SharePoint Walk of Fame

Regular readers might be surprised at my extra posting this week, but I am very excited about the brand new SharePoint Walk of Fame that is being unveiled at SharePoint Village as part of their 1st Birthday celebrations on 1st September. They are following our lovely Queen and having a Birthday Honours List with the four honoured SharePointers been inducted onto the SharePoint Walk of Fame. Also I want to tell you how to get free SharePoint help.

SharePoint is a remarkable in the way that so many people are so ready to help other SharePoint Users. When I was involved in creating SharePoint Village I was keen for it to be a showcase not only for the best products in SharePoint but also the SharePoint Community. This is why you will find many of the woldwide SharePoint User Groups listed there as well as links to great SharePoint resources like 'SharePoint Magazine' (now available as a glossy magazine to order) and  'Nothing But SharePoint' (home of the famous 'Stump the Panel').

The SharePoint Community is massive so if you are involved in SharePoint never feel you are on your own. If you have a problem don't quickly get your credit card and buy a support call from Microsoft try the SharePoint Community first. There are two great ways of getting instant free help with SharePoint and one of these I only came across yesterday. Like many of you I twitter and have started using the hashtags even though I didn't really understand them. But it seems that if I type #avfc lots of Villa fans even ones who don't follow me will see my twitters. Also #sharepoint means I can annoy the SharePoint community, but the best new one if you seriously are asking a SharePoint question and need help is simply #sphelp. I tried it and within seconds had found the answer to a problem that I had spent hours scratching my head over. So to all you tweeters don't forget the #sphelp tag.

 
The second way to get quick and very helpful SharePoint help is to join the yahoo group 'SharePoint Discussions'. Then when you have a question or problem (ideally SharePoint related) you just email sharepointdiscussions@yahoogroups.com and within seconds the group will try and help you with your problem.

So let's take time to say thank you to some of the real SharePoint Super Stars who go the extra mile to help us all. People whose passion for SharePoint shines through and who can communicate it so well. If you know a SharePoint Super Star then don't keep it to yourself nominate them for the SharePoint Village Birthday Honours list and then perhaps they might end up being one of the first four people on the SharePoint Walk of Fame. Visit http://sharepointvillage.com/?page_id=7008 to nominate them now before the closing date of midnight 31st August 2011 (same time as the transfer deadline for the Premier League).

So who will be on the Birthday Honours List?

Good luck to Villa as they take on local rivals Wolves on Saturday and try to return back to the top of the premier league. To link the mighty Villa with the SharePoint Walk of Fame it was great to see this week that entire 1982 European Cup winning team is set to be inducted into the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame, in October. The Villa side who beat Bayern Munich in an unforgettable night in Rotterdam were managed by the late Tony Barton who took over from the great Ron Saunders two months before the final. 

SharePoint Success - Howzat?

So what does it take to make your SharePoint Project a success? I am typing this whilst watching the last day of the final cricket Test Match in the series between England and India.It has been a series which will end with England being the number one test nation in the world. As with SharePoint projects I have been involved with, as part of Office Talk, it is interesting to try to work out why England have become so successful. After the Botham, Willis and co. years English cricket suffered twenty years in the doldrums. Years were the Aussies often whipped our bottoms and an England Test match victory was as rare as a Gordon Ramsay swear-free sentence. So why are we suddenly so good?

I believe there are 5 reasons why England cricketers have become so good and these are as follows;

1. They have good coaches and mentors. Players who have been there like Graham Gooch.
2. They spend longer training.
3. They have good players in all areas. Best batters, bowlers and fielders.
4. Teamwork.
5. They have a winning mentality.

So back to SharePoint then and the best way of steering a successful SharePoint Project. The best starting point is the five points we included for the successful England cricket team.    

Firstly, good coaches or mentors. It really helps to have somebody involved who has been there before and knows about the pitfalls and the hidden gems of SharePoint. I strongly recommend you use a SharePoint consultant at least for the early weeks of your project. Somebody who can transfer their knowledge to your SharePoint Project team. I will, of course recommend Office Talk if you are UK based but there are lots of other SharePoint Consultants you could use. Look for ones who are only involved in SharePoint and have experience of working with similar companies to you. If you want a quote from Office Talk please email marketing@office-talk.com.

Secondly, make sure that you Project Team (and Super Users) all have the necessary training. These are the people who will be working the most with SharePoint and sharing their knowledge with others so it is vital they have the correct teaching. Also provide all your End Users with at least a one hour training course and then once a year offer some more training. The more training users have the more likely they are to use the system and use the extra features. You wouldn't just give somebody a bat and expert them to be able to bat against a world class fast bowler.

