Simple Naming Conventions that Improve End User Experience in SharePoint Sites

Inspired by a great blog post by Veronique Palmer about removing %20's from your SharePoint URL's, I've decided to document some additional naming convention best practices that improve the user experience for SharePoint end users and power users alike. The tips are grouped by permissions because not every user has the power to apply these best practices.

If you don't want to read all the details, here are my recommended naming conventions in three sentences:

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Where are the SharePoint solutions in Nielsen Norman Group's “10 Best Intranets” for 2012?

Earlier this month, Nielsen Norman Group released their annual list of the 10 best intranets. In recent years, at least half of the winners featured solutions built on SharePoint. This year, the Intranet Design Annual 2012 includes only 3 intranets based on SharePoint, though an additional two companies use SharePoint for team collaboration. So, what's going on?

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Sharing SharePoint at SHARE 2012 Atlanta

In April, I'll be in Atlanta to speak at and participate in the first SHARE conference in the US. Share is the only conference I've seen that is exclusively designed to showcase how business users solve business problems with SharePoint - and so I'm particularly excited to be part of the first US version of this conference following successful events in South Africa and Australia.

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SharePoint User Adoption Strategy: Team Member “Service Level Agreement”

User adoption of SharePoint solutions is a challenge for many organizations (and consultants). I've done conference presentations on the topic and Michael Sampson wrote an entire book (which is excellent, by the way). I often talk about what I guess I'd call "macro" adoption strategies - larger scale, company-wide initiatives. Recently, I've been working with clients on more "micro" strategies - specific strategies for individual teams that are almost like service level agreements (SLAs) for team members.

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One conference, one person, multiple identities – my SharePoint 2011 Conference experience

I had a unique opportunity to participate in the Microsoft SharePoint conference this past week. I presented two sessions (on Measuring the Value of SharePoint Investments and a Practical Approach to SharePoint 2010 Governance) but, thanks to this blog, I was also invited to the conference as a representative of the press - which meant I got to go to a few extra events and participate in a few one-on-one meetings that were just as interesting as the sessions I went to as an attendee. Basically, I spent the past 4 days as a "Certs" - both a candy and a breath mint! What follows are some of the most interesting insights and experiences I had.

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5 reasons why I'm excited to be going to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim #SPC11

In just about a week, I will be headed, along with several thousand other enthusiasts, to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, CA. If you aren't planning to go, here are some of the reasons you might want to join me.

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5 Lessons I’ve Learned About How to Create Memorable and Useful SharePoint Governance Plans

I feel like I've worked on a gazillion SharePoint governance plans - or at least half that many - and each time, I think the latest one is the best one. I've definitely learned that the 80-page governance plan document is just that - a document. It doesn't actually help govern a SharePoint deployment, much less provide any type of guidance to SharePoint users. Here are 5 of the lessons I've learned about creating useful and memorable governance plans.

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Get SMART: Make sure you have quantifiable objectives for your SharePoint solution!

It's important to make sure that you have meaningful and realistic objectives for your SharePoint solution. If you want business decision makers to pay attention, your objectives need a measurable target.

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SharePoint User Adoption Challenges? Help from Microsoft

If you are having challenges communicating what SharePoint 2010 can do or how to use a particular feature, check out the clever "I use SharePoint" website from Microsoft. The site has a collection of excellent videos (I like the Meeting Workspace one a lot) and a complete User Adoption Kit that you can download and customize.

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Office 365: A great answer for users in technology “mixed marriages”

If you're like me - in a technology "mixed marriage" with Windows laptops and desktops running Outlook with Apple mobile devices (iPhone4 and iPad2) but not using Exchange for e-mail, then you've probably been using MobileMe to synchronize your calendar and contact information. At least you were until May 5, 2011, when Apple forced all MobileMe users to go to the new MobileMe calendar, which no longer properly syncs meeting invitations or alerts with Outlook. Fortunately, the timing of the public Office 365 beta makes it easy to drop MobileMe and switch to a solution that actually works - really, really well. But, to avoid a lot of blood sweat and tears, there are some steps you need to follow.

