SharePoint Problems Chocked Up to Management
March 10, 2015
A large percentage of SharePoint installations are reported to have stalled or not lived up to expectations. Despite those numbers, approximately 75% of organizations report that they will stay with SharePoint, regardless. They are committed to making it work and looking for solutions. CMS Wire gives more details in their article, “Blame the C-Suite for Your Failed SharePoint Project.”
The article begins:
“About two out of three organizations complain their SharePoint projects have stalled (26 percent) or failed to live up to their expectations (37 percent). And it gets worse, according to new AIIM research. A majority of respondents blame those SharePoint failures on lack of support from senior management.”
For those organizations and users who feel stuck in an ineffective or stalled installation, outside resources are invaluable. Stephen E. Arnold offers a helpful collection of resources on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. His dedicated SharePoint feed features the latest tips, tricks, and news regarding Office 365 and SharePoint specifically.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 10, 2015
Librarian Solutions to SharePoint Problems
March 6, 2012
When time and money is spent on a SharePoint implementation, it makes sense that companies would require that their employees jump on board and start using the application. However, this has led to an epidemic of frightened and frustrated employees, and an overflowing of training and tips on the internet. Lorette S. J. Weldon addresses this issue and uses her library science training to craft a solution in, “Help with SharePoint is on the way in The Adventures of SharePoint Reading Bee© Animated Series.”
Weldon states her motivation for developing a unique training tool:
To maintain Weiser’s belief of being sufficiently trained in order to be free to use the technology, for example, SharePoint, for the job, I have created The Adventures of SharePoint Reading Bee Animated Series. Librarians and information professionals are free to suggest ideas for future episodes ‘anonymously’. This animated series is a free service trying to meet the business needs of setting up SharePoint to perform needed tasks from within the office environment . . . librarians have been increasingly asking me to find out how Microsoft SharePoint can help them. The Adventures of SharePoint Reading Bee will try to help break it down for the non-programmer in answers that do not require coding. The SharePoint versions to be covered will be 2007 and 2010.
We commend the innovative approach to SharePoint training. The key is the user focus, without the need for programming and coding. But the major drawback of SharePoint is a fundamental one, something that cannot be overcome with training, the obtrusiveness of the program. Weldon herself laments that SharePoint does not run seamlessly in the background. However, some third-party enterprise solutions do just that.
We like Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their suite of enterprise solutions.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise understands you, or to be more precise, understands what the most important information is for you at any precise moment in time. It is the center of excellence for your knowledge and simultaneously your personal assistant for all questions. The information pairing technology brings enterprise and Cloud data together.
If SharePoint is a struggle for your employees, explore training options such as those offered by Weldon or consider adding an intuitive third-party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Solve Your SharePoint Storage Problems Before They Start
April 6, 2012
SharePoint is the most highly adopted and used collaborative content platform in the US and it is beginning to see a rise in the world market. With this comes a higher demand on SharePoint storage and, of course, the start of problems. IT Business Edge caught wind of this trend and wrote about “Five SharePoint Storage Performance Killers and How to Fix Them” with the help of Quest Software.
“Rapid user adoption is positive for any organization leveraging SharePoint for content collaboration and version control. As user adoption increases, however, so does the amount of data that must be stored in SharePoint. Content overload can wreak havoc on SharePoint infrastructure, and can become a leading cause of poor performance – not to mention the corresponding management headaches. For example, as the amount of content steadily increases, so does the need to scale database capacity and SQL Server processing power to ensure that performance matches user demand. When this happens, organizations face a dilemma: cope with poor SharePoint performance, or bite the bullet and buy additional SQL storage space and computing power to catch up with demand.”
The article format is very interesting, you scroll through a slideshow of pictures with a description of the problems and how to resolve them. Or so you would think. The pictures are from free-image farms and hardly inspirational. While the problems are identified, only a couple offer tips on how to fix them. The majority of the information simply explains the problem; after reading it you get a “duh” feeling from already knowing the content.
Despite the poor presentation, data storage problems are an issue and I’ll see what I can find that addresses them better. In the meantime, while you have all that content to search through, you will be able to find your information quicker with solidly engineeded methods. Search Technologies offers engineering and consulting services which support search and general purpose SharePoint use cases. To learn more, navigate to www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, April 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
SharePoint 2010 Solutions for Incremental Crawl Problems
February 13, 2012
The blogosphere is full of fixes and solutions for SharePoint 2010 quirks and problems. Unfortunately, we know that many of these solutions come from the pain and suffering of others – others who have had to figure these things out because of something that SharePoint failed to do. The article, “Scheduled Incremental Crawls Suddenly Stopped Due to a Stale Timer Service in SharePoint 2010” is a perfect example.
