Premiership SharePoint - MOSS v WSS ?

Even after nearly ten years of Microsoft’s SharePoint the main question SharePoint Consultants are still asked is; “what is the difference between SharePoint Server (currently MOSS 2007) and Windows SharePoint Services (currently WSS 3)?”

There is a document on the Office Talk website that lists which features are available in each version. At first glance you will probably notice that WSS does an awful lot of what MOSS does, so maybe the fact the WSS is FREE (providing you have Windows Server 2003 or 2008 and the Windows Server CAL licences) will tempt you. So why do people pay for the full SharePoint version?

Perhaps a good comparison was yesterday in the FA Cup when my beloved Aston Villa very nearly missed out on their second trip to Wembley in two months. At half time the mighty Villa were trailing 2-0 to Championship side Reading and heading, embarrassingly, out of the cup. Stick with it I will explain the SharePoint relevance and am not just gloating about a Villa victory. Now, the whole Reading team probably cost only a few million pounds and very few of the names were known to many of us. Yet the Villa team had internationals like Downing, Milner, Young, Dunn, Friedel (for our American readers) and big John Carew. Last time I calculated this Villa team had cost well over £70m to put together - thanks to the generosity of our American owner Randy Learner. So comparing Reading with Aston Villa would be like comparing WSS with MOSS.

Yet for much of the game Reading showed they were easily a match for the claret and blue stars. In the same way that WSS does, probably, at least 70% of what MOSS can do. It has the same Intranet style presentation, has the same document versioning controls, can create the same surveys, can apply the same permissions, can create the same reporting views and uses many of the same webparts. Just as Reading’s eleven men could do very much the same as Aston Villa’s men. Then in the space ten minutes after half time everything changed. Villa hit top gear and Reading were left chasing shadows. The Premiership class could be seen in movement, finishing and sheer belief. The reason that the Villa players cost more was there to be seen by everyone tuned into ITV. It was like suddenly seeing the extra benefits of full SharePoint Server. The added value of being able to search across multiple sites, the full two-way integration with Active Directory, the personal MySites (that allows each user their own automatically created site), the ability to target certain audiences, the addition of Form Services, the creation of Business Intelligence dashboards and the colourful graphs of Excel Services. Suddenly the extra investment was shining through and the differences were clear to anyone who wasn’t watching the EastEnders omnibus.

So this season’s FA Cup has just five premiership teams in. No team from outside the top flight is still dreaming of lifting the famous trophy this year. In the same way it is true that if you really want to maximise your returns on SharePoint, providing you can afford the initial investment, then you should go with the full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server version. But if this is not something you can afford to do now it is still worth installing the free Windows SharePoint Services. This will let you start to develop a system and a platform and then maybe next financial year you can make the step-up to the ‘Premiership’ of SharePoint. All the sites you create in WSS will work in MOSS. You don’t need to invest in a completely new team just make a few tweaks. Am going too far with this football analogy?

Maybe it makes financial sense though to look at one of those FA Cup Semi Finalists, Portsmouth (our Marketing manager Frank Faulds’ team). Portsmouth won the cup in 2008, but since then they have been hit by financial ruin and even now their future is in doubt. So they are like a company that have invested all their money in a MOSS project using the most expensive consultants (should have gone to Office Talk) and adding all the top SharePoint third party add-ons (Control Point, MediaRich, DocAve, etc). Maybe they should have cut their cloth accordingly and stuck with Windows SharePoint Services. What’s more important having a team to support for years to come or a few visits to Wembley? If you want free advice on the cost of implementing any form of SharePoint drop Frank an email on frank.faulds@office-talk.com

Any Liverpool supporter reading this might be left thinking that Reading over two games knocked them out of the FA Cup. This goes to show that any project needs good leadership to succeed. In the way that all SharePoint projects, be them WSS or MOSS, will be helped by the involvement of a SharePoint Consultant. Well done Martin O’Neill for whatever you said to those Villa players at half time. Perhaps there is a training course that Rafael Benitez could go on. Now is there a training course on how to beat Chelsea at Wembley.

Comparison Document MOSS v WSS

Get Going With SharePoint

For those who have read my posts before you will be aware of two things. Firstly, I am passionate about SharePoint and how it can benefit all organisations and secondly, I am a fanatical Aston Villa supporter. So let me start by saying well done to Manchester United (although most of their supporters seemed to be wearing Norwich scarves) for winning the 50th Carling Cup on Sunday. Ok it might have all been different if the referee hadn’t forgotten his red card, but hopefully I will be back at Wembley to see Villa win the FA Cup in May. So to SharePoint and the best way to get a SharePoint Project started.

It has been a few weeks since my last blog and one of the reasons for this has been a trip to Egypt. An interesting trip to swap the snow of England for temperatures of 30 degrees and of course like all English tourists I brought back a souvenir stomach bug. One of the highlights of my trip was a camel ride in the desert under the stars. It was certainly worth the money, and the pain, to experience some amazing views. It made me think it was a bit like SharePoint because it took some investment and some effort to get going, but once I was riding through the desert on top of that large animal the benefits were so clear. Now, I had not really understood the effort that would be required when I initially paid my money for this excursion. It had said wear long trousers on the information provided so I decided it was best to wear my jeans. The camel knelt down ready for me to get on its back, but with the saddle on, which had two wooden holding bars sticking up at either end, I realised that this was not going to be easy. It seemed that to be able to get on I would have to lift my right leg about four foot in the air and my legs would have to end up at about one hundred and fifty degrees apart, an angle that my jeans were not happy to go at. I tried seven times to mount the camel without success. At least the small boy holding the camel looked to be seeing the funny side it even if he spoke no English. Then a kind older Egyptian gentleman appeared and without saying a word got hold of my leg and lifted it on to the camel. The help of an expert was all that it took and for the next hour I watched in wonder at the amazing views as I majestically rode the camel that I had named Humphrey. As I rode I thought about how similar the experience was to a SharePoint Project. Is it similar or was it just the effect of too much sun on my baldy head?

