The Connection Between Metadata, Social, and Personal Productivity

The Connection Between
Metadata, Social, and Personal
Productivity

Christian Buckley

cbuck@axceler.com
@buckleyPLANET

SharePoint Saturday UK
November 12th, 2011
Email Cell Twitter Blog
cbuck@axceler.com 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.com

My Background

Christian Buckley, Director of Product Evangelism at Axceler

• Most recently at Microsoft
• Microsoft Managed Services (now Office365-Dedicated)
• Advertising Operations, ad platform API program
• Prior to Microsoft, was a senior consultant, working in the software, supply
chain, and grid technology spaces focusing on collaboration
• Co-founded and sold a collaboration software company to Rational
Software. Also co-authored 3 books on software configuration management
and defect tracking for Rational and IBM
• At another startup (E2open), helped design, build, and deploy a
SharePoint-like collaboration platform (Collaboration Manager), managing
deployment teams to onboard numerous high-tech manufacturing
companies, including Hitachi, Matsushita, Seagate, Nortel, Sony, and Cisco
• I live in a small town just east of Seattle, 4 kids. Co-authoring ‘Implementing
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Real-World Projects’ (MSPress, Feb2012)

Axceler Overview
Improving Collaboration for 16+ Years
Mission: To enable enterprises to simplify, optimize, and
secure their collaborative platforms
Delivered award-winning administration and migration
software since 1994
Over 2,000 global customers

Dramatically improve the management
of SharePoint
Innovative products that improve security, scalability,
reliability, “deployability”
Making IT more effective and efficient and lower the total
cost of ownership

Focus on solving specific SharePoint problems
(Administration & Migration)
Coach enterprises on SharePoint best practices
Give administrators the most innovative tools available
Anticipate customers’ needs
Deliver best of breed offerings
Stay in lock step with SharePoint development and market trends


How productive are your
end users on SharePoint?


Email Email Cell Twitter
Cell Twitter
Blog Blog
cbuck@axceler.com cbuck@echotechnology.com @buckleyplanet
425.246.2823 425.246.2823 @buckleyplanet http://buckleyplanet.net
http://buckleyplanet.com

What are their most active sites?
What are their usage patterns?
What business problems have been
improved or solved by SharePoint?
What has been the ROI of your most
recent SharePoint deployment efforts?


Many managers have a difficult time
answering these questions

Not because the platform is failing to provide
value, but because of a lack of measurements

How do you measure your success?


It is easy to put a value on quantitative
improvements to
productivity

It is difficult to put a value on qualitative
Email improvements
Cell Twitter Blog

What is personal productivity?


Is it simply about getting more stuff done, faster?

Personal productivity is about:
Setting meaningful and measurable objectives
Evaluating the objective into actionable items
Completing the individual actionable items
Reviewing and acknowledging your progress
(http://workawesome.com)


SMART goals

S - specific, significant, stretching
M - measurable, meaningful, motivational
A - agreed upon, attainable, achievable,
acceptable, action-oriented
R - realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding,
results-oriented
T - time-based, timely, tangible, trackable


What are you doing to make
your end users productive?


Creating Passionate Users, Kathy Sierra

Areas for initial focus

Are you optimized for search?
Have you prioritized feature and solution requests?
Have you established a cycle for continuous
improvement on what you’ve built?
Have you adopted a metadata strategy?
Have you developed a social strategy?


Role of Social in SharePoint

End Users

Search
Governance

Social Media

Taxonomy Ad Hoc

Metadata

What is metadata?


Definitions

In Biology, taxonomy is the science dealing with the
description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms.
“however, the term is now applied in a wider, more general sense and
now may refer to a classification of things, as well as to the principles
underlying such a classification.”

“Metadata provides context for data. Metadata is used to facilitate the
understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data.
The metadata required for effective data management varies with the
type of data and context of use.”
Wikipedia.org

The role of metadata

• Metadata is the key to making social media
work inside the enterprise

• Most social media brands are built for the
individual (and ad revenue)

• Metadata makes social media visible,
searchable, linkable, relevant

• Metadata is the building block of social
media within SharePoint

The Role of Metadata

Scott Singleton, Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010
http://www.slideshare.net/scottsingleton/managed-metadata-insharepoint2010

Social tools use both
taxonomy and folksonomy


• Document name • User name • Status
• File type • Department • Approval
• Author • Title • Check in / check out
• Description • Role • Version
• Page number • Project
• Retention rules

• Book title • Name • Device ID
• Author • Account Number • Email
• ISBN • Credit Card • Software version
• Publisher • Social Security #
• Billing Address