The author describes the issue he had with the SharePoint 2010 timer service:
It is always fun to get back on site after a couple of days off work. SharePoint 2010 is like an annoying little critter, if you’re not there to cuddle with it, it will do the most strange things. I currently have a support case open regarding some issues with crawled properties (I hope that will be another story to tell another day) and went into the Search Service Application admin pages in Central Admin to check some things. When poking around I noticed that the incremental crawl hasn’t been run for a few days . . . I fired up an incremental crawl manually and that worked, waited for the next incremental crawl to start – and it didn’t. Also tried a full crawl manually – which worked fine, but the scheduled crawls never started.
Ultimately, the author found a solution and was able to get everything back up and running. We know that SharePoint is a strange beast (or annoying little critter as the author stated) and these types of issues are common. However, many organizations are turning to third party solutions to either improve their SharePoint installation or replace it completely. Many find that these third party solutions are more tailored to the end user and save frustration on the part of the SharePoint administrator. One solution receiving accolades is Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
When the solution won KM World Trendsetting Product of the Year for 2011, KM World had the following to say about the easy and efficiency of the solution:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Appliance as a pre-packaged solution (hardware and software) offers a quick and easy way to enjoy a high-end enterprise search solution out-of-the-box. The product is ready to use within in a very short timeframe.
If you are tired of troubleshooting SharePoint issues on a micro level, explore the other third party solutions available, paying particular attention to Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 13, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Insights Into SharePoint 2013 Search
August 25, 2015
It has been awhile since we have discussed SharePoint 2013 and enterprise search. Upon reading “SharePoint 2013: Some Observations On Enterprise Search” from Steven Van de Craen’s Blog, we noticed some new insights into how users can locate information on the collaborative content platform.
The first item he brings our attention to is the “content source,” an out-of-the-box managed property option that create result sources that aggregate content from different content sources, i.e. different store houses on the SharePoint. Content source can become a crawled property. What happens is that meta elements from Web pages made on SharePoint can be added to crawled properties and can be made searchable content:
“After crawling this Web site with SharePoint 2013 Search it will create (if new) or use (if existing) a Crawled Property and store the content from the meta element. The Crawled Property can then be mapped to Managed Properties to return, filter or sort query results.”
Another useful option was mad possible by a user’s request: making it possible to add query string parameters to crawled properties. This allows more information to be displayed in the search index. Unfortunately this option is not available out-of-the-box and it has to be programmed using content enrichment.
Enterprise search on SharePoint 2013 still needs to be tweaked and fine-tuned, especially as users’ search demands become more complex. It makes us wonder when Microsoft will release the next SharePoint installment and if the next upgrade will resolve some of these issues or will it unleash a brand new slew of problems? We cannot wait for that can of worms.
Whitney Grace, August 25, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Oh, Oh. Big Data Has Problems. Impossible.
August 21, 2015
A happy quack to the reader who alerted me to “5 Problems with Big Data.” How can this be? Big Data is the new black, the new enterprise search, the new information management opportunity.
The write up states:
But when data gets big, big problems can arise.
The article identifies five issues. Most of these strike me as trivial for MBAs and failed middle school teachers to resolve before lunch. The alleged problems are:
- Storage. Hey, hey. I thought storage and the management thereof were a no brainer. But I have heard rumors that finding useful items and moving them around may contribute to digital heart burn.
- Bias. What! Incredible. I heard an MBA say at a conference not long ago that with Big Data little issues get smoothed out. Imagine. Big Data works like an electric iron with a spritz feature.
- False positives. Yo, dude. Those are things one talks about in Statistics 101. So a method says Tom and Betty have Ebola. After a quick check up at the doc in the box, both seem to be suffering from bad pizza and a sleepless night caused by worrying about the mid term statistics test. So what if a financial model predicts that GOOG and GOOGL shares no upward boundary. Hello, infinity.
- Complexity. Gasp. Layering SAP with SAS components within a SharePoint environment is complex. No way, José. This is century 21. We can crash a lander on an asteroid. We can handle a simple upgrade to an air traffic control system.
- Outputs which answer a question no one asked. Look, gentle reader, we have IBM Watson. That system can answer the question, “What sauce will tamarind enhance?” The answer which made perfect sense to me was barbeque sauce. Who worries if the question was a coded string intercepted from a anonymous post on a Dark Web forum.
Stepping back I have complete confidence in the confidence men and women pitching the Big Data thing. Five speed bumps presented as real, live problems. Big Data is the answer. Enterprise search vendors like Lucid Imagination and wizards like the IDC crowd which sold some of my work without my permission on Amazon (Dave Schubmehl, where are you?) know that Big Data will do the revenue trick.
Problems are just too darned negative. I want a happy face on that flawed, incomprehensible, irrelevant, and expensive report. This is the modern world, not tout at the chariot races pitching Nero’s team.
