Migration Solutions for SharePoint and Office 365 Users
January 10, 2012
The New Year always brings about an avalanche of resolutions, some reasonable and some completely unattainable, as people strive to become a better, slimmer, more productive, smarter, funnier, happier, and/or healthier selves.
Maybe your New Year’s goals are to cut back on coffee, quit smoking, save more money, lose weight, or be better organized? Or maybe your resolution is to figure out a solution for converting those pesky Google Docs to your fancy new enterprise system. If the latter is the case, then Google-users have one more reason to celebrate in 2012, as MetaVis Technologies recently announced in “MetaVis Now Offers Google to SharePoint Migration” that they have created a solution that allows Microsoft SharePoint or Office 365 users to migrate their Google Apps and Google Docs.
According to the MetaVis announcement:
“MetaVis Migrator for Google Apps [http://www.metavistech.com/product/metavis-migrator-google-apps] allows customers to migrate Google content to either a hosted or on-premise-based SharePoint solution while preserving valuable metadata required for compliance and governance policies….With the MetaVis Migrator product line up, customers can migrate content from multiple sources including SharePoint 2010, 2007, 2003, file shares, Exchange Public Folders, Outlook Folders and now Google.”
We know that SharePoint has become the magnet for third-party enhancements. With more than 100 million SharePoint licenses deployed, the demand for SharePoint functionality is rising sharply. Growth in SharePoint was robust in 2011, and 2012 may be another banner year for Microsoft’s most popular enterprise solution.
At Search Technologies, we put the customer first. If a solution requires a third-party component such as MataVis’ or original programming, our engineers have the deep technical know how and engineering expertise to make next-generation information access a reality. To learn more about Search Technologies, point your browser at http://www.searchtechnologies.com.
Iain Fletcher, January 12, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Keeping Data Governance Under Control
December 16, 2011
Adopting an enterprise solution is often seen as a move towards simplifying an organization’s data organization and retrieval needs. However, if it is not handled appropriately, an organization can create an enterprise model that creates more problems than it solves. The white paper, “Create a SharePoint Data Governance Model,” discusses how an organization can prevent loss of control in regulating their SharePoint sites.
SharePoint collaboration sites grow and grow and grow… and all too often grow to a point at which they are out of control. That’s not good – not if you’re a SharePoint admin. This 12-page paper will help you create a data governance model to bring those SharePoint sites back under control. Read the paper to see a simple model for data governance based on a typical SharePoint content management process. Each section discusses one major activity related to data governance within the document management lifecycle, and how it relates to key organizational roles like IT Administrators, Corporate Risk/Compliance Officers, Content Owners and Information Workers.
Download the full text of the white paper to learn more. We also recommend exploring third party solutions to fill in some of the gaps that SharePoint has yet to close. Fabasoft Mindbreeze offers a suite of solutions that are designed with usability and uniformity in mind. Mindbreeze works in conjunction with an already existing SharePoint implementation or as an alternative to SharePoint. Read more about their Folio software:
“Fabasoft Folio is the standard software product for Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Compliance Management, agile Business Processes and Information Governance. The solution provides uniform, reliable and controlled management of digital content in the enterprise. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise links Fabasoft Folio for uniform enterprise-wide information access.”
The moral of this story – control your enterprise solution, do not let it control you. Best practices and other suggestions can help your organization optimize SharePoint, but other third party solutions, such as Mindbreeze, might produce better results with less effort.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 16, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Data Retention: Will Courts Drive Information Governance?
October 2, 2011
Beleaguered search and content processing vendors are chasing market segments where there is money. The vendors’ systems may not be well suited to address niche specific requirements, but that have not stopped purveyors of findability fantasies in the past.
I read an interesting article the other day in the field of electronic discovery. According to Proactive Retention Means Effective Preservation in eDiscovery, legal costs and court sanctions can be effectively reduced by implementing an information governance strategy.
