SharePoint

Checking for empty or null dates in SharePoint

A client asked me today how to create a view filtered so that only items that where missing their Start Date, Due Date, or both.

First, create a calculated column DatesMissing with the following formula:

=NOT(AND(ISNUMBER([Start Date]),ISNUMBER([Due Date])))

Don't forget to set the type to Date!

Create a new view, and set the Filter to DatesMissing 'Is Equal To' 'Yes'

The view will only show you the items missing either one of those dates.

MOSS in Action: The Scientist’s Workbench

I recently attended the "Microsoft Health and Life Sciences Industry Council - The Scientist Workbench" in Malvern, PA (http://blogs.msdn.com/allandcp/archive/2007/12/18/microsoft-health-and-life-sciences-industry-council-the-scientist-workbench.aspx). The Scientist Workbench is another great use of SharePoint, applying the technology to solve real-life problems and save money. The business case for using the Scientist Workbench (a framework that sits on top of SharePoint to help drug researchers visualize, collaborate on, and search data better) goes something like this. The following conditions are often true:

• Most drug companies tend to be organized across therapeutic areas.
• The drug discovery process tends to be more of a silo than a collaborative, information-sharing process, between therapeutic areas and even between stages of development in a single therapeutic area
• An ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook) starts to address this, but there is much more benefit to be had
• Pipeline books detailing which compounds are at what stage tend to take a while to collate, up to two months (forcing executives to make decisions with stale data)
• The longer a research project lasts before trimming it (if the drug is not effective in treatment), the more money is spent in vain.
• The lab process, be it using real experiments or "in silico" experiments is often rife with opportunity to automate data acquisition, transfer, scrubbing, and reporting, reducing the time and increasing the efficiency of expensive research PhD's
• Co-development between drug companies presents unique security challenges of sharing all the data that is needed for a project with the right people on both sides, and hiding all other data
• What if your next blockbuster drug is sitting in your discard pile right now? (see the famous story about the hypertension drug that grew up into something else entirely  http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/mdd/98/novdec/viagra.html)

The Scientist's Workbench is a framework for addressing these problems. Note that it is not a shrink-wrapped product, it is a tool for companies, integrators, and ISV's to develop solutions. Since every company tends to have slightly different processes or tools, it is nearly impossible to deliver a full-blown product that meets every permutation of needs across the space. The framework instead allows an organization to quickly develop a solution using SharePoint. Some examples of how the power of the workbench can be harnessed to address the issues above:

• 1) An OBA-style solution can quickly be developed to provide an ELN solution that uses the client-side tools scientists are used to working with (Word, Excel, etc) and SharePoint as a storage mechanism on the server. Metadata can be captured along with real data. Data feeds from lab equipment (even better if it emits XML) can be integrated as well. Add an extra 10-15% of efficiency just in the lab process using SharePoint and Excel Services!
• 2) Building on the first step, this data can be made searchable (with controllable security) across the stages of development, and/or across therapeutic areas. Additionally, this data can be shared outside the firewall with a co-development company if needed, with item-level security and access controls.
• 3) The time to collate a pipeline book can shrink to days from months, allowing near-real-time decision support to executives
• 4) "Fail early" and discover sooner if the efficacy of a drug is sub-par, saving research money.
• 5) Allow you to re-examine compounds down the road, and understand the complete data and context of your work months or years later.
• 6) Make your compliance efforts (21 CFR Part 11, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, etc) easier using MOSS with A/D, Records Center, and Information Rights Management

The Scientist's workbench contains a whitepaper and presentation, a sample implementation, and a MOSS template. It is based on the Connected Life Sciences Framework, and is promoted by the BioIT Alliance (http://bioitalliance.org/). It will be released soon as Open Source, when it comes out I'll update here or in the comments with a URL for download.  

SharePoint 2007 Capabilities Breakdown (Part 2) - Collaboration

In Part 1 of the Capabilities series of SharePoint 2007 we discussed the overview of the platform.  In Part 2 we will dive more deeply into the functionality that represents the Collaboration slice of the pie chart.

Collaboration is defined slightly differently by people due to the type of environment they collaborate in, or the demands of their work that require collaboration.  All this means is that different features of a collaborative environment have varying degrees of effectiveness in certain situations.

Although I can't speak to and cover each of the many scenarios, I can discuss the features of MOSS designed to create and build collaborative environments in your organization.  I'm optimistic that some will apply to each of our readers.

