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…!

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”

The Idea, The Challenge…

Good, even though I am just starting to have a look at the development of web based applications I received a comment on one of my previous posts that maybe comparing Domino development against ASP/.NET could have interesting results.

I believe this to be a good Idea, but my only worry is that my lack of knowledge, as a .NET starter will bias the outcome of this “test” a bit. However, if I choose to make something really simple, this should not be that much of a problem.

I am looking into developing the same project twice. Once in Domino, and once in VWD (Visual Web Developer), the tool I am using at the moment to learn more about the development in ASP and SQL.

This is a bit of extra work, but I believe I can make the time to do this, and that it would  be very valuable, especially to see where major differences create delays, or make things slower (or faster, probably in rare occasions). Therefore I will try the following:

An application (I am thinking about one I have to make soon anyways, which will be an IT Asset Management Tool), Web based,containing:

* Standard Navigation
* 1 Form
* 1 View for reporting

There are a few things I cannot really test yet. For example, the (ASP/SQL)environment I use now @ work is purely local, and I cannot query Active Directory for user management. Therefore, Ill skip the whole access and security part (which usually takes quite a bit of planning and work), also, I cannot use Mail functionality, as our development environment does not have Domino, nor an Exchange server.

The aspects I will look at are:
- Time spent on each part
- Effort/Knowledge required to finish each part
- General Overview of differences/problems encountered

As mentioned before, I will have to find time for this, and I will probably post it all bit by bit, and join all bits together at the end. Stay posted!

Learning…..

lately I do not post that often. Well, to be honest Ive never been a very frequent poster. My problem is, if you can call it a problem, is that I prefer to do that to write about what I could be doing. Luckily enough, there are some gaps at work, in which I can dedicate some time to update this blog.

Last time I was excited about the speed in which it is possible to, from no knowledge whatsoever, build a decent database based web application. Now, a couple of weeks later, I started the Visual Web Developer again to see if I still manage.

The result is surprisingly Yes, I manage!! Still on a very basic level, but I had no time in the last two weeks to study, read or watch any of the training materials out there. I had to work on a couple of domino projects. To be fair, its very hard to work on both platforms simultaneously. I get too confused by the different terminologies etc.

Today, I will start to have a look at what I am capable of building without using the help or alike. This is a technique I often use to learn something and allows me to know exactly in what areas I still lack some knowledge. Also I would really like to know if there are any other Domino app designers that had to make this switch to MS. I guess there must be loads, mainly because in Europe I believe the businesses are more and more moving towards a non-domino environment. Soon I will explain my findings. However if there is anyone out there that can help me draw up my “road map to MS”, I welcome your comments/hints/help!

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part III

For a couple of weeks I did not have any spare time to look into the share-point Implementation project. Last week, however, I managed to get some days free to look into the plans.
I am working with another technical lead on this, and he is taking some pressure of our back, so we can really study this well.

Last Thursday, I decided to take a look at the technology behind it… ASP of course!

I used to (more that years ago) build websites as a freelancer. As a freelancer, my budget was limited (budget : = @Number(“0″) + @Text(“€”)!) and I learned to develop using PHP, ans MySQL. This worked more than fine for me. Also Learning PHP to a level you can use it to connect to databases, insert data, retrieve etc. is not too hard.
And the best of all… It´s all Free!!

Now however, in the office I am working, the price of legal software is not important anymore, and on top of that, we receive the Microsoft Action-pack, with new releases and training licences. This opened up all kind of experimentation with MS technologies.

Last Thursday I installed a copy of Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, with SQL Server 2008. Biggest surprise of all… Its a Free download! Combining that with the standard IIS Server which comes free with most windows systems, you have a pretty nice Web development platform.

Since the interface confused me a bit, coming from Domino Designer, I started watching the MS Training videos , and over the weekend I followed a couple of tutorials.

I found myself building a complete application by Saturday! To be very honest, I have always been advocating Open Source and Free software. However It looks like Microsoft is taking care of their low budget developers and it works! There are quite some similarities with Domino Developer (v7), even though VWD looks much more web-facing and using the toolbox is a real joy! also the whole data-layer architecture, makes connections with databases something I understand!!