The article sites a recent industry survey and several 2011 legal cases from across that country to drive home the point that better data retention practices yield more successful document preservation results. Writer Philip Favros states that in the case of Haraburda v. Arcelor Mittal U.S.A. inc:
“…The court tied a litigant’s preservation duty to its document retention efforts. In order to discharge its duty to reactively preserve evidence, the court reasoned that enterprises must proactively create ‘a ‘comprehensive’ document retention policy that will ensure that relevant documents are retained.’ Failing to implement a retention policy often results in a loss of key information. And this, opined the court, may result in sanctions.”
With the hoo-hah about governance choking SharePoint and other special interest information services, are we now at the point where courts will force organizations to get their data management, editorial processes, and records management methods in working order? What’s obvious is that a general purpose search system is ill suited to cope with the type of information requirements the legal processes require. Ad hoc “index it now, to find out if we are guilty” methods are easy to sell to those who wonder, “Are we guilty?” However, the slap dash approach can add friction to an organization’s response to a legal matter. Marketing is of little help when the fines and sanctions arrive. Where are those marketers? Probably playing golf or pitching fantasy solutions to another market segment. Will the azure chip consultants pinpoint such situations? Nah, those folks are worrying about billable hours and writing reports about “governance”. Good work for English majors, failed Web masters, retooled librarians, and those who should be making cookies.
Jasmine Ashton, October 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
The Governance Air Craft Carrier: Too Big to Sail?
August 31, 2011
In a few days, I disappear into the wilds of a far off land. In theory, a government will pay me, but I am increasingly doubtful of promises made from 3,000 miles from Harrod’s Creek. As part of the run up to my departure, we held a mini webinar/consultation on Tuesday, August 30, 2011, with a particularly energetic company engaged in “governance.” (SharePoint Semantics has dozens of articles about governance. One example is “A Useful Guide to SharePoint Success from Symon Garfield”. The format of the call was basic. The people on the call asked me questions, and I provided only the perspective of three score years and as many online failures can provide. (I will mention SharePoint but my observations apply to other systems as well; for instance, Documentum, Interwoven, FileNet, etc.)
What I want to do in this short write up is identify a subject that we did not tackle directly in that call, which concerned a government project. However, after the call, I realized that what I call an “air craft carrier” problem was germane to the discussion of automated indexing and entity extraction. An air craft carrier today is a modular construction. The idea is that the flight deck is made by one or more vendors, moved to the assembly point, and bolted down. The same approach is taken with cabins, electronics, and weapon systems.
The basic naval engineering best practice is to figure out how to get the design nailed down. Who wants to have propeller assemblies arrive that do not match the hull clearance specification?
What’s an air craft carrier problem? An air craft carrier is a big ship. It is, according to my colleague Rick Fiust, a former naval officer, a “really big ship.” Unlike a rich person’s yacht or a cruise ship, an air craft carrier does more than surprise with its size. Air craft carriers pack a wallop. In grade school I remember learning the phrase “gun boat diplomacy.” The idea was that a couple of gun boats sends a powerful message.
What every content centric system aspires to be. Some information technology professionals will tell their bosses or clients, “You have a state of the art search and content processing system. Everything works.” Unlikely in my experience.
Governance or what I like to think of as “editorial policy” is an air craft carrier. The connotation of governance is broad, involves many different functions, and sends a powerful message. The problem is that when content in an organization becomes unmanageable, the air craft carrier runs aground and the crew is not exactly sure what to to about the problem.
Consider this real life example. A well meaning information technology manager installs SharePoint to allow the professionals in marketing to share their documents, price lists, and snippets from a Web site. Then the company acquires another firm, which runs SharePoint as well as a handful of enterprise applications. On the surface, the situation looks straight forward. However, the task of getting the two organizations’ systems to work smoothly is a bit tricky. There are the standard challenges of permissions and access as well as somewhat more exotic ones of coping with intra-unit indexing and index refreshes. Then a third company is acquired, and it runs SharePoint. Unlike the first two installations which were “by the book”, the third company’s information technology unit used SharePoint as a blank canvas and created specialized features and services, plugged in third party components, and some home grown code.
Now the content issue arises. What content is available, when, to whom, and under what circumstances. Because the SharePoint installation was built in separate modules over time, will these fit together? Nope. There was no equivalent of the naval engineering best practice.
