The release of the Intranet

As I mentioned in one of the last posts, we released the first build of our Intranet site, built on Windows Sharepoint Services.

The release went very well. Mainly because of the preparation and planning on forehand. I am now (2 months down the line) seeing some things that could have gone a bit faster or differently.

We built and configured the server first, set up the outgoing mail settings, and the main structure of the site. After that we started setting up all the standard content for the sub sites, such as the calendars, some templates and so on.

When the main structure was set-up, we moved to the front page. We made a static block in which we added a lot of links to pages we believed would be either difficult to find or needed more attention. Also we created templates for the announcements from different departments.

When we where ready, we organised small sessions in which the team leaders could go, or send people from their teams to. Since we are mainly a call-center, it si hard to get people off the phone, so these sessions took about 30 minutes and spanned the whole day during 4 day’s. This, we believed, would give everybody interested the chance to have a look.

To remove administrative overhead, and also make sure the intranet will be used by the staff (of all levels) we decided to ask for volunteers in each team to administrate their account sites. This generated some quite positive feedback, and within a week, I had the team of administrators complete.

This created a small gap. I did not expect to have the team of admins ready that soon. Therefore, had no training material ready yet. The problem here is, that as soon as the site went online, the last think I want to think about now is writing How-To documents!  Therefore, be advised, make sure all documentation is ready before!

For the launch we started 3 competitions:

• The Naming competition, to get a name for our intranet, untill now we where still using the server name to access.
• The Logo or Template Design competition and a
• Bug Hunt. I hid images of little bugs in the site, and people had to find one, and accompany it’s location with a real Bug in the site.

The Bug hunt, really helped me a lot in the first day’s to get a list of all the little things I still had to work on/fix. To be honest I can really recommend something alike.

These competitions really helped to get most of the people online. That together with the Site-Admins, coming from all levels in the organisation and from all teams.

Aside from the standard set-up, I have also been creating some List templates, for things we know will be used in several Sites, and can be easily set-up this way. Examples are FAQ, Policies & Procedure Libraries, etc.

Resuming the first two months, I am very impressed by the capabilities of WSS, out of the box. Also about the manageability and ease with you can set up basic lists forms and such. Well, the fact of me, Solo, running an intranet for 350 employees divided in 25 teams while developing applications speaks for itself.

I am sure that my enthusiasm for this platform will diminish, as soon as I will try to customise a bit further than the help-file likes… after all, this is a Microsoft product

At the moment, I am looking into two different things. I am trying to find out how (if..?)  the custom workflows work, and trying to publish a .Net application I built in the sharepoint site as a webpart.

To be continued…!

It is all Over, It is all starting… again!

The holiday season officially ended yesterday with the Kids going back to school in Spain. Bad Weather came to Barcelona this weekend, with the local weatherman declaring the end of summer. My holiday’s ended already more than a month ago, and it looks like there will be none at least untill X-mas. It is all over!

The last few months where great though! I really enjoyed my trip to Brasil, and the summer months in Barcelona are great too. The Neighbourhood parties, day’s and Nights at the beach and loads of Kite Flying!

I really managed to recharge batteries for the sprint ’till christmas. Due to the above reasons, it has been really quiet here (on this blog). The last post was even before FC Barcelona won the 3 titles they opted for and broke almost all historical records.

At work quite some things changed too! The management structure has been made more agile and I moved to a new team. At the moment, we are analysing my Job-Title, and description, to see if it still fits my position.

The new team I am working in now is called Service Assurance. This name explains most of what this team takes care of. Make sure the service is running, work on improvements and raise the quality of the work done. I also increased a level within my position, meaning … a little bit more cash in hand, and quite some more responsibilities and tasks.

The good news here is that in my new team I am tasked with the Intranet project. This is nothing new, but the new part is that I can dedicate 100% of my time to it, and I can make use of more resources.

During the last month, I have been working hard to get the first version of the Intranet online. It is there, and we launched it officially last week.

Since I changed teams, I am managed differently. Differently in Italic, as I was very close to write better. To be honest, there where quite a lot of discrepancies between me and my manager in many things. Even though I could understand, or at least try to understand most of his decisions. Now I have a new manager. after now 2 months, I can easily say I have the feeling we are on the same line. Which is good. This helps me a lot in Completing projects, as I have a sense of support from higher up the chain, which I had the feeling I lacked a bit before.

As I mentioned before the intranet project is really getting a shape. We have launched the first version running on a small (20gb) Virtual 2003 Server running WSS. This is, after all the investigation and plan-making a lot less than we originally aimed for, and the effect is visible.  Now we have to start making a case to upgrade the server to a full moss, and an SQL server for storage.

