How Good is Your SharePoint?

In this week’s blog I am going to include a simple rating scale to let you quickly see how good your SharePoint environment is.

However, before then I must say sorry to all my readers because it has been nearly two months since my last Posting. I might have made a good Catholic if I hadn’t been born a Methodist. So what is my excuse for lack of postings? I could blame the Christmas rush, the public strikes or the appalling football the Villa are playing, but the truth is I have just been really busy bee. 

The second half of 2011 has seen a major boom in the number of SharePoint 2010Projects across the UK. At Office Talk all the SharePoint Consultants have been in constant demand for their SharePoint skills. No, that isn’t an opportunity from any Recruitment Agencies to start ringing us! It appears that more and more organisations are now ready to trust SharePoint 2010 and with support for 2007 going soon , (well it is 5 years old) they are choosing now to migrate.

All the corridors look like this

I have spent many nights recently working away from home (well my home until I move next Thursday) and have become an almost permanent guest at a popular chain of hotels. I won’t say which chain of purple hotels or mention Lenny Henry just in case I write anything they don’t like. Now, normally I stay in one that is quite near to the centre of the town, but today as Christmas is approaching there was no room at the Inn so I have had to go to one that is about three miles north of my normal one. At first glance they look identical with even the same purple pictures above the bed and identical bathrooms (at least I only have to learn one lot of shower controls), but then you start to spot little differences. The woman on Reception is less friendly here, the pub restaurant here is far classier (they even do something clever with red cabbage), the breakfast sausages at the other hotel are crispier and the lead on the hairdryer here is longer. I mention the hairdryer because it seems the ironing board and iron are booked out all night so I am trying to de-crease my shirt by drying it with the hairdryer after wetting it in the shower. The long cord means that I can hang it in the open-plan wardrobe as I dry it. So there are pluses and minuses for each of the two hotels. I think I prefer the normal central one but I am not sure. This got me thinking about what makes a good SharePoint environment.   

So here goes with a festive ‘How Good is your SharePoint? Perhaps I should make it into a board game or make it a TV show on some remote TV station.

You start with 50 points and each question could involve you either subtracting or adding to your score. Don’t worry I will keep the maths simple.

1. Was your last successful SharePoint Backup (including SQL Server) more than 48 hours ago? [If you said ‘yes’ lose 50 points]

2. Has your landing page been changed in the last five days? [If you said ‘yes’ gain 20 points]

3. Have most your End Users had at least one hours SharePoint training? [If you said ‘no’ lose 20 points]

4. Do you have a list of all users with Site Owners permissions? [If you said ‘yes’ gain 10 points]

5. Does your Search currently work? [If you said ‘no’ lose 30 points]

6. Have you got any of the following on your SharePoint?
a) Holiday System
b) Purchase Order System
c) Expenses System
d) Staff Directory
e) Risk Assessment System
f) Incident Reporting
g) Visitors Book
h) Web Enquiries
k) IT Helpdesk

[For each one gain 5 points]

7. Have you created any Content Types? [If you said ‘Yes’ gain 20 points]

8. Have you enabled any Libraries to receive emails? [If you said ‘Yes’ gain 10 points]

9. Have you used any Active Directory Security groups in your SharePoint permissions? [If you said ‘Yes’ gain 10 points]

10. Have you created any of the following?
a) Discussion Groups
b) Surveys
c) Blogs
d) Meeting Site
e) Wikis

[For each one you have gain 5 points]

11. Do you have Super Users / Advanced Users clearly defined? [If you said ‘no’ lose 20 points]

12. Do your End Users have access to a manual for your SharePoint? [If you said ‘no’ lose 10 points]

13. If your SharePoint is over 12 months old has it been reviewed in last 12 months? [If you said ‘no’ lose 5 points]

14. Are the Event Logs on all servers in the SharePoint Farm monitored or checked daily? [If you said ‘no’ lose 30 points]

15. Have you created any Template Sites? [If you said ‘yes’ gain 10 points]

16. Do you have a Change Request system in place for your SharePoint? [If you said ‘no’ lose 15 points]

17. Do you have an area on SharePoint for all your Organisation’s policies? [If you said ‘no’ you lose 20 points]

18. Do you have a ‘Social’ area on your SharePoint? [If you said ‘yes’ gain 20 points]

19. Do you have a Disaster Recovery procedure in place for your SharePoint? [If you said ‘no’ lose 20 points]

20. Does over 70% of your organisation use your SharePoint? [If you said ‘yes’ gain 30 points]

This is just for fun but hopefully will get you thinking.

