Can You Afford to Not Consider the Cloud?

The first theme that was evident in a large way was the focus on the journey to the cloud and the importance of spending your resources in ways that impact the environment the most! The point that was really expressed was: can you really afford to not look into option for hosting? If you could work with partners who are experts in infrastructure and environment then you could realign your focus, efforts and energy to the business. At Rackspace, we fully support this path. Why not rely on us for things that could easily free you up to focus more on the business and really be able to spend the time applying your efforts to bringing technical solutions to the organization? Regardless of what you are doing now for SharePoint, the latest release – SharePoint 2013 — is really the time to evaluate your options and look at things differently. It’s easy to ask the questions and seek out more information; so by all means, build a plan to explore your options and use this new release as a jumping point for the conversation.

Empowerment + Enablement = Forward Movement

The second theme that really resonated throughout the keynote was the idea that it’s all about the user and delivering natural, easy and fluid solutions to enable them to more simply do what they already do, and do it better. This is very evident in this release as you look at all the small things that have been added to the environment. Everything from automatically rolling up all of my tasks in the environment to my personal My Site, to being able to easily drag and drop documents into a SharePoint document library. Or the ability to see previews of my documents when I search to make sure that I can confirm what content is relevant before having to take the time to open the document. It is all of these small things that remove the barriers to a high level of user adoption and empowerment. When it becomes so easy and natural to do things within SharePoint users will start to use them freely and drive the direction of the solutions within your environment.

See What the Fuss is All About

At the end of the day, though, it is all about seeing it and really experiencing it for yourself. So, to help make that process a little easier, Rackspace is offering you the ability to create a test site and take it for a drive yourself! Getting signed up is easy! Just head to this link and look for the button that allows you to sign up for the trial, enter a few pieces of information and then take it for a spin!

Sessions & Post-Conference Training

What’s New with Service Applications in SharePoint Server 2013
Shane Young and Todd Klindt
Monday, November 12, 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.
#SPC263
There are a lot of significant changes in SharePoint 2013. Fortunately the service application infrastructure hasn’t changed a lot. There are, however, a few new service applications in SharePoint 2013 that we as administrators will get to install and configure. In this session we will cover what the new service applications are and how to configure them. We will also cover the service apps that existed in SharePoint 2010 and demonstrate how they have changed. At end of this session you’ll have all the information you need get these new service apps up and going in your SharePoint 2013 farm.

Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud
John Ross and Randy Drisgill
Wednesday, November 14, 9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.
#SPC047
The process of building, branding and delivering a well-designed web site is more than just skin deep. In this session we will walk you through best practices for planning, creating and deploying engaging web sites with SharePoint 2013 for both on-premises installations as well as SharePoint Online. We will also share best practices around the branding process with lessons learned from real world SharePoint branding projects. Whether you are an administrator, developer, manager or someone who just wants to make your SharePoint site look better – this session will leave you with the resources to get your branding project off to a good start and the guidance to make it all the way to completion!

Planning and Creating Well Designed Intranet Sites in SharePoint Online
John Ross and Randy Drisgill
Wednesday, November 14, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
#SPC015
Come see how SharePoint Online can be used to create intranet sites that are both usable and provide an engaging user experience. In this session you will learn how form and function are related when planning and creating your company intranet in the cloud.

Document Trafficking: Now Safer than ever with External Users in SharePoint Online
Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers
Wednesday, November 14, 6:45 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
SPExpress Sessions, Microsoft Pavilion

From Zero to SharePoint Hero: 5 Easy Steps for Bringing Business Value to Collaboration Solutions
Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers
Wednesday, November 14 7:10 p.m. to 7:25 p.m.
SPExpress Sessions, Microsoft Pavilion

SharePoint 2013 Deployment and Administration End-to-End
Shane Young and Todd Klindt
Thursday, November 15 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
You have just spent the past few days of SPC learning about all of these great new features you want to play with. One problem: when you get home you don’t have a SharePoint 2013 world to play with. Problem solved. Come to this post conference session where SharePoint MVPs Todd Klindt and Shane Young will start you down the road of everything admin you need to know. They will start with guiding you through a solid SharePoint install for testing. Once you have it up and running they will cover key administration tools and interfaces so you can keep the wheels spinning. And finally, what fun is a SharePoint farm without some data? So they will show you how to grab some of your SharePoint 2010 content databases and upgrade them to SharePoint 2013, thus filling your basket. The guys promise no death by PowerPoint but instead of some accelerated learnings on how you can go from empty machine to a shiny SharePoint 2013 bicycle.