Documents

Let's start with one of the most common items in collaboration:  The Document.  Document libraries represent the cornerstone of collaboration.  The ability to create an unlimited type of documents, requiring specific metadata, with check-out, check-in, approval, and multi-user workflow around individual document and document types is extremely powerful.  You can also define default document templates for each type of document you define.  The day of the network file share should be over. 

If that isn't enough, you can create document workspaces, which are sites specifically built around a single document.  These workspaces represent a more in-depth and secure area where tasks, discussions, calendars, meetings, notes, etc. can be built around a single document.  This may be useful for people collaborating on a book, chapters, or a large sales proposal.

Calendars

Calendaring in SharePoint has become very good.  Whether you use MS Exchange or not, you can still take advantage of many features in shared calendars.  You can choose to have a public calendar that you share for dates, meetings, deadlines, etc. for a given context (project, document, logical workspace or team site). You can also sync multiple calendars to outlook to overlay and manage your schedule as it relates to the schedules of all the calendars you must contend with.

Blogs, WIkis, and Discussion Forums

These lists represent a more modern web experience, and depending on your intended usage, they can be very effective.  Blogs can be used for external sites or internal users to create personalization and information dissemination in a familiar format. Discussion Forums can be used in team areas or document workspaces to keep context and focus around your work and your information while providing an ongoing dialog.  Wikis are very flexible and give you the opportunity to build documentation, help files, notes, glossaries, indexes, etc. in any environment.

Tasks

Task lists allow you to assign and track work or duties to specific users in your organization.  Metadata can be added to expand the use of these lists allowing for Calendar and Gantt views as means to manage and report on task data.

One Note Shared Libraries

If you use One Note as I do extensively, you can create One Note shared libraries in SharePoint.  This is one of the best features for collaborating with off-line users and content.  One Note will sync your library, sections, and pages back to SharePoint for all users.  This is very effective at automatically keeping notes, pages, etc, available off-line and synced automatically.

Collaboration Sites

Although we already mentioned Document Workspaces, SharePoint also delivers other pre-defined Site Templates for similar purposes.  Team Sites and the various options for Meeting Sites and Workspaces are also available.  Microsoft has also released 40 additional site definitions and templates you can download for free.  These pre-defined templates create a default set of lists, pages, and workflow to help create a foundation for a type of work activity or group.

Project Management

Between standard site templates, standard and custom lists, the Gantt chart view on task lists, and some innovation with SharePoint and security, you can create very effective Project Management Workspaces within your SharePoint environment.  If one of the pre-defined templates will not work, you can define your own requirements and build your personalized project site and save it as a template for reuse.

Alerts, Views, Roll-ups

SharePoint lets you assign alerts to lists so you can get email updates with the types of changes you want to see in areas of concern.  This is very useful for staying updated on changing content.  You can also create some very sophisticated and targeted views on lists such that a single underlying list can offer significantly different and useful slices of the data depending on the user and the context.  Think of it like a light version of reporting services in your ability to get very specific views of your document and list data.  This makes metadata and its accuracy very useful and important.  You can roll-up task lists into views at various levels so you can see all your tasks across the entire portal or specific site and sub--sites.  This is a great way to keep your data where it belongs, but still have access to all of it when you need to see the big picture.  Through the use of some of the more sophisticated web parts you can learn to roll up any lists, list types, or content types in your site collection.

Outlook and Email Integration

If you use MS Outlook as your email client, you can sync SharePoint lists, calendars, tasks, etc. to your local Outlook folders, tasks, and Calendars so you can take this data off-line with you, and get updates when you are connected.  This is a great way to keep sets of tasks or documents locally on your laptop while ensuring they stay current with their underlying server-based location. 

SharePoint also allows individual lists to accept email.  This allows you to send email directly to SharePoint as a means to capture carbon copies, or quickly send/forward required content to a specified list.   This helps to back up or make available certain data contained in email through the SharePoint platform.

Workflow

Last, but certainly not least, is the availability of Windows Workflow Foundation as a built-in component of SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0.  SharePoint provides some basic workflow options out of the box, but with SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.NET and a willingness to write a little code, you can extend it much further.  Workflow integrates with collaboration because of the ability to create and assign tasks automatically as part of a collaborative process.  This can help efficiency through automating certain required tasks as part of a project, deliverable, or set of functional goals within a given context.  This frees you up to worry less about making sure all items are getting proper attention, and spend more time on actual productivity.

Conclusion

This covers the basics of the functionality built into SharePoint that promotes collaboration.  Some people choose to use a certain subset of these features, some use all.  Most find innovative ways to make these features even more useful by working within the flexible SharePoint environment and working with some combination of all the items I mentioned.

