For those who missed the webinar this week, Axceler hosted SharePoint governance and information architecture experts PaulCulmsee (@paulculmsee) and Michael Pisarek (@michalpisarek) for a webinar entitled Aligning SharePoint to Business Goals: Don’t Just Say It, Do It which is a must-see for teams and organizations struggling with defining and defending the scope and business value of their SharePoint deployments. Paul is a well-known SharePoint expert and consultant based out of Perth, Australia, and recently published his book The Heretic's Guide to Best Practices. Michal is a SharePoint MVP and consultant, and is the founder of SharePointAnalystHQ.com 
The problem is more fundamental than just SharePoint -- it is a recognized deficiency in many IT projects: projects often move forward without a clear understanding of what is to be delivered, without a clear picture of that "end state" of the project. Many IT teams see the inherent value in SharePoint, but have trouble articulating this value to management and executive sponsors, which is a serious problem -- and this can impact the long-term success of a project.
Here's how Paul and Michal describe what they cover in this webinar:
It is common to hear consultants wax lyrical about how we have to align SharePoint to "business goals". While this and other popular clichés like "obtain executive support" or "obtain user buy-in" are easy to say, in practice they are much harder to do. After all, if this was not the case, then business goal alignment would not be near the top of the list for SharePoint challenges.
Deploying Microsoft SharePoint is about alignment, adaption and adoption (all that “people stuff” that geeks suck at). Current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery, but just because your system is rock solid, stable, well documented and processes defined, there is absolutely no guarantee of success. In fact, the secret sauce to a successful SharePoint project is an area that governance documentation barely touches.
Rather than just tell you what is wrong with the world, in this session, we'll offer practical guidance, tools and methods on how to tame this complex problem. We will demonstrate how to ensure that all aspects of SharePoint delivery clearly align to organizational aspirations, ensure all stakeholder needs are considered and at the same time, create the understanding and commitment via an inclusive, collaborative approach.
Session topics:
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Why aligning organizational goals is hard
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Why SharePoint belongs to a class of problems that are inherently hard to solve
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Why users have trouble articulating what they really want
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The reality of how we actually solve new or novel problems
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How to avoid chasing platitudes and tap into the wisdom of crowds
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The one best practice you need before you consider any other best practice
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Field tests, practical tools and techniques
You can watch a complete recording of this webinar here, or view their slildes here. In addition, Paul and Michal are also conducting a series of classes entitled SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class, with the next one being offered on February 6th and 7th in Vancouver, BC. Axceler is proudly sponsoring this event. If you would like more information about this class, the site is here. Future dates and locations across North America are being planned.
One of the keys to SharePoint's popularity is its ease of use - users can create collaborative websites in less than 5 minutes. But, because it is so easy to build new sites, SharePoint systems can grow quickly and, if not administered wisely, become unwieldy.
Organizations increasingly need SharePoint governance, especially as SharePoint becomes an enterprise collaboration platform and falls under corporate IT governance requirements. There are many parts to a SharePoint governance equation; two of the most important are the software and the services.
On this webinar you will see how Axceler’s ControlPoint governance and administration software and Jornata’s AutoPilot managed service offering work together to give SharePoint administrators a standardized governance model and maintenance plan for SharePoint deployments, including proactive support for farms, information management and application policies.
Join us on this webinar to learn:
- Best practices for establishing a SharePoint governance model including policies and farm-wide application control
- How to establish a standardized governance model & maintenance plan for SharePoint deployments
- How to enforce governance policies automatically with ControlPoint
- How to identify SharePoint governance violations
- How to manage SharePoint security
- And more
We hope you can join us for this informative webinar.
January 19, 2012
Thursday
2:00pm - 3:00pm EST
Register Now
A common SharePoint scenario: Your end users have begun to invest time and effort into using their My Sites and other social networking features inside SharePoint 2010, but as the administrator, you’re finding it very cumbersome to see just what kinds of activities your users are doing. Are their comments, notes, and statuses appropriate? What are they tagging? What documents have a high rating? Using SharePoint out of the box, you need to go through each and every user’s My Site and prune through the tabs of data. It’s not a very realistic task.
Using ControlPoint’s Social Activity Analysis, administrators can track all of the social activity across the entire farm and break out what each user has done into a single report. As shown in the screen shot below, the user “James Joyce” is expanded to quickly see the notes, comments, ratings, tags, and statuses that he has applied to documents across the farm.
This report can be automatically sent to your administrators, power users, department heads, and anyone else who needs insight into what users are saying about the content in SharePoint.
ControlPoint provides deep insight into what is happening inside SharePoint, and then allows you to take action on that information. Reports can be customized, automated, and archived for historical views on what is happening within your environment.
For more information on this award-winning platform, you can find the datasheet here, or sign up for a live webinar here.
A common SharePoint scenario: You are restructuring your SharePoint environment, migrating users to a new Active Directory domain, or you may just be modifying the names of Active Directory users or groups. In either scenario, when users need a new login name, the STSADM command to migrate users falls short, requiring you to manually enter users one by one.
For organizations with hundreds or thousands of users, one by one is simply not an option. Axceler ControlPoint lets you perform a bulk migration of end users, moving everyone from your old domain to their account under the new domain. As shown in the screen shot below, using wildcards you can migrate all users in the respective domain at once. This operation provides a quick and easy way to move all SharePoint users to the new domain.
You may also use the text boxes to simply change a login name for a specific user. For example, a user named Margaret Mead (AxcelerDomain\MargaretMead) was recently married, and you need to change the login AxcelerDomain\MargaretBateson. ControlPoint provides a method to make these explicit changes one at a time, or in bulk. Additionally, ControlPoint gives you the option to remove any existing permissions for target accounts already in the new domain. Overall, ControlPoint will migrate users quickly and properly under multiple scenarios.
