A Safer Journey to Social SharePoint 2010
My kids love The Oregon Trail computer game. It’s a simulation of pioneers traveling west across the US. Watching them play, it struck me that there were some parallels between the challenges faced by those settlers and a company heading down the trail of enterprise social computing on SharePoint 2010. Doesn’t sound like an obvious match? Well pull up a stool and have a listen—it’s about getting to where you are going, while keeping all the settlers happy.
Our hero Joe, a hard working guy who tends to all the collaboration critters, was called in by his boss and given the job of setting up SharePoint 2010. Turns out, the management team is convinced that it will solve all their social business problems. Joe has a slew of chores and not a lot of hands, but when the boss says you’re going west there’s nothing to do but get moving. Joe is a seasoned hand with a difficult journey ahead, so he breaks down his challenge into a few parts.
First, he figures he better get a good idea of where he’s headed. It’s awfully hard to plan a journey if you don’t understand the lay of the land. He picks a star cowhand to set up a SharePoint 2010 server that they can show off like a prize bull. There’s no substitute for live demonstrations and hands-on work.
Second, Joe sets out to gather the team of pioneers who’ll be blazing the trail with him. They have tendered lots of requests for collaboration and knowledge sharing from across the community. Joe soon realizes these folks had scouted some social territory of their own. They know things about Facebook and Twitter, and they’ve tried some others with names like Blather and Chitter. Joe makes a note to check for holes in the old network security fence down on the south forty.
The initial group of settlers has seen a demo of SharePoint 2010, and several are happy. They remember the old SharePoint, and they think this looks a whole lot nicer. They like the tagging and rating and the wiki, but it isn’t that grand social homestead by the river they pictured. They tell Joe it doesn’t have communities like they need, and it doesn’t work like Blammer or Stutter. They want to comment on things in the activity stream, use hashtags and target microblogs to individuals and groups. They also want to engage through their email and mobile clients, since so many of those buckaroos are on the trail all the time.
The NewsGator Solution
Suddenly Joe finds himself in a box canyon. His boss had told him to head one way, but the settlers are angling for something different. Now, because this is a story about Joe and his journey, we’ll go a bit through this part and just say that Joe finds himself a pretty nifty way out of this particular pickle. By grabbing a solution called Social Sites from a company called NewsGator, he makes SharePoint 2010 so social it had all the settlers humming. What really lit Joe’s fire is that they don’t need to buy new equipment or hire any new hands. The social business software installs directly on SharePoint 2010 Servers and runs as a managed service application.
Joe is in IT architect heaven, but still has to deal with full deployment. He knows where he’s going, but has some tough decisions ahead. You see, Joe’s been using MOSS 2007 for a long time. His team built some mighty fine applications on it, and he’s trying to decide just what to do with it all.
His next hurdle is migration. Just as in the days of traveling the Oregon Trail, a good guide can make all the difference. He knows he isn’t the first to travel this path, so he finds himself a couple of experienced guides to show him the ropes. Some have staked out nice terrain on MOSS 2007, but haven’t claimed My Sites. Joe is astonished to see folks had settled on a plan of a separate SharePoint 2010 farm with My Sites, while taking their time bringing along their MOSS 2007 upgrade. This is a whole lot like a settler leaving his wife and kids back at the settlement and sending word for them later.
Joe is especially pleased that he’s able to set up NewsGator on his new SharePoint 2010 farm without having to worry about the old farm. He hollers with joy when he finds he can bring notifications from the 2007 farm into the new activity stream on 2010. It turns out that this clever managed service application has a bunch of nifty APIs to gather events from a whole lot of other places. And NewsGator has a slick little module to send over messages for changes in lists like documents, wikis, blogs and discussions from the old MOSS 2007 farm.
So at the end of his journey Joe got SharePoint 2010 up and running, and the settlers are happy. When his boss asked him what he learned from his journey, he summed it up: “I reckon it’s like darn near every journey. You gotta know where you’re going; you gotta get all folks on the wagon; you gotta get the right tools and good guides; and you gotta break the journey up into steps and do the first steps first.”
So, there, my friends, is a tale of making SharePoint 2010 social. It sure conjures up images of a Conestoga wagon rolling over the plains to me. And now that you know the secret of Joe’s success, it’s time to stake your own social SharePoint 2010 claim.
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