Taking your SharePoint/Outlook Integration further

I recently wrote a post describing how to integrate SharePoint within Outlook.  The beauty of this integration is that it is simple to roll out and it provides access to the documents that are the heart and soul of your corporation.

However, you will likely want to take this integration even further, enabling drag and drop of e-mails into SharePoint instead of the less convenient individual uploads required by the solution noted earlier.  Here are a couple of solutions that I would recommend you check out once you’ve reached this point.

• Colligo Contributor for SharePoint.
  • Customers wishing to make use of Contributor must only install software on the client machine.  If you have a standard image it will be simple to add this software to the image and deploy to all of your end-users.
  • At this point in time Contributor only supports Windows Authentication, not Forms-based authentication.  For internal intranet applications this is a non-issue.
  • I was able to move e-mails into and out of SharePoint via drag and drop without encountering any problems whatsoever.
  • Here is a screenshot of the integration within Outlook:

  

 

• nSynergy myDocs.
  • Unlike Contributor, myDocs requires both client-side, and server-side, installs.  Both installations ran without incident.
  • As with Contributor, Windows authentication is the only security mode currently supported.
  • The integration within Outlook is similar so I am not including a screen shot.

There are, of course, other alternatives on the market but these two appear to be the leaders.  My recommendation would be to purchase primarily on price as the products are very similar in nature, with the one noted difference being the server side installation for myDocs.

Have you used either product?  Let me know which one you recommend.

John

Using Microsoft SharePoint from within Microsoft Outlook

I wanted to share a quick tip with you, demonstrating how to better leverage your investment in Microsoft products.  At Swimfish, we base the bulk of our business on the Microsoft technology stack.  As great as the products are individually you can gain more efficiencies as a business when you begin integrating each of them together. Here is a simple way of exposing SharePoint within Outlook, making it easier for your users to take advantage of the power of SharePoint everyday.

• From within Microsoft Outlook, right-click upon the Inbox folder and select New Folder.
• Name the folder SharePoint (any name will do).
• Click upon the newly created SharePoint folder, right click, and select Properties.
• From the Properties dialog, select the Home Page tab.
• On the home page tab, specify the Address of your SharePoint site, select the “Show home page by default for this folder” check box, and choose OK on the dialog.

You should now see something similar to this from within your Outlook:

Will you use this?

John

SharePoint in Action: Test Management

This post is a follow-up to my SharePoint In Action overview post which can be found at SharePoint In Action: An Overview.  If you are interested in reading the other articles in this series search for “SharePoint in Action” on this blog.

In most startups Quality Assurance (QA) is one of the last roles filled.    I have worked in three straight startups and I have been fortunate to have two of the three fully buy into my view of QA.  QA is about more than just banging away at the keyboard to see what blows up.  Careful planning combined with an appreciation for how user’s interact with the system is critical.  Planning, execution, and accurate, unbiased, tracking and reporting will make a good team great.

As many of you know, I work at Swimfishand I am working hard to fully leverage our investment in Microsoft SharePoint.  As I began discussing my reporting needs with the QA group they quickly leapt at the chance to use SharePoint for their Test Management System, understanding that:

• We are heavily invested in SharePoint.  Using SharePoint for Test Management builds upon this investment and further leverages the knowledge the team has with the platform.
• As we grow we can more easily tie Test Management  metrics into our Project Management System(also in SharePoint).
• It’s out of the box templates, rich workflow, and powerful APIs make it a system we can fully customize for all of our needs.

To be honest, I was somewhat skeptical about using SharePoint for this task.  There are dozens of Test Management Systems available that would have immediately met our needs.  These systems do Test Management and they do it well.  Why create a new system?  Well, it came down to the three points above combined with the desire to let the team channel their ideas to solving the problem I had given them.   SharePoint provides the basic capabilities and for little extra work I can get the basic reports I need.  Forcing an alternative system down the team’s throat was not necessary.  Management 101, give the team a goal and then let them solve it. 

Constructing the Test Management Site

We created a “Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Systems” template by:

• Within Sharepoint we used the Site Actions menu and selected Create.
• We then chose “Sites and Workspaces”.
• Fill in the information on the form and choose the “Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects” template under the Applications Template tab.
• Press Create.  After a few seconds you now have your Test Management Site.

Using the system

The QA group was able to easily replicate the projects from our Project Management site and tie the test cases to these projects.  Fields have been added to track if test cases passed or failed, defects logged by running the test case, and expected vs. actual results.

I added a Management Overview view to track % completion, budgeted days, and combined this with reporting from Bugzilla to get an accurate picture of the current project from the test team’s perspective.