Metadata is the lifeblood of SharePoint

Taxonomy and metadata drive the tools and
processes that make the world go round

Metadata powers search,
it powers social media,
and it powers SharePoint


Structured and Unstructured

CENTRALIZED DECENTRALIZED
Site architecture is centrally controlled Site architecture is ad-hoc
Metadata is always applied to content Metadata may not be applied to content
Site Columns and Content Types are created at Columns are created on lists
site collection root Columns are combined in an ad-hoc basis on each
Lists get “bundles” of columns list

PROS PROS
Improves consistency Requires no planning
Reduces metadata duplication Requires little upfront effort
Easy to update Works across site collections and portals
Easy to support and train on
Allows document-level DIP, Workflow, Information
CONS
Policies, and document templates Decreases consistency
Increases metadata duplication
CONS Hard to update
Requires planning Hard to support and train on
Requires upfront work Only allows list-level Workflow, Information Policies
Hard to manage across site collections and and document templates
portals Difficult to reverse

Definitions

“Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social
interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing
techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to
transform broadcast media monologues (one-to-many) into social
media dialogues (many-to-many).

It supports the democratization of knowledge and information,
transforming people from content consumers into content producers.”
Wikipedia.org


Why are social tools important?

They surface data, provide content
They are another layer of the search
experience
They are increasingly the common way
in which people communicate

November 13, 2011

Why SharePoint Needs Social

Islands of information
You can’t find anything
You can’t tell who owns what
You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old,
or what has changed
It’s all disconnected


The Social
Informatics
Shift


Social Informatics is the study of information and
communication tools in cultural and institutional
contexts

It is a cross-disciplinary focus on usage patterns. It
is a blend of
sociology, anthropology, psychology, technology
and business perspectives, examining the changing
way in which we do business. (Wikipedia)

The Connection Between Metadata, Social, and Personal Productivity

The Future of Social Media


What are the social tools
within SharePoint?


Social Media in SharePoint
2007 2010
Blogs Managed Metadata Service
Wikis Advanced routing (based on metadata)
My Sites User profiles (My Sites)
Team Sites Status updates/activity feeds
Discussion forums Knowledge mining
Shared calendars Bookmarks (replaces My Links)
Alerts Feedback/rating
RSS Note board (Wall)
Search Podcasting kit
Tag clouds Social tagging
Mobile accessible Expertise tagging
Presence awareness Wikis (including wiki edits of Team Sites)
Email archiving Share & Track tab
Individual and team blogs
Email Cell Twitter People and social search
Blog

[Reality Check]


Problems in Paradise

Feature OOTB? Issue
Tag Clouds Sort of Not a true tag cloud, not tied to blog content

Star Ratings Sort of Need to heavily configure

RSS feeds Yes Need to turn them on, light configuration

Anonymous Access Yes Enabled by farm admin, decreases SP security

My Sites Integration Sort of Some actions show up in the activity stream

Comments Approval No Third-party solutions can enable this

November 13, 2011

Social driving personal productivity

Activity streams adding narrative, context to content
Wikis simplifying collaboration between >2 people
Real-time connectivity bringing teams together
across the hall, around the world
Partner ecosystem closes many of the gaps


NewsGator

• Aggregated newsfeed across
SharePoint sites, and using
Social Sites, feeds outside of
SharePoint
• Expanded trackable items
• Daily news digest
• Add individuals, groups, and
hashtags
• Create groups, each of which
have their own microblog,
documents, calendar, and
other capabilities
• Statistics on social activity

Attini

• Provisioning process for
adding new users
• Attini Talk provides
microblogging, nested
comments, sharing, mentio
ns and badges
• Improved blog
capability, plus
• Aggregate news, and
• Aggregate video assets


SnapWorkSocial

• Social within team sites,
does not create separate
page
• Microblogging
• My Site integration
• Task integration
• Aggregate feeds
• On-prem, cloud, and
Office365


Strategy for improving
productivity


Strategy for Improving Productivity

1. Understand your culture
2. Communicate your vision
3. Develop your use cases



4. Define your solutions
5. Outline your taxonomy



4. Define your solutions
5. Outline your taxonomy
6. Build your solutions
7. Implement a governance model
8. Consolidate, update, improve

Predictions on the future of
productivity in SharePoint

Advances in the features we know
More “built in” capability and solutions
SharePoint becoming more or less “middleware”

November 13, 2011

For more information

Contact me at
Christian Buckley, cbuck@axceler.com, 425-246-2823
On Twitter at @buckleyplanet
www.buckleyPLANET.com

Check out
SharePointProMag.com article How SharePoint 2010 Stacks
Up to Your End-User Social Media Requirements


The Connection Between Metadata, Social, and Personal Productivity

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