Governance, in my opinion, is the buzz word slapped on content centric systems of which SharePoint is but one example. The same governance problem surfaces when multiple content centric systems are joined.
Will after the fact governance solve the content problems in a SharePoint or other content centric environment? In my experience, the answer is, “Unlikely.” There are four reasons:
Cost. Reworking three systems built on the same platform should be trivial. The work is difficult and in some situations, scrapping the original three systems and starting over may be a more cost effective solution. Who knows what interdependencies lurk within the three systems which are supposed to work as one? Open ended engineering projects are likely to encounter funding problems, and the systems must be used “as is” or fixed a problem at a time.
Fierce Criticism of SharePoint
September 30, 2010
I have lost interest in SharePoint and SharePoint search. Not much strikes me as new and improved. Nevertheless, when my newsreader spits out an interesting link from Fierce, I do scan it. “New Survey Reveals Dissatisfaction with SharePoint” caught my attention and provided me an opportunity to write an ambiguous headline. Surveys, as readers of this blog, know are suspect to me from the git-go. There’s the issue of sample size, sample selection, question shaping, and analytic methods. These juicy items are tough to get even when you have the survey wonks who did to work sitting directly in front of me.
Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
For instance a whopping 78 percent of respondents reported that SharePoint “user experience was inadequate,” while only 17.6 percent chose that SharePoint was “great and adequately met their needs.”
So, unhappy campers. You can read more about the survey’s findings in the Fierce write up.
My questions:
- Why is a product so widely used generating so much discontent?
- Why aren’t the third party, certified vendors making more of this discontent? My view is that these folks pay money to be certified and don’t want to anger their meal ticket.
- When will the open source community exploit this pain point?
In the meantime, I will maintain my present position and waddle forward without much concern. No search worries. No governance worries. No metatagging worries. Life is good at the goose pond. I will leave those worries to the CFOs who have to figure out why SharePoint is so darned interesting when it comes to costs.
Stephen E Arnold, September 30, 2010
Freebie
SharePoint Dual Feature Bonanza
September 13, 2010
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has more social and search features, which are intertwined to create an enticing platform for users. This and more is revealed in the Able Blue blog post “The MOSS Show Interview”, which takes you to The MOSS show site’s interview “Enterprise Social (and Search) in SharePoint 2010”.
The two part podcast interview of Matthew McDermott, who is a Microsoft SharePoint expert and MVP, talks about the new improved social features like improved My Sites, Activity Feed, tagging, rating, managed metadata, taxonomies, and folksonomies in SharePoint 2010. Matthew talks about the importance of having a search strategy, and leverage the search applications by making the search actionable and refined.
SharePoint 2010 can help create a knowledge base that benefit over a long period, and can be shared amongst users. Matthew points out, “What makes SharePoint 2010 special is its ability to gather feedback from people participating in the content consumption,” which enhances the value of the content, making it more important to the enterprise. This is enterprise social, which gains more relevance if “made more findable by tagging and using proper metadata.”
Matthew explains that SharePoint 2010 adds great enterprise social capabilities, and facilitates to integrate third party external applications like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter outside the firewall from SharePoint 2010. These social tools can be used to create a business value. The new SharePoint 2010 allows the internal as well as external URLs in the browser to be tagged, and enables the list of all the tagged URLs to collect on a tag profile page.
The managed metadata store of SharePoint 2010, allows people to create a central repository of data through service applications. There is also a feature to make the data translatable into multi-lingual forms, and even deny the use of tags for various reasons. “Activity feed is a feature through which you get your news or tips of the day by just following the tags,” Matthew reports, “and you get the ability to consume content around the organization.” He believes that this helps the employees to connect with each other, nurture cooperation, and makes them productive by improving the culture of the workplace.
The beauty of SharePoint 2010, as per Matthew McDermott is that users can themselves decide upon the governance of the data, and thus get complete control of this powerful enterprise social platform, with highly developed search techniques.
Now, how expensive is it to maintain a proprietary system that requires hands on fiddling to make work as advertised? The answer to this question is not in the movie. Maybe the sequel?