For more information on this award-winning platform, you can find the datasheet here, or sign up for a live webinar here.
On December 28, 2010, we launched the video series 'The One Thing You Need to Know About SharePoint 2010,' capturing advice and perspectives from SharePoint experts, MVPs, and MCMs from various events around the world. Each video generally runs between one and three minutes, and focuses on a favorite feature, solution, or best practice (and each with a different song from my extensive collection). Some of the experts helped promote their videos through their own blogs, through Facebook, and through Twitter, while others had their videos mentioned or linked through various news articles and web magazines. Altogether, the series has been a resounding success, with over 130 posted this year.
To close out the year, I thought I'd share a list of the most popular videos of 2011, listed by total number of views. To be fair, some of these videos were posted near the beginning of the year and have had more time to pick up views, while others have had a short run but picked up hits quickly -- but that's how it goes :-)
Top 10 OneThing Videos in 2011:
- The One Thing: Erica Toelle and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Laura Rogers and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Mark Miller and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Chris McNulty and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Fabian Williams on SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Susan Lennon and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Dux Raymond Sy and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Jeff Willinger and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Karuana Gatimu and SharePoint 2010
- The One Thing: Paul Swider and SharePoint 2010
As an honorable mention, I have to note that coming in at #11 is one of my all-time favorites The One Thing: Brian Jackett and SharePoint 2010 which, as some of you know, spawned a very popular t-shirt.
(Btw, the all-time most popular video on the Axceler channel was the funny short I did with the help of my daughter, called How to Become a SharePoint Site Admin)
Going into the new year, I am continuing to add to TheOneThing library, and will be posting videos recorded at the upcoming SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach (birthplace of the event, celebrating its 4th birthday!) and SharePoint Saturday Austin events. I am also expanding the series to include Office365 and Project Server, so watch for more new content coming to the Axceler site and to the Axceler YouTube channel in 2012.
Happy New Year!
While attending the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, California earlier this year, Axceler's Director of Product Evangelism, Christian Buckley, met with the Nintex team to discuss on camera Axceler's partnership with Nintex and the long history of Axceler's migration products supporting Nintex Workflows.
As was recently announced, Axceler offers the most comprehensive, full-fidelity migrations of Nintex Workflows on the market, including migration of all Nintex definitions and versions, history and tasks, constants and variables. Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 includes full support for all 120 Nintex activities, and all 22 Workflow templates.
You can follow Christian on Twitter at @buckleyplanet, or read more of his content here on the Axceler blog, on his personal blog, or on the AIIM.org SharePoint Expert blog.
Looking for a product to add to your Wish List that will help you get control over your SharePoint environment? Then make sure to check out ControlPoint, the product that swept three major SharePoint product awards in 2011: 2011 Windows IT Pro Editors’ Best SharePoint Product Award, 2011 Windows IT Pro Community Choice Award, and 2011 Best of SharePoint Pro Connections.
Join us today for this live demonstration of ControlPoint where we will show you how you can:
• Enforce SharePoint governance automatically
• Enable better SharePoint decisions
• Improve the focus and agility of your SharePoint management team
• Boost your SharePoint’s value
• Avoid SharePoint security breaches and their associated costs
• Increase end-user adoption
• Reduce demands on the overall SharePoint infrastructure
Attend the webinar and add ControlPoint to your end of year wish list today.
Register now.
While presenting at the European SharePoint Conference held in Berlin in October, Axceler evangelist Christian Buckley shared his thoughts on areas where Microsoft may look to improve upon the popular SharePoint platform, based on his customer and partner conversations while on the road at various events.
For more insights from Chrisitian on SharePoint, social computing, and various governance and planning topics, you can read his blog here, or follow him on Twitter at @buckleyplanet.
As we close out the year, Christian will be presenting one last time before the holiday season, speaking at the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group this Thursday at 6pm on 'Mastering SharePoint Migration Planning'. In January, he'll be back on the road, presenting multiple sessions at SharePoint Saturday Virginia Beach, VA (Jan 7th) and again at SharePoint Saturday Austin (Jan 21st). Hope to see you there!
Axceler, the leader in Microsoft SharePoint governance, administration and migration software, and a Technology Partner of Nintex, the world’s leading SharePoint workflow company, today announced the general availability of Axceler’s Davinci Migrator 2.0 for SharePoint 2010. Axceler is the first Nintex Technology Partner to provide a full-fidelity Nintex Workflow migration including Nintex Workflow history and settings.
Read more.
A common SharePoint use case: As the administrator, you want to empower your site and site collection owners to run their own reports and/or actions using ControlPoint. This will help them manage their SharePoint sites to greater effect. However, as is often the case, you might want to trim the functionality these site owners can see and use. Allowing site owners to change SharePoint permissions and configuration settings can lead to fractured, non-uniform sites that break internal SharePoint governance policies.
Using ControlPoint, you can create custom menus for different groups of users based on the functionality and reports they need to better manage their sites:
Step one: Use the ControlPoint Menu Maintenance user interface to create a custom menu based on an existing template. These menus can be created at any level in the SharePoint farm hierarchy.
Step two: Create a SharePoint Group with Read access in the ControlPoint Configuration Site and add the users directly to this group.
Step three: In the Axceler Menu List, find the newly created menu and assign read access to the SharePoint group created in step two. Remove their permissions to any other menus.
Now when users from that SharePoint group log in, they will see a security trimmed menu of reports and functionality. This will increase their productivity as they see only functionality they need and at the same time you will reduce the risks of users breaking your governance policies. For more information on this award-winning platform, you can find the datasheet here, or sign up for a live webinar here.