5/8/2012
I’ve always thought the word kill comes on a little strong, but at the same time… I think it gets the point across. I’ve been very big into mobile lately and SharePoint’s default mobile WAP interface is driving me crazy. About 5 months ago I wrote about some of my experiences: SharePoint For Mobile – Yes we can!
It’s also not the first time I’ve said “SharePoint Defaults have Faults.” I’ve found we are missing out on more valuable mobile experiences with SharePoint because the mobile interface is on by default in SharePoint 2010. Ironically there is a hidden feature to turn on mobile support, I say turn on because it is off by default. In SharePoint 2007 you could turn on the feature, now that feature is hidden, and oh by the way… it’s useless. Just ignore it. Essentially in SharePoint 2010 you need to work your way up the stack. There are essentially two ways to turn off the mobile browsing interface in SharePoint. It’s the most annoying interface. The experience is horrible for Intranets (no webparts), very sad for publishing sites (no content management), and not even decent at best at collaboration sites (no good info outside of lists). I have to even wonder if there’s someone in India that is appreciating it right now with their old school flip phone. People are NOT using WAP phones, those old text based phones to hit SharePoint anyway I now get 4% mobile traffic and less than 1% of that is WAP the strong majority is smart. They are using their Androids, iPhones, Windows Phone 7. Smart phones recently took over as the most popular in the world. I’m ready to declare victory over the old WAP phones and tell everyone to turn it off… You are losing people because there is NO easy way to browse to SharePoint by default on your phone without getting a bad experience. It requires the Administrator to turn off the WAP interface.
TURN IT OFF
- Modify the web.config in the root of the web app
- Add three lines of code that set all browsers to not be redirected
- Does not allow for browsers to be handled individually
- File is on the server in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\PORT\bin folder of your SharePoint site, where PORT is the port of your site
- Add this section right before the close tag: </system.web>
- Code to add:
- <browserCaps>
<result type="System.Web.Mobile.MobileCapabilities, System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a"/>
<filter>isMobileDevice=false</filter>
</browserCaps>
TURN IT OFF Selectively by USER AGENT
- Redirect based on User Agent: compat.browser - This file lists all of the browser User Agent strings that it will redirect
- Changing a value from true to false for all of them will cause it to NOT redirect those browsers
- Allows for flexibility in switching some browsers back if needed
- Allows more browsers to be added in the future
- This may be hammered during any SP update
- File is commonly at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirutalDirectories\80\App_Browsers\compat.browser (Modify the path based on your webapp)
- Code to change (for each User Agent):
- <capability name="isMobileDevice" value="false" />
Example of a few phones this was built for:
- Pocket Internet Explorer in Microsoft Windows Mobile (as in pre-Windows Phone)
- The Nocki WAP 2.0 browser (xHTML only)
- Motorola Mobile Information Browser 2.2 or later
- Operwave UP browser 6.2 or 7.0
Can I turn it off on one site? I don’t think so. If you come across the hidden feature exposed through STSADM and Powershell… that’s fine in SharePoint 2007, but I have not found success with it in 2010. I’ll list it here for someone to correct me if I’m wrong.
Windows Powershell
· Disable-SPFeature -Identity MobilityRedirect -Url http://yoursite
STSADM
· stsadm -o activatefeature -name MobilityRedirect -URL http://site
While SharePoint for Mobile sounds like a bad experience, it doesn’t have to be. The default masterpage, and even those that are written should have mobile in mind. I end up using SharePoint rich with mobile on occasion, it’s not bad when an admin has turned off the horrible “mobile” WAP interface. One of these days I’m going to make a masterpage that’s designed for mobile phones. I’m making sure our internal masterpages are tested with mobile devices. Interest in that? Let me know. I’ve considered partnering with Heather Waterman or someone cool like that.
All our internet facing stuff has had the mobile interface turned off, now after a meeting today we are turning it off on ALL our web apps… no exceptions.
If you’re looking for a real rich experience you should check out a few of the product reviews recently I’ve done. Harmon.ie launched their product this week, and Colligo launched a couple of months ago. Both of them are pretty sweet.
· Product Review: harmon.ie Mobile – SharePoint on the GO on your Terms!
· Product Review: Colligo Briefcase - Secure SharePoint Sync on your Terms
5/7/2012Overview
The irony continues to amaze me. SharePoint is practically everywhere, but one of its biggest challenges continues to be accessing SharePoint on the go. The experience takes a huge leap backwards whenever you leave your desktop and pull out your mobile device.
No longer. I recently visited the people at harmon.ie and was very impressed with their brand new mobile offering, hitting the streets for the first time. harmon.ie Mobile delivers a full-featured document collaboration and social experience on-the-go that's consistent with harmon.ie for SharePoint on the desktop.
It's definitely worth a look.
Figure 1: harmon.ie Mobile Startup Screen on the iPad
Understanding Challenges Today
In the world we live in, it's not uncommon to find yourself rushing out the door with one or more unfinished documents you need during your trip. You don't bring your heavy laptop but face urgent deadlines. What to do? Most people resort to asking people back in the office to "email the latest changes." And that's when the chaos begins. As soon as you receive the email, you're hit with all the classic version control issues that SharePoint is designed to solve. These issues really cause a lot of problems. The document is not checked out, other people may be making changes simultaneously and there is little to no collaboration between you and your team. So what happens? All sorts of errors and omissions creep into the documents you're traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to present. Then, when you're next online, you upload your version of the documents and BAM! The documents get overwritten and the version history gets blasted. That's the crux of the problem caused by a lack of reviews and lack of collaboration.