Upcoming challenges, future changes

People familiar with Test Management Systems can already see many of the challenges that we need to overcome.  None are large and I remain confident that the team’s decision to go with SharePoint will lead to a great integrated solution.  However, here are some of the items the team will have to overcome in the near future:

• We will need a way to easily replicate test cases from one project to another project when they are both associated with one core product.  For example, we released Version 3.0 of our Mobile CRM producta couple of months ago and Version 3.01 is set to be released very soon.  It has to be easy to re-use testcases from 3.0 in Version 3.01.
• As the team identifies bug through their test process I would like it to be easy to cleanly tie the bug from the bug system (BugZilla) and the Test Management System.  Not hard, but not yet done.
• As developers fix bugs I want this to flow out to the Test Management system as part of the code check-in process (SubVersion). 
• If a project under test is a services effort associated with an engagement in our CRM system I want the status for the project to cleanly flow back to our CRM system.

Did the team make the right choice?  What else is missing in your opinion?

John

Unless you work at AIG, it’s time to reduce your costs by considering a reduction to your IT team.

We all know the economy is terrible and not everyone is making hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses.  You need to be driving innovation, helping the business find new sources of revenue, and continue to reduce costs.  Not only that, you only have 168 hours per week to get it all done. 

One place that you can probably reduce operational cost, while improving overall focus on the business, is on your IT budget.  While this post is mainly focused on non-tech companies, even they can learn a thing or two.  This sounds painful, I know, and it is.  However, downturns like this often lead to more innovation, this one will be no different. 

Before I continue, if you are looking for a new job consider reading this post on what you should be doing while you’re looking for your next IT job.

You are constantly hearing about SAAS, outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, and other popular buzzwards of the day.  In simple turns, you need to decide what you want to manage on premise versus what you are comfortable having managed outside of your building.  There are also models where hardware runs within your building and is managed by outside resources (we offer that as one alternative solution for our customers).  You need to manage cost vs. quality of service vs. risk.  Here goes:

• E-Mail.    For most companies that are smaller than 100 employees I would argue you should outsource your e-mail.  Managing backups, account setup and shutdowns, SPAM filtering, etc.., is  a job best left to the professionals.
  • If you’re in a company of fewer than 10 employees and need simple mail and calendaring I’d argue you should just use gmail.
  • If you’re in an industry that is regulated by HIPAA, SOX or some other law/regulation think carefully before you outsource this function.  If you find a provider that truly understands these requirements you will be okay, but be careful.  There is too much risk associated with going with the wrong provider.
• Document management, workflow, training.  Whether you are discussing SharePoint or your favorite LMS you are usually better off partnering with a knowledgable hosting provider.  They can manage the storage and bandwidth costs and offload the management of these systems so that you do not have to invest in hiring expensive resources to manage these solutions.
• CRM Systems.  You need to consider the data you are putting into your CRM system to make the right call here.  Some guidelines I would suggest include:
  • Is your CRM system really just a contact management system?  Outsource it.
  • Is your CRM system storing sensitive relationship or financial data?  Either keep the solution in house and do it right (expensive personal to manage the system and keep your data clean) or outsource to a SAAS provider who is not architected using the traditional multi-tenant approach. 
    • Let me explain my point on multi-tenant solutions.  They are scalable and you gain cost efficiencies in terms of the overall management of the system.  However, you also have greater risk to your data because it resides within the same systems that are storing data for other customers. Find out if your potential providers can give you dedicated environments (either virtualized or on physical hardware).
• Phones and faxes.  If you have fewer than 50 employees I would consider a VOIP provider like Teliax and a PBX like Fonality over a traditional telco.  The technologies have evolved to a point where the quality of service is excellent.

I could write for another hour and fail to fully cover this topic.  However, I hope this provides you with plenty to consider as you’re looking for new ways of reducing your costs.

Let me know what you think.

John

SharePoint in Action: The IT Help Desk

 This post is a follow-up to my SharePoint In Action overview post which can be found at SharePoint In Action: An Overview .

If you’re part of a small start-up it can be very difficult to effectively manage your IT issues without things falling through the cracks.  The challenges only get harder as you grow.  At Swimfish I’ve been leveraging the power of SharePoint to gain deeper insight into our IT-related issues, ensure that items do not slip through the cracks, and to provide users with a higher degree of confidence that their issues will be resolved. 

While my use of SharePoint for managing IT Help Desk issues is fairly new, as noted when I discussed my use of PIR, I wanted to take some time to share with you how we’ve constructed the site, the early successes that I’ve seen, and some insights into where the site will eventually go.