We also decided to make release 1 of the intranet as standard as possible. Fully based on templates, and only a few custom lists. This to make sure we could build a case for a more expensive MOSS Server (the idea was that if we could show that we could do it, we’d have a better buy-in from the management team).

To be honest, the possibilities of the standard WSS installation, with the 40 Famous Microsoft templates is giving us about 75% of all the functionality required.  The gaps we have identified will be mostly filled when we move to a full MOSS Server and are mostly related on how we store information and to align that with the spanish law on data protection.

Today, first 1-2-1 personal review with my new manager. She was happy, the intranet is there, on time and with a lot more functionality then we all expected… -> Im Happy!

It is all starting again!

Planning the Intranet IV

This morning I finished building the WSS Webserver we will use to build our intranet on. To be fair, it was very straight forward and did not gave me any issues aside form the speed, as I was working on a VM copy of the real server.

I made a virtual copy of the live server, to do a test run of the set-up. I used the VMware converter which is simple to use, and gives me an exact copy of the live server. I used this to complete the setup and configuration. This way, if any problems appear, I am aware of them and can prevent them from occurring on the live machine.

I did however encounter one small issue, which is completely my “fault”. I did not check in advance how to set up the email configuration for outgoing and incoming mail. The server is a standalone installation, not part of a farm, and I believe the WSS server, although standalone, should be able to benefit from the UK exchange environment for the mailing purposes.

Another thing I now have to have a look at is the way we will “upload” the custom applications we will be building. My best guess is that we will set up a site in IIS for each which we will link to from within the WSS site. However, I would have to have a look on how this can be done. Shared folder, Frontpage extensions, don’t know yet. We will be developing in wither visual studio, or on the VS Web developer express edition, and I’m not 100% sure what is the best way to publish the applications we build in there.

Planning the Intranet III

For about 5 years I have been working with IBM software. Mostly using Lotus Domino and Notes, designing applications. However I also looked at other technologies, like Websphere and DB2.

I have recently switched (well, I’m still switching) to comparable products from Microsoft. Mainly becasue the company I work for made the decision to stop using IBM for their internal mail and databases.

I do however believe that IBM, known as Big Blue, a big and slow organisation, was ahead of Microsoft concerning intranet software and ease of development back in the day’s they launched Websphere. I have been looking at an article on their website, that states that in 2006, their Intranet was listed in the Nielsen Norman Group Report: Intranet Design Annual 2006: Year’s Ten Best Intranets.

I never heard of that report before, and headed straight over for a look: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/. The report is for sale. 224$ and its yours. For me that is too expensive, and Im sure that my boss (who is likely to leave soon), would have a good laugh if I walk over to ask him for the money!

(reports from previous years still cost about 200$, which I still find very steep!)

However, it gave me a good impression what points to look at for our Intranet:

Some of the key areas for which best practices are presented in the report are:

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies

These points are things (call them features) they look at when evaluating intranet sites. I believe this to be a very complete list, and I’m sure that in a company our size (just looking at our office in Spain, we are about 300 people) can and will have to remove some of the points. Either because of difficulty of implementation (read: cost), Irrelevance or plain Overkill.

It looks like we have a Feature Checklist, with which we can start planning!

Intranet budgets and staffing

Planning the Intranet II

Seems like someone in the company has read the post about the intranet re-design. We received communication that a complete organisational layer will be disappearing! This was actually what I hoped for because I firmly believe in flat layered organisations. From what Ive seen in different companies, is that flatter organisations tend to embrace employee empowerment, are quicker in their decision making and more flexible in fast moving/changing markets (like the IT business we operate in).

I also believe that this will enable me to design the intranet in a much more useful way. The platforms we implemented lately are web based platforms to enable and improve both horizontal and vertical communication. My biggest fear was that with the classic org-chart the company has here these platforms would not be used to the fullest. Especially when I received the first ideas from management, in which they actually wanted to implement the full structure of the organisation in the intranet design.

As it looks now, I’d have to go back to the drawing board, which I’m happy with, because now it looks like we can design a modern intranet, that will actually enable cross-team communication and combine that with a sound knowledge management strategy.

Planning the Intranet I

As we are currently about to start implementing a sharepoint environment, this also implies that we will have to plan the Intranet.

