I’m a SharePoint advocate and as such I’ll start with the negative and finish on the positive, it’s how I work.

Firstly, have you ever tried using a web-based document management system? It can be painful, it can be slow, it can time-out (which, because time correlates with how much work you’ve done, is highly inconvenient), it relies on browsers (I’m not even going to expand on this) and as for version control, who has a file on the web that doesn’t also reside in either their ‘my documents’ folder or on their desktop?…

If this hasn’t already reminded you why you reverted back to the network file server, lets look at integration. Having supported hosted SharePoint for a number of years I have helped a number of businesses consisting of teams of independent consultants working remotely from homes and small offices. This scenario sounds ideal to any business owner, think of the savings on office space and equipment, the geography you could cover and the low administrative overhead.

To the support technician however, this scenario is rather different. Lets make the assumption that SharePoint will work exactly the same for two consultants if they are both running the same version of windows, the same version of Internet Explorer, the same version of office and are using the same anti-virus software. This is a very big assumption, now place yourself in this scenario where all 25 consultants use their own laptop and home desktop and throw in every combination of operating system, office version, browser and antivirus software, random installations of updates and patches and a generous helping of spyware and malware to boot. This scenario becomes a seething mass of performance and authentication issues, constantly changing due to automatic updates and system upgrades, the support overhead goes through the roof and, if you’re not careful, the support technician out the window.

But if SharePoint and other web-based document management systems are such a nightmare, why did I say  ‘Yes’ to the original question?

For a start the picture I just painted is only really a horror story for the support technician, indeed he takes his own life at the end, but to the consultant (i.e. The end user) the issues are for the most part a temporary annoyance. In my experience most of the 25 users will have some form of frustration with the SharePoint system, a few very frustrated, however; you cannot make an accurate assessment without taking into account the benefits the system does bring.

Check-in and Check-out to streamline collaboration, version control for auditing and recovery, alerting when documents change, views, filtering and search for document retrieval - access from anywhere?… Priceless.

To be fair, these features aren’t unique to SharePoint, they should be standard to any document management system, so what does SharePoint bring to the mix above and beyond the basics?

The two features I’d bring into the mix are this point are, custom fields and workflows. The reason for this is not to blind you with vague terminology but rather to step document management up a notch into something a bit more clever and a lot more valuable… Let me explain:

Up to this point, a document gets retrieved, it gets edited and it gets saved, whatever the bells and whistles, it essentially remains a simple two dimensional process. Now lets think of the document as more than a document, an entity that has lots of other useful information attached to it as well as the actual document. For example it may be a proposal entity which consists of the word document that is your proposal, the owner of the document, a notes field, the stages of the proposal process, the value of the proposal, the follow-up date etc. etc. These additional fields are what we call custom fields and can be automatically added to the form you use when uploading a document to the system. In itself this is quite valuable, especially if you want to use views to group documents or tally up values (in this case perhaps the total value of active proposals) but where do workflows fit in?

Now we have all the business information we need we can start the clever stuff and we call the clever stuff workflow. SharePoint uses the Windows Workflow Foundation but never mind the technical - I’m not going to start going techie on you now. What you can do with workflow is tell SharePoint to take automatic actions based on events that occur on the system - essentially you can automate business processes. Lets use the proposal system I mentioned earlier, you could create a workflow which would initiate when the sales person changes the status of the proposal to ‘accepted’ - the first step in the workflow might be to create a task for accounts to raise an invoice and at the same time create a new project entry in the project list. When the task completes the value may be entered into the sales figures, meanwhile the project manager has been emailed to notify him the project is a go.

See, this is where SharePoint starts to get sexy; think of a process you want to improve, work out the information, people and stages required, then knock up your new business management system with the built in features of SharePoint… Simples.

Now you may think I’ve veered off the question as to whether SharePoint is a good document management system, and you’d be right, I have but for a very good reason. Many people with document management problems are actually having problems with information management and that is because they are using documents to store active business information - usually Excel documents, when what they should be using is an integrated system or database. Now it is by no means black and white and I appreciate this is a sweeping statement which I will have to clarify in a later post, however my very broad guideline is whether the information is ‘active’ or not. If its not active it is a document and can be stored in a structured document store or, my preference, a big bin. Now I’ll just clarify that by ‘bin’ I don’t mean that ‘special’ filing cabinet that all those board memos and CVs get ‘filed’ in, I mean save everything in one place, no structure and let a search engine do the finding. I personally believe this is how SharePoint works best with documents anyway but in this scenario you’d be looking at MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) and its enterprise search functionality, again another post.