Please stay tuned for Part 3 of this series where I will discuss People and Personalization.

Part 1 - Overview

I hope this helps,

-Ryan

Enterprise Dashboards Overview

Let’s talk about dashboards and what they mean for a business.

First and foremost, what is a dashboard? It’s a management tool that shows “vital signs” for your enterprise, aggregating data from a wide range of business systems to provide key performance indicators in a clear and easily readable fashion. A well designed dashboard can identify negative trends, measure efficiency, help plan both short-term and long-term strategies, and align them with organizational goals.  It can also save time by keeping the most important information in one place.

An important feature of any dashboard is the timeliness of presented data; for a trader it’s important to see real-time prices on a stock exchange and up to the minute financial news; a state department of transportation would benefit from having updated information on traffic for the major highways; while a system administrator needs to be prompted about a problem or issue in the company’s IT infrastructure.

Also, the type of data presented should be relevant to the user – a project manager doesn’t need to immediately know current call volume in the customer support department, but customer the support manager might need to know current status of a development project.

One of the defining factors in dashboard adoption is interface design – whether or not it keeps you on course or confuses you and forces to use other sources of information defines whether one is going to use it for her daily activities and decision making. As a designer you should use intuitive and easy to recognize indicators, the simplest of which are based on the traffic light system: green is good, yellow means alert and red signals failure. Those signs are universally acceptable and can be used in any area: in a project manager’s dashboard a color-coded alert can be linked to overspendings or sliding timelines; traffic light on an investor’s dashboard may warn regarding a stock performance.

Ease of use is the key factor for a successful dashboard – bad design causes data presentation to become overwhelming by adding too much information and too many details. If it takes a CEO ten seconds to find the company’s share price among numerous small-sized widgets on the dashboard page, he will probably stick to using Yahoo Finance instead. Graphically, a well designed dashboard shows high level process information, with the ability to drill-down to the lower level details which might otherwise be buried deep within the corporate enterprise and difficult to find. The less cluttered the dashboard is, the easier it is to find pertinent information.

Creating dashboards in SharePoint has become more and more popular with the latest release of MOSS 2007 which is packed with features like Excel Services, BDC (Business Data Catalog) integration, Web Services, etc. making for powerful enterprise dashboards.

A good example of a Sharepoint dashboard is a Marketing KPI Dashboard from SharePoint Community Portal (live demo is here):

And to draw the final line to today’s posting, I wanted to add three core principles of a dashboard design (from a recent article in CIO Today “The End Game for Business Intelligence”):

1.      The Rule of placement
Ideal dashboard must be placed where it cannot be missed or ignored.

2.      The Rule of Design
Conveying information correctly, intuitively, and in a pleasing way is a challenge that even the best designers can struggle with. Partly a matter of deciding on the appropriate content in terms of which metrics and what types of charts, and partly a matter of observing (or trail-blazing) the correct visual design approaches, this skill set is finally developing as it needs to.

3.      The Rule of Accuracy
We all learn to pay attention to things that prove to be reliable and ignore those that are just noise. Even if your dashboard is placed in a way such that you simply can’t ignore it, and design such that it is a joy to behold and use, you WILL NOT USE THE DASHBOARD IF IT GIVES YOU WRONG INFORMATION! It’s as simple as that.

SharePoint 2007 Capabilities Breakdown (Part 1) - Overview

Many of our client relationships began with an initial meeting where the client asked us point blank: "So, what can this product do for us?"  Although there are multiple ways to slice up, segment, and view SharePoint's capabilities, we have gravitated towards the structure you see in the pie chart below.  Although the categories are not unique to Syrinx's view of SharePoint, it might be beneficial to dive into each slice of the pie in a little more detail.  In this post we will discuss the reason for reason for the series of articles and what we plan on covering.

Why can it be so confusing?

As I've mentioned in previous postings, many organizations that purchase SharePoint have considerable difficulty determining and defining how best to use the platform.  In many ways SharePoint's versatility can often be its biggest weakness. 

Most "boxed" software has a fairly specific purpose.  You don't go out and buy a copy of The Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 at BestBuy and install it expecting it to start helping you write applications.  Although server platforms are different and require higher levels of expertise and infrastructure, the expectations around their abilities and implementation requirements should be set accordingly.  Most of the other Server Software from Microsoft tends to have fairly well-defined uses.  When I see Exchange, Project Server, BizTalk, Commerce Server, etc., I tend to have a decent idea of what general roles those products can fill in a given organization.  When a company purchases SharePoint, they could potentially use it for anything, including integration with any of the above mentioned platforms.