As well, projects are constantly changing while you're out of the office. If you're not available to weigh in on document changes, you may cause huge delays or miss deadlines, which is not good for business.
So how can you better equip people to collaborate while on the go? Imagine having all your team documents and colleagues in a unified view on your iPad or iPhone with read-write document access and the ability to share links, see contacts' presence and contact info and get real-time document and status updates. Now we're talking…
My Experience with harmon.ie Mobile
I recently installed harmon.ie on my iPad and pointed to http://www.sharepointjoel.com. Adding a site is really basic. After getting past that initial authentication, which I believe is always the biggest hurdle with any mobile app connecting to SharePoint, I was happy to see all my documents. I navigated into my folders and browsed around. By clicking on a document, I could see the version history and last modified info in clear view; check it out and open it either with a default viewer or document editor; check it back in on SharePoint and email the document or link to a colleague.
Figure 2: harmon.ie Mobile – Documents on the go
Trying to connect to my Intranet, I had a little trouble with our customized single sign on solution, so I started digging. I found that harmon.ie supports a broad range of authentication mechanisms in harmon.ie Mobile. For example: harmon.ie Mobile supports Windows Authentication, Form-Based Authentication, Custom Web login Forms, Client Certificates, legacy Microsoft ISA Server and Microsoft Forefront Authentication or UAG, including the regular basic over SSL with HTTPS and self-signed SSL certificates. I contacted harmon.ie support, and they're preparing a fix. In the meantime, I pointed to harmon.ie's sample site, available out-of-the-box, to check out all the collaboration and social features.
I quickly discovered that my favorite harmon.ie feature, rich document updates, is also available on the iPad. Awesome! This really this is the killer feature, I believe. I can get real time document updates, without having to call or email anyone. So there's no more pestering colleagues to let me know when they've updated a document, and having to wait and wait and wait for that email update. Instead, I can easily see what changes a person makes and when. It's important to note this is something that is not in-the-box in SharePoint. This is special sauce. Good stuff from harmon.ie. I really like the people focus.
Figure 3: harmon.ie Mobile's killer feature: real-time document and status updates
I also love having access to everyone on SharePoint, and when I want to contact them, say to ask a question, I simply click on the contact name and I'm staring at the rich profile details from their SharePoint profiles! Now that's a surprise. I have people search right on my device, and it's a simple step to click on a number to save that info in my contacts.
Figure 4: Access colleagues' profiles and save contact info in personal contacts
It's very comforting to know I've got all my team's contact info, including contacts outside my team working on the project. I can also search by skills, competencies, projects, and all the other goodies stored in the profile. These features give you that "connected enterprise feel" while on-the-go.
So what's the downside?
Tongue-in-cheek, harmon.ie claims they make SharePoint so accessible that they've created a public health risk, as mobile users everywhere begin "SharePointing" while walking. Check out the footage of the mass hysteria at www.DontSharePointWhileWalking.com. It's quite entertaining and an off-beat way to engage users about SharePoint on-the-go.
Figure 5: Pandemonium caused by SharePointing while walking
Seriously, though there's really very little downside to speak of. I think the biggest thing people will find a bit surprising is that harmon.ie is not a document sync tool. It is primarily for online use. You can obviously work with the documents you saved or emailed that are offline, but harmon.ie is not an offline sync client app. So there's no offline cache to worry about if a device is lost. Some businesses have spent a lot of time and effort investing in offline sync apps and document encryption, but with harmon.ie, you've got nothing stored, so the risk is minimized.
The other potential downside may be in the roadmap. There's currently a desktop version for Outlook and an iOS version. So if you're a Windows Phone user or Droid fan, sorry. harmon.ie says these are in the works, but it's worthwhile to let them know you care.
Conclusion
harmon.ie has gone after a key scenario that users are looking for… that unified user experience across the desktop and mobile. In their efforts to address the needs of users to get at their documents, versions, updates, and the people writing the documents, harmon.ie has done a great job at connecting people in an otherwise disconnected scenario. The out-of-the-box mobile experience on the iPad and iPhone is awful. There's no arguing that.
harmon.ie Mobile has differentiated itself by focusing on the people and quick access to documents with the ability to open it across many apps. That will make your users smile. The additional social capabilities that harmon.ie brings to the table are engaging, and the first attempt at nailing down the various authentication hurdles is a very noble one.
I recommend people try the free read-only version first to ensure that you can get at your sites before downloading the $19.99 version. As well, I know they'd love to hear from you. They are easy to contact on twitter at @teamharmonie or through their site http://harmon.ie.
This product review is an unbiased review and a paid service by Joel Oleson. How did I do?
5/2/2012Microsoft is now open about the fact that they will be revealing the details of SharePoint 15 at the SharePoint Conference.
Key points to Note:
- Inside scoop of 15 at the invent
- Product team access
- Dates: Nov 12-15
- Registration opens mid May 2012
- The Hash Tag will be #SPC12
Conference website and more details at http://www.sharepointconference.com
You can contact the SPC12 events team at spc@microsoft.com
4/30/2012Overview
I recently spent some time with the people from Sazneo. The first thing I really noticed was their emphasis on providing real time actionable communication. They are focused on decision making and the ability for teams and people to communicate real time in the context of their data without having to factor in time zones or distance. Rather than taking you out of SharePoint, this tight integration provides rich chat and communication right in the SharePoint interface. If you've got users on the go, there's an iPad, iPhone, Android or BlackBerry web app to keep you connected.
