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At the core of Information Architecture (IA) is findability. Web Information Architects achieve this by structuring and configuring the following four ‘systems’: organization systems, navigation systems, labeling systems and search systems.

Information Architecture and deliberate planning around findability is gaining momentum in organizations as they come to understand the impact that poor information architecture has on their organization. Microsoft, having a pretty good pulse on corporate business challenges and the technology that helps mitigate them, also understands the importance of Information Architecture and findability by virtue of the fact that features dedicated to this domain have been included in SharePoint 2010. Some of these features include Managed Meta Data Services, the Term Store and Keywords. There are other features in 2010 as well that help organize content and make it findable. My colleague Steve Tycast is in the middle of writing a blog series on the specific features just referenced. Steve’s blogs will help you understand what these features are and how to configure them in SharePoint. You can read them here: SharePoint 2010: Breaking Down More Barriers with Metadata Management and Tagging (Part 1) and SharePoint 2010: Breaking Down More Barriers with Metadata Management and Tagging (Part 2).

The focus of this post is the application of the Term Store and its features from a business perspective…i.e. how does an organization make the term store work for them. Consequently, this post assumes that you understand what these features are and you have a good sense of how to use them.

Successful Term Store Set Up

To begin, let’s consider the following question: What does the business have to do in terms of planning and role establishment to successfully utilize Managed Metadata Services, Keywords and the Term Store for the purpose of creating an environment where content is easily findable? I believe the answer is to establish roles and policies (governance).

The roles associated with the Term Store are not complicated, but do require a bit of familiarity and learning. Here they are:

Term Store Group Roles

Roles at the ‘Group Level’ (a group is the highest level in the term store hierarchy):

*Before you can create terms sets with managed keywords/metadata, you have to create a ‘Group(s)’ wherein the term set resides.

1. Group Managers

2. Contributors

Group Managers are those people that will have the authority to edit terms and term hierarchies within all term sets for the particular group they are managing. They also have the authority to assign Contributors. It is likely that a Group Manager may be a Vice President or Director of a business division. This may not seem like a likely VP task the VP community is longing to be involved in; however, I think that as organizations begin to understand what a mess their intranet is and how prevalent the problem of finding content within the organization is (from the CEO down to the Information Worker who has been there 20 years), and what the cost to the company is, VP’s will be less likely to turn a blind eye. In addition to this, the brunt of the work can and should be passed off to the Contributors. In this example, the Vice President could have oversight into what terms are being used as metadata for specific reports and documents related to his/her division while Contributors interview the business and work on creating a logical and effective Term Store.

Quick side note: the last company I was consulting at (Fortune 1000 and global company), a senior vice president took a great interest in findability of his own volition. He knew that findability was an issue and wanted us to address it in our SharePoint architecture. This individual would have made a great Group Manager.

Another likely candidate for Group Manager is an in-house Information Architect or someone with dedicated time to oversee Managed Metadata Services within SharePoint 2010. This could be a SharePoint architect or even potentially a Business Analyst. The key here is that the person needs to have time to spend on managing the Contributors within their group and to stay engaged in an oversight and planning role to help ensure successful on-going use of the Term Store. Slapping this role onto someone’s plate and then not empowering the individual to dive into managing the Contributors in their group simply won’t work. The Term Store will be weak, disorganized and likely won’t reflect the labels that information workers use to describe the content within their team or division.

Contributors are those people that can edit terms and term hierarchies within all term sets for the particular group they have been assigned contributor permissions. In some organizations, there may not be any contributors as the Group Manager may assume this role as well. In other organizations the likely candidates for Contributors are SharePoint Site Collection Administrators, Business Analysts, Team Managers, and in-house Information Architect and probably a few other possibilities. Again, the key criteria for selection is that the person is allotted time to assist the Group Manager to execute the plan (metadata management) and has a clear understanding of how to work with the business to establish the company’s Term Store (Term Store = controlled vocabulary).