Currently we do not have any. Well, we have the intranet site of our English company headquarters, but that is hardly used, and does not interact with us. Meaning that we cannot add our content, links to our tools, etc. The Sharepoint implementation will give us the possibility of having our own intranet site. This is, I believe, very important. Mainly because being an IT company with a lot of different teams, spread over different floors using only email as a way of “digital communication” is … say… a bit outdated (Heavy understatement). This is especially true if you know that most problems we experience internally are due to communication problems (either lack of, incorrect or simply non-existing).

The intranet could change that. Could, I say, because I believe that if not planned and managed correctly and across the board, an intranet can cause more problems than it was designed to resolve.

Management manages this company in a very typical style, you could really apply the machine metaphor to this one! Top-Down and in very linear streams. It is really hard here to make different dept. managers talk with each other and even more if they have to work together.

Lately there is a lot if buzz about 2.0 technologies, and how they can benefit communication outside work, but also in the office. Examples are company wiki’s, facebook-style people profiles etc.

I am now looking into planning the whole new environment. Not because I’m asked to, but because “I can see the cloud hanging above me, and don’t feel to wait till its raining”… Call it being pro-active (but I will dedicate another post to that;) ).

Personally I would like to make sure the intranet will give us these communication advantages and I believe that is also has to be future proof. My biggest fear is that the intranet ends up to be absorbed by “the Machine”, managed by a few upstairs who only care about their specific parts/departments or tools.

I see that the modern organisation is flat, as flat as possible without interfering with operations. If you look at these new communication technologies, you see that these are enablers for this. Maybe they even push organisations is this direction. The problem is: “how to apply modern tools in a company whose management thinks in an old-fashioned way”

Knowledge Management (KM)

As mentioned in the previous post, we are now looking into setting up a whole new knowledge management strategy for our office.

Currently this is dealt with per team. We have approx 250 people working in 15 account teams, giving IT support. Each of these accounts have their knowledge base and their knowledge management processes (if any). As you understand this is not an ideal situation. It is impossible to benefit from each others’ information, and there are a lot, really a lot of double, even triplicate documents. (after all most of us troubleshoot a printer in a similar way).

For a company that is trying to standardise all over the place, this is one of our worst areas.

According to many KM specialists, the first step in this whole plan should be to make sure we have senior management support. This to be honest is more difficult as it seemed. I was convinced that knowing the above, and actively trying to standardise, they would listen to a plan like this, but soon found out the “the idea is good, but it will be too expensive, or take you too long”. Yes, there will be a cost, and a considerable effort, but the return will be a very valuable asset; Knowledge! The work we do at service desks is for a huge part based on the knowledge we have at hand. An analyst can be great in troubleshooting and phone skills, but without documentation…. After all, none of us knows everything.

We are now at the stage that the senior management team is interested in our plans, but we are still not getting a clear go-ahead. This causes us to have to work on the plan outside office hours…

We already have the main outline of the plan. We have the platform (wss) and bit by bit we start to get support. I’m sure that one of these day’s well get the “official” project request. Then we can start gathering people to set up a small project team, and present our plans to the different teams, to get their feedback.

Also, we made a SWOT analysis of the current tools we use, which will help a lot identifying the requirements once we reach the lower level of our plan, which is how the database design would look.

At the moment we are putting everything we’ve got in a high level project plan. Mainly to keep ourselves on track and focused on the parts that are important at the moment and not get in to too much detail (which is a common mistake techies make!). As soon as we have it ready, Ill post an update!

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part III

A while ago, I wrote about the plans we had in my office for the move from Lotus Domino to MS Share point as a database driven application platform.

This was quite a while back, but it looks like we will get some kind of approval soon.

This is great, especially after it took me about a year to have senior management listen to me. Up until now, that has been my greatest headache. Mainly because I believe that applications we build here are a vital part of the organisation. If you can have them developed in-house,  you save a lot of money and you are sure they are fit for pourpose!

Management, however could not see through the first layer, and somehow wanted applications to “just be there”. When I learnt how they thought about this, it was a lot easier to convince them. I spent the last months walking around, trying to sell applications that did not exist yet. Finally they saw want I meant.

I can see now that there is a huge gap to bridge, because all this time I have been running around selling my big plans… I did not have a lot of time to continue training myself in this platform.

o-oh!

My manager, who lately is finding out what I’m busy with, signed me up with the company training system to start the MS course Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS): .NET Framework 2.0 Web Application. This, as it looks from the Lesson 1 viewpoint, will take me quite some time.

To give some more details on the environment we will be working with, here it is. Be aware, this is not the company’s main Share point server landscape, nor it is part of it. This is purely for our 300 person office.

We decided to go virtual, as the demands on the system where pretty low and the cost was a lot lower since we only pay for the licenses and had no hardware cost.