Figure 1: Sazneo on Office 365 – Real Time Team Chat
Understanding Challenges Today
Business users need results quickly. They are in and out of SharePoint sites and searching for the latest. They are looking for that unified experience of having their data and their tools integrated. The Sales Manager starts looking at sales data and he immediately wants to share the results with the team, but he's also looking for that real time feedback. If he was next to his employees, he'd pull them together and fill them in and get their gut reaction. This is real life. It's that question you've got of… is this good or is this bad? Sometimes you don't necessarily want to send an email, and email is so slow as well. You want to get the gut reaction of people who are online, and as well, when someone gets online you want to immediately get their thoughts. It's IRC, Chat, Instant Messaging done professionally with serious integration across devices and embedded in the browser that's cross browser compatible, supporting the old and new browsers alike. The latest release is Sazneo Embed, where site administrators can embed a real-time group messaging capability within the applications they are already using in less than 5 minutes and with no coding. You can see the power of having real time communication in SharePoint.
Something that is unique about Sazneo is that they started with a standalone group messaging service and their customers then requested they build Sazneo Embed to fit this need. People spend time in SharePoint, so it makes sense to give them the tools they need to communicate with their team in real time without needing to learn a new application.
So you've just uploaded a document to your SharePoint site. Now you hope someone finds the document. If they do, maybe they'll read it. The problem is you want to share the file and then get the reactions. How do you do this? Email it around? That's what most people do today. Fills up inboxes and most ignore the email anyway. What if you could stand over someone's desk and say, "Hey, check out that document I just sent to you? " You'll get a much more real time reaction. Real time communication provides that mechanism of having a conversation within a short period of time and to both ask for something and get results. There is power in being able to reach out and get real answers not just to documents, but to questions. You're on a support call and you want to ask the rest of the team in real time. You need communication integrated into the experience. You need to know who is online, and encourage them to quickly respond, so you close the loop.
- In the messaging world, you individually have the story, but there is no central story. Not so with Sazneo. You get centralized logging, and you don't miss messages. In fact when you log in, you'll see unread messages. You don't have to be online to be part of the conversation and to understand what's going on. You can get back online and get the entire conversation.
- As well, with other real time communication tools, you rely on what client apps and server apps you have in your infrastructure. In some organizations the challenge is there never has been a desktop communication tool outside of email. With Sazneo you have the tool baked into the browser, so if you're on a kiosk you don't have to load any software or go to some other site to communicate with your team. You get on the site and your team is there. Someone is missing, no worries… they'll get the message.
- The challenges with teams are things get complicated when the team gets split up. This can be distance, it can be time zones, it can be directories. With Sazneo you don't need to be in the same organization even. Since Sazneo is a cloud based tool you can set up new users outside of the organization and incorporate them in the group conversations. It even works in Office 365, so you can provision vendor or customers depending on your needs. For those on the go there's Sazneo Mobile which doesn't require SharePoint.
Figure 2: Sazneo Mobile – For Your On-the-Go Real-Time Needs
My Experience with Sazneo
I have to say, at first I was a bit excited to see chat in SharePoint. Then I was like… hey, isn't this really competing with the enterprise Lync or Office Communicator. Then I started realizing that a lot of small and medium businesses don't have Lync. As well, I found that as a result of it being embedded in the site with no real ActiveX requirements or Silverlight requirements, it was very portable and for those times when you just need it to be simple and work. It's right there. There were plenty of scenarios that I found that Sazneo hit, that Lync just wasn't designed to do.
The more I dug in, the more I saw it as a professional tool that really worked around the scenario of the team that needed it. For example in one sales scenario, you've got a rich way of keeping all the sales guys working off the same set of communication. I thought it was really cool that ability to start tagging things by customer. Some color coding features did seem to really set the tool apart from other communication. Being able to flag items and quickly see multiple channels of communication really started to make sense. For support teams, sales teams, anywhere you have a team that's a bunch of people who need to be closely coordinated the scenarios started flowing.
The next way I started looking at it was… Really? Isn't this backward? Shouldn't we be pulling in microblogging? Why are we pulling in an interface that looks like IRC chat? To my surprise they had thought about Twitter and actually had a way for bringing in Twitter feeds based on search terms. It gives the team the ability to quickly respond and flag and work on who is going to handle the response. That scenario really started to pop for me for a marketing, brand or social team. Imagine the amount of chaos when everyone has their own Twitter client and that all important tweet that needs to respond to goes into an email. That's definitely not efficient. Nor is sending it as a DM to someone else, where it ends up in an inbox.
Figure 3: Sazneo Channels Using Twitter & RSS
The set-up is quite easy and you can actually set it up yourself for free. Why Not? Check out "3 steps to real time decisions based on twitter activity."
So what's the downside?
Well there's cost. Whilst there is a free version you can try, you have to know how you're going to use it before you start digging in on cost. Guess you'll have that with most products. I find the sweet spot for this tool is actually the team or group that will use it. . You would probably begin your Sazneo roll out in one team or department, e.g. Development, Helpdesk or Sales, where you are managing projects where time is of the essence and then grow Sazneo out from there. You are probably not going to give it to everyone immediately.
It is not microblogging, but then again, it isn't designed that way. I actually think there's something to be said of taking the old IRC principles and bringing them up to today's world of browsers, mobile, and iPads. People are on the go. That's just the reality. The online group chat is just another sweet spot for this tool.
I think those that fail in using this tool don't understand the scenarios well enough. It's not for everyone. If you get where it fits and understand why you're deploying it, you'll likely get good use out of it. This isn't next generation twitter for the enterprise, but like I mentioned before… It just might be that tool that you use to monitor the tweets. Maybe this is the enterprise social tool for marketing management. This is real time messaging and group chat with channels built around processes. It could be the missing link in your processes where you've been resorting to email, and real time communication is a better fit.