Term Store Term Set Roles

Roles at the term set level:

3. Owner

4. Contact

5. Stakeholders

The Owner of the term set can be one user or one group. You cannot have multiple security principles as the Owner. The Owner can view the terms in the term set and view configuration settings, but cannot change anything. This is an interesting, possibly unnecessary role. At this point, I can see the owner being (as the SharePoint on-screen description says) the primary user or group that interacts with the content that the specific term set was created for. Prior to attending monthly governance meeting on findability and The Term Store, the Owner may review the terms in his term set. At the governance meeting he would then offer suggestions for improvement and feedback that he collected at the Information Worker level over the course of the last month. The Owner could help validate whether or not the Contributor is on track with creating a winning Term Set with accurate managed keywords.

The Contact role is not set up in the Term Store to be a role per say. There is no people picker to use to assign a person to the role. Instead SharePoint asks you to enter an email address where keyword term suggestions and feedback can be sent. At first blush, it seems to make sense to assign either the Group Manager or Contributor to be the Term Set Contact by entering his/her email address in this field. This is an awesome feature that was built into SharePoint 2010 that is going to allow Information Workers to educate Term Store Contributors and Group Managers on the way they (information workers) think about the information they consume on a daily basis. As any Information Architect will tell you, creating a functional system requires understanding your users. Consequently the labels that information workers are using to tag documents and content are the labels we should be using when creating our top-down classification schemas (Term Store Managed Metadata is largely top down classification) . The Contact feature within the Term Store is a simple yet powerful way for accomplishing this. Information Workers can easily at the item level, reach out to the Term Store Contact and submit their suggestions and feedback concerning the managed metadata that is available for use on the particular content they are working with.

The Stakeholders role…this is an interesting inclusion in the Term Store. I like this role that SharePoint 2010 has made available in the Term Store because it’s a simple approach to help govern the concept of a controlled vocabulary (term store) which will support findability in the environment. It does so by putting the Stakeholders names in SharePoint on a screen that others can see which fosters accountability and commitment to projects. Who knows, it may encourage a Stakeholder to attend an Information Architecture or Term Store meeting.

Tactics For Building Your Term Store Managed Metadata

O.K. so we’ve covered the roles that the Term Store makes available to us. Proper selection of these roles is a good start. Once, we have roles in place, what do Group Managers, Contributors, Owners and Term Store Contacts actually do to create a successful Term Store? This will likely vary from one organization to another. Here is an example of one possible tactical approach:

Group Manager: VP of a business unit. This person empowers Contributors within his/her division to spend time interviewing the business to begin building a relevant term store. Group Manager may also provide communication support by sending an email or series of emails to Information Workers within the division explaining how they will be interviewed for thoughts on keywords which help to describe the documents and content they touch on a routine basis. The Group Manager may also want to speak to his/her direct reports (typically Directors or middle Management) to explain the importance of metadata, findability and the coming interviews and have them pass the message on down to their direct reports (and so on and so forth).

Contributors: Business Analysts or Department Managers. The Contributors will interview the business over time (won’t happen all at once) to gather the list of documentation that is currently in the system , the official and unofficial names used for the document and keywords the business uses when thinking of the documents in order to find them. Contributors document these findings and use them to build the term store. Contributors will also want to gather some type of data on how often and how much new content enters the system.

Owners: An Information Worker who has longevity in the company and understands much of the documentation being used in the department. The Owner attends meetings with the Contributor and/or Group Manager to help validate the Contributors findings.

Contact: This is likely the Contributor. Here the Contributor receives feedback and suggestions for terms. The ability for Information Workers to communicate this information at the right time and in the right way will help fill in the gaps between Contributor interviews of the business.

Stakeholders: A committee of VPs. Stakeholders can support the company’s goals to create an environment that supports findability by empowering Group Managers and Contributors to spend time on these tasks. They can also help send a clear and consistent message to the business concerning the organizations efforts to create an environment where content is easily findable and the importance of doing so.

Ongoing Management of the Term Store

What policies should we use to govern our organizations Term Store (controlled vocabulary)?