Get real. We have no “problems.” We have opportunities.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2015
Users Hope SharePoint 2016 Eases Integration Woes
June 4, 2015
SharePoint integration is often mentioned as one of the lowest points of user satisfaction for the whole solution. However, to be fair, SharePoint has very drastically moved away from its very simple start. Its original purpose was document sharing, and probably just Office documents at that. Now the platform is expected to handle any type of file constantly emerging in the fast-moving world of content. IT Business Edge takes a good look at the issue in its article, “Why SharePoint 2016 Needs to Address Integration Shortcomings.”
The article begins on a humorous note:
“SharePoint integration must be really hard, judging by this new infographic, “Seven Alcoholic Drinks to Imbibe as Your SharePoint Integration Project Fails.” . . . Why is SharePoint so hard to integrate? There’s the obvious reason, of course: Microsoft’s built it for Microsoft ecosystems with little concern for heterogeneous environments. Still, that’s not the only reason it’s a pain. In fact, SharePoint had integration problems even with other Microsoft solutions, as this 2012 post by an application architect shows.”
There are clearly issues with SharePoint integration, and in light of them, head SharePoint execs are discussing improvements to the 2016 platform. While it will take some time before it is known whether the changes do improve user satisfaction, keep an eye on ArnoldIT.com for the latest updates. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and his Web service gives a good deal of attention to SharePoint. In fact, his dedicated SharePoint feed is a good place to start for the latest need-to-know information.
Emily Rae Aldridge, June 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
SharePoint Gets Serious with Information Governance
March 19, 2015
SharePoint has enjoyed continued success over the last 15 years, but it has not been without some bumps along the way. Information governance is one of the noted areas in which Share has fallen flat. Read more in the CMS Wire article, “Keeping SharePoint In Check with Information Governance.”
The article begins:
“Historically, SharePoint was thought to cause as many information governance problems as it solved. The 2001 to 2003 versions did not show Microsoft putting much effort into helping customers with information governance. But after the massive take up of SharePoint Portal Server 2007 licenses, and the often negative conversations coming out of the sizable SharePoint user community, Microsoft started to take governance issues seriously.”
In addition to keep an eye on your news feed for the latest SharePoint buzz, staying tuned to experts in the field is a great way to save time and get pointed information pertaining to improving a SharePoint installation. Stephen E. Arnold has one such SharePoint feed on his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. Focusing on tips, tricks, and news, Arnold collocates much of content that users and managers alike will find helpful for navigating day-to-day SharePoint operations.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 19, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Gamification Makes SharePoint Fun
November 18, 2014
According to Wikipedia, “Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems.” This could be a good solution for SharePoint users, who typically have a lot of problems to solve, and not a lot of fun doing it. CMS Wire covers the latest news in their article, “Badgeville Offers New SharePoint Gamification.”
The article begins:
“SharePoint’s not pretty. Adoption, therefore, can be slow. Officials at gamification provider Badgeville believe they can change this by making SharePoint fun. And they’re doing so with a new release of their gamification integration specifically for SharePoint. Badgeville for SharePoint is the Redwood City, Calif., provider’s next generation solution to add game, reputation and social mechanics to SharePoint community and collaboration environments.”
Stephen E. Arnold of ArnoldIT.com has made a career out of following all things search and reporting back to users and managers about the latest news, tips, and tricks, Gamification is a trend in a variety of software settings these days, so it could be good for SharePoint. Stay tuned to Arnold’s SharePoint feed to see how gamification might affect, for better or for worse, your SharePoint implication.
Emily Rae Aldridge, November 18, 2014
SharePoint May Prove Its Worth
April 8, 2014
SharePoint has long been on the defense about proving its worth, even though it is unrivaled when it comes to controlling the lion’s share of the enterprise market. A new report might make Microsoft feel a little more comfortable about its position, and CMS Wire covers the details in the article, “SharePoint: A ‘Formidable Enterprise Collaboration Platform.’”
The article begins:
“Everyone knows SharePoint has had problems. However, the Radicati Group just released a report that contains words new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella must be more than happy to hear. According to the Microsoft SharePoint Market Analysis, 2014-2018, edited by Sara Radicati, Microsoft ironed out the wrinkles in the 2013 edition and now offers a powerful enterprise collaboration platform for business users.”
The article goes on to describe a few of the shortcomings that SharePoint has yet to overcome. Stephen E. Arnold is a longtime leader in search and often turns his expertise to the subject of SharePoint. He delivers content through his Web service, ArnoldIT.com. He has found that there is still progress to be made, but SharePoint 2013 went a long way toward improving the user experience.
Emily Rae Aldridge, April 8, 2014
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