Conclusion
There is no reason that your business should not be experimenting with this. It's free for 5 users up to 25MB of storage, with 1 group channel with no monthly fees. The Sazneo pricing scale graduates from there 10 users for $5/month per user, on up to 100 users at $8 per user, and enterprise… give them a call. In any case you get a 30 day free trial for all pricing plans. I think the key thing is to understand your business processes and requirements first, then look at how this tool can embed into your SharePoint site, hit various desktop and mobile users to hit the needs of the team or group where ever they are. Interested, confused or have feedback? Sazneo is listening. Ping them on Twitter which pulls right into their social dashboard @sazneo and tell them @joeloleson sent you.
This product review is a paid service by Joel Oleson. How did I do? You can have him review your tool.
4/27/2012One of the mysteries of SharePoint Profile Management is that scary proposition of deleting old profiles vs deleting my sites which may have data which they shared with other users. In the enterprise it's easy to blame AD for making mistakes about users sticking around too long, but sometimes it is actually SharePoint displaying profiles that are "Missing from Import." These profiles that are missing from import have been flagged to be deleted, but without the My Site Cleanup job, those profile will continue to persist. In our environment, the engineers were worried that my sites would disappear without someone first having a chance to get the data off those sites before they should be deleted. Support was light handed as it was, so turning off a job that was called "My Site Cleanup" felt safe.
That assumption was incorrect. In fact the "My Site Cleanup" timer job does NOT delete my sites! I know that Spence says you my run the My Site Cleanup timer job to delete my sites, but that is only half correct. You must run both the "My Site Cleanup" timer job AND the Site Use Confirmation Deletion to delete My Sites. Most people will never turn on the Site Use Confirmation Deletion, and as a result the My Sites will never be auto deleted. The fears were unfounded. We found we had more than a few hundreds users that were in this case.
Using Windows Powershell to see users "Missing from Import" (This snippet from this article in TechNet "Maintain profile synchronization" has some great info that is often overlooked. People don't even know it exists!! Thanks Ram
Note: you'll need to string the first two or the first and third strings together to see the users or to delete the users manually. This is not the long term solution, but a quick look.
To get the User Profile Service application object, type the following command:
$upa = Get-spserviceapplication <identity>
Where <identity> is the GUID of the User Profile Synchronization service application.
To view the users and groups to delete, type the following command:
Set-SPProfileServiceApplication $upa -GetNonImportedObjects $true
To delete the obsolete users and groups, type the following command:
Set-SPProfileServiceApplication $upa -PurgeNonImportedObjects $true
While it could be said that the feature called Site Use Confirmation Deletion was built based on my feedback it wasn't implemented the way I asked for it. It's one of the most useless features the way it was designed. Here's why… SharePoint has a problem with old unused sites. That's a fact and my feedback was, I need the ability to automatically ping people with old unused sites and encourage them to delete them. Why ping everyone? Why is it not usage based? The more advanced concept is to lock them if no one responds to give us a chance to correct the owners/administrators. We don't want to put an added burden on support. Spence's blog is pretty good, but was just missing that detail, which it sounds like he wanted to explore at some later time.
Spence Harbar did a great post on the Account Deletion and User Profile Sync in SharePoint 2010 back in February that is a must read as is a lot of what he writes.
First off there is a common misconception that Spence addresses in his post: "There are a number of Microsoft sources (including some of mine) that state it's the forth sync run following account deletion that will remove profiles. It is also a common misconception that a full synchronization is required. Both of these are wrong and come from how the previous version worked… This is because the profiles still exist in the Profile DB and are a simply marked for deletion. In order to actually delete the profiles, we must run the My Site Cleanup Timer job. This job will purge the profiles marked for deletion and therefore once complete make the count tally with the number of useable profiles."
Essentially the main point to understand is that to delete a profile it requires not only the profile sync which marks the profiles as "missing from import," but also requires the My Site Cleanup Timer job. This timer job is one of the first ones people will turn off because they are *Freaked Out* that the support issues are going to go through the roof. In SharePoint 2007 if the profile sync ran a few times on the 4th attempt it would clean it up. Now this is not the case in SharePoint 2010. The My Site Cleanup job actually deletes the marked profiles. This job runs hourly by default, but if people think they don't have my sites, they don't need this job. As well if they have no my site host, they won't even get this job.
Also important to note is that the "My Site Cleanup" Timer job requires a My Site Host to be configured on the UPA, even if you are not using My Sites. Spence explains, "If there is no My Site Host configured the job will bail out and the profiles marked for deletion will never be deleted."
Kudos to @harbars for keeping all of us from utter insanity around UPA…
Here's how things go in simple terms:
You want profiles only, no My Sites.
- You need to configure the User Profile Service Application with your import settings. See: Plan for profile synchronization (SharePoint Server 2010).
- You need to setup a My Site Host (but not give anyone rights to create my sites) This is needed for the My Site Cleanup job to show up.
- You need to enable the My Site Cleanup Job to clean up users that are "missing from import" during the profile import.
You want Profiles and My Sites (but no my site deletions)
- You need to configure the User Profile Service Application with your import settings.
- You need to setup a My Site Host and configure it for normal my site creation (Users have rights to create sites on the web app)
- You need to enable the My Site Cleanup Job to clean up users that are "missing from import" during the profile import
You want Profiles and My Sites including My Site Cleanup
- You need to configure the User Profile Service Application with your import settings.