Again, the answer to this question will vary from one organization to another. I personally always prefer less governance than more. Typically, responsible people reduce the need for control and governance. That being said, some governance is necessary.

My $0.02 on the matter is to have the Group Managers and Contributors meet once every week or 2 weeks for the first few months. They can share their successes, failures and roadblocks. As time goes on and they develop an understanding of how to best move forward with creating a relevant Term Store, less meetings will be required. I think Stakeholders need to be involved at some level. Again, this will vary from organization to organization. At the end of the day, I have seen Stakeholders take a vested interest in people and projects and it goes a long way. I believe the reason for this is simply that when our Stakeholders show care for something, we tend to care about it. When our Stakeholders, by show lack of care for a particular deliverable or project, upon seeing this attitude in our Stakeholders, we immediately care less about it as well. After all if those running the company don’t care about a particular project, why should I?

There should be a process for recording new types of content put into the system. This process should include the Term Store Contributor and/or Group Manager. This will allow these individuals the ability to create new managed keywords within days (or even the same day) of the new content entering the system. Without a process established to cover this, the Term Store may start out strong and relevant, but will lose efficacy over time. The Term Store like any other fluctuating system will change over time. Establishing a policy and a role(s) to record this change and incorporate it into the Term Store is necessary for success.

Measuring the Success of Your Term Store Implementation

In closing, a possible measure of success for whether or not your Term Store is comprehensive and relevant would be:

1. Have all content types (not SharePoint content types…rather general content types) within the organization been identified?

2. Does your ‘content inventory’ include the official name and unofficial names for each content type (again just general content types)?

3. Have these labels/terms been inputted into the Term Store? If only 50% of them have, consider your Term Store 50% successful at best. If 75%, consider your Term Store 75% successful at best.

4. Have Stakeholders or others communicated to information workers how to tag content and offer suggestions? Are the information workers trained at all?

5. Are information workers suggesting keywords to the term set Contact?

6. Is there a process in place to identify and record new content that comes into the system?

7. Conduct interviews with 10-20 people concerning findability at the beginning of the implementation. Instruct them to record any instance in which they have trouble finding a document or list or piece of content in the near future (next 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, etc.). Have them record the amount of time it takes them to find the content as well as how often it happens. Repeat this exercise in 6 months. Look for patterns of improvement. *I know this is easier said than done, therefore, take all participants out to lunch. Give them candy or whatever it takes to gain their participation. Make it fun for them. Show them that you and the organization care about findability in the organization.

One of the items not covered in this post is the Other Labels field in the Properties screen when a term in a term set is selected. This is a powerful feature and is important for creating a successful, highly relevant Term Store. Look for a post about this from myself or Steve Tycast in the near future!

I’m sure others out there have other great information regarding the Term Store and Information Architecture best practices. I would love to hear them. Please leave comments here or email me at: bill.kuhn@rbaconsulting.com.

Enjoy your week!

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June 16

SharePoint 2010: Breaking Down More Barriers with Metadata Management and Tagging (Part 2)

by Steve Tycast

on 6/16/2010 8:43 AM

Category: Enterprise Content Management (ECM); Information Architecture; SharePoint 2010

This post is a follow-up to Part 1 of the series and will be (http://blogs.rbaconsulting.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=25) discussing the basic concepts and terms relating to the term store. In this post, we will specifically cover the best practices and creation of Term Sets and Terms – which ultimately become Managed Term. Now let’s get right in to how to build these terms and term sets in to SharePoint! At any site (as long as the user has permissions to the Term Store), a user can access the Term Store. There are two ways of getting to the Term Store, one is through Central Administration (lengthy and a lot more links…) and the other is simply through the Site Actions tab on any site.

Step 1: Go to Site Actions, and select “Site Settings”

Site Settings.png

Step 2: Under the Site Administration section, click on the “Term store management” link

That’s it and you’re in! Now you have access to all of the Managed and Un-Managed terms throughout your SharePoint environment. Note: The Term Store crosses ALL site collections within your web application. No longer, as in MOSS 2007, do you have to set these up at every site collection. This is the central repository that is the brain of your environment.