Harleena Singh, September 13, 2010
Freebie
SharePoint, Criticism, and a Rigid Microsoft Wizard
June 28, 2009
I am not sure what a Fierce Media is, but it ran a story that frightened me. Addled geese are easily startled as you know. I think of the poem in which a young girl who dies comes alive when she chases geese “who cried in goose, ‘Alas’. The headline for the SharePoint “brown study” was: “SharePoint Director Remains Bloodied but Unbowed.”
Here are some selected fang-like phrases from the Fierce write up:
- “Often-maligned content management tool”
- “Microsoft claims 100 million [SharePoint] licenses, but even if that number is exaggerated…”
- “Coopetition” to “fill in the [SharePoint] gaps”
- “When it comes to document management, Finn [Microsoft wizard] says that might not have as comprehensive an offering as say EMC Documentum…”
- “Finn admits that they are lacking in this area, but says channel partners make up for the gap.”
- “The whole issue of SharePoint governance is definitely a pain point…”
You get the idea. Fierce Media certainly makes me think that SharePoint has more rough edges that smooth, slick edges.
For me the most interesting parts of the story were this statement:
Finn understands that Microsoft is a target, but he defends his product (just as you would expect) and he points out that they were offering MySites, a collaboration environment, in SharePoint 2003 before Facebook even existed, but it didn’t get any attention because it was so ahead of its time. Perhaps so, but he’s certainly satisfied with his market share and he can always point to that. With that kind of presence, everyone has to take SharePoint seriously, and frankly it would be crazy to ignore it.
And, second, there was zero reference to enterprise search. Search is a big deal, and I did not find one single mention of the free SharePoint search, the search tool that runs out of gas at 50 million documents, and the highly publicized Microsoft Fast ESP solution. After spending $1.23 billion, starting a special Web site, and creating a Web log for the product prior to Mr. Ballmer’s stream of commentary about the importance of search, I expected something about SharePoint search. I came away from the write up with more concerns than before.
Stephen Arnold, June 28, 2009
SharePoint Success Now Ensured
April 12, 2009
his headline grabbed my attention: “Information Architected Inc. Releases New Methodology to Ensure SharePoint Success” here. The item is a news release from Information Architected Inc., a “consultancy focused on the intelligent use of content, knowledge and processes to drive innovation and thrive in a digital world.” Here’s what the news release said about the methodology:
The methodology is executed in three stages. It begins with an assessment of overall business goals and objectives. It identifies and ranks the business issues associated with the SharePoint implementation, expected outcomes and benefits targeted. The assessment includes a rationalization of the needs for collaboration and knowledge sharing versus the needs for compliance and security. It also examines user work habits, the need to collaborate, search and navigation habits and needs, related processes and overall business goals and objectives.
The second step looks at current and planned technology strategies. This includes everything from network capacity, to existing and planned tools and techniques for collaboration. This can include existing portals, document and content management systems, enterprise 2.0 technologies, and any existing SharePoint sites.
The third step aligns the findings of the first two steps, resulting in an implementation strategy that balances technology capabilities with business requirements. Alternatives are presented that highlight alternative cost and change management issues associated with the SharePoint implementation. For each targeted goal or benefit, alternatives regarding deployment in SharePoint “out of the box integration of SharePoint with existing systems, customization of SharePoint and/or simple tweaks of SharePoint are compared. The solution is positioned within an information architecture, ensuring easier and wider scale adoption and alignment with corporate governance. The result is a well thought out business-technology strategy that maximizes the value derived from SharePoint and minimizes any risks of shortcomings in the short and long-term.
That’s fine but the buzzword density is a bit high for this addled goose’s taste.
What stopped me was the implication that whatever methodology existed prior to the release of Information Architected’s method must be flawed. I pondered the implications of 100 million SharePoint installations less successful than their users originally anticipated. I have been baffled by SharePoint, which is a snowball type of server from Microsoft. Each year SharePoint picks up more functions which are often mashed into the server product, but not fully integrated. What began life as a content management system, now operates like a Universal home gym. One big, heavy structure that can be used like a gymful of exercise equipment. I hope the new method that “ensures” success gets traction. Mud wrestling with SharePoint can be hazardous to one’s standing in the eyes of colleagues. And search? Make friends with the chief financial officer too.