- You need to setup a My Site Host and configure it for normal my site creation (Users have rights to create sites on the web app)
- You need to enable the My Site Cleanup Job to clean up users that are "missing from import" during the profile import
- You need to enable the Site Use Confirmation Deletion to delete sites after X number of confirmations and in Y number of days. The deletion is the key piece. You can configure these settings to whatever you want. It is VERY important to note that any restore of a team site will need to be reset with a confirm that it is in use or it will again be deleted on the next notification round. Changing Owners/Administrators is the key. Doing a simple restore will also restore the # of times a site owner/admin has been notified.
The next question I had was… if you use the actual Site Use Confirmation Deletion process built into SharePoint, will it be in the SP1 Site Recycle bin? I assume it will be and available to restore via powershell, but I haven't had a chance to confirm this. Anyone know?
One resource that's an oldie but goodie is SharePoint Profile Cleanup from Sean, great info about how a lot of this has changed over time:
This update was the key to helping me have doubts "Chris reminded me that I was not quite right about the My Site deletion. While the e-mail itself is not related to the "Site Use confirmation and deletion" feature, sites are not actually deleted unless that feature is turned on. The e-mail to the manager is telling a fib. If the "Site Use confirmation and deletion" feature is enabled, the site is deleted due to the fact that the user never confirms the e-mail checking to see if they are still using the site; not due to the My Site Cleanup Job itself. I also came across another great resource on My Sites and disabled/deleted users from Phil Wicklund that is well worth reading: http://philwicklund.com/whitepapers/Documents/My%20Site%20Concerning%20Scenarios%20Study%20and%20Strategy.pdf)
4/21/2012Overview
You've been there, you're looking for good analytics, but every tool you seem to run only tells you what it can find in the IIS logs. You are interested in the content and users together not just by itself. It's not that hard to find out who your top users are, you want to know if they are doing good things or malicious things. You want to know how the environment itself is performing. Just because people are hitting the pages, doesn't tell you how adoption itself is going. With Adoption and engagement being the ultimate goal, Nintex Analytics is peering directly into what is being stored, used, searched, checked out, by whom, and where we are in the workflow.
Figure: Nintex Analytics: Users Report: Active Users per Month
It comes down to your ability to understand your environment and properly reflect what is actually going on. It's best if you can start out with the questions to ask, but even if you don't know what to ask, in Nintex Analytics you can quickly get up to speed on what's going on with common dashboards that can give you an Overview of System Usage, or a broad overview of the Content & Collaboration that's happening across the environment. Common questions that the business has… How many total sites are there, how many were viewed in the last 30 days, modified in the last 30 days, how old are they on average? Out of box charts will give you the top storage by site, including number and size of content database and more easy to read charts. Because Nintex is written on SharePoint, any chart can be added into a SharePoint site as a webpart. Now that's great portability.
Figure 2 - Below: This System Usage Dashboard is one example of a report providing trends with both metrics and charts blended into a rich report that can easily be exported into a variety of formats including PDF and Excel. You may want it in email. Just subscribe.
Figure 3 - Below: The Chart designer allows you to pick chart types, colors, gradients, axis, and see it change before applying it.
Understanding the Challenges Today
1. I want to better understand the real business value I'm getting out of this SharePoint Deployment – Today it's a real problem trying to figure out if the platform is growing. Most will focus on the unique users as a method for determining if the platform is being adopted. What's the problem with that? Well what happens when HR puts a link to the time tracking application on the home page of the Intranet. Does that equal adoption? Some would say stop looking at Unique Users and start looking at number of visits. Well that's a good suggestion, now we can count the number of visits to the time keeping app, but we're also tracking the number of visits to the cafeteria menu. Until you really start digging into what the users are *really* doing with SharePoint, and what they are searching for, you'll be spinning your wheels on determining if you're platform is meeting a business need, filling a gap, or missing the mark. You've invested in your platform, is it working.
2. You've invested in SharePoint as a Document Management or Records Repository, can you trust it? What about Trust, privacy and security? There's a lot of concern around SharePoint as a potential dumping ground that pushes data from file shares or even potentially more secure sources into a more accessible, heavily indexed, and exposed environment. A lot of people stripped out the security when they did their migration. Are you worried about certain files or libraries? I am. I've invested in that area. I am concerned about people who don't know what they are doing. The killer feature in this box is email subscriptions for files or sites I care about. Imagine getting emails about sensitive files. I can see exactly who is accessing those files. I can schedule reports, I can run one on demand, but most important I can report when someone is accessing my files I don't have to jump out to some reporting interface, I can get the email and know what's going on.
3. Canned reports, are ok, but I'm still going to have to create custom scripts to gather the data I need… right? Actually, the extensibility in the box is pretty rich for building customized reports, charts, with backed access to all of the data that's being collected. You can also take the data and build reports to your heart's content in Excel. They can also be reported and displayed on the sites where the data should live. The data can be quickly retrieved and displayed in a webpart. In fact you can empower your users to create, configure and customize reports. You decide who has access based on privacy requirements. Worried about the backend performance hit or waiting around for reports to render? There is report cache to help you avoid the wait times. Need fresh data? No problem, you can also retrieve fresh results on demand. The data is collected real time as the system is being used, so there is no heavy process trying to pull in logs. The data is loaded into a data warehouse for reporting or compiling reports that are cached for fast access. Any existing investment in Nintex Workflow also pays off with rich reporting on workflows and activity reporting.
Figure 4 - Below: How integrated is it really? Check it out… manage it right in SharePoint Central Admin.
Figure 5 - Below: Pick from available data columns based on data to build custom charts. Auditing data is gathered and you decide what is important. If you don't want to customize it, you'll find many reports are designed for the most needs and environments right out of the box.