Finally well go for one Virtual 2003 Server, running IIS, ASP.Net and WSS (I did try to get the full MOSS, but the licence cost was a bit too high ) and a virtual SQL server.

To be honest I believe that this is fit for purpose, as the amount of usage (users / contents) will not be too high and if we exceed expectations the virtual servers can be upgraded quite easily.

The next step will be planning the contents. I already presented some in the plans I’ve put forward, but these now need to be worked on. A lot!

The most important plan is to re-design the Knowledge-management strategy within our office, and possibly within the whole company.  As I am also lecturing Knowledge Management internally, I really feel like being involved in this. I have been building the different knowledge bases we are using here, but this is a chance to setup the complete shop!

We already had a couple of meetings to look at how we are going to approach this. Still pretty high-level, as this is something we will  have to convince management…. Again! However, in the IT Support business, I believe the case is quickly made. Especially looking at our current KM organisation, in which every account team runs its own K Base and the teams do not comunicate with each other. I think this is where WSS can make the biggest difference!

Probably in one of my next posts, Ill explain a bit more about that!

My new toy

That (previous story) is how I ended up with yet another new toy, the eee-pc 4g/7001.

This is her, on the left. Even though the picture does not really show the design very well, I liked it because it gives a good idea of its size. It is really small and not heavy at all.

This ee pc in particular, the 4G / 701 is one of the older models and come to me with the following specs:

• Display 7″  (800*480px)
• CPU & Chipset Intel Mobile CPU & chipset
• WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g
• Memory 512MB, DDR2
• Storage 4GB S.S.D. (Solid-State Disk)
• Web-Cam 0.3 Mega Pixel Video camera
• Built-in stereo speaker, Built-in microphone
• Battery Life 3 hrs (4 cells)
• Dimension & Weight 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm.

It came pre-installed with the Xandros OS, a linux build for the eee-pc.

To be honest, and I have the machine for 3 days now, I am very happy with it. There are two things that I can imagine would bother a lot of people. One is the Keyboard (I’m lucky I have small fingers) and the other one is the screensize, which is 7″ with a resolution of 800*480.

The operating system Xandros, is not too great either. It looks a bit like a children OS.

This is the first thing I have changed. I first tried installing Windows 7 on it, but ran in too many problems (mainly booting the installer from USB… if anyone made that work… pls let me know!).

Now I installed “EasyPeasy”, a Ubuntu based linux distribution that is designed for small displays. This worked fine from the start. Booted fine from USB, installed with no problems and recognised most hardware except for the webcam.
(looks a lot better!)

The screen is nicely layed out and I am very happy with the system. On my laptop I always use to have a small Ubuntu partition, so it is not really new to me. This new window manager makes working with a 7″ screen a lot less painless, even though some (Ubuntu system) windows are too big, leaving the Cancel-Ok buttons hidden.

I am still fine tuning the system. Taking out stuff I do not use, and adding applications, I already miss.

My first plan, when the machine is set up 100% (I’m afraid, really afraid it will never be) Is to play with Google Maps. I have seen some really nice Iphone applications that make use of the Iphones’ GPS. I would like to see if it is possible to obtain the same results and applications using the Gmaps API, in combination with the Firefox Geode location add-on.

To be continued….

Killer Game

The last couple of months, I was involved in a violent spree of killing in my office. We launched a cluedo-type killing game with about 90 employees and with an Asus 4G 701 eee-pc as the main prize.

To be very honest, it was a lot of fun. Also quite some paranoia, and in general I believe this game caused an increase in productivity (as your desk was one of the few places you could not be killed).

I teamed up with a  friend, and we made a deal. She really needed the eee pc, as her laptop was broken. Because she’d use it mainly for watching m0vies, and facebooking I offered her a deal. I would fix and upgrade her laptop, and I’d get the eee pc. She took the deal (’cause she’s my friend, or ’cause its a good deal) and we started the game.

This is the Story:

ISC KILLER – The Santiago Nasar Story

The nickname I used in the game explains how my expectations where set:

El día en que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5:30 de la mañana para esperar…“

Since I did not expect to stay a live much more than one day, I decided to take the name from Santiago Nasar, the main character from a book. The book he’s from (Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada – Gabriel García Márquez) starts with the above phrase. “Appropriate“, I thought.

The first round went smooth…. My first kill did not take too long; she fell on the second day of the game. What I did not know by then, is the importance of my next action (or the lack of it).

The plan was good. I would let my victim alive and watch how people start dying (as I knew she was good) and on the last day of the first round I would finish her off.