As mentioned in previous posts, we now need to create our Term Sets, and the underlying Terms that should follow. Remember, this is your “managed metadata” and is NOT associated with any tagging that is occurring. (Tags will appear at the bottom in the “System” section under “keywords” and “orphaned terms” – we will cover this later). We need to keep in mind that we are creating a Taxonomy here, and that our Term Set is the over-arching word or phrase that demonstrates similar traits to the underlying terms within the set. Just like as you would create a folder on your hard drive, you name that folder with a term or phrase that represents the contents within it.

In this example, let’s keep consistent with the previous post relating to our dog theme. Last post, we used the Term Set of “Retriever”, and the corresponding Terms of “Labrador, Golden”. Let’s go ahead and set this up.

Step 1: Create the Term Set by clicking on the drop down arrow to the right of the “TechEd 2010”link. Now select “New Term Set” (Note: When first establishing the Term Store, best practice should be to create a single group with the name of your environment- in this case TechEd 2010. Now you have a single “group” to which ALL of your Term Sets can reside. There can be a total of 1,000 Term Sets and 30,000 Terms per Set (total 1M) overall in the store. This portion is created through Central Administration)

New Term.png

Step 2: Simply type in the name of the Term Set you wish to use, in this case “Retrievers” and hit Enter.

You will notice that after hitting Enter, the right side of your screen changes. This now becomes the “administration-like” section for this Term Set. Every Term Set in your environment can be individually managed. This is highly important to remember as now you do not have to be reliant solely on one individual to manage and update the terms. From my experience working with SharePoint, it would be best practice to name your Term Sets after each Site Collection within your environment, and subsequently name your Site Collection Administrator as the owner of that Term Set. By doing so, now you can discreetly and efficiently manage and organize terms across your environment.

You will also notice a “stakeholders” section where you can add other individuals. Your Term Set owner can choose to create a team of people to help manage this as well. It would also be best practice here, at a minimum, to have your Site Collection Administrator backup listed here.

Step 3: Creating the Term – Now we want to create the underlying Terms that are associated to this Term Set. Simply click on the arrow to the right of your Term Set, and click “Create Term”.

Repeat this as many times as necessary to complete your term set. Note: you can create “sub-terms” as well, depending on the level of granularity you prefer.

You will note that after we create the Term, a new “administration” section appears. You will want to ensure that the “Available for Tagging” is checked. This will allow users in your environment to easily tag terms that are “managed” and can help create a more structured approach. You will also notice that you can create “other labels”. This is important because there may be multiple terms that can be that same as the term you created. This way, if an end user tries to type in “Gold” for example, it will auto-associate that term to “Golden” for them.

So, to demonstrate how this applies to an End User, when they are on a site and click on the button “Tags and Notes”, a pop-up box will appear and the user will be asked to input a tag. When they start typing, “suggestions” will appear below. These “suggestions” are directly taken from your Term Store and thus help the End User facilitate a more structured approach and better user experience. As you see below, I started to type the word “golden” as my tag and it automatically gave me the suggestion box for Golden Retrievers.

So what happens when End Users do not use one of the suggestions, or there were no suggestions? Well, now we are talking about managing “Orphaned Terms” and “Keywords”. Please stay tuned for my next post in which we will cover the ability to convert un-managed terms to managed terms.

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June 07

Use a Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Project to Deploy and Debug a Silverlight Application.

by RBAEXT\sbeeson

on 6/7/2010 12:40 PM

Category: SharePoint 2010

Overview

Silverlight and other RIA technologies are becoming a more desirable platform for delivering technology solutions, it has also become essential that we know how to develop these solutions, debug them and integrate these technologies into our other standard development processes.

Assumptions

This Post assumes:

- You have an Existing SharePoint environment that has a Team Site provisioned

- That you have an existing VS Solution that contains a Silverlight application project.

- That you will be deploying your Silverlight Application to the Masterpage Gallery. NOTE: This may not always be the best destination for your Silverlight Applications. Information on deciding where to deploy your applications will be covered in another post.