 
Thirdly, have the best people on the Project Team from all areas of the business. Having all IT personnel won't mean success in the same way as having just a team of bowlers won't. You need people in project team who know how the business really works and can help provide a SharePoint environment that enhances procedures that are already in place and develop new ways of working that can improve the business.

Fourthly, the Project Team needs to be a team and whenever possible work together. Consistency throughout sites and document libraries will help the overall use of the SharePoint. Different Project Team members will have different qualities that they can bring to the team. Shared experiences can help to find and resolve issues even before piloting.

The fifth cricket one was 'a winning mentality'. I don't know if this one is really relevant to SharePoint, but I do feel that it is vital that both the business and all the Project Team members fully believe in SharePoint and what it can bring to the organisation. Any negativity from the Project Team will be passed to the End Users and can prevent success. The England cricketers have a belief that they can now win any Test Match and this is why they never seem to give in. What a great way to celebrate 30 years since Botham's Ashes.

The cricket season might just be coming to an end but the Premier League is very much back with us in England and on Saturday night my beloved Aston Villa FC were top of the league. I celebrated by pressing the pause button when the league table came up at the end of match of the day and filling in my SharePoint Premier League Performance site. You can follow the Villa's performance on SharePoint by visiting http://office-talk-dev.co.uk/villa/SitePages/Home.aspx . There is also the chance to claim your own free 'My Premier League Performance' SharePoint Template by clicking here.   

Come on Villa lets starts challenging for trophies again as we were in the early 80's.

Which SharePoint? Foundation or Server?

Many companies are now taking the plunge and moving to SharePoint 2010 to help them improve their internal systems whilst reducing their overheads, but which version should they chose?  There are actually 5 different versions although two of them are just Internet versions of the ‘Standard’ and ‘Enterprise’ editions so in this blog we will just focus on the main three.

It is not an easy choice and whilst Office Talk’s SharePoint Consultants are happy to advise it really depends on your organisations budget, requirements and technical expertise.

I have a similar decision to make at the moment because for the first time in twelve years I have decided I need a new telly. With the digital switchover happening in my area in just a few weeks and my old chubby Panasonic TV from the 90’s now looks quite outdated it is time to decide which new TV I should purchase. As with SharePoint it depends on my budget (which is probably around £500), which features I would like and which features I am actually going to use. Do I choose a plasma, LCD or LED? It seems to depend on what kind of programmes I am going to watch and what size telly I want. Reading reviews and online articles has probably confused me even more, but in the showroom the LED backlit ones seem to give the best picture. This could of course be because the sales staff just tune them in better because they make more money on them.

 Even when I have decided on LED I have to ask myself do I want a ‘Smart TV’. This isn’t a statement about the look of the TV, but whether it comes with Internet features. It seems that people want to use Twitter, Facebook and even Skype at the same time as watching ‘Coronation Street’. If it is a ‘Smart TV’ should it be wireless or am I happy having a Ethernet cable running behind my sofa? Then do I really want to see my Sky Sports in future in 3D (scary thought of seeing Iain Dowie in 3D)? Then there is the question of if I really want to try and balance those special 3D glasses on top of my normal specs?     

So back to deciding which SharePoint version is right one for you.  The main three SharePoint 2010 versions are ‘Foundation’ (the one that is sort of ‘free’), ‘Standard Server’ and ‘Enterprise Server’.  First consideration is cost and if money is no object then the Enterprise Edition is for you. If you have a very limited budget and already have Windows Server on a 64-bit machine then you can just download SharePoint Foundation 2010 with no licensing costs.  For many the middle one ‘SharePoint Server’ is just right. Sounds like Goldilocks and the three bears beds.

Each of these three versions have different features and thanks to Dave Coleman’s SharePoint EduTech I have listed all the feature differences below;