So if I was going to sum up this quite extensive rant, yes SharePoint is a good document management system if you’re prepared to meet it half way and rethink how you manage your information. But it brings a hell of a lot more to the table than document management and that is what I plan to explore in the rest of this series.

A:  A network file server is fantastic if you’re in the office, manageable (but sometimes painful) if you’re out the office on a VPN and basically impossible if you’re in a different organisation. So to share documents externally we look to email, the easiest and laziest way to share documents, completely unstructured and horrific for version control. Combined, these technologies get the job done but they are completely separate systems, impossible to maintain with any form of process and extremely inefficient: Where’s that document? It’s in my email.

Can you send it to me? I’m not sure which is the latest version.

What about the one on the file server? I edited it before I sent it out…

Any of that sound familiar?..

The point is, a single web based system for storing and sharing files can be accessed the exact same way whether you’re an administrator in the office, a director in the far east or a customer in another organisation. The principle is simple: Controlled access to the right document, anywhere you are, by anyone who needs it.

This is the reason an online document management system appeals to businesses and in turn, this is the reason businesses may look to SharePoint to meet all their document management needs.

The new phone itself isn’t much different from the older 3G version, boasting a very similar look and feel, but packing a few extras under the hood:

• Quicker processor
• Double the memory (256MB)
• Updated camera that can do video recording
• Electronic compass
• Nike+

It is quite good that Apple haven’t updated the fundamental design as it means all the accessories and add-ons that were available for the earlier version work with the new one.

The interesting thing about this phone is that most people with the iPhone 3G will not be able to upgrade immediately, tied in as they are to an 18 month contract with O2. That said, sales of the new 3G S seem to have been pretty strong with many original version iPhone users upgrading (my wife upgraded on the day it was released) and a whole bunch of new customers drawn in by Apple’s impeccable marketing.

Of interest to all iPhone users is the update to version 3.0 of the iPhone software which brings with it a whole host of useful additions.

A few highlights are:

• Ability to use rotated keyboard in any app (that supports it) particularly useful in email app.
• MMS
• Copy and Paste
• Enhancements to activesync (main one is to allow push to other folders than the inbox)
• Global Search
• Enhanced bluetooth
• Tethering (ability to use your phone like a USB 3G dongle)
• Push notifications

There are a lot more, I have only highlighted the particularly newsworthy ones and the ones that I personally have found benefit from. The keyboard update and the general user interface enhancement have made the whole experience more aesthetically pleasing and more practical. This is quite impressive considering the quality of the previous version, but Apple have done a good job with the incremental improvements.

Of all the updates I would expect the push notifications to have the biggest long term impact as it will allow developers to build applications that appear to stay open on the device when they have actually closed, this is going to be extremely important for instant messaging and social networking type apps.

Overall the latest updates are a good addition to the iPhone series; I wonder what they have up their sleeves for next year….

Additional information available here: BBC

We have been trialing Windows 7 Beta and more recently Windows 7 RC (Release candidate) and are happy to report we are very impressed with the updates and changes from the previous version (Vista). We are looking forward to this being the stadard on all new PC’s.

During the first three months of 2009, sales of servers worldwide fell 25% against the same period last year. Market research carried out by research firm IDC indicates that global sales were the lowest figure (£6.14bn) since the firm began monitoring some 12 years ago. The outlook doesn’t get any better with the situation expected to continue throughout 2009. 

“Market conditions worsened in all geographic regions during the first quarter as customers of all types pulled back on both new strategic IT projects and ongoing infrastructure refresh initiatives,” said Matt Eastwood, IDC’s group vice president. He continued to add; “Most enterprise organisations are deferring new IT procurements and instead focusing on extending server lifecycles and improving existing asset utilisation.”

This kind of broad decline in sales, across all three server markets – volume, midrange, and high-end systems, has not been experienced since 2002. The big 5 – HP, IBM, Dell, Sun and Fujitsu/Siemens – all suffered a double digit drop in revenue. HP and IBM have been hit the hardest, with Sun and Dell joint 3^rd. Dell alone have seen server revenue plummet by over 31%.

Revenue decline

Server operating system revenue also declined, IDC said.

·         Revenues for Unix servers fell 17.5% compared with the same period a year earlier.

·         Revenues for IBM’s System z servers, running the z/OS operating system, fell 18.9%.

·          Microsoft Windows server revenues fell 28.9% to $3.7bn

·         Linux server revenues fell 24.8% year-over-year to $1.4 billion, its lowest in five years.