SharePoint, in either the full SharePoint Server (MOSS) form or the free Windows SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0), is fairly easy to install as my trip was fairly easy to book. The difficult part then is really getting started and setting your foundations. Maybe the issue is that there is just so much SharePoint can do ranging from Document Management to updating websites with options like creating surveys along the way. It really can impact (and enhance) all areas of your business, or organisation. But as with my large frame trying to get on to a camel it really needs to be thought out first. A SharePoint Project Team is ideal and it is well worth downloading the free SharePoint Project checklist from Office Talk to plan what you are trying to do. Once on my camel I was led by the small boy, but I think left to my own devices I would have had a very frustrated camel and could have ended up anywhere in the desert. So a plan is needed when starting out with SharePoint. The problem companies often have is knowing what to include in their plans. Really a starting point needs to be to understand what the version of SharePoint you have can actually do, before deciding how you are going to use it. Which departments will be included, what types of electronic forms will be customised, what kind of reports will be produced, how will contacts be stored, what kind of workflows will be created, will versioning be used and many, many more questions. This is why like when getting on a camel for the first time it helps to have an expert at hand. Obviously as an Office Talk Consultant I hope that you would use Office Talk for all your SharePoint needs, but there are a number of other Microsoft Partners who offer SharePoint services so shop around.

In my experience the best way to start a SharePoint Project is for the key users to receive a day or ½ days training session on the basic of what SharePoint can do. Office Talk offer these training courses onsite in the UK for up to 12 people and give the key users an overview of the many things that they could do with SharePoint including incorporating Video and automating so many internal processes. Again look around for Microsoft Partners in your country who offer similar SharePoint services. I think I might have benefited even more from my camel experience if I had had an English speaking person to lead. Maybe then I wouldn’t have fallen off the camel when I came to dismount.

Another way of making a fast start on SharePoint is to purchase one of SharePoint Department Templates already available. Why re-invent the wheel when a lot of your needs are shared by other people and templates already exist. If you haven’t already seen them take a look at the Action SharePoint Department Template Bundle. This means you can start your journey already on the camel and heading in the right direction. Perhaps I am overdoing this metaphor now.

So back to the Villa and good luck to them on Sunday when they play Reading and are just ninety minutes from going back to Wembley. Who knows we might end up seeing an all Birmingham game at Wembley. That would certainly be a challenge for Chiltern Railways and the Birmingham to Wembley Stadium route. I wonder if they use SharePoint.

SharePoint in Photographs

Recently I had a new Blackberry and although my chubby fingers are slightly too wide for the qwerty keyboard I am getting use to it. Especially as I now know you don’t have to have it so it bleeps all night long every time a message arrives. With the add-on apps like Google Maps and mobile Facebook added it is sadly becoming a big part of my life. I can even view my SharePoint sites on there. Of course as is the norm these days every mobile device has to have an inbuilt camera. I mean I am typing away at the moment on my laptop and if I accidently press the wrong function key I will hear a clicking noise and an unflattering picture of the top of my head will appear on the screen. When I follow the boys in claret and blue to Wembley in February my Blackberry will probably end up videoing my walk to my £70 seat or taking a photograph of the Wembley arch in the dark. The world is becoming full of digital images and videos. So how can SharePoint handle all this digital images?

If you hear the term DAM SharePoint it isn’t always a bad thing as DAM can be Digital Asset Management. This is how you manage your Digital Assets. If you have SharePoint (either WSS or full MOSS) then there is a terrific application for you called ‘MediaRich for SharePoint’. MediaRich does really have the wow factor and brings SharePoint to life. For media people it finally gives them a reason to use SharePoint even on their precious Macs. It adds a couple of extra webparts that makes the out of the box SharePoint Picture Library look as exciting as a conversation between Steve Davis and Nigel Mansell on the subject of stamp collecting. It allows you to zoom in close on images, crop sections, change formats, turn to trendy black and white, sharpen quality, flip upside down and even email as a zip file to your commercial printers. Even if you haven’t got thousands of images or videos the automatic thumbnailing of all types of files including Office Documents makes it worth trying. Throw in the enhanced Search capabilities and suddenly your SharePoint has come to life. Who needs 3D TV when MediaRich can make your SharePoint this dynamic and you don’t even need to put on any cardboard glasses. Oh and I haven’t even mentioned that you can set all these image changes to run as an overnight batch job.

If you have SharePoint I recommend you take time to watch the MediaRich Demonstration video now because it might make you rethink the way you use SharePoint. Just Click Here and I think you will be impressed.

So now I need to send all my photographs, videos and audio recordings from my Blackberry to my SharePoint. Many of them taken at the recent Villa semi-final game. I need to make room for pictures of Villa lifting cup against Manchester United on 28th Feb.