I guess it was not an accident that Nintex released Nintex Workflow 2010 on day 1 of #WPC, the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

When I was searching for some Nintex video’s on Youtube, I found this very nice video of Mike Fitzmaurice explaining with his well known and recognizable voice what Nintex Workflow 2010 is.

For the readers who are not familiar with Nintex workflow, it adds a drag-and-drop workflow designer, connectivity and advanced workflow features to the Microsoft SharePoint document management and collaboration platform, empowering business users and IT Professionals alike to quickly and easily automate business processes; from a simple leave approval request, to complex integration across external applications and data sources.

The slogan of Nintex is “Worklfow for everyone™” and if you ask me, that’s what they bring

I would like to add or emphasize a really important reason why Nintex Workflow is IMO “better” then a custom development workflow. Release management. When a Visual Studio workflow is ready for production and a WSP (SharePoint Solution) file is produced, you have to go to he release management procedures and processes, and they can be quite hard with SharePoint.

The moment my SharePoint 2010 environment is up and running , I will start to experiment with Nintex Workflow 2010, and if time allows me, I’ll even post about that

Since a few years I execute the job of SharePoint consultant. SharePoint seems to be one of the most successful product, maybe even the most successful product Microsoft has launched. Then why should a guy like me complain about that Microsoft is wrong in their bring to market? They probably earn billion$ with SharePoint. And they should, because it is a great product! But at the end of this post, in the quote you can see my worry.

During the SharePoint Evolution conference SPEVO held in April of this year, my memory was refreshed of something that was said during one of the analyst sessions in the SharePoint Conference 2009 (SPC09) in Las Vegas.
The SPEVO was actually the SharePoint Best Practices Europe Conference, but because of the launch of a new version called SharePoint 2010 there were not a lot best practices to share on SharePoint 2010. BUT the organizers of this conference really got the message I’ll talk about in this blog post. They organized a IW (Information Worker stream) In fact, they organized even 2 parallel streams. Well done Steve Smith!

During a session from Symon Garfield, he explained why 70% of all projects fail. There are several reason, like unclear requirements, scope changes. One of the main failure reasons is that a SharePoint project can’t be driven only by IT.
SharePoint is a business driven product. IT can install, deploy and support it, but it can not solely drive it toward long term success.
You also need to have a good user adoption plan, and some corporate guidelines (let’s call them governance) to make sure that when people really start using SharePoint, it doesn’t get a maze where you can’t do or find anything. If you take a look at the Microsoft Press books, about 99% of the SharePoint books are technically focused. There is a lack of business side books. (Thank you Michael Samspon for representing this 1%)

During that analyst panel session at SPC09 there was a discussion about having a third pillar next to the Developers and IT PRO’s. The name was not specified, but lets call this group Functional people, or Functionals.  For me, but also for all SharePoint projects in general, I thought that was good, no even great news.

But until now, nothing has changed. From Microsoft’s opinion you are or a developer, or an IT PRO.There is no new group. Or you write code, or you have access to Central Admin.

A good example of this are Ignite Sessions. They are organized for IT Professionals and Developers, but not for Functionals. Even with such a huge release of  SharePoint 2010, where a lot extra power is provided to PowerUsers, and it very important to have that link between Business and IT.

Or the Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Learning Plan.

In my first conversation with Karine Bosch (a Belgian SharePoint MVP) right after a BIWUG session  we were talking about what we did in the SharePoint world. When she explained what she does I replied, “Oh, you’re a code sh|tter”, without being disrespectful. That’s good because we need SharePoint code writers I replied, (you can also read developers)  to cover non ‘Out Of The Box’ functionality , When I explained what I do, I summarized it with “I’m a document sh|tter”. And We also need them (I guess). Actually that’s also what Karine confirmed.

That’s why in my humble opinion that Microsoft is acting wrongly. Until now, they don’t provide any special documentation or support for these Functionals. Besides some sales and marketing information on how SharePoint will make your organization more productive, there is no specific information for the Functionals. They are just twilights. They act the “Build it and they will come” way.
And they should pay attention to this, because otherwise SharePoint might become one of these “Oooh darn, it’s a SharePoint” applications.