HOW? (WSS 3.0)

1. All good things in SharePoint begin with the Site Actions menu.  Select it and choose Create.
2. From the Create page choose Sites and Workspaces.  Choose the Help Desk Site (under application Templates), name it, etc.., and choose Create.  You now have a basic help desk system.
3. In order to make this useful I then went into the site I created and chose View All Site Content (in the upper left-corner) and edited the Keywords list.
   1. Keywords represent the categories that you are using to funnel help desk requests through the system.  For example, I created IOD (for our InterAction On Demand product), SOD (our SharePoint On Demand product), Phone Problems, Network Problems, etc..
4. I once again opened the View All Site Content option and edited the Experts list.  Here I defined the leads for each of the problem areas (keywords) I defined in the step above.
5. I wanted to update the form and views within the help system to work optimally for myself and my team.  Here are the minor changes that I made:
   1. I selected my favorite menu, Site Actions and then Site Settings.
   2. I selected Site Libraries and List and chose to customize service requests.  I simply removed the customer field as I don’t feel the need for my teammates to have to look up their names.  SharePoint keeps track of who created the requests and that’s all I need to know.
   3. The final piece was to go in and add the Created By field to all of my views so that I would know who entered the request.

CURRENT STATUS

   The team is getting used to the new system, nothing happens overnight.

•  The company is entering tickets instead of running up to the IT team (unless it’s an emergency) , the system is definitely beginning to work.
• We have resolved several tickets in the system and users have visibility into the state of their requests.  Nothing is slipping through the cracks so it has definitely resolved one of my major issues with our old processes.
• I have alerting setup at ever step of the process, so IT folks are alerted when task come in.  We are headed in the right direction.

CRYSTAL BALL TIME…  THE FUTURE

I am always a proponent of iterative processes and incremental improvements and this help desk system is no different.   Here are a few things that I will want to do with the system over time:

• Integrate it with our CRM system.  Some help items related to our hosted offerings or specific customers.  When the issues are related to specific clients I want to get that information back into our CRM system.
• Integrate with our SharePoint project management system.  Many IT tasks are hard to plan for but do impact schedules.  My goal is to tie this work back to our project tracking system for real-time schedule updates and to provide information that we can use to better estimate our IT headcount needs.

I’ll let everyone know how this system evolves.  Keep watching for more postings in the SharePoint in Action series.  Stay tuned.

John

“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” – Laurence J. Peter

This is one of those quotes I would encourage everyone to think about on a regular basis. Every week try and take a few minutes to consider how you spent your time.  I’m not suggesting writing a status report, write a Pain Index Report (PIR).  Include the following in this PIR:

-  Any tasks that you had to do on a daily basis.
-  Any miscommunication you encountered throughout the week.
-  Anything that you found painful to resolve that you’ll have to deal with again in the near future.
-  If you manage a team do you understand how your team spent their time.  I am 100% against micromanagement, it’s a horrible practice.  However, if you know your team is working hard but you can’t pinpoint what they’re working on this should go on your PIR.

  Once you’ve constructed the PIR, identify one or two items you’re going to address in the coming week.  You don’t have to come up with major wins every week, just keep moving the ball forward.

Here are a few of the items on my personal PIR that I’ve made progress on in the last two weeks:

-  Delivered a SharePoint-based IT Help Desk.  I need more visibility into the time being spent supporting our internal staff.  I also wanted to ensure that things were not falling through the cracks.  While it’s early on I already have a higher level of understanding into the painpoints and the rest of the team has more confidence that things will not fall through the cracks.
-  Updated our SharePoint Enhancement Request site with additional fields to enable the product team to better communicate with the rest of the company regarding the plans for these requests.

You might consider these minor updates and you would be correct.  However, these minor improvements are keeping the wheels of progress turning.  What’s on your PIR?

John

SharePoint in Action: Project Management

This post is a follow-up to my SharePoint In Action overview post which can be found at SharePoint In Action: An Overview .

Project success is dependent on great project management.   Great product management is only possible if you are using the right tools.  If you’re delivering a one-use application feel free to track your schedule on the back of a napkin.  However, you need to be better prepared for any other project.

When I came on board to Swimfish I found that we were using Microsoft Project for driving the majority of our product and services driven projects.  The team was using the tools well, executing on or near on schedule.  It was clear, however, that the individual project files were not providing enough visibility into resource allocation conflicts or project backlogs.  I needed another solution.   While I did consider Microsoft Project Server I felt that a solution within SharePoint that would ultimately tie back into our CRM system (and other systems as well) was more in line with where I want to take the organization.  My goal for the rest of this post is to go over how we are using it today, some of the initial challenges we encountered, and where we will go in the future.