My experience with Nintex Analytics
I'm personally always skeptical whenever I look at any reporting tool. I've been looking at web analytics reports for over 15 years, so any tool that tries to tell me it looks at analytics in a new way makes me furl my brow. When I really started digging and didn't find the common usage reports I was looking for I realized… Hey there's a different approach here! So what is it? Essentially Nintex Analytics is not trying to be your web analytics tool. It's not trying to be your Google analytics or your latest IIS reporting tool or the latest real time usage analytics tool. Nintex as a company has been there with SharePoint since the beginning. Really there were one of the first if not the first that brought third party tools to the SharePoint platform. As a result they have heard a lot of complaints from business users over time, and the web analytics piece is a crowded Market. What there isn't a lot of, is SharePoint specialized analytics tools. Nintex starts with understanding the platform. They start with gathering everything that can be gathered around how files are being used, how the workflows are being processed and getting at items that your best web analytics tool wouldn't ever be able to touch. What does a web analytics tool know about your site collection or your database?
That in mind, I find it humorous just how many custom tools I've seen built over time to collect the total number of site collections, grovel data to find out the largest sites, the most used sites, and pulling data from SQL to pull in content database size reports. This data is such a pain to gather from so many different places.
What I do know is that Nintex has a niche in Workflow, this need extends to people wanting to get analytics on their workflows. If you're already reporting on workflows, why would you not want to know everything you could know about your users, files, file types, databases, your storage, and the ability to answer those things you don't even know to ask.
Something that I have been noticing is the great relationship that Nintex has with Microsoft. A lot of former employees of the SharePoint team have made their way to Nintex. Why is that? Full disclosure… I spent some time doing some consulting with Nintex when I first left Microsoft. They've got a great operation, and the management team is the friendliest bunch you'll ever meet.
What's the Downside?
Make sure you know why you are buying this tool. Some people are just fine with the SharePoint reports out of the box. I'm NOT in this camp. Even the free tools you can find on the web only start to scratch the surface. Nintex did not build Nintex Analytics to report on web usage. Nintex Analytics can give you reporting on storage usage by database, by site, by file type, there are reports they are not trying to give you in the areas of usage reporting. I mentioned above that Nintex Analytics is not trying to compete with the Webtrends of the world. You are not going to get "referrals," or "country, city" reports, you're not going to get "pages not found" reports, or "orphaned sites". This tool is literally gathering what it can from a number of sources and builds an impressive data warehouse of data that can help you understand the data, lists, and sites in your environment more than most other tools and display it in some of the more impressive charting that you'll find. It is important to note that Nintex Analytics has provided an SDK where you can pull in data in other databases to create new data set templates to query any database. There are tools that Nintex Analytics is not. It's not an Admin tool, it's not a recovery tool either. First understand what auditing reporting, adoption and usage reporting looks like in the box, then you'll be able to have an intelligent conversation… as those areas are definitely lacking. There are some management tools that do try to do some reporting, but Nintex Analytics really does focus squarely on putting the data they can gather at your fingertips so you can decide what is important. Understand the tool, explore it. The data collection possibilities are pretty wild. The real diversity of reports is vast.
How well do you understand your requirements around reporting and analytics? Ask yourself that question, look at the out of the box usage reports, and health reports, and then come back with a good list of what you'd like to know. There is a lot to choose from.
Figure 6 – Below: The first screen of many of available datasets to choose from for designers building reporting data set templates.
Conclusion
Nintex has put together a very rich set of data right out of the gates. The canned reporting data you get is rich and useful for IT and the business. Those responsible for ensure that adoption is happening are definitely going to be interested in getting their hands on these reports. They are exportable to PDF and Excel, so you can even print them. If you don't know what you're looking for, that's ok, they've got most of what you're looking for and a lot more that can be easily put together in data sets and templates. Invest as little or as much time as you'd like. In my mind the quickest ROI is on telling your people with highly confidential data that they can subscribe to a report or even better "Watch a document" or site and when people start hitting those documents the emails will help them understand why they moved to SharePoint in the first place. This feature is golden. Hope you're excited about that one as well. I hope it does settle the question about how well we can manage what is really happening in SharePoint… and I think that's really the value out of what you'll get out of Nintex Analytics. A better understanding of what really is going on in our environment.
This is a paid and unbiased review by Joel Oleson of SharePointJoel.com 4/17/2012Where do I start? The users demand support for multi lingual. First step I see is to start supporting the language packs… but which ones? You need to figure it out. You may not be best served by simply installing all of them. What would happen if MS decided to stop supporting one of them? I've found a few places that make me sound smart when I recommend languages to support… It doesn't have to be a guessing game. 1) Active Directory mailbox language info 2) Language Usage Report on the Intranet 3) Looking at Top languages of the Internet world (Useful for Internet Sites)
This was my approach…
- Look at stats of msExchUserCulture - Starting with a survey was stupid. There are systematic ways of getting this data, and very few will admit they need translation. If they will, they won't tell you in English. The first systematic way I found was to look in the AD at a specific Exchange attribute... Specifically the "msExchUserCulture" attribute in AD. With permissions.
One way to find out what language your users are speaking is to find out what language the users are using for their mailboxes. With Outlook Web Access there is an attribute that the Exchange Servers group has write permissions called the msExchUserCulture attribute. This attribute contains one or more preferred languages and essentially when the users is using outlook web access it knows what language to display the UI for the User. I dumped the data into excel and then did subtotals on the columns. Then I normalized it further to collapse all the english and spanish. Get the mailbox data out of exchange. There is a field in Active Directory where it reports the mailbox "msExchUserCulture"
"How it worked before Exchange 2007
In previous versions of Exchange Server, the language for a user mailbox was determined by the language setting of the MAPI agent (such as the Outlook client) and not by the Exchange server:
At the first connection of a MAPI agent (like Outlook client) to a user mailbox, the language of the default folders (like inbox) and system messages (like quota messages and non-delivery reports) was set on the information store (PR_LOCALE_ID MAPI property) to the language used by the MAPI agent.