That’s also why I am so happy that guys like Michael Samspon, the author of Seamless Teamwork, a book on using SharePoint from a business perspective, Raymond Dux Sy , the author of SharePoint for Project Management: How to Create a Project Management Information System (PMIS) and Paul Culmsee take a different approach on SharePoint. I will do my best to provide useful information like these guys do in their blogs, webcasts, books, … That will be my way to contribute to the grey twilight zone that Microsoft can’t fill.

On the other hand, I must admit that I know a few, but just a few guys that are good at coding, have a good knowledge of the the Out Of The Box functionality of SharePoint and are able to talk to the business and translate their requirements to SharePoint functionality. These are the golden egg chickens…

But to conclude, what I’m trying to explain is that Microsoft, and the Microsoft partners will be judged by their clients (the business) based on the return SharePoint gives to the business, not on it’s nice technical gracefulness.

Just for the record, here are my my questions to Microsoft.

What are your intentions to this issue? (When)Are you planning to setup a functional stream?

A fellow consultant and blogger Michael Sampson @collabguy organized a survey on Site Closure.

Michael is the author of the book  Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways, which I recently received from Combined Knowledge (many many thanks for that Zoé and Steve). I would recommend this book for everybody who is interested in empowering people and team with SharePoint.

But I don’t post this just to talk about this book. The reason I write this post is because Michael has launched a survey on Site Closure. And The survey will close on friday July 9th. So this is yet another last minute post…

His next book, SharePoint Roadmap Governance Themes, greatly expands on the governance chapter in SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration. Two themes have been explored to date — Site Creation Rights, and User Adoption Strategies — and there are reports available on both of those. The third theme for investigation is Site Closure Policy. In other words, what do you do with SharePoint sites when their useful life is at an end, however you define that?

As with the previous two reports, there’s a survey. If you have involvement in setting governance decisions for SharePoint at your organization, please take the survey now.

Respondents who complete the survey will receive a free copy of the research report, due for publication in July 2010.

The survey closes on Friday July 9 … so please do it now!! Thanks.

Open Lecture – How to Best Gather Requirements for SharePoint

Monday, June 28, 2010 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM CEST

USPJ Academy invites you to the first open lecture of the academy. If you want to learn more about USPJ Academy, please visit our web pages at http://www.uspja.com/

Poor requirements can be attributed to failed SharePoint implementations. The key to successful SharePoint implementation is properly developing requirements. A lot of people know that this is important, however, only a handful of folks truly understand what it takes to do this right.

In this presentation, you will learn key techniques in effectively eliciting, analyzing, prioritizing, validating and documenting requirements for SharePoint projects.

In addition, participants will be able to identify:

• Key components of requirements gathering process

• Why requirements traceability is paramount in defining ROI in SharePoint projects

• Why having a well defined business case is necessary to effectively initiate requirements gathering

The primary audience for this class are executives, managers, analysts, consultants who wish to properly implement SharePoint and immediately reap its’ organizational benefits.

Participants will get presentation notes, checklists, and templates.

It’s a great lecture, held by one of the true masterminds of SharePoint project management, Dux Raymond Sy. (Twitter: MeetDux)

Register (no cost) on https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/729809009

As you probably know there are different kinds of Lists and Libraries available in SharePoint (WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007). This table shows an overview of available lists and libraries for MOSS 2007 Enterprise.

You can easily reuse a List or Library, with or without its content. For instance, you have created a survey and you would like to re-use that survey (maybe several times a year, but this doesn’t really matter, you just want to reuse it) without having to input all questions and eventually branching again. The same thing may apply when you Webcast want to reuse a Document Library or a List with several columns.

It’s quite easy to reuse a list. In the following procedure you will see some screenshot how you can do that. I have also created a Webcast about reusing a list or library in SharePoint 2007.

This is my initial setup:

I have a survey called: Users satisfaction.
In this survey there are several questions, and some questions are branched. (This means that depending on your answer, you well go to a specific question instead of the next question)

• The first thing you need to do is save the List/Library as a template

• To create a new List/Library based on this template: Click on View all Site Content and then create and select your Template.

When you want to delete a list template, you can browse to the List Template Gallery http://servername/Sitename/_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx

This is  just a very short Blog Post but I thought it was important enough to post.