Summary of Steps

This Post includes the following steps:

Step 1: Create Your SharePoint Project. In this step, you add a SharePoint project to your VS Solution and add the appropriate project items.
Step 2: Configure Your SharePoint Project: In this step you will configure the items added in Step 1 with the appropriate information and settings to complete the implementation
Step 3: Configure your Silverlight Project for Debugging In this step you will add a test page and configure the Silverlight application to use this page for f5 debugging of the Silverlight application

Step 1: Build Your SharePoint Project

Add a SharePoint 2010 Project to your existing Visual Studio Solution by right-clicking the solution item and selecting Add > New Project…From the Add New Project window, under SharePoint > 2010, select Empty SharePoint Project. Enter a name and then OK. When prompted select Farm Solution.

Note: This project will deploy your Silverlight Application to the SharePoint MasterPage gallery. Provisioning your Silverlight Application to this location prevents it from working successfully as Sandboxed Solution. The Silverlight Application could alternatively be provisioned to a custom Document Library that would allow it to be packaged as a Sandboxed Solution.

To this solution add the following SharePoint 2010 project items:

1. A Module named "Silverlight" – Delete the Sample.txt file that is automatically added

2. A Module named "Pages" – Delete the Sample.txt file that is automatically added

Step 2: Configure Your SharePoint Project

Right-click the Module named Silverlight and select Properties. From the Properties window, find the Project Output References property and select the ellipsis . In the Project Output Reference Window, select the Add button. For the new Item, find the Project Name property and select the Silverlight Application project from the Drop Down list. For the Deployment Type drop down, select ElementFile.

Select OK to close the window. Now we must make some minor modifications to the Elements.xml file. Modify the Elements.xml to look like the following (make sure and update the file names with your specific names)

Next we will add a custom page that will be deployed to SharePoint and automatically provision a Silverlight WebPart to host your Silverlight Application. To do this, right-click the module named Pages and select Add > Existing Item…Browse to the following location :

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates\sts\

Note: A Page from any other Site Template could also be added in the same fashion

Select the default.aspx page. This will make a copy of the default page used for the Team Site Template and add it to your SharePoint solution. Next we will need to modify the Elements.xml to provision the page to the SitePages library, give the page a friendly name and make it ghostable in the library. Modify the Elements.xml file for the Pages module as shown below:

Next we need to add some provisioning markup to the <File> tag that will automatically provision a Silverlight webpart to the page. Add the following markup to the <File> tag :

<![CDATA[ <webParts>

<type name="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SilverlightWebPart, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0,

Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />

<importErrorMessage>Cannot import this Web Part.</importErrorMessage>

</metaData>

<data>

<property name="Hidden" type="bool">False</property>

<property name="Direction" type="direction">NotSet</property>

<property name="HelpMode" type="helpmode">Modal</property>

<property name="Description" type="string">A web part to display a Silverlight application.</property>

<property name="ChromeType" type="chrometype">Default</property>

<property name="Title" type="string">Silverlight Web Part</property>

<property name="ChromeState" type="chromestate">Normal</property>

<property name="Url" type="string">~site/_catalogs/masterpage/SilverlightApp.xap</property>

</properties>

</data>

</webPart>

</webParts> ]]>

</AllUsersWebPart>

Pay special attention to the highlighted areas. You will need to ensure the Url Property is pointed to the Silverlight application for your implementation. Also , the Height and width should be set to match the dimensions of your Silverlight application.

Step 3: Configure your Silverlight Project for Debugging

Finally we will configure your SharePoint project to allow for Silverlight debugging.

On the SharePoint project, right-click the project and select Properties. From Property pages, select the SharePoint tab. At the bottom of the SharePoint tab, find and select the check box labeled Enable Silverlight debugging (instead of Script debugging).

Save and close the properties window.

Finally, select the SharePoint project and hit F5 to the SharePoint Solution and enable and attach the debugger. Simply place some break points in your Silverlight application and once the SharePoint site loads, simply browse to the page containing your Silverlight webpart and application.

