Quick Thought Videos – 10 Myths

Robert Bogue October 28, 2010 No Comments

One of the things that I hear fairly frequently is “that discussion was worth the price of admission.” Of course, the specific topics that folks are talking about change from presentation to presentation, however, the theme is the same. There are some conversations that are just so value they’re worth the entire presentation. In thinking how to address this I’ve decided to start posting some quick thoughts videos. They’ll be less than 10 minutes or so each and will cover whatever random topic I’ve heard folks say is valuable – or whatever topic folks are asking for. (Email me if you’ve got a topic that you want to see me talk about.)

The first quick thought is a revisit. I used to do a talk titled “The Top 10 Myths of SharePoint 2007.” I wanted to revisit this conversation from the context of SharePoint 2010 since some of the myths are still myths, some of them aren’t so “mythy” any longer, and some have been completely removed. I’ve posted a WMV version and a MP4 version. If you like it let me know.

If the concept is well received I’ll spin up a separate vidcast feed so you can subscribe to them as they come out. Right now it’s just a test to see how well the face-to-face experience translates to video.

On Influencer50 and the SharePoint Influencer50

Robert Bogue October 21, 2010 4 Comments

First, I’ve been struggling with this post for a while now. I realize that there’s simply no way to post this post without some folks thinking that I’m just being “sour grapes.” However, I’ve had so many people reach out to me and ask me about this or talk to me about it that I just don’t feel like I can be silent about it any longer. I know that many of my friends have elected to be silent on this topic because they believe that it can be ignored. I, however, am concerned that if it remains it will create problems for users because they won’t realize just how bad the list is. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Global360 published an Influencer50 report on their web site. There have been numerous folks commenting – some publically – that the list is hogwash. While I fundamentally support the concept of better understanding your market, I think the list itself is fundamentally flawed.

The basic set of comments that I’ve heard about the project is “Who are these people?” That’s a pretty impactful question when the list is supposed to be a set of folks who are the influencers in the market. Obviously, I’ve been asked why my name isn’t on the list – and while I must admit my curiosity, I’m much more interested in the folks who actually are on the list. I have a belief about how the list may have become fundamentally flawed – however, I’m way ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the public background that’s been explained and expand it with some additional data.

Global360 and KnowledgeLake commissioned Influencer50 to create a report on the most influential people in the market. That’s actually one of the smartest things I’ve seen in the industry (IT) in years – organizations that recognize the value of research in allowing them to target their marketing efforts. I’m working to better understand how marketing works so that I can better sell the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users. I think the idea of understanding your market and influencers better is a great idea. However, I’m convinced that they just stumbled across the wrong folks to “help” them.

How did they stumble across the Influencer50 folks? I don’t really know. However, their claim to fame is the book Influencer Marketing. The book is published through Butterworth-Heinemann which is an imprint of Elsevier – a respected publisher. However, when you look more closely (more closely than either Global360 or KnowledgeLake would have reasonably been expected to look) you’ll see that the sales for the book aren’t that great. Amazon’s sales rank is notoriously fickle (in publishing circles) however, as I write this the Influencer Marketing book rank is 835,415 and by comparison The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users (2007) is 31,287. Whether or not you’ve read The Long Tail you’ll know that there’s a big difference in sales between these two ranks. Having read it you’ll know that people way out on the tail can continue to make money. Consider that we’re talking about books that were released at roughly the same time (Q1 2008) and that mine was self-published so it has no back end marketing engine behind it (like you would expect from a publisher and an author of a marketing book.) Wouldn’t you think that a book by a respected publisher on marketing would out sell my little self-published book? Again, I know the Amazon sales rank number is not very reliable but it’s public so everyone can take a live look at the data whenever they want. You can draw your own conclusions but the one I drew was that a book about marketing didn’t sell very well or doesn’t continue to sell very well. It’s not something that seemed to resonate well for the market and if the authors are experts at marketing and the influencer concept is the key concept why didn’t it?

If the book doesn’t appear to be selling, what do we know about the organization? Not a ton really. Several of the links on the web site don’t work, there is a limited amount of content. The content that is there is repeated or framed into small windows to create the appearance of being more than it is. What do we know about the process? Well, there’s the new blog post on EndUserSharePoint.com titled Criteria for Selection of the SharePoint 50. That calls out 8 criteria. However, they’re not clear about how these are calculated. So rather than try to understand the details of the process, let’s look at what appear to be the foundational concepts of the book (I’ve not read it.)

The Influencer50.com site describes the book “‘Influencer Marketing’ is the next serious book in the tradition of The Tipping Point (Gladwell), The Influentials (Berry and Keller) and Purple Cow (Godin). The book demonstrates clearly, authoritatively and with numerous real examples Seth Godin’s widely accepted view that it’s ‘useless to advertise to anyone except connectors with influence.'” So let’s get past the marketing hype. They’re saying that they’re going to show you how to market (and identify) connectors with influence. But what are connectors? Malcom Gladwell’s book Tipping Point made the point that connectors are folks who are regularly make introduction. Gladwell talks about them in the context of Mavens – trusted experts in the field. Ideally you want someone who is a trusted expert in the field who is connected to a Connector to leverage that knowledge. The other piece of the marketing statement is ‘with influence.’ Dictionary.com defines influence in part as ‘the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others’. That makes sense. Influence can change behavior. Organizations want to change behavior toward buying their product. (There’s not necessarily any malice in this. It can be that the organization believes that their product is in the influenced person’s best interest.)