Since a few days I have a feeling of anxiety and stress. Even though I am following the rules of GTD and am doing weekly reviews. At least, I thought I was doing GTD. But then I took a small break to have a view from a distance and thought at what causes my fear. After a few minutes I think I found the reason. At least, I think that now, but we’ll see in a few days or weeks.

I had Actions that actually should be Projects, or should be split into several Actions. So now I am converting these actions to Projects or I make smaller chunks so i don’t have an action that can take 8 hours. This looks banal, but if you ask me, that’s what GTD is all about. Little banal tricks to make you more productive and Get Things Done.
These little thing make big things happen for me.

Last week, exactly one week ago SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 got launched. More information on http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/2010launch 

Since May 8th the Information worker VHD files are ready to be downloaded. You can find them at http://is.gd/cfVcv

You can also download them with the Akamai download manager

• Virtual Machine 2010-7a parts 1-12
• Virtual Machine 2010-7a parts 13-22, SFV & Setup Guide
• Virtual Machine 2010-7b

The download is about 18 GB big.

This is the content :

Virtual machine “A” contains the following pre-configured software:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications
7. Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010
9. Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010
10. Microsoft Visio 2010
11. Microsoft Project 2010
12. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

Virtual machine “B” contains the following pre-configured software:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the “CONTOSO.COM” domain
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Active directory has been preconfigured over 200 “demo” users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010.
SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a “Complete” farm using the default SQL Server 2008 R2 instance. A default site has been created using the Team Site template at http://intranet.contoso.com/ and a FAST Search Center at http://intranet.contoso.com/search/.
As shipped virtual machine “A” requires image “B” for email. Running image “B” is optional.

Recently I had to configure a SharePoint workflow where an item had to be copied to another list when the Approval Workflow status is approved. It was ok to start the workflow manually. The workflow had to be created in SharePoint Designer 2007, since no other specialized workflow software is/was available.

The problem I had was that when I assigned a condition that would check if the Approval Status equals Approved. But this doesn’t work when you use this condition, it will be skipped, because internally SharePoint uses a number for the workflow status.

Also, if you Edit in Datasheet (your list or Library) you can see the numbers is stead of the text.

Here is an overview:

So, I need to modify my workflow like : If Approval Status Equals 16, ….

The same policy applies when you would like to have a view where you display items based on their Approval Workflow Status.

This list is partially copied from David Wise blog

On May 11th, 10 days after my ‘The near future of Nozbe (on iPhone) looks promising.’ post, Nozbe 2.0 for iPhone was released in the AppStore. As I was waiting for this version, I downloaded the moment I could. In this post I’ll try to explain the (new) features, what it means to you and me and what I think about it.

Nozbe for iPhone v2.0

The first thing that has changed is the logo. The logo is refreshed and I like it. Nothing more to say about that, it is just a nice logo. The home screen of the Nozbe 2.0 for iPhone has changed slightly. There was a great demand for an Inbox, and since it was implemented in a previous release of Nozbe on-line, it is also implemented in the iPhone App. For the rest, the menu remains the same except the Inbox is added (Inbox, Next Actions, Projects, Contexts, Calendar), but the layout has changed, and there are new icons.  The icons at the bottom of the page have the same functionality as the previous version, but for them who haven’t used Nozbe for iPhone before, there are 5 icons as you can see in the screenshots

continue reading…

I was recently searching on the exact syntax to add Actions and/or to email them so they’ll arrive , with or without notes in the Inbox or in a Project in Nozbe.

On the Nozbe blog there were several posts that refer to each other and my purpose is to create this one page overview with everything you need to know when sending email to Nozbe. Since GTD is also about having an ubiquitous capturing tool, this is the ubiquitous Email to Nozbe page.

So, here is my overview of everything you need to know when sending emails to Nozbe.

First of all, it’s important to understand the “Nozbe language”

Syntax

The syntax for a (Next)action is simple

Example:
Write a blog post about Email and Nozbe #blog @computer @home on today %30 min !

You just have to follow this syntax :

• #projectname : Add a # sign before the name of the project
• @context : Add a @sign before the context. Multiple contexts can be used.
• dates : write the date in the action like ‘On today’ , ‘ on tomorrow’, ‘next week’, ‘on June 18”. Nozbe understands these all. If you use a date, you also need to use “on” or “at” before the date. If you use next week or  next month,  you don’t need to use the prefix.

continue reading…