As I said, the plan was good, but even a perfect assassin makes mistakes. The Friday the first round ended, I went to work a bit early (I know, strange, but then again, there is a reward at the end) and had my weapon (a balloon prepared. What I did not knew is that my victim would be in a training the whole morning!

It was obvious I was unable to kill twice in the first round, which left me with the idea I was removed from the game.

Right after the first round, I went for a two week Christmas holiday. Relaxed and without any fear when turning corners.

When I came back from my days off, I was convinced I was not in the game anymore, and I was quite happy to find out I still was. This made me decide to take it a bit more seriously and start killing…

I used my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/alexkbcn) to log the rest of the game, this would help me to talk less about it (which is helpful in this game) and have people follow what’s going on. Resuming:

ISC Killer game, a assassination Game we play in our office just entered the second round!…. guess what.. I’m still in! Santiago Nasar 1:44 AM Jan 13th.

One victim down! 1:44 AM Jan 13th.

ok second victim just dropped….. 15 to go! 11:16 PM Jan 13th.

received name of next victim. Don’t know the guy and I’m not sure if that makes it easier or more difficult 1:40 AM Jan 14th.

ok, found a picture of the guy 5:42 AM Jan 19th.

got a spy on him now, hope to get him today!! 4:02 AM Jan 20th.

got tipped that he was leaving… followed the poor guy down, and … Paf! Dead by a Beach-Towel! 5:42 AM Jan 20th.

aiaiai! got my next victim… he/she is a bit too close and I’m not sure whether  to use a spy in this case. 6:46 AM Jan 20th.

… kill someone with a Santa Claus hat??!! 6:48 AM Jan 20th.

looking around the office for a Santa hat.. 6:52 AM Jan 20th.

Santa hat located 12:41 AM Jan 21st.

Santa hat in the bag, and awaiting my chance. 5:43 AM Jan 21st.

where is my victims’ schedule? 12:35 AM Jan 22nd.

almost got killed yesterday! almost!! Yesterday evening, about to leave, I found a guy waiting suspiciously at the door of the office 12:36 AM Jan 22nd.

Monday! 3 people left in the game 9:11 PM Feb 1st.

almost got killed yesterday! almost!! Yesterday evening, about to leave, I found a guy waiting suspiciously at the door of the office 12:36 AM Jan 22nd.

so we called that one… “doing overtime” 12:37 AM Jan 22nd.

followed my victim out for a cigarette yesterday evening…. when leaving the room… Bang!! number 4 down. 10:50 PM Jan 22nd.

awaiting message with new victim. 10:50 PM Jan 22nd.

new victim received…. Have to kill him/her on a different floor, with a BIBLE!! 12:35 AM Jan 23rd.

new victim! couldn’t get any worse… it’s the guy sitting next to me!?! 10:59 PM Jan 27th.

weapon to use: A monopoly Board! that will be tough, as none of the expats I work with brought their monopoly boards along to Spain! 11:00 PM Jan 27th.

cutting pasting a printed monopoly board now. 12:36 AM Jan 28th.

where can I get a Monopoly Board?? (without paying for it obviously)… after all, I’m still Dutch! 5:54 AM Jan 29th.

ok monopoly board located… I LOVE TWITTER!!! 6:52 AM Jan 29th.

Monday! 3 people left in the game 9:11 PM Feb 1st.

ok 2 people left! Waited for my victim in the staircase for over an hour!! Worth the wile though! 1:42 AM Feb 2nd.

managed to agree on a cease-fire for today… both me, and the last killer left need a break! 1:43 AM Feb 2nd.

soooo nice when there is no need to worry! 6:27 AM Feb 2nd.

ok, tomorrow the game will end.. (I hope) 7:13 AM Feb 2nd.

spent my morning waiting in a staircase, only to find out my victim already passed-by. Better luck next time 10:29 PM Feb 2nd.

arghh, my victim came in 3 minutes before me!! all the waiting for nothing 4:27 AM Feb 3rd.

now working from a different floor, as my killer is posting in front of my office. 4:27 AM Feb 3rd.

jeeez, she’s patient 4:31 AM Feb 3rd.

had a long wait this morning! after one hour she came in and escaped me through the stairs…. Bad luck again! 12:22 AM Feb 4th.

Yesterday, my absence at my desk, even though everyone knew where I was, caused a huge problem!! 12:24 AM Feb 4th.

..and this problem yesterday made me decide to give up. After my long wait this morning, I asked my killer if she could make an end to it. 12:25 AM Feb 4th.

and she just did. 12:25 AM Feb 4th.

Último momento, Santiago Nasar a muerto” 12:26 AM Feb 4th.