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
Herding SharePoint Content Sheep
November 2, 2008
Microsoft may be pushing Fast Search’s ESP into large SharePoint installations, but certified gold partners continue to find opportunities to make money from the 100 million SharePoint installations. Autonomy and Open Text recently rolled out systems that make it easier to keep control of SharePoint content. Why control SharePoint documents? You will learn quickly enough when you get caught in a legal matter and have to figure out which version of each document is the one that is the “right” one. SharePoint offers primitive and clunky controls for herding SharePoint content sheep; that is, the many bits and pieces of modular documents, emails with attachments, and PowerPoint decks with some relevant information but perhaps not the best and final version of the deck. When you get the invoice for collecting documents manually, you will understand why you have to have robust tools for governing information.
Let’s look briefly at two products that herd content sheep:
First, Autonomy has rolled out Controlpoint. You can read more about the product on the Autonomy Web site here and in the Marketwatch write up here. In a nutshell, you install Controlpoint, and you get policy-driven control of all SharePoint content. Autonomy includes a number of content processing functions with Controlpoint; for example, classification of documents.
Next, Open Text dubs its governance solution the sveltly named Open Text Content Lifecycle Management Services for Microsoft SharePoint, eDOCS Edition. The acronym is OTCLMSMSE. Between you and me Autonomy does a better job naming products. The Open Text solution delivers life cycle management, policies, and archiving functions. A licensee can hook SharePoint into Open Text’s other enterprise content management services as well. You can read CMSWire’s write up here.
Let’s step back and think about SharePoint. Autonomy and Open Text have identified a glaring weakness in the Frankenstein SharePoint. SharePoint is, according to some, Microsoft’s next generation operating system. I think that’s pretty wacky. SharePoint is a product that changes with each release. First it was content management. Then it was collaboration. Now it is knowledge management. The Microsoft sale pitch makes SharePoint seem easy, cheap, wonderful, and the cure for what ails a modern organization. In reality, SharePoint lacks the chops to deal with content when a lawyer shows up to collect information as part of the discovery process. SharePoint doesn’t do any single function particularly well. What it does is deliver stub functions that work okay when you have two or three people using a small number of documents. Increase the number of documents and the number of users, and you have a multi million dollar investment to get the system stable and running with acceptable performance.
I am willing to go out on a limb and say that Microsoft will introduce enhanced policy and information governance features. The Microsoft certified professionals will install these extensions, and the company will find that liberal injections of money and technical resources will be needed to get the amalgamation working in an acceptable way.
In the meantime, Autonomy and Open Text should be able to make sales. When Microsoft rolls out its own governance solutions, engineers at these companies will develop a fix for another void in SharePoint.
Stephen Arnold, November 2, 2008
ZyLAB on Disorganization
January 2, 2012
We look at the enterprise search forum on LinkedIn.com occasionally. We have noticed that “problems” are a big part of the discussion. If you are struggling with search challenges, you may want to consider that disorganization is an issue.
The ZyLAB blog CodeZED’s new piece about “Legacy Data Clean-up for Email, SharePoint, Audio and More” is making it very clear that most organizations are ignoring records management, policy, and governance until the last minute when it is often too late. But to what end? We learned:
Exchange server mailboxes and PST repositories are not designed for, and should not be used as, document archives—but they often are. . It is very easy for users to retain their emails, resulting in e-mail archives (PSTs) that rapidly swell to GBs of information. Problems fester because the information in these PST folders is often completely unstructured. For example, potentially sensitive human resources-related e-mails (such as performance reviews or confidential financial or medical information) are frequently in the same collection (i.e. Sent Mail) as other, unrelated messages.
It’s important to create folders and subfolders and make sure that your business utilizes software that relegates where an email is to go from the start. Keep everything organized, backup is key. When using SharePoint governance and organization is the key to a healthy happy system.
The same problems email faces are prevalent elsewhere. Always archive projects and individual documents based on your companies set of policies. Don’t deviate too often or it creates a jumbled mess that is more costly to untangle than it would have been to just do it correctly the first time.
Organization is the key.
Leslie Radcliff, January 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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