Mr Eastwood said companies had suspended buying new equipment and were focusing on extending the lifespan of existing products. “While these strategies are effective in the near term, server demand will begin to improve in the second half of the year as customers begin to rebuild their IT capabilities in advance of a meaningful economic recovery in 2010,” he said.

Whilst the figures are correct, Apple fans will argue there are many reasons for the apparent 2nd place.

For example, the US carrier Verizon undertook an agressive marketing strategy running a Buy one, get one free offer which (unsuprisingly) proved popular.

Another major contributing factor was the fact that the Curve costs 1/2 that of the iPhone 3G and that every iPhone fan is eagerly awaiting the launch of the 3rd version, widely expected this summer.

The release of a new version of the groundbreaking touchscreen device from Apple is certainly a factor behind the reports that both o2 in the UK and AT&T in the US have seen sales slump in the 1st 1/4 of 2009. Down as many as 2.5m since the 3rd 1/4 of 2008. A similar slip was seen last year just before the release of the iPhone 3G in July.

The current top 5 smartphones are:

1. RIM BlackBerry Curve
2. Apple iPhone 3G
3. RIM BlackBerry Storm
4. RIM BlackBerry Pearl
5. T-Mobile (Google) G1

Most of Exchange 2007 appears to have been rewritten to better support large-scale deployments.

• Built-in archiving with retention policy and e-discovery support. Many 3rd party vendors who have built a business upon Exchange Archiving solutions have reason to be concerned. Coupled with Microsoft’s own Exchange Archiving Online, these 3rd party solutions appear to be going the way of the dodo…

• On-premise or Online? How about both….depending on the organisation’s requirements, the on-premise solution will integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange Online.
• Policies for big business - There’s a centralised policy definition and management system. This is based on mainstream regular expression pattern matching and simple boolean logic, applying to message content and metadata, and for users and groups of users. Polices can be enforced manually or through user intervention. The policy framework is used in a variety of contexts, such as for data leak prevention, rights management, determining what is archived, and retention policy.

Other improvements that will have users and administrators looking pleased are;

• Windows Mobile experience steps ever closer to being the same as the desktop via Outlook.
• Anti-error/embarassment features with “MailTips,” users are automatically warned about potential faux pas when an an email is about to be sent, such as when a distribution list will cause it to be received by a very large number of people, or when the email is so large it’s likely to bounce, or when recipients are out of the office.
• Cross-browsers support for OWA - now supports all the main browsers including Safari and Firefox, not just IE.
• Google-esque Conversation view - Email conversations are much easier to manage via the updated Conversation View.
• Voicemail previews - Text previews are generated of voicemail in Outlook, OWA, and Outlook Mobile. This saves a lot of time when quickly scanning through voice messages.
• External Diary Access - Free/busy times can be exchanged with outside parties, not just internal colleagues, with due privacy controls.
• Press 1 to leave me a voicemail - User-customizable voicemail menu hierarchies.
• Much reduced I/O and much more flexible storage options. Continuous replication over WANs is now practical, and provides much faster recovery for damaged message stores. There is generally better resilience in case of system failure.
• Much faster mailbox moves; can be done while users are online, during regular business hours.

Microsoft points out that a number of these features help address the age old problem of mailbox overload, such as MailTips, Voicemail previews, the conversation management tools, the call answering rules, and the rich and consistent Windows/OWA/mobile experience. All of these are welcome and good developments.

However, don’t expect email overload to go away.

To ensure that the same fiasco doesn’t happen again, Microsoft are including an “XP Mode” into their new operating system, Windows 7. The inclusion is a move to encourage users to switch to 7 without fear of incompatability issues.

It will be achieved by using the software giant’s own virtualisation software, “Virtual PC” to run those problematic apps.

A Microsoft blog stated; “Windows XP Mode is specifically designed to help small businesses move to Windows 7,” said Microsoft. “Windows XP Mode provides you with the flexibility to run many older productivity applications on a Windows 7 based PC.”

It won’t be as cumbersome as some imagine, the appliations will be installed directly into the virtual XP envrionment and then published to the Windows 7 desktop/program menu to be run by users.

Without being specific on test release dates, Microsoft have said they will “soon” release a beta version of XP Mode for 7 Professional and 7 Ultimate. It is unclear if the final release will be limited to specific 7 flavours.

Uptake of IPv6 is low, despite predictions that IPv4 numbers will become used up in as little as two years. A recent survey by the Internet Society found that many within a small sample of internet industry heavy hitters reckoned IPv6 uptake was being driven more by fashion than a strong business case.

A team of Google engineers has worked on an IPv6 transition project on a part-time basis for about 18 months. The work means that the majority of the search engine giant’s applications and services have supported IPv6 since January. Google Maps IPv6 support was added last month.

