MOSS / SharePoint 2007

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Permalink Reply by Rich Hogan on April 9, 2009 at 9:53am

Gian,

Thanks for joining the CoI webcast and conference call this morning and introducing this topic. There was obviously strong interest among the folks who joined today.

As I mentioned during the call, we use Sharepoint 2007 combined with Infopath to assist us in collecting and reporting metrics about the use of our standard highly engineered services kits. We have a simple XML form with checkboxes for each standard offering kit that the field consultant uses in the course of delivery for an engagement and also capture project codes that we can use to correlate with utilization data that we capture in our QuickArrow PSA system. The result is that we can produce a Portfolio Performance Report that will tell frequently each of our standard offerings are actually used by delivery geography, individual consultant, and time period.

We also use Sharepoint to host our Deal Desk application. The Deal Desk maintains the revenue by service offering when they are combined on a single SOW by acting as a repository for Deal Desk"bundles" which include a pricing calculator with the break down for each discrete service offering, the SOW/MSA and potentially a Work Order for subcontracting to a partner. Together, this lays the foundation for the Closed Loop Services Engineering Method that I want to share and validate with all of you.

Cheers,
Rich

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Kolburn on April 9, 2009 at 10:43am

MOSS is acting as our corporate intranet portal, document MS, and KM system. The initial approach to taxonomy, which was designed by IT, is along divisional lines. We have a KM coalition that is cross departmental in nature serving to guide the development of the deployment - one of the first actions executed by the group was to create tabs that facilitate sharing of information across divisions.

As far as technology usage goes, here are some lessons learned:

- Wiki: Push for one wiki only except in cases where knowledge security is required. Our feeling is that MOSS wiki technology is inferior to most commonly used wikis out there, but serves the basic purpose.
- Document management: This is a multi-step process. Corporate culture needs to change from an email/harddrive knowledge storage mentality to an online common locale storage mentality. Once employees start to think of the portal as the place to go for knowledge assets and the place to store assets, such as project documents and the like, then you've crossed a major hurdle. Subsequent to, or even in parallel to, the culture change is to embed metadata into knowledge assets by way of content types and site or list columns. Deciding on what types of assets particular areas have in advance of creating those areas will save rework later. This can be taken all the way to creating custom content types, e.g. Solution Sales Presentation, with an associated template and a custom set of document properties that enable powerful storage and distribution capability. Finally, educating users on workflow and document editing features (check-in/check-out/versioning/publishing) is key to facilitating complete online knowledge creation and management, but is very difficult to do.
- Lists: we have pushed lists to the bleeding edge in many ways, especially since we do not use the Designer software. Anything that might have been a static list in a document that would rapidly become obsolete we try to replace with a MOSS list - FAQs, best practices, tasks, schedules, inventory of offerings or methodology have all found their way into custom lists that are very easy to manipulate, filter, and even join together with MS Access for further updating and reporting.
- Subsites/Workspaces: we started off thinking that there was a lot of value in creating vast hierarchies of sites and quickly learned that knowledge/data doesn't travel well through that hierarchy. There are definite times to create subsites, particularly where security is key, but for common content we've found that multiple pages within one site make much more sense.
- Blogs: MOSS blogging technology isn't bad. Of particular value is the ability to categorize blog entries and setup RSS feeds to specific categories. We use it for pushing out updates that we don't want to email the entire company about, for instance.
- Discussion Groups: given the expertise MSFT has in DG technology we're sorely disappointed with the DG features that are bundled with MOSS 2007. We're looking into other options.

Just about everything Services Engineering does is facilitated through MOSS 2007 within our company, so we've had to get up to speed quickly on the technology. As I mentioned on the phone today we're looking to roll out Communities of Practice through MOSS in such a way to promote participation through online recognition of expertise and contribution and to facilitate internal knowledge area support, which would include the ability to search all CoPs, post to multiple CoPs, etc. Any lessons learned in this area would be more than welcome.

Bryan

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