Legal IT Professionals

As promised, here is the 4th part of my fall conference wrap-up. In this part I will take what I talked about in the previous 3 parts, and try to relate it to real world solutions.

Usability & Manageability
Obviously the changes to the UI in SharePoint 2010 are significant, and are the most noticeable change your users will see immediately. This should hopefully lead to better adoption by your users, and better productivity.

Professional Developers Conference 2009

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is Microsoft’s big programmer event. Usually, this is where they announce major new products and technologies. For example, PDC 2003 was the first major public announcement of Windows Longhorn (which grew up to be Vista) and its underlying technologies. At last year’s PDC, Microsoft announced its cloud computing strategy, Windows Azure.
PDC09 was a little different. This year was more about fulfilling the vision. A number of new products are in late beta stages and approaching release:

Continuing on from my last column (part 1), here are some more notes on SPC09…

Business Intelligence

PerformancePoint has been absorbed into SharePoint Server. PerformancePoint Services are included in the SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise license. There is also a significant update to the presentation graphics within PerformancePoint, including use of Silverlight, 3D graphics, and time-lapse charts.

Another big announcement was for PowerPivot (formerly project Gemini). The PowerPivot addin for Excel allows Excel to use the Analysis Services engine in memory, allowing Excel to work on very large datasets (millions of cells) very rapidly.

Well, it has been an extremely busy autumn, between attending a couple of major Microsoft conferences, an adventure in "out of country health care", and trying to actually do some billable work along the way, there has not been much time to think.

What I would like to do in this column is summarize the highlights of the Microsoft SharePoint 2009 conference in Las Vegas in October, and the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles in November.  Because there was a lot of content at these two conferences, this column is split in three parts. You are now reading part one, part two will be published on Wednesday and the last part will follow on Friday. There is also some techie stuff in here – more than usual. I encourage you to read on and skim over what is too detailed for you, there is a lot of interesting stuff coming.
 
I plan to follow this up in January with some thoughts on "what does all this mean for a law firm?"

Last month’s column drew quite a bit of interest and many comments here and elsewhere. Most were even positive, and those that were not were at least constructive. Before getting into this month’s topic, I wanted to revisit some of the things people said.

One valid point that was made was that much of what I said last time did not apply only to SharePoint, but to pretty much any implementation of an enterprise software product. While I agree with this, I also think the SharePoint is a little different in that it is a less specific product than many others. When you implement a practice management system, or document management system, or an accounting package, you typically already have at least a high-level understanding of what you want to achieve and what success looks like. This is not necessarily this case with SharePoint – I have seen many organizations charge headlong (or drift aimlessly) into a SharePoint deployment with no clear understanding of the high-level business value.

This column I want to deliver a warning to all of you out there – do not implement SharePoint in your organization! If you ignore this warning, and implement SharePoint anyway, beware. You run the risk of any number of problems, including:

• User dissatisfaction
• Maintainability and support issues
• Data silos, making information hard to find, hard to share, and hard to maintain
• Lots of rework
• General chaos
• Projects that take 10 times longer than you had planned, if they finish at all.

I do a lot of work helping organizations build solutions using SharePoint – is that all a lie?

I am very excited about the upcoming 2010 version of Office and SharePoint. Then again, I am a techie and love to play with new toys. So I have been looking through the SharePoint 2010 Sneak Peek videos recently posted by Microsoft, and thought I would post some first impressions regarding the upcoming release. Keep in mind that this is all very preliminary, and that I have not seen any of the software running, or seen anything beyond the videos. This is just the stuff I liked – I would strongly recommend looking at the videos yourself to see what strikes your fancy. Plus, I can’t show demos or screen shots, so the videos will let you actually see some of this stuff in action. 

Microsoft is changing the positioning around SharePoint a little bit, but it is still all about sharing and finding information, and improving the way people collaborate. There are hints of new features related to enterprise social networking as well.

So this time I am going to talk about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as I promised quite a long time ago. After setting a definition, I will talk about what WF is, and as importantly, what it is not. In addition, I will talk about how WF fits in to the SharePoint world. I will then talk about some of the things I like about WF under SharePoint, and some of the things I do not like (hey, no technology is perfect!)

What is Workflow?

Yeah I know, we all “know” what workflow is – unfortunately it is different things to different people. In fact, it does not seem to be a word – at least not according to the Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary, but this is a definition I found at BusinessDictionary.com:

Progression of steps (tasks, events, interactions) that comprise a work process, involve two or more persons, and create or add value to the organization's activities. In a sequential workflow, each step is dependent on occurrence of the previous step; in a parallel workflow, two or more steps can occur concurrently.

I would tend to simplify this a little. For me, the meaningful part of the definition is:

Portal Technologies: Fact and Fiction, Part 2

One of the great things about SharePoint (note that in this column, when I say SharePoint, I am somewhat generically referring to WSS and MOSS) is its ease of use, ease of implementation, ease of administration, etc. In many ways, a parallel can be drawn between SharePoint and the early days of Visual Basic. Visual Basic made it easy for anyone to create a Windows application. An unfortunate side effect was that a lot of people did in fact create Windows applications which were ill-planned, ill-conceived, and badly implemented. Did this mean the VB itself was bad? No, it just needed to be used intelligently (I know, many will argue that it was and is a bad language, but that is a different discussion).

SharePoint is much the same. It is easy to set up ad hoc sites, throw together team sites, do some collaboration, store some documents, etc. However, it is also easy to get into a lot of trouble when these ad hoc sites grow and multiply. As with many things, it is easy to do the easy stuff, but much more difficult to do the hard stuff well.  It is even more difficult to implement SharePoint in such a way that it brings real, lasting value.

Add to this the breadth of functionality in SharePoint, and it becomes obvious that in order to get the most out of an investment in SharePoint requires a significant amount of research and understanding of SharePoint’s capabilities, and what they mean for your needs.

Well, I am finally getting my first column written. It has taken longer than expected – the joys of cold and flu season here in Canada.

First, a bit of background on why I am here – writing on a Legal Technology site. Working as a Principal Consultant with T4G Limited and having spent much of the last decade as VP of Technology with Whitehill Technologies, I have helped hundreds of clients overcome challenges related to document generation, document automation, and workflow.  Along with leading the teams that developed and maintained Whitehill Enterprise and Paperless Proforma, I was also the driving force behind the creation of Whitehill’s workflow solutions for legal.

My primary focus currently is on portal technologies and the deployment of portal solutions in the enterprise. Of course, one of the big challenges I find is that the whole idea of “portal technologies” is very broad, and often ill-defined. What I mean is that a lot of organizations decide (or are told) that they need a portal solution, without having a clear idea of what that means, or exactly what business problems they intend to solve.