This is what the scoring means;

Over 200 – Wow you’re good do you want to be a SharePoint Consultant?

150-199 – Your SharePoint is going very well take a bow.

100-149 – Not bad, but maybe worth reviewing your SharePoint how you can improve it.

50-99 – Needs some work.

0-49 – Oh dear do you really feel think you can afford a Christmas break?

Below 0 – Please don’t let anybody know that you read Andy Dale’s blogs!

For those people who scored over 100 it is probably time for some Christmas fun. At SharePoint Village we are again running our popular ‘Secret Santa’ competition. Where if you find the six hidden Santa’s you have a chance of winning a superb Xbox 360 Kinect. Sadly I can’t enter, but please have a go at http://www.sharepointvillage.com  

As we are talking about an Xbox I have to bring you back by popular demand the Ronnie Corbett Blackberry sketch.

I am off now to fill the kettle and then wait about ten minutes for it to boil. Why are hotel kettles the slowest in the world to boil? Oh, and how are you supposed to fit them under the basin tap to fill?

  

SharePoint doesn't have to be a frustrating Flatpack.

On Sunday 9th October we opened two large boxes of what claimed to be a wooden desk. In fact it contained 22 pieces of wood, four bags of varying screws, a tube of very sticky glue and an eight page 'easy' assembly guide. The guide claimed it took two hours to assemble; so straight away I was a worried man (remembering the wardrobe of 1998 that claimed one hour and took a whole weekend). But I can now happily report that on Monday 17th October we successfully finished building the desk. Sadly with a few extra holes (as you'll see in picture below the dowels were quite hard) but these have now been disguised by skilfully arranging items on the newly assembled desk. Also quite a few screws left over for future projects (hopefully well in the future).

It didn't all go quite to plan along the way to building the desk

So why am I sharing my lack of DIY skills with you in this SharePoint Blog? I suppose it is because although SharePoint is fairly easy to build it is still very difficult to get the sites to look exactly how you had envisaged and for them to behave in quite the manner you had required. So unless you are a SharePoint expert I would recommend two different ways of building your SharePoint Environment.

Option 1 is the one that many companies do and can make projects run a lot smoother. Is to hire a SharePoint Consultant. I would have loved to have hired a Desk Consultant who would have quickly assembled the desk for me or shown me step by step what needed to be done. Including how far to insert my dowelling rods.

Option 2 is to buy a SharePoint already built. I would have been very happy to buy a desk already built even if it would have been a challenge to manoeuvre it through the study door. So how can you buy SharePoint already built? One way is to buy Site Templates that you can just upload straight into your Solutions Gallery and then you can be using in just minutes (I mean real minutes not Flat Pack Assembly minutes). This is what many customers of Office Talk have been doing and our set of 11 Department Templates have proved very popular. We originally created a set of Templates for SharePoint 2007 (they also worked with WSS 3.0) and then early this year converted them all to SharePoint 2010 (and Foundation).

This Post is turning into an advert for the Office Talk Department Templates , but there are plenty of other SharePoint companies selling Templates too. Office Talk have used their understanding of how both Private and Public Sector organisations work to design templates for the Human Resources Department, Information Technology Department (or whatever IT is currently called), Finance Department, Purchasing Department, Training, Project Departments and the most popular of all the Health & safety Department. Each of these templates contain Lists and Libraries that are relevant to that department. For example the Health & Safety Department includes an 'Incident Reporting System' and the IT Department one includes an IT Helpdesk System.

So my advice if you are looking at implementing SharePoint is to either get expert help with your Flat Pack installation or buy some ready built sites.

At least the desk is now looking sturdy and the drawers are gliding in and out quite freely. Perhaps after around 20 hours of work and several blisters I am reasonably pleased with what Claire and I have created. I might even risk putting a heavy book on it later.

If you want to buy one or all of the excellent Department Templates then please visit the Office Talk website now http://www.office-talk.com/index.php?id=151.

Just make sure if you call in the experts that they really are experts. Never forget when the Trotters claimed they were expert Chandelier cleaners on the classic 'Only Fools and Horses'.