And now with Exchange 2007/2010
In Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, you can specify the language preferences for a mailbox, in order of preference, with the Languages parameter by using the Exchange Management Shell and the Set-Mailbox cmdlet. Several Exchange components display information to the user using the preferred language, if that language is supported. "
More info at Language Setup for a mailbox on technet blogs
Set-Mailbox -Identity "Carlo Dupont" -Languages "fr-FR"
Does this mean that the administrators set all the languages? No. There's this setting called "DefaultClientLanguage: The default value for this setting is 0. This means the default client language is not defined and users will be prompted to choose a language and time zone the first time that they log on to OWA. If the value is defined (different from 0 ) (for example 1036 for French (France)), users will not be prompted to choose a language and the OWA time zone will use the time zone of the Client Access server."
So the users essentially can configure both language and time zone.
You can get a dump of the data with an LDAP query, Windows Powershell or by running dsquery user. Be careful. You could likely work with your directory team to get the data, but really any Windows Server with DSQuery User you could likely get the data you're looking for.
Understanding the Data
msExchUserCulture = en-US or pt-BR or es-MX or en-US,fr-FR etc…
Here's a good list of all of the language codes (Well actually it's missing Turkish and Japanese, so refer to this one if you can't find it) first two digits are language, and the second two are country codes. I also found this regional and language settings page helpful. It lists the language codes which are very useful for older versions of SharePoint and has a list of the various time zones around the world. I'm considering adding that as a choice field on the profile page. Great setting for a global audience. Just saying I'm in Russia doesn't say when it's cool to call me.
Some of the Chinese codes were a little more challenging, so I'm listing those here:
zh-tw | Chinese (Taiwan) | zh-cn | Chinese (PRC) | zh-hk | Chinese (Hong Kong) | zh-sg | Chinese (Singapore) |
EN-US is English-United States. PT-PT is Portuguese-Portugal and PT-BR is Portuguese-Brazilian. In SharePoint there are really only one language where the country code is important. (All the language packs are listed further down in this document.) Portuguese for SharePoint has both a Brazillian and a Portuguese version. So, essentially all of those Spanish variations don't really result in any difference in SharePoint itself. It's the same diff with English. They are all dumped into 1. There are two types of Chinese, but those are different in the codes themselves. Sorry no French Canadian language pack. Just French. Would you be interested in the Canadian English language pack, eh?
Ultimately I put together a list including counts per user (omitted for privacy reasons):
Language | English | Spanish | Portuguese (Brazil) | German | Japanese | Russian | Korean | French | Simplified Chinese | Italian |
In our case we looked at Portuguese and found that most of our needs were for Brazilian Portuguese. That list represents our top 10 languages we want to support… but wait! Shouldn't we also verify that those users are using the Intranet, and what about growth?
2. Now I jump into our web analytics software and drill down on User browser language, and look at the data from a recent month, and do some comparisons.
Language | English | Spanish | Portuguese | German | Japanese | Russian | Chinese | French | Italian | Korean |
While it tells us that Chinese are more frequent users of the Intranet and Koreans are less frequent users of the Intranet we still ended up with the same list of 10, which is great news.
3. I think it's important to point out the Top 10 Languages of the Internet.
Looking at this list we actually aren't that far off on our language usage. The only difference I see is Italian vs. Arabic.
Finally I look at the list of SharePoint Language Packs, and start lining them up. … (As of this post 4/17/2012) more detail on technet.
Language | Language ID | Top 10 for Intranet/Internet | Language Codes | Arabic | 1025 | + | AR-* | Basque | 1069 | | | Bulgarian | 1026 | | BG-* | Catalan | 1027 | | CA-* | Chinese (Simplified) | 2052 | x | Zh-* (Taiwan, Hong Kong) | Chinese (Traditional) | 1028 | | | Croatian | 1050 | | HR-* | Czech | 1029 | | CS-* | Danish | 1030 | | DA-* | Dutch | 1043 | | NL-* | English | 1033 | x | EN-* | Estonian | 1061 | | ET-* | Finnish | 1035 | | FI-* | French | 1036 | x | FR-* | Galician | 1110 | | GL-* | German | 1031 | x | DE-* | Greek | 1032 | | EL-* | Hebrew | 1037 | | HE-* | Hindi | 1081 | | HI-* | Hungarian | 1038 | | HU-* | Italian | 1040 | x | IT-* | Japanese | 1041 | x | JA-* | Kazakh | 1087 | | KK-* | Korean | 1042 | x | KO- | Latvian | 1062 | | LV-* | Lithuanian | 1063 | | LT-* | Norwegian (Bokmål) | 1044 | | NO-* | Polish | 1045 | | PL-* | Portuguese (Brazil) | 1046 | x | PT-BR | Portuguese (Portugal) | 2070 | | PT-PT | Romanian | 1048 | | RO-* | Russian | 1049 | x | RU-* | Serbian (Latin) | 2074 | | SR-* | Slovak | 1051 | | SK-* | Slovenian | 1060 | | SL-* | Spanish | 3082 | x | ES-* | Swedish | 1053 | | SV-* | Thai | 1054 | | TH-* | Turkish | 1055 | | TR-* | Ukrainian | 1058 | | UK-* |
+ top 10 for Internet
What about the SharePoint Server install language?