SharePoint 2010 Version Comparison
Feature	Foundation	Standard	Enterprise
Accessibility	●	●	●
Access Services			●
Advanced Content Processing			●
Advanced Sorting			●
Audience Targeting		●	●
Basic Sorting		●	●
Best Bets		●	●
Blogs	●	●	●
Browser Based Customizations	●	●	●
Business Connectivity Services	●	●	●
Business Data Connectivity Service	●	●	●
Business Connectivity Services Profile Page		●	●
Business Data Integration with the Office Client			●
Business Data Web Parts			●
Business Intelligence Center			●
Business Intelligence Indexing Connector			●
Calculated KPIs			●
Claims-Based Authentication	●	●	●
Chart Web Parts			●
Click Through Relevancy		●	●
Client Object Model (OM)	●	●	●
Colleague Suggestions		●	●
Colleagues Network		●	●
Compliance Everywhere		●	●
Configuration Wizards	●	●	●
Connections to Microsoft Office Clients	●	●	●
Connections to Office Communication Server and Exchange	●	●	●
Content Organizer		●	●
Contextual Search			●
Dashboards			●
Data Connection Library			●
Decomposition Tree			●
Deep Refinement			●
Developer Dashboard	●	●	●
Discussions	●	●	●
Document Sets		●	●
Duplicate Detection		●	●
Enterprise Scale Search		●	●
Enterprise Wikis		●	●
Event Receivers	●	●	●
Excel Services			●
Excel Services and PowerPivot for SharePoint			●
External Data Column	●	●	●
External Lists	●	●	●
Extensible Search Platform			●
Extreme Scale Search			●
Federated Search		●	●
High-Availability Architecture	●	●	●
Improved Governance		●	●
Improved Backup and Restore	●	●	●
Improved Setup and Configuration	●	●	●
InfoPath Forms Services			●
Keyword Suggestions		●	●
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) for SharePoint	●	●	●
Large List Scalability and Management	●	●	●
Managed Accounts	●	●	●
Managed Metadata Service		●	●
Memberships		●	●
Metadata-driven Navigation		●	●
Metadata-driven Refinement		●	●
Mobile Connectivity	●	●	●
Mobile Search Experience		●	●
Multilingual User Interface	●	●	●
Multistage Disposition		●	●
Multilingual User Interface	●	●	●
Multi-Tenancy	●	●	●
My Content		●	●
My Newsfeed		●	●
My Profile		●	●
Note Board		●	●
Organization Browser		●	●
Out-of-the-Box Web Parts	●	●	●
Patch Management	●	●	●
People and Expertise Search		●	●
PerformancePoint Services			●
Permissions Management	●	●	●
Phonetic and Nickname Search		●	●
Photos and Presence	●	●	●
Query Suggestions, “Did You Mean?”, and Related Queries		●	●
Quota Templates	●	●	●
Ratings		●	●
Read-Only Database Support	●	●	●
Recent Activities		●	●
Recently Authored Content		●	●
Relevancy Tuning		●	●
Remote Blob Storage (SQL Feature)	●	●	●
REST and ATOM Data Feeds	●	●	●
Ribbon and Dialog Framework	●	●	●
Rich Media Management		●	●
Rich Web Indexing			●
Sandboxed Solutions	●	●	●
Search Scopes		●	●
Secure Store Service		●	●
Shared Content Types		●	●
SharePoint 2010 Search Connector Framework		●	●
SharePoint Designer	●	●	●
SharePoint Health Analyzer	●	●	●
SharePoint Lists	●	●	●
SharePoint Ribbon	●	●	●
SharePoint Service Architecture	●	●	●
SharePoint Timer Jobs	●	●	●
SharePoint Workspace	●	●	●
Similar Results			●
Silverlight Web Part	●	●	●
Site Search	●	●	●
Solution Packages	●	●	●
Status Updates		●	●
Streamlined Central Administration	●	●	●
Support for Office Web Apps	●	●	●
Tag Clouds		●	●
Tag Profiles		●	●
Tags		●	●
Tags and Notes Tool		●	●
Thumbnails and Previews			●
Tuneable Relevance with Multiple Rank Profiles			●
Unattached Content Database Recovery	●	●	●
Unique Document IDs		●	●
Usage Reporting and Logging	●	●	●
Visio Services			●
Visual Best Bets			●
Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools	●	●	●
Visual Upgrade	●	●	●
Web Analytics		●	●
Web Parts	●	●	●
Wikis	●	●	●
Windows 7 Search		●	●
Windows 7 Support	●	●	●
Windows PowerShell Support	●	●	●
Word Automation Services		●	●
Workflow	●	●	●
Workflow Models	●	●	●
Workflow Templates		●	●

Although you can see that Foundation has a lot less features than the others it is still very powerful and there are many 3^rd Party Add-ons that can add many of these extra features. It is like buying a telly that hasn’t got HD FreeView built-in and then buying a separate HD FreeView box.

Choosing Foundation Edition is similar to choosing a lower spec. TV. If you have never had ‘Rich Web Indexing’ you aren’t going to miss it, in the same way that if you have never had 3D on your TV you won’t miss it.

If I was recommending a ‘Best Buy’ for SharePoint 2010 and taking into account ‘value for money’ then I would nominate the Foundation Edition. But for larger companies (or organisations) who want the largest return on their SharePoint investment then SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition is the one to choose. It is like choosing a 3D Smart TV with built-in HD FreeView and WiFi.

Office Talk offers a free service to help UK companies to decide which version best suits your individual needs. Please email marketing@office-talk.com to find out more.  

So now I am off to the electrical store to buy my new telly ready for the start of the football season. If you haven’t claimed your free Premier League SharePoint Template yet please visit http://office-talk-dev.co.uk and click the ‘Buy It Now’ option.

Good luck to the Villa during the new season.