STARTING OUT

Creating a simple multiple project tracking site within Sharepoint is straight-forward, just use the Site Actions -> Create -> Sites and Workspaces.  From there, choose the Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects template and create the site.  This standard template provides a good starting point to begin exploring the capabilities.  For us, however, I needed to make a few changes in the application and in our processes:

• Lose the concept of monetary cost.  We use another system for billing and I wanted to avoid duplicate entry or the more attractive, but more sizable effort, of integrating the two systems.
• Added the ability to track if the project was for internal projects, external products, or customer solutions development.  This is important for us to better measure and track the percentage of time we’re investing in each area.  I have clear targets that I want to achieve and this will help me measure if we are staying on track.
• Before projects begin all tasks must be in SharePoint and their must be project estimates for each tasks.  We use this as our baseline and can determine how well we’ve estimated, using this to help us improve our estimation skills.
• For each project I create a Datasheet Grid view for all tasks.  The view lists all tasks for that project and includes totals for percent complete.  Team members are expected to have this view open and update as they go.  This minor amount of extra process ensures that everyone has an up to date view of the project as it progresses towards each of it’s milestones.
• I have also created views for each of the team members, showing their open tasks.  This view enables me to quickly determine the individual team member’s backlog.  In the startup environment that we live in everyone is working on multiple projects and it’s very helpful to have this view at the individual level as well as at the individual project level.
• Our documents are all stored in document libraries within this site.  This has worked well and has improved our level of collaboration beyond what we had been using (primarily Lotus Notes).

REMAINING SHORT-TERM CHANGES

While we’ve made great strides with this system there are a few short-term changes that are still needed. 

• Leveraging the Dashboard view as part of our daily standups.  We use this great agile practice and it is beneficial for everyone.  I feel that Dashboard will provide information for this meeting but have not yet integrated this into our process. 
• Creating another view to see resource allocation across all projects that are currently open.  Today we have volumes of information available at the individual, and at the individual project, level.  The remaining piece is the overview of all resource across all projects, one of the main reasons I went with SharePoint.
• Integrating a tool such as Project Publisher to import/export Microsoft Project files.  Microsoft should support this functionality out of the box but does not.    We do alot of custom development with customers that want to see Microsoft Project files.  It’s critical that we can use these files with our core project management system. 
  • I’ll be evaluating Project Publisher soon but already have a lot of faith in it based upon this recommendation from Dux Raymond Sy, PMP (http://www.meetdux.com):

“In my experience, Microsoft Project does a great job in allowing project managers to plan and track key project metrics: schedule and budget. However, it is quite challenging since the project information is isolated within the Microsoft Project file. An efficient solution is to leverage Microsoft Project, Microsoft SharePoint and Project Publisher. Project Publisher is a very inexpensive third-party tool that addresses the need most project managers yearn for: allowing project resources to update their tasks on a SharePoint-based project site that synchronizes back to schedule stored in a Microsoft Project file.”

THE FUTURE

I am a huge proponent of iterative process development.  While the work above has already made us a better organization there is much more work to do.  While this list is not complete, here are a couple of key integrations coming in the near future:

• Integration with our billing systems.   Work on custom projects must be billed in a timely fashion.  It’s not fair to customers, or to our company if it is not.  Having this more automated will benefit everyone.
• Possible integration with our source control and bug tracking systems, enabling teammates to make changes in one central location and having it flow throughout the company.
• Integration with our CRM system.  As engagements are opened in our CRM system I want these to automatically create projects in SharePoint.  Automate what you can.

If this is helpful, let me know.  I’ll keep you all updated as we continue to refine and improve our efforts here.  Also, if you’re doing things with SharePoint that I haven’t listed please share with the group.

John

SharePoint in Action: CRM Integration

This post is a follow-up to my SharePoint In Action overview post which can be found at SharePoint In Action: An Overview .

Swimfish offers our customers two SAAS offerings that I will be discussing briefly in this posting:  SharePoint On Demand and InterAction On Demand.  InterAction is a powerful CRM system that models relationships in very clean, very powerful ways.  You know what SharePoint is. 

I promise not to make this a marketing article, however, instead focusing on how we’re using this integration to provide a cost effective method for streamlining our sales, marketing, and services efforts.  There will be some things that I cannot discuss in too much detail due to the fact that we also sell this offering.  I’ll be able to discuss our other uses of SharePoint in greater detail in additional posts coming soon.