Here are some other reasons SharePoint blurs this line: 

1.  The older versions were more straightforward.  SharePoint versions prior to 2007 may not have been necessarily easier to use, but they were certainly more focused in their functionality, simpler in many ways, and much less generic in it's potential use. 

2.  Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a "free" product that comes with your server operating system.  Many people aren't sure what this is and how much different from Office SharePoint Server 2007 it really is.  Some people are wondering if they simply get "SharePoint" as a service pack or Windows Update release.  If so, what can it do for me?

3.  SharePoint Configuration Wizard.  When I first installed SharePoint 2007, I breezed through the process in 10-15 minutes.  A few minutes after that I was up and creating my site.  Yes, it can be done this way.  As we've discussed before, this is not the correct way to implement SharePoint.  This installation only sets up minimal services, locks you into using SQL Express, and creates default web application and site collection without any knowledge or information from the installing user.

4.  Features.  Features in WSS 3.0 / MOSS represent ways to install and enable individual functional components.  As a daily user of SharePoint I have learned the hard way that there are various levels of feature enabling (Farm, Web Application, Site Collection, Site).  Certain features combined with certain Site Definitions create exponentially different user experiences.  Turning on certain features at certain levels allows certain behavior that changes the user interface, including the availability of certain web parts and lists/libraries.

These elements, among others cause people some confusion as to what SharePoint is, how it can and should be installed and used. 

What can we do to help make sense of it?

The goal of this series of articles is to go into a little more detail for each segment of the Capabilities Pie Chart seen above.  Each slice of the pie represents a logical breakdown of capabilities within the SharePoint server family of services.  Most organizations will not need everything the application can do, but can take advantage of a certain set of features within their enterprise. 

Companies often find that increasing familiarity with SharePoint will allow them to branch out and utilize more functionality as they begin to understand the strengths of weaknesses of the platform and their organization.

Hopefully this series of articles will help you determine where you can get started with SharePoint or possibly where you can expand an existing implementatin within your current environment.

Part 2 - Collaboration

I hope this helps,

-Ryan

Options for trying and using SharePoint in any environment

Adding on a bit to a recent post by Andrew about some methods and reasons for adopting SharePoint (see Popular migration paths), I want to discuss some conversations I have had with clients.

More than a few clients have been skeptical about the adoption of SharePoint.  I'd like to discuss some of the reasons for their hesitation and some common responses I have for them.

1.  The licensing is very expensive considering we only need basic collaboration (or some other singular feature of SharePoint).

The licensing model, costs, and packages can be expensive, confusing, and even frustrating when you're new to the product and trying to figure out what you need from it. 

Remember, you can purchase a server license and pay for Client Access Licenses for what I consider to be incidental costs if your user-base is small.  This allows small companies to gain the benefits of an enterprise platform. 

You can also be thrifty about server allocation if necessary.  Choose your level of risk in terms of redundancy and clustering to lower overall server costs.  Choose to use WSS 3.0 only machines in some parts of your infrastructure where access and functionality is separate from your complete MOSS farm and the requirements match functionality.  WSS 3.0 licensing is part of your Windows 2003 Server license as opposed to a full MOSS license.  These are aspects of the SharePoint architecture we can help determine and setup to save our clients money.

If you end up relying on and building out your infrastructure over time, the licensing costs become nominal relative to the gain in efficiency.  Until that happens, you do have options for keeping costs down.

2.  It takes a long time to set up.  To "do it right" we need lots of different Active Directory accounts, multiple servers, etc.  It's daunting if we don't have the resources or hardware allocated.

Although it is true that we allocate some time to a proper environment setup, there are multiple ways to get going with the product.  Although there are many levels in the middle, we most often talk about the following 2:

A.  Complete setup for an enterprise client who knows where they are going.  This is a complete "package" setup so that the farm has legs and is the foundation for a complete SharePoint or Office Server infrastructure.  You can't short-cut this, so don't risk it.  It takes some time to do correctly and requires some involvement from corporate IT and business stakeholders.  You wouldn't just install Active Directory or Exchange and set it up one morning without some planning and discussions about how to implement, manage, etc.  We're starting to get to Governance, so I'll stop there.