“We can provide all Google services over IPv6,” Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti said during a panel discussion at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) last week.

Google engineers took IPv6 from the development of network architecture blueprints and software engineering work, through a trial phase, until Google made IPv6-based services publicly available. The project used 20 per cent of a team of Google engineers’ time between July 2007 until its completion in January 2009.

Putting together a pilot IPv6 network “was not expensive” nor particularly difficult, according to Colitti, who advised organisations to roll out next-generation IPv6 networks in stages. Colitti said that moving to IPv6 reduces the infrastructure and support costs associated with piece-meal upgrades to existing IPv4 systems, such as the addition of additional layers of Network Address Translator kit. NAT equipment allows multiple internet-connected devices to present the same IP address.

Chicken and Egg

Google recently hosted a conference for IPv6 implementers, shortly after the ad aggregator published a manifesto on why IPv6 was a significant technology.

By expanding the number of IP addresses - enough for three billion addresses for every person on the planet - IPv6 will clear the way for the next generation of VoIP, video conferencing, mobile applications, “smart” appliances (Internet-enabled heating systems, cars, refrigerators, and other devices) and other novel applications.In a report prepared for the National Institute of Standards & Technology in 2005, RTI International estimated annual benefits in excess of $10 billion.

Unfortunately, IPv6 presents a classic chicken-and-egg problem. The benefits of any one network operator, device vendor, application and content provider, or Internet user adopting IPv6 are limited if there is not a critical mass of other adopters. As a result, adoption lags.

Despite this enthusiasm (from Google at least) only a minority of organisations, admittedly very significant players including the US federal government, engineering services firm Bechtel, UK academic network JANET and err… The Pirate Bay, have embraced the next-generation Internet protocol.

Original Article Source: The Register

I believe that Project Management is the most underestimated and undervalued role in business today, overruns are estimated to cost the UK billions each year, not just in the public sector and that’s not to mention the projects that don’t even make the first hurdle because they simply don’t know where to start. However I’m not here to prattle on about the importance of project management, you’ve heard it before, you know it’s important, critical in fact… but why would anyone want to do it? And surely I’m exaggerating when I say I’m absolutely fascinated by it…?

Actually no I’m not, and here’s why;

The Challenge – When over 70% of projects run over budget* what a challenge to scope, plan and see a project through to so its successful delivery on time and within budget! Even more so when you learn that it’s impossible to achieve without building in allowances for variation in scope, implementing cost contingency and adopting a communication strategy throughout its lifecycle.

The Diversity – No two projects are ever the same, by its very definition a project is a one-off endeavour to deliver an end product and its success will depend heavily on the business, people and technologies involved. Liken it to cooking a meal for guests, you can use the same ingredients but their freshness may vary, timings and measure slightly off, helping hands chop to different shapes and sizes, you may just be in the mood for a bit more spice that day and most importantly of all you can almost always guarantee someone will turn up a vegetarian!

The People – You can read every book, know every methodology, use every tool but I have yet to see a successful project run by someone who doesn’t work well with people. There are no tips or tricks that I know of to guarantee that you’re going to get the best out of your team when things get tough and no magic formulas to placate the sponsor when compromises have to be made. If anything, keep calm, keep in control, take full responsibility and treat every stakeholder with utmost respect for the role they are playing. Something to note is that even the most mundane project will have an element of excitement, if you can nurture it and share it around a bit, it can be a powerful influence on the success of the project – a bit of internal project marketing if you will.

The Systems – Never use a system just for the sake of it but always look for better tools to help you manage your projects. Einstein once said, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” There are thousands of tools available for project planning, tracking, reporting, information management and communication, explore them and you’ll come across some gems which will make the entire project easier to manage but be careful not to take your eye, or anyone else’s off the ball. A favourite tool of mine is Microsoft SharePoint for coordinating and sharing information and tracking progress, meetings and decisions that are made throughout the project lifecycle. It’s simple to use and it presents a professional image right at the early stages when you as a project manager are yet unproven.

I realise that I haven’t delved into the depths of project methodology such as PRINCE2 or Theory of Constraints (TOC) but I knew an article on Project Management was going to be rather dry and the last thing I wanted to do was bore myself to death too. I do hope that I have at least expressed my enthusiasm for this topic and maybe even talked some sense along the way. There is a lot more behind project management than this humble introduction which I’d like to share in the future, things I’ve experienced and read and advice I’ve been given but much, much more I have yet still to learn. Thanks for reading.

*Standish Group (2004) on IT projects in the US