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May 31

How to Help Experienced SharePoint End-Users Adopt SharePoint Server 2010

by Kim Lund

on 5/31/2010 11:03 PM

Category: SharePoint 2010; Getting Started; Information Architecture

I have been a user, trainer, administrator and consultant of SharePoint since SharePoint Portal Server 2003 so when I started to work with SharePoint Server 2010, I expected a little bit of pain, but hoped for the best, because I have been through this once before only 3 short years ago when MOSS 2007 came onto the scenes. So here I go again along for the ride of the technology upgrade. This is what people in my business thrive on as it keeps us busy. But what about all those business users who don’t thrive on change or look at version upgrades with the kind of excitement that those of us in consulting do. Those of you thinking about or beginning to upgrade to SharePoint 2010 will need to consider what will the business users go through as the sites begin to take on the new features and look of SharePoint 2010. Will the users embrace the change, challenge the decision to upgrade, be frustrated or upset that they have to re-learn the technology, or think this is not a big deal and start using the new features as if they were always there? In all reality all of those scenarios will likely be experienced throughout your organization, and in the short term there will be pain, especially as users adjust to where the edit this page is now located or how do you get to the library settings. The interface is enough different and settings that were once a drop down on the top right of the screen are now on a ribbon or in the top left part of the screen. Changes like that usually lead to frustration and some wanting the “old way” but once the initial pain is past, users will more than likely love the new way of doing things. But what should we do to help users already experienced with SharePoint get past the initial pain of all these changes? I would like to suggest some things you can do to promote a good user experience, adoption and acceptance when moving to SharePoint 2010.

1. Start with a communication plan. Users will want to understand the reasons for the upgrade, the timing, what the benefits are and who will be impacted. Enough people have been negatively impacted by upgrades in the past so they are hesitant that there will be value in taking the time to change in hopes for something better.
2. I recommend 2 phases for jumping into SharePoint 2010 when you have already had SharePoint within your organization.
a. First introduce the basics:
i. Share with users that there are many things that are the same in SharePoint 2010 and get them comfortable with what they already know. Fortunately there are many things that are the same. Users won’t have to learn new things about many of the list and library features such as check out, version history, or the types of basic lists and libraries. So re-assure the experienced users that much of the basic functionality will remain.
ii. Hold some lunch and learns or other short demonstration based meetings to introduce the new visual enhancements and changes. Don’t introduce any new functionality at this time; just acquaint them with the changes that will impact them immediately such as the ribbon and how a drop down on the link bar is now an option on a multi-purpose ribbon. The goal is to make users comfortable without overwhelming them or making them think there is all this new things they have to learn.
iii. Look into purchasing or developing some 1-3 page quick-start guides or desk side job aids for users who need a little more security as they learn the new interface.
b. Once users are comfortable with the visual changes of SharePoint 2010:
i. Plan to train the site administrators on the new features that the company wants the users to begin to use. At this time implement and encourage the site owners to implement these new features. The short delay in introducing all at once will pay off as users aren’t forced to learn everything at once.
ii. The end users that are members to the site at this time should receive some opportunities to hear about and learn the new features being used. This can be done, depending on the level of the users, in different ways. Have some computer based training available, offer some lunch-n-learns, instructor led training, user group meetings over pizza or encourage the site owners to have a kick-off meeting that gives them a chance to share with their team what the new features mean for their site.
3. Other ideas that can be used at any time during a SharePoint upgrade or first time implementation are:
a. Identify some site owners that have successfully leveraged the new features and allow them to be role models, mentors and the go to individuals for how SharePoint 2010 is benefiting them.
b. Stand up a training site where you can post training opportunities, frequently asked questions, discussion boards, who and where to go to for help, on-line training resources and communications with key dates about how and when SharePoint 2010 will be available.