Book Signings

Sunday at 7:30 p.m.: Tom Resing
Tuesday at 2 p.m.: Shane Young and Todd Klindt
Tuesday at 4 p.m.: Jennifer Mason and Laura Rogers
Wednesday at 3:30 p.m.: John Ross and Randy Drisgill

Twitter

And finally, no conference is complete without a social aspect, so for real time updates be sure to follow our team on Twitter!

• @wonderlaura for Laura Rogers
• @toddklindt for Todd Klindt
• @shanescows for Shane Young
• @johnrossjr for John Ross
• @resing for Tom  Resing
• @pjirsa for Phil Jirsa
• @iwkid for Raymond Mitchell
• @jdeverter for Jeff DeVerter
• @jennifermason for Jennifer Mason
• @drisgill for Randy Drisgill

Not Attending SPC12?

Not able to attend the SharePoint Conference this year?  No worries, because we are there for YOU!  Throughout the conference we will post daily updates to the blog and communicating on Twitter.  Post conference we will have a series of webcasts that will highlight all the newest things from the conference.

Earlier this week the SharePoint team here at Rackspace had the opportunity to attend the Preview launch for Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365. The event was held in San Francisco and showcased the next generation of Office products.

During the keynote presentation Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer presented a new Office product suite that focused heavily on bring consumers to the cloud and was referred to as the “Modern Office.”  This new Office suite is built with the general consumer in mind and is designed to be easy to use, efficient and improve productivity.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the Office Preview event.

Ballmer was clear about the goal of the Modern Office: to have one tool that can be used across multiple platforms for multiple purposes. No matter if you manage a small business, work with a large executive team or have to coordinate a trip for your son’s Cub Scouts league, you have one tool that works for it all.  The new Office suite is tightly integrated with the newest release of Windows 8 and is very dependent on having the latest up to date hardware.  Since the newest version of Windows runs consistently across multiple devices, such as smartphones, laptops and tablets, users can have a single consistent experience no matter what tools they use to access their content.  Leveraging the cloud not only creates a consistent experience, but also simplifies the ability to access content and do so on any device.

Attendees at the event received a Samsung Series 7 tablet running the Preview of Office 2013 and the latest release version of Office 365.  After using the table for a day I can say first hand that the added features and tools provide a way for increased productivity and overall ease of use. As I continue to use the tablet I will provide some follow up posts about the functionality as well as any issues that I run into.  I was pleasantly surprised with the first day of use and I am looking forward to making it a regular part of my toolset.

Overall, the event confirmed that Office is well on the way to reaching the modern market.  Microsoft has adapted its products to match how users naturally work.  The improvements make things simple and easy to use, even for the most common actions.  The newest improvements are based on the upgrade of the tools and hardware and also are tightly integrated into the cloud using SkyDrive.  All of these features, while great, will have other implications and I think time will tell how well users adopt these new changes.

If you weren’t able to watch the live broadcast of the announcement, you can find the link here.  I highly recommend taking a few minutes to hear directly from Microsoft about its vision for the new Modern Office.  Also, for a more detailed post on my thoughts you can check out my latest publication on CMSWire.

In my opinion Microsoft has really hit the mark on ease of use and general enjoyment for these products.

This morning the Rackspace SharePoint team will be reporting live from the event, giving you the information as it is released.  The details of the event have been kept secret, but that just adds to the excitement!

The event starts at noon PST on Monday , July 16.  I will the following social media channels to share the information and once the event is completed I will do a follow up post giving a summary of the entire event.

• Twitter : Once I get to the event I will create a specific #hashtag for the news so you can easily follow my updates.
• Yammer: I will create a group within the SPYam network
• My Blog
• CMSWire

These types of events are my favorite because they allow me to connect with the SharePoint community on some of the latest and greatest things!  Be sure to join in the social conversation with me, and ask any questions you have.  I’d be happy to dig around and help you find more details.

• Video 1: Basic Troubleshooting
• Video 2: Look Up A User’s Permission

Watching these videos will provide you with some quick and easy methods that you can use to understand how the permissions on your site have been configured.

And don’t forget to check out our previous videos, which take a high level view of how permissions are managed within SharePoint Online; a more detailed look at SharePoint permissions; understanding permissions inheritance and limited access; and custom scenarios.

• Video 1:  Inheritance
• Video 2: Limited Access

Watching these videos will help you understand at a very high level what happens when you assign unique permissions to items within SharePoint.

And don’t forget to check out our previous videos, which take a high level view of how permissions are managed within SharePoint Online and a more detailed look at SharePoint permissions.

