November 14th, 2012
The (excellent) Tuesday morning session at SPC 12, “Best Practices for Designing Websites with SharePoint 2013” was presented to an elbow-to-elbow standing room only crowd of SharePoint professionals, and the new features and best practices presented in the session elicited applause from the crowd (and frequent hooting from one person in front of me). On the surface it’s a strange room to find an Engineer in, whether SP Practice Lead or no, but I suspect the crowd represented a cross-section of SP pros of all different disciplines.
November 13th, 2012
To borrow an old, bad joke; “When is an app not an app? When it’s a document library!”
It’s obvious that Microsoft has invested a tremendous amount of time and mindshare into making the Wave 15 (SharePoint 2013) products “app friendly.” This is an exciting shift in focus for the SharePoint platform, as well as for the Office products, and especially Office 365. The investment they’ve made in enabling developers to build solutions that can function in hybrid cloud deployments with online and offline capabilities is critical, and is likely to yield a fantastic App ecosystem in the future.
October 26th, 2012
Out of the box a My Site is limited to a maximum of 100 MBs, and generates a size warning at 80 MBs. Those last 20 MBs can .go quickly, and SharePoint will not allow users to create or upload new documents once they’ve hit that limit… Worse yet, that limit may present as other types of errors, making it difficult to pinpoint – for example, auto-syncing OneNote 2010 Notebooks will simply generate errors during sync, and the errors you get are not clear and obvious. (This, in fact, is the use case that inspired this post).
October 26th, 2012
On Tuesday afternoon Miller Systems founder and CEO Seth Miller led a panel of seasoned marketing professionals at FutureM 2012 in a session titled “The End of Depth? Marketing Complex Services and Products.” The discussion explored the challenges and opportunities inherent in the high-frequency / short burst world of social communication and marketing, especially as products and services become increasingly difficult to sum up in a few words.
October 19th, 2012
It’s not rocket science these days to create and publish web pages, using relatively simple WCM tools like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Widespread availability and adoption of free tools like these have removed the barrier to entry for just about everyone who’s interested in publishing anything (no complaints on my end as I type this very post into WordPress).
There’s a trap here, though. The simplicity of creating basic pages like blogs and wikis has somehow led many to conclude that WCM is generally less important than it used to be. One point I’d argue: if you’re trying to foster collaboration and deliver knowledge management via your intranet, your WCM tools and strategy are still very important.
CMSWire recently published my article exploring this idea: The Evolving Role of Content Management in Modern Intranets.
What do you think? Has WCM been completely disrupted by the social web and cheap or free tools? How does your response change in the context of an intranet?
Your thoughts and comments are always appreciated!
October 8th, 2012
Do you have an Exchange calendar that you share with colleagues in your organization? Did you know that there’s no way to create a private appointment on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch using the native calendar app? Well, if you didn’t know, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Search Google for some variation of “can’t make private appointment iPhone Exchange calendar” and you’ll find thousands of posts with people asking for this feature – since 2008.
September 19th, 2012
Originally published in CMSWire, November 07, 2012
As discussed in a previous article (Making SharePoint WCM More Adoptable for Content Contributors), a thoughtful and usable contributor experience is critical to the successful adoption of a SharePoint WCM experience. Content drives the site, so making content contributors comfortable in the editing environment is essential. Here are just a few ideas for simple improvements that can make a world of difference in adoptability.
September 18th, 2012
Here’s a classic semantics/nomenclature problem in IT: people often interchange “Business Continuity” and “Disaster Recovery”. While they’re birds of a feather, there are some substantial differences, at least in this author’s humble opinion. Here goes:
September 4th, 2012
The proliferation of web content management platforms promises to put content creation rightfully into the hands of subject matter experts, but the editing experiences of many of these platforms remains a mixed bag. Microsoft’s SharePoint platform, which is becoming a major player in the WCM arena since its release of SharePoint 2010, provides seemingly endless opportunity for creating and publishing content. However, it still presents some significant adoption obstacles to content contributors.
July 29th, 2011
I bought an iPad. Full Circle? Former Mac zealot gone Windows long ago. Cupertino home-bound? We’ll see.
My wife and I are (FINALLY!) going on our honeymoon in a few weeks, and I decided a long time ago that there’s simply no way in hell I’m lugging a laptop on that trip, and it’s just been “which tablet am I gonna get before we go?” Those of you who have known me for 10 years or more will probably get a particular kick out of this story. For those of you that don’t, the upshot is that I used to be something of a Mac zealot, but switched over to Windows long, long ago, and my livelihood is very Microsoft centric these days. (Funny, that’s the last time I mention Microsoft from here on out. Omen?)