Our CRM system is a good CRM system.  In fact, we are experts and have fine tuned the product beyond what most users are capable of doing themselves.  CRM systems, however, are just a piece of the puzzle when you consider your marketing and sales strategies, details on modeling your sales pipeline, monitoring individual marketing campaigns and the performance of individual sales teams and personnel.  Even though it is a critical tool, other tools are required as well.

One of the first challenges we encounted with our CRM system was how to effectively tie together all of the documentation that is associated with everyone, and everything, in our CRM system.  We tried a Windows server file share.  This fell apart, of course, with common problems such as:

• Remote users could not reach the files.  VPN access is a simple enough solution but the IT costs (time) to install and maintain the solution is generally larger than you originally think.
• Modelling the relationships and the objects (companies, people, deals, etc..) that you have in your CRM system on the file share is impossible to get right.  If you’re lucky you start off with a small set of data and your users are able to find those proposals and contracts.  However, as you utilize your CRM system you begin to rapidly add data.  Keeping the file system in sync with the CRM system is a major maintenance nightmare.

It did not take long to look to SharePoint for assistance.  It does an excellent job with file storage, has workflow capabilities built in, and enough security to handle our needs. SharePoint comes at the right price and we have been able to leverage it to reduce overall operational cost, keeping all of the critical information together in one place to speed up our ability to make good business decisions.

To ensure users make use of SharePoint it has been critical to directly integrate into our CRM system  This integration has been built via a C# .NET project that manages communication between the InterAction system (via it’s APIs) and SharePoint (via it’s APIs and direct links).  As noted, we do sell this integration so I’m not able to share code with everyone and I apologize for that.   Here are some of the more interesting pieces:

• When viewing people, companies, deals, etc. within our CRM system users can view all of the files associated with this object.  A simple Windows file system-like view is displayed to the user.
• By leveraging the CRM system APIs we are able to honor the security model of the CRM system, ensuring users only see the information they are entitled to. If you are doing any sort of integration with SharePoint it is critical that you carefully consider the security model.  As I noted, SharePoint’s model is acceptable but not as robust as you may want.
• Single sign-on support.  Through the magic of some secret sauce user’s do not have to login to SharePoint once they have logged into the CRM system.  Remember, every additional login that you throw in front of your users slow them down and likely result in slower adoption of your system.
• Within SharePoint itself we have further closed the loop by including custom web parts including one that enables quick queries against our CRM system from within SharePoint.  This way, users that decide to spend more time in SharePoint than in the CRM system can easily query data from the system.

This integration, including other pieces that are coming soon, have greatly reduced the operational cost of managing the files associated with our CRM system.  We have also seen real gains in terms of sales performance as sales people are not hunting for information, it is all available at their fingertips.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, or if you would like me to provide more detail in any specific area.  If I can provide more details without sharing too much secret sauce I will definitely do so.

John

SharePoint in Action: An Overview

This is the first in a series on how I am leveraging an investment in SharePoint to reduce operational costs, gain internal efficiencies, and drive new revenue streams. I’m hoping that this information can help you better understand SharePoint as well as get you thinking about how to become more efficient in these tough economic times.
Over the course of this series I will explore:

• How we integrate our CRM system with SharePoint.  This integration enables us to be more efficient in our sales and support efforts.
• How we utilize SharePoint for project management.
• How we utilize SharePoint for managing product enhancement requests.
• Our plans to further utilize SharePoint for IT help desk functionality as well as for a more robust Test Management System than we currently have in place.

A reasonable question, of course, is why did I choose SharePoint for these activities?  Easy:

• We are a Microsoft Partner and were already making use of SharePoint internally.  I wanted to maximize our investment with the technology.  I want to ensure it’s only used where appropriate, but if there is a fit, it is my default technology for collaboration and communication.
• Internal training benefits.  SharePoint is a great solution that I firmly believe can provide internal benefits as well as benefits for our customers.  To ensure that our sales and support teams can speak to those benefits we must use it internally and understand it well.
• SharePoint is extremely flexible.  The ability to create robust workflows and customized forms is critical.
• SharePoint provides a rich set of APIs.  It is easy to extend SharePoint by developing WebParts and other extensions.
• SharePoint’s security model.  While the security model is limited, it provides a rich enough model to support most company’s needs.
• The number of prebuilt templates enables users to get up and running with SharePoint quickly.

Remember the words of W. Arthur Porter:

“The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams.”

Keep innovating.

John