In this blog post we want to share with you some simple videos that will provide additional insight on the basics of permissions. These have been created specifically to highlight how to work with Office 365 sites, however most of the information presented can also be used for on premise or hosted scenarios. In this post we have three different videos that highlight the basics, including:

• Video 1:  An Overview Of Permissions
• Video 2: Creating New Users And Granting Them Access
• Video 3: Introduction To The Pages used To Manage Permissions

These videos will help you understand at a very high level how permissions are managed within SharePoint Online sites and should help you start to understand what types of activities will need to be done as you start to map out your permissions strategy.
   

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the process of getting started with SharePoint and how to best move forward.  In most cases you will see information that leads you to think of Governance as being the starting point for all things SharePoint.  And while I agree with this, I think the better thing to do is to evaluate your goals as an organization. No matter if you are the smallest of companies or the largest of companies, you have goals and a direction in which you are moving.

As you look at SharePoint and determine if it will become part of your organization, you will want to ensure that it all starts with the overall direction of the company.  By starting here you can really align the value found within SharePoint to the core of your organization.  SharePoint, after all, is just a tool that you can use to build solutions that make your organization better.  But the focus should never be on the tool or what the tool is doing.  The focus should always remain on the business.  By doing this you will be able to really align your solutions to the heartbeat of the company and will be able to ensure a broader user adoption.  After all, if we are building tools that make the company better and align with the direction of the company, why wouldn’t people use them?  At times I know that all of this sounds great in theory, but can often be hard to incorporate into everyday practice.  So in this post I want to share with you some of the ways that I think you can be sure to incorporate these ideas into your work.

A Tool Is Just A Tool

The first thing that I think we should focus on is the fact that SharePoint is just a tool.  If you were to build a birdhouse, the focus would be on the actual constructed object and not on the wood, nails and hammer used to build it!  The idea is the same with SharePoint.  There are many, many different options available to be used within our solutions, but at the end of the day, if we are using Workflows, Lists or Forms they are all just tools that are used to make up a complete solution.  The important thing is that we are providing an easy way for users to submit expense reports or that we are tracking project data.  If the focus becomes we need to use InfoPath for this and Lists for that we run the risk of having a focus on the technology and not on the business.  The technology is great and it can empower us to do some really awesome things within the organization, but if we lose focus on the business goals we are entering into really risky territory.

Understanding The Audience

The next thing I want to highlight is the audience and the importance of knowing it!  When you start to look at potential solutions that can be built in SharePoint, knowing your audience is a key success criteria.  If you build the most complex solution you can build using all the advanced tools but no one actually uses the solution, then what value does the solution have?  Every time we look at a new process or idea to implement in SharePoint we need to look at our audience and we need to build a solution that aligns with its needs.  By doing this we are helping to ensure that our solutions are going to bring immediate value to the organization.  And the beauty of this approach is that as our audience matures and develops the types of solutions we build will likely also develop into more complex, detailed solutions.  By taking this approach we can mature our solutions as our audience matures.  This allows us to make the most of the moment while still planning for the most in the future.

Just Get Started!

The next thing I want to point out is the importance of getting started.  I have a phrase that you will often hear me repeat over and over, which is “Think Big, Start Small & Keep Growing.”  You definitely want to look at the big picture when you start to think about how SharePoint can be used within your organization to solve business problems, but you don’t want to get caught up in the analysis phase to the point that you are never able to really get started.  So I encourage you to spend some time looking at the big picture, but if you find an area that you don’t have all the information determined or that you know things are changing, I encourage you to identify it and plan to the best of your ability, but still keep moving!

Know What Is Available

The final thing that I want to point out is the importance of learning the tool.  You may not know exactly how to configure advanced versioning for a document library, but it is important to understand what versioning is.  By at least having an understanding of the concept you will be able to more easily identify locations in your business or problems that those tools can address.  This part can get tricky because there is really no end to the learning!  But that’s ok, because you can take it in steps and continue to learn new skills over time.  I get asked a lot how to get started, so I created a blog post around my thoughts.  If you are looking for more information in this area I encourage you to check it out!

Final Thoughts

SharePoint is a powerful tool to have in your environment, but like most things it can also bring harm if not looked at correctly.  By always looking to the business you will force yourself to align your solutions with the overall strategy and direction of the company.  By keeping the technical solutions aligned with the company and built for the internal audience, you will find that you have a much greater opportunity for user adoption.  Hopefully you will find these tips helpful as you look at how you can begin using SharePoint within your organization.