The key to success is to realize that you don’t have to do it all at once. SharePoint 2010 does have many new and important key features, but users already experienced with SharePoint don’t probably care if you start using all those new features overnight and don’t want to be inconvenienced with change. So just because the features are available, don’t force them on users before they are ready to start caring about them. Once users are comfortable with the new interface, the changes in new features can and will start to bring excitement to users, instead of inconveniences that are being forced on them. There are plenty of new things to learn, in fact I have documented probably 5-10 days of full training if everything is learned, but fortunately not all end users need to learn everything. So at a minimum, identify the priorities and timing of the phases that you anticipate to implement.

While I focused on the aspects of what you need to consider directly for the end users, the other component to focus on that directly impacts user adoption but in the background is the governance and information architecture. Poorly designed and un-governed sites are one of the biggest reasons SharePoint use doesn’t grow at the rate you may hope. I will write about those topics in future posts.

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May 13

SharePoint 2010: Breaking Down More Barriers with Metadata Management and Tagging (Part 1)

by Steve Tycast

on 5/13/2010 11:35 AM

Category: Information Architecture; SharePoint 2010; Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

With the introduction of SharePoint, from the very first release to our now just released 2010 version, Microsoft has seen explosive growth in the sales and use of their product. So why has this technology been so successful?

From a basic concept, SharePoint has been designed to allow the end-users of the application to not simply just “use” a technology, however put the power of creation and design back in to their hands. Ultimately, end-users now have the ability to create and implement concepts, strategies and functionality through the use of a highly friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI – pronounced gooey). Coupled with other products, such as SharePoint Designer, slowing fading are the days of old where end-users relied solely on their IT departments to design, build, implement, and maintain the application across the enterprise. Now that power is being embraced and utilized by tech-savvy end-users.

The capabilities of SharePoint 2007 were groundbreaking, empowering enterprises to collaborate cross-functionally on a global scale. The introduction of metadata versus file folders, sites and pages to bring content and users together in one area, simple yet effective out of the box workflows, and of course enterprise search. All of these capabilities have demonstrated an increase in everything from and increased employee user experience to productivity and efficiency gains, ultimately driving increased ROI.

With the introduction of SharePoint 2010, there are a lot of really great technological enhancements and functionality that will further increase the ease and use of the application. However, the biggest gain I see is through the understanding and control of the velocity of information contained within an organization. The speed at which information is created, coupled with the speed in which it is consumed, presents significant challenges for end-users to find and use information as well as for IT departments to control the amount of data ultimately stored.

With this challenge, the further enhancements around metadata coupled with the introduction of “tagging” capabilities will significantly enhance the way end-user consume these massive amounts of data. It makes sense, that with the introduction and success of Facebook, Twitter, etc, classifying data has allowed the masses to quickly and efficiently find and consume information with topics covering just about everything you can think of. This concept is no different in any organization. So let’s take a closer look at metadata management and tagging.

There are many benefits that are inherent with metadata management and tagging, such as:

· Enhancing navigation and findability

o Taxonomy (top-down) with Folksonomy (bottom-up)

· Allowing for improved search (keywords, terms, term-sets, etc)

· Security tagging (ediscovery, legal holds, retention)

· Improved personalization (tag clouds, related content)

With this new functionality, there are several key pieces of information we need to understand prior to getting our feet wet. SharePoint 2010 has some new “vocabulary” to work with in order to properly implement this functionality.

TERM: This is the basic building block or foundation to any classification schema. It is any type of word, phrase, etc that is used to “describe” or be “associated to” a piece of content.

Example: Golden

TERM SET: This is a group of terms that are related to each other in some type of fashion. A term set can be thought of as a typical taxonomical hierarchy of like terms.

Example: Retriever

Golden

Labrador

So our term set describes a group of like-type dogs being Retrievers, and the individual terms that are “associated” to them are Golden and Labrador. This type of metadata classification is done through the end-user, giving them the power to organize their data accordingly.

However, the question that still remains is how do we manage information across the enterprise? The answer is through the use of Managed Metadata and the Term Store. Prior knowing what this is, how it works and how to implement it (this is the next post), we need to understand two more critical words and how they relate to the two previous examples.

MANAGED TERM: This is when a user with appropriate security permissions is allowed to take a user-generated term and place a “control” around it. The “control” is simply the ability to store the term in to a term store, where end-users can now re-use the term as a piece of controlled vocabulary.