Well… Ill stop now, before I sound like an Uncle Bill add.

The Sharepoint Adventure – Part II

Well, some more things got clear to us this week. By the end of this year the company will start to implement a new environment based on Office 2007 and a full MOSS implementation. We are not sure yet if our branch office here in Barcelona will get its own server, or if we will depend on our UK main offices.

I certainly hope we will get our own server, as we have a very strong need for ad-hoc development of small database driven and workflow applications. If we would depend on the UK, we will have to pay for each small request, and beeing a branch office, well be at the end of the queue.

Therefore we, after submiting a businesscase that supports the above, we have been given green light by the Branch manager to go ahead and develop a Sharepoint learning environment, but keeping in mind that a part of this learning environment could be used for production eventually.

Since we have opened a test-lab last month. Set-up by both me and my collegue tech-lead we have squatted a meetingroom and set up 12 pc´s running a Virtual windows XP workstation ans a PC running 2003 Server. The server runs as DC, SQL Server and Exchange. I can imagine you must think we have a beast of a box there, but it´s nothing out of the extraordinary. With a Dual core P4 and 2GB of ram, it´s not the fastest server but it does the job. It is a great help for training newcomers, often new to IT.

The server however will not be able to run either WSS or MOSS properly. therefore we have asked to use a server we moved from an abandoned DR Site as the box for sharepoint. We will patch it from our comms´-room to the lab and…Play! This one is a older G3, but runs a quad core Xeon processor, and we´ve ordered 5GB of RAM to get to a total of 8. now that is something we can play with!

Sharepoint!

After some time in the dark, I finally have some time to write something about what I am up to lately.

The company I work for is moving slowly, very slowly from a 100% Lotus Domino environment to a MS one.

Personally, I am not sure if I am happy or unhappy with this. I am certified in Domino application design, and have been working in notes for more than 3 years now. The applications I develop are not too complicated, but satify the needs we have in our company for ad-hoc development. Since I started here, I used to do a lot of Lotus Notes Client troubleshooting too. It is safe to say, that I now know what I am working with.

Now, for some reason, somebody making decisions decided MS would be better. (I believe that MS has got a very effective sales dept.). The problems for us here in Barcelona start by beeing a dependance of a large UK based company. Basically, we are told this will happen, and just have to live with it. However, teh plan is not as clear as I would like yet. For the moment, the migration is planned in several steps.

The First step will be the migration of all email to exchange. This is the part I can really live with, because supporting the notes client in a 200+ employee office by yourself is not fun. I will miss all the extra functionality I managed to find in notes over time, but I am sure that with time, I can come up with an equivalent in the outlook client.

When this has been done, we will, according to the last and only company communication regarding this whole thing, “Move to Sharepoint“. This is Great, I thought.
As explained before, I am a technical lead in this office, and my job consists in knowing our infrastructure, our tools, and our people, and link these together to complete projects. So when this news came out, I was pretty enthousiastic about it. A new platform, new things to learn, etcetera!

However my enthusiasm went away quickly on my first “sharepoint google“, to my big surprise, there are may different ways to implement sharepoint technology, and the best one all depends on the organisations’ needs.
In our case, they (the UK people running this migration) will implement a full MOSS environment.
This is where my trouble starts. I would like to start studying as soon as possible, and think that starting with the basics, which is WSS 3.0 would be the best idea. We have a small Lab environment, and I would like to use that to build and study this.

MOSS however, the full server, has enormous hardware requirements. Our lab consist of 11 workstations, all running a windows XP Client, and one running a 2003 Server. the machines all have 1 gig of memory, and the server 1.5. Looking at the specs for MOSS, we would have to upgrade the server. harddisk, memory etc.
I am not sure how my supervisors, and my supervisors’ supervisors would look at me, after I submit them the business case to request this upgrade.

Please, if anyone reading this has any ideas experience with this, please let me know how you tackled this problem, and started learning. (As we have a microsoft Actionpack subscription, licencing is not a problem).