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Metadata that checks in but won’t check out

The ability to create metadata in one place in a site collection and use it where you need it was an especially welcome feature in SharePoint 2007. In SharePoint 2010, the managed metadata service extends this capability to share metadata (and content types) across site collections - which is even better. This week, we painfully discovered that there are several out of the box SharePoint site columns that end users should NEVER re-use in a document library - unless there is a developer armed with PowerShell to help them get rid of them if they decide they don't want them after all.

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Adventures in the land of metadata: should I use a Lookup or a Choice Column?

I'm working on a project where we are re-architecting a folder-intensive document library structure to a metadata-centric library structure as part of a migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010. For a variety of reasons, we are not using managed metadata (for now). One of the interesting choices we're reviewing is whether to make our document attributes Choice or Lookup columns. Here are some of the factors we're evaluating and which column type is typically the better choice for each evaluation criteria.

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Award winning SharePoint intranets that don’t look like SharePoint

I'm spending this weekend hunkered down with the 433-page Intranet Design Annual 2011 from Nielsen Norman Group featuring what they consider this year's 10 best intranets. As in the previous several years, about half the winners (5 in the current edition) use SharePoint as a foundation for the entire intranet or a significant component. However, unlike some previous years, unless you read the detailed descriptions of the technology behind these award-winning intranets, you would never know that they are built on SharePoint. I often hear clients say, "I want to use SharePoint but I don't want it to look like SharePoint." As these winning intranets demonstrate, with a little time and effort (and money, of course) this is definitely possible.

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They’ve got an app for that – review of Best iPad Apps by Peter Meyers

I was fortunate to get an iPad as a gift and for the past several weeks, I've spent some time asking people about their favorite apps but no one was quite as helpful as a great book about apps called Best iPad Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders by Peter Meyers (published by O'Reilly).

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Oops, you really shouldn’t have seen that … automated redaction for SharePoint content

When you need to remove sensitive information from documents on a regular basis (think Legal, Engineering, or Healthcare environments), manual processes are both tedious and subject to error. I recently got to see a demo of a product that helps quickly and easily redact SharePoint content - Redact-It from Informative Graphics. With Redact-It, the risk of accidentally sharing sensitive information stored in SharePoint libraries can be virtually eliminated.

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My Twitter golden rule: Tweet about others as you would like them to tweet about you

It seems like every industry conference has a Twitter hash tag so even if you are not at the event, you can get a sense of what is going on by following the Twitter stream. I think this is pretty cool, but last week I was at an industry conference where some of the Twitter chatter started to feel like talking behind someone's back. Rather than challenging a speaker by asking a question and engaging in a dialogue, I noticed that people were tweeting "nasty-grams" when they disagreed with a speaker's comments. Seriously people, is that nice? Maybe we need a new golden rule: "Tweet about others only as you would like them to tweet about you."

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Drowning in email? Grab on to The Hamster Revolution!

Have you ever thought about the total time you spend processing email per year?  Well, Mike Song, Vicki Halsey, and Tim Burress, authors of The Hamster Revolution, have - and the number might surprise you.  Let's say you send and receive a conservative 50 messages a day and spend an average of 2 minutes on each message.  If you assume a work year of 240 days, that's 50 days/year on email!  If you could save even just 10% of that time by reading this short book, you would get back an extra week of your life!

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Websites your grandma can develop? Maybe.

For the last six months, my hair stylist has been talking about creating a website for his salon. He didn't want to spend thousands of dollars but he wanted something that looks really nice. There have got to be thousands of low-cost build-it-yourself tools out there but most of them aren't easy for a novice to use, particularly if the newbie wants to make use of any sophisticated web tools supported.

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Honored to be named to the 50 Top SharePoint Influencers List

I'm very honored to be named as one of the top 50 influencers in the SharePoint space.  The list was commissioned by Global 360 and KnowledgeLake. Today's announcement featured only Systems Integrators and Consultants.  We consumed 17 of the 50 slots.  I guess that means that 33 spaces remain for Solution Providers, Microsoft Executives, Journalists, and Analysts, who will be announced soon.

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