B.  The quick setup.  We have begun to offer this to clients that are still on the fence about the product, unsure if they want to license, don't know what the product can do, etc.  Sometimes we'll just run the Easy Configuration wizard on an empty server or even a VPC.  This reduces the install time down to minutes.  This lets you get your feet wet and utilized the rapid capabilities of the platform.  This is meant to be a testing ground only, so production-level use should not be allowed on this instance, but get your employees hands' on the features this way.  Try it!

3.  We were sold SharePoint based on all these great features, but I installed it and fired up a browser and I don't see any of those things!

If I had a nickel every time I talked to someone who said something along these lines to me, I'd have at least a couple dollars.  :) 

The point is valid:  SharePoint doesn't come with an instruction manual on what to use it for.  When you buy a camera, it doesn't tell you where to use it and what to take pictures of.  It assumes you already know that, so it just tells you how utilize the functions required to take pictures.  SharePoint is essentially the same thing.  Don't let the tail wag the dog.  Take control of SharePoint so it meets your needs.

The Office Server 2007 SDK and WSS 3.0 SDK are great tools for learning how to do things that you already know you want to do, but too many people have asked me: "What can this product do for me?"  It actually isn't an easy question to answer.  Soon I'll be posting a multi-part series on the different parts of SharePoint and how they might work for you, but in the mean time I'll try to break it down to how we try to get the answer from our clients.

Because the platform is so open, you essentially start with a blank slate.  The key is to determine where certain needs exist within your organization.  Yes, document management, project/collaboration sites, intranet or extranet portal etc. are all standard responses, but that's only the easy part, everyone knows that.  SharePoint can do so much more.  What are some of the process pain points in your organization?  What were some of the features that sold you on the product?  How do you think those features could improve efficiency/cost/organization within your company?  Do you need audit trails on certain documents, digital signatures?  Could the migration of certain forms or paperwork to an automated system save you time, money?  Do you have problems with "loose" content and clutter in email and shared drives?  What about specific, secure, backed up, logical areas where people can work on projects or teams?  How much searching do you do or want?  Personal sites, task lists, calendars, blogs, wikis. The list goes on and on...And how to I incorporate those into my enterprise?  I tried to set it up and people can't log in or can't use it effectively, or it got out of hand quickly.  Call us and we'll help you.

It's important to remember:  I've yet to see a company roll out *everything* they want to do with SharePoint at the same time.  You get it running and solve one set of problems first.  You will start to see areas the product can improve other aspects of your organization as you use it.  Then you launch your second round, etc. 

Don't confuse this with rapid application development as a style for rolling out SharePoint.  Careful planning needs to go into your initial rollout and objectives, then the infrastructure can fill out and meet needs as intended in a manageable fashion. 

4.  We tried or used SharePoint 2003 and were not too impressed.

SharePoint 2007 / WSS 3.0 were completed re-built for this latest version.  The architecture, feature-set, compability, usability, and coding platform have *all* been improved significantly.  This version clearly shows us the level of commitment to this platform when you look at the amount of functionality and characteristics.  Please evaluate this product independently from any previous versions.

5.  What else can we do with this platform since everyone says it is so great.

A lot of clients purchased SharePoint because they got a deal on their enterprise licensing or were convinced by a good presentation.

These companies often don't realize what they got their hands on.  In many cases we have used WSS or SharePoint as the base platform for a site or application that one normally would not associate with the SharePoint feature set.  It is an extremely flexible environment.

There are multiple public web sites out there using SharePoint as the platform.  Most people would not recognize these sites as being SharePoint applications because of the significant customization made to them.  Many of these companies chose SharePoint for their applications or sites because of the return on their investment in terms of features for price.

Content Management, Publishing, Enterprise Searching, built-in Web Parts and Business Data Catalog connectivity are just a handful of the features that organizations choose to use in an external web site.  When you add in security, Active Directory integration, profiles, etc. you quickly can determine that any one of these features would cost more than an external SharePoint license to build or often buy on your own.  The built-in web service integration alone can be worth a full license depending on your project.  Generally speaking, you can find reasons to use the platform that will save you money in many web-base projects/applications.  This applies equally to both internal and external uses.

In many cases, WSS 3.0 can be used at minimal cost to gain some of the required features and infrastructure that you would have to build or buy on your own. 

One final note...

One of the biggest reasons I have for convincing clients to use some flavor of SharePoint as a platform is stability.  Pre-built infrastructure requires a fraction of the Quality Assurance testing usually involved in a custom application.  This reduces development costs, time to market, and costly maintenance over the lifecycle of the application.  Any built-in pieces of SharePoint that can be used will save costly and time-consuming development and testing efforts.

I hope this helps,

-Ryan