MANAGED KEYWORD: This is a fancy way of saying “tag”. End-users have the permissions to create managed keywords (tags). When they do, the keywords are placed in to a non-hierarchical list within Central Administration allowing Information Architects to easily create a Folksonomical hierarchy or navigation structure. Users with proper permission can convert keywords in to managed terms.

Now that we have an understanding in the basic terminology, we can take the next step and begin to implement this knowledge. As mentioned, my next post is focused around Managed Metadata and the Term Store. Stay Tuned!

Part 2:

http://blogs.rbaconsulting.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=29

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May 13

SharePoint 2010 TechNet Documentation Released

by Paul Grafelman

on 5/13/2010 8:51 AM

Category: SharePoint 2010; Installation; Configuration

As expected, Microsoft released all of the preliminary documentation for SharePoint 2010 on Wednesday, May 12. The amount of data included there is staggering and will likely keep anyone interested in SP2010 busy for many hours.

Some Hilights include:

Planning for adminstrative and Server accounts
Plotter friendy diagrams for multiple topics (upgrades, topologies, etc)
Downloadable content including Books and Videos

Visit TechNet and start reading, as the adoption of SP2010 is already gathering steam!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(office.14).aspx

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May 11

Deploying Application to Azure (Intro to Azure - Part 4)

by RBAEXT\llong

on 5/11/2010 10:51 AM

Few important items to know when deploying to Azure

Even though we are developing Azure applications with VS2010 and the default targeted framework is set to .NET 4.0, Azure does not support .NET 4.0. You must manually change this WebRole > Project Properties > Application Tab
For all non-native .NET assemblies in your project, you must select them and set the copy local property to true

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FtivOyVx7I

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May 10

ASP.NET (WebRole), Azure SDK & Azure SQL (Intro to Azure - Part 3)

by RBAEXT\llong

on 5/10/2010 6:20 PM

Create a simple ASP.NET (WebRole) application with VS 2010, Azure SDK 1.1 and SQL Azure (Cloud).

Prerequisites:

Download and install SQL Server Express 2008 R2 Edition
http://www.microsoft.com/express/database
if you have a full version of SQL 2008 R2 then you will need to configure Azure SDK using the DSInit command utility which I will cover in a separate blog. Also the latest version of Azure SDK will not run on a virtual instance. This is promised to be fixed from MS
Download and install Windows Azure SDK v1.1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dba6a576-468d-4ef6-877e-b14e3c865d3a&displaylang=en

For this demo we will quickly do a POC with databinding to an instance of SQL Azure with the AdventureWorks database we loaded in the previous demo. We are using my favorite ASP.NET UI controls from DevExpress, however you can wreak the same havoc using out of the box ASP.NET controls.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4J7Sis6cmg

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May 10

Loading AdventureWorks into SQL Azure (Intro to Azure - Part 2)

by RBAEXT\llong

on 5/10/2010 6:06 PM

Category: Configuration

Quick and easy to loading AdventureWorks (Lightweight version) into SQL Azure to start developing and building POCS

Download AdventureWorks community sample (Azure friendly):

http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37304

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyHm9alUFVw

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May 10

Creating a SQL Server Instance in Azure (Intro to Azure - Part 1)

by RBAEXT\llong

on 5/10/2010 5:56 PM

Senario:

Create a highly redundant SQL Server instance in the cloud
Highly redundant being that there will be three instances, two of which will be in the same physical datacenter and the third in a different geographic zone so that in theory of someone drops a bomb in the primary datacenter, downtime is almost non-existent because the active role will be passed on to the third instance located in a different datacenter. J
Last but not least could you please have this done in the next five minutes or so?

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDyXHms5_lo

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This is the official site for the RBA Consulting blogs, here you will find the latest and greatest information and news on SharePoint and Office 2010. As a team we are dedicated to providing the best solutions possible using the best technology in the world. As individuals we are very excited about the upcoming SharePoint and related releases.

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