tales to simplify the explanation of complex, technological solutions. His current mission is to save the planet from the default SharePoint 2010 interface at NothingButBranding.com. He is the founder of two of the largest, online SharePoint communities in the world: href=”www.nothingbutsharepoint.com”>NothingButSharePoint.com and href=”https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/default.aspx”>EndUserSharePoint.com.Mark is a founding member of href=”http://sharingthepoint.org/Africa/Home.aspx”>Sharing the Point, a group of SharePoint evangelists who travel the world bringing support and encouragement to underserved SharePoint communities.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com