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 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.

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!

Developping Distance

As promised in a previous post, Here is a shortlist of the first things I discovered when moving from Lotus Domino to ASP/SQL as an application Development platform.

Of course this is far from complete, but gives you an idea what its about. I will populate it over time. As I have just created one small app, I cannot list all the possible differences….. for the moment, the most obvious:

biggest differences between developing a simple database driven application on the Domino platform compared to the MS ASP.NET/SQL Environment
		DOMINO		ASP/SQL
Data Layer	No Intervention req. Using the Domino designer, only the fields need to be planned.		+	SQL Database needs to be planned and set up.	-
				Data connections need to be planned and set up.
Application Layer	Formula language, very easy to learn. (ex. @mailsend(“Alex K”;”cc name”;”bcc name”;;”Subject”;”Mail Body text bla bla)		+	ASP / SQL Both not an easy language to learn. However not impossible either, depending on your capabilities.	-
	Lotus script, very similar to plain VBScript.		-/+	to create a simple application, no coding is required.	+
Presentation Layer	Domino Designer is not really made for developing for web clients. However, using css pages, and “render as HTML” make it possible to layout your site well. However This is not very straight-forward, and will take a bit to get a hang of.		-	The Microsoft VWD is clearly a web development tool. Layout and design are really easy.	+
Other	Access control easily managed, up to field level		+	Access control depends on set-up, Active Directory access makes things easier, while using roles in the asp.net user management console can be quite complex when managing multiple applications	-
Application: 1 database table 1 form for entering data 1 reporting view Access Control

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!

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).