I'd tell you it doesn't matter, but out in the field I hear something different. I've talked to plenty of Admins and Ops guys with years of SharePoint and Microsoft experience. I've been hearing a tune that says… Install English SharePoint servers even if you don't speak English as your first language. Why? That's sounds arrogant. Well, it is, but it's also the language of the product team and the common language of the community where you'll be getting your support. If you try to translate your error message if it doesn't match up, you will likely have problems with searches on the Internet to find those errors and error codes. I'm just passing on some best practices from the middle east. I thought it was clever, and sad but makes sense. Wish it was as simple as having my blog come up in various languages as well. I wish you could read this blog in your native tongue.
I feel bad for saying that. I've spent a lot of time in South America, and I'd actually say from a Spanish perspective, you're probably ok. I just wanted to put that out there. Many companies have their own policies when it comes to server and OS language. Japan and Korea may be fine as well. There are a lot of great experts that speak Japanese and Korean. Use your best judgement. Look at the third party tools you're wanting to install. AvePoint, Quest, Axceler Bamboo as an example, some of the largest vendors don't support all of the languages that SharePoint supports. So be careful. Make a few calls. I'm definitely less concerned about language support.
I hope this information is useful. Saw a Facebook comment about me recently that said I haven't posted anything useful in a while. I'm posting this in spite of what that guy wrote, not because of it. Dude, that's not motivating. 4/13/2012Very excited to say this last trip was extremely productive. Not only did we speak at MS Days Bulgaria and have an incredible #SharePint #ShareDinner with my new Bulgarian SharePoint friends, but with the superb help of Darko Milevski SharePoint MVP in Macedonia and the incredible community in Skopje Macedonia. Key people including Dejan Dimitrovski (MS DPE), Fitim Durmishi, Rusul Ibrahimi, and Ahmed Abdullai.
When we met Darko over email, we thought it was going to be great to meet up with some SharePoint people out of the .NET or SQL usergroups in Macedonia. He incredibly surpassed our most wild thoughts… with Macedonia SharePoint Conference when we showed up and over 100 people show up and over 150 people registered for the newly created SharePoint User Group. Fantastic!!
There's a facebook page for the Macedonia SharePoint User Group. Definitely get involved. Read more about our travels in Macedonia and the mysterious gypsy city.
There are many great communities in the Balkans:
Croatia:
Toni Frankola SharePoint MVP in Croatia #CROSUG & the SharePoint User Group in Croatia - Hrvatska SharePoint Grupa. I hear there was an event coming up. I'd suggest pinging Toni.
Slovenia: Branka Slinkar and Slovenian SharePoint Users Group SloSPUG on Facebook. Don't miss the upcoming Konferencia SharePoint dnevi – I was there last year with Toni, Michael, Paul, Zlatan, and it was great! Planning on 2012!
Bosnia & Herzegovina:
Dragan Panjkov – User Group leader SharePoint User Group 1sug.com in Bosnia and Herzegovina (9 months ago) Zlatan was one of the first speakers in Bosnia & Herz. I hear there is an upcoming SharePoint event.
Hungary: Agnes Molnar – SharePoint MVP Community lead in Hungary #HUNSUG @hunsug
Macedonia: Darko Milevski – SharePoint MVP Macedonia in Skopje #MKSUG Macedonia SharePoint User Group
Bulgaria: Radi & Tihomir - The ones who run the SharePoint User Group in Bulgaria are Radi SharePoint MVP and MCM and Tihomir from Microsoft. Facebook страницата ни
SUGBG в LinkedIn
Picture above of our SharePint/ SharePoint Pre MSDays Show Dinner below: Milen Dimov, Radi Atanassov, Tihomir Ignatov, Paul J. Swider, Ивайло Хинов and Rossen Zhivkov. (Yeah, Michael, Paul and myself are in there as well.) You can read more about my travels in Bulgaria
Albania & Kosovo: Betim Drenica
leads the MS Developer .NET technical community in Kosovo.
While there isn't yet a full on SharePoint User Group in Kosovo, there is a great group of smart guys that we got together with in Pristina, Kosovo. You can read about our travels in Albania and Kosovo on my travel blog. Betim is well connected in Albania as well. He could likely line up technical folks in Tirana as well.
Am I missing anything? Let me know…
Check out the SharePoint Romania Experts that get together to talk SharePoint in Romania.
4/11/2012As many of you know, I run the SharePoint team at a large non-profit by day. After hours, I organize SharePoint Saturday Utah, an annual event that brings more than 20 SharePoint experts and hundreds of attendees together for a full day of SharePoint educational sessions. If you've ever managed an event or project involving multiple parties and moving parts, you know that email is a horribly inefficient tool for collaboration. Your inbox gets inundated as people respond to the call for papers and you have to deal with a ton of event logistics, ranging from venue options and shirt sizes to speaker forms and schedules.
On April 24th, I'm teaming up with harmon.ie evangelist Michal Cohen, and my sidekick biz consultant, Ron Fetters, to share real-world tips and tricks for organizing events and projects more efficiently using SharePoint, while making SharePoint accessible via email. Join us for this Webinar to learn how to organize events and projects more efficiently using SharePoint, improve the user experience, and make your work life much easier.
Specifically, we'll demonstrate how to:
- Streamline the process of issuing a call for papers and consolidate responses.
- Manage emails, overcome email attachment renaming issues, and save messages alongside the files they relate to on SharePoint.
Simplify the search for resources, people and content on SharePoint and stay abreast of what's new on SharePoint with social and document updates.
Join us on April 24th at 11:00am Eastern, 8am Pacific. Global participants welcome.
Register now!
Hashtag for this event is #harmonieSP |
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