SharePoint Best Practices Conference Recap

Tim Farrell and Marcel Meth of Knowledge Management Associates presented some of their notes from the recent SharePoint Best Practices Conference.

Tim and Marcel attended the SharePoint Best Practices conference in DC Sept 14-17.

Marcel is seeing a trend where extranets and intranets are collapsing. He is seeing companies deploy in a secure site outside the firewall. Internally, Microsoft's SharePoint deployment has 14 Terabytes of data. They keep each database under 200GB.

Microsoft expects support of non-window browsers within 2 years.

There is also a new SharePoint online. You do not need to install SharePoint. Your information just lives in the cloud.

Intranet search and enterprise search are different. The intranet search of SharePoint is mature and works well, but it is not an enterprise search.

Workflow is not quite ready for prime time. There are lots of subtleties and you will need some expertise to use it.

Tim spoke about governance and taxonomy. You should have a governance team of about 10 people even for a big company. Chose a pilot program that can build grass roots support. See how it grows and emerges. Start with just the one pilot. (He seems to like the concept of emergent collaboration.)

Tim also focused on tiered levels of control.  At the top, with the highest degree of control and the lowest degree of innovation and change are the enterprise wide taxonomy. At the opposite extreme are MySites that have the lowest degree of control and highest degree of innovation and change.

Tim's best practices for document management in SharePoint:

• Support a single source of the truth
• Consistent taxonomy
• Centralize management of taxonomy
• Updateable taxonomy as the organization changes
• User can enhance core tax and enhance with own particular needs
• Changes shared with rest of business to avoid duplication

Tim's top ten pitfalls for a SharePoint implementation

1. MOSS as replacement for a network drive
2. We know that we need, just set up a default site
3. Failure of capacity planning
4. Just set up a site, Joe user will love it - you need some user testing
5. Oh, while we are at it - adding other upgrades at the same time
6. Upgrading SQL and line of business applications during portal implementation
7. Letting front office administration manage SharePoint - they need training and defined roles for Governance
8. Designing every site before rolling out SharePoint - think in terms of phases.  Do function first
9. Over-engineered security - use AD as much as you can.
10. Converting all of the ASP.net code to web parts - some stuff may just run better not being in