I’d say that they missed more than a few books on the concepts that they are talking about. Specifically, Linked and Groundswell come to mind. I suppose that Wikinomics is also important because what we’re talking about is a set of mass-market, social interactions that generally don’t have any money changing hands.

We take Nick Hayes and Duncan Brown at their word that their work is based on the work of Malcom Gladwell, then we’re got a basis for understanding. I should say that Malcom Gladwell is an interesting individual in his own right. He deserves a bit deeper investigation because he’s an excellent researcher and writer. In addition to The Tipping Point, I’ve also read Blink and Outliers. Back to the point, we’ve got to tear apart Malcom Gladwell’s initial assertion about the value of connectors and their influence. In his book he made the point that connectors aren’t really valuable in themselves. They’re the conduit to connect to the get to the mavens. I believe, based on Nick Hayes responses in the interview with Global360 posted on EndUserSharePoint.com that they’ve tried to take this into account because they’ve made it clear that the loudest voices aren’t necessarily the influencers. True enough. However, I believe that fundamentally the approach that they’re taking cannot work and here’s why:

You cannot measure what you cannot see

Most of the connections that happen and most of the influence that is exerted simply cannot be seen. When I get asked by a client for a Ruby on Rails architect there’s no way you can see the email exchange. Nor can you see that my response included Mike Gunderloy who I met years ago when he was developing for Microsoft technologies and serving as a lab manager for 101 communications. There’s no way to see (from the outside) my Outlook contacts.

Influencer50 attempts to infer the effectiveness of a connector by public information – marketing information. However, the public information is noticeably skewed and incomplete. Let’s take an acquaintance for whom I have great respect, Susan Hanley. (She made the list by the way.) It’s hard to see the folks that she respects and refers folks to because here web site doesn’t have a set of outbound links from her web site. Thus there’s no way to see who she values or where she’ll send people if they ask her about any topic. There’s simply not enough data to know who she trusts – and who you should trust if you trust her.

My point is simply that it’s foolhardy to believe that there’s enough information to make an assessment of someone’s influence based on public information. Of course, this opens the opportunity that Influencer50 did interviews and got Sue to describe who she would recommend for different things. That would be fine if Influencer50 knew the right questions to ask about the important areas in SharePoint but candidly I don’t know anyone that does.

Let’s take for instance Global360’s market – business process management. If there were to focus on SharePoint Workflow (the most equivalent concept in SharePoint) they should have come up with three names: David Mann, Wouter van Vugt, and me. Why do I say that? Well, between the three of us we’ve got almost all of the public information and tools on workflow. David wrote a book. I’ve written book chapters. Wouter runs a codeplex project with helpful tools. With a handful of exceptions David, Wouter, or I are the ones speaking about workflow at conferences. None of us made the list. So clearly the question wasn’t asked about workflow influencers wasn’t asked. (I realize the preceding borders on “sour grapes” – you could leave my name off the list and the impact is the same but I didn’t feel like leaving my name off of the list would have been genuine.)

I realize that I’m saying if they did ask the question they should have fallen back and checked the market to see if Sue’s answer matched what the market was seeing – which I believe would have been prudent – but that goes against the idea that they were doing telephone interviews to figure out the connections. The reality is I know they didn’t have conversations with everyone on the list. The list was initially intended to be private but was made public because Global360 felt like they could get some marketing gain from it.

Honestly, I don’t know KnowledgeLake’s influencers well enough to tell you who that list should be and who didn’t make it. I can’t tell you who are the folks that you would look to for ECM guidance on SharePoint and whether KnowledgeLake is the right answer or not. Having been in and around the ECM market outside SharePoint in the past I know that I’ve not seen anyone talking about the kinds of issues that customers doing ECM think about.

You cannot predict the weather

I remember watching a TV show years and years ago which was talking about how scientists and researchers had created these massively complex weather models leveraging knowledge of fluid dynamics and other disciplines. The show was on chaos theory and the fact that there are some things that are difficult to predict even when you know all the data. The key experience was when the researcher fed data back into the program he was developing and he got a different set of results. His discovery was that he had rounded his values to 3 decimal places when he put the data back in and the difference between three decimal places and the computers values made a difference when he reran the simulation. Thus for complex formulas to work you need exceedingly precise data. Don’t believe me? How often is your local weather man wrong about the weather? I sometimes joke it’s the only job that I know where you can be wrong 2/3rds of the time and still keep your job. (I’m not picking on the people simply the belief that it’s a solvable problem.)

When you’re looking at influencers how can you possibly see enough detail about the interactions to accurately predict or influence them? Another set of examples. I’ve had really bad interactions with two corporations. First, Verizon back when they were GTE. I had a cell phone cloned (think analog.) They handled the problem so poorly that I refused to ever do business with them again. Second, Bright House/Road Runner and I had some issues where their customer support was so bad I’ll never do business with them again. The first example you wouldn’t have known. The second issue, you would only know because of my blog post. If you were trying to predict my behavior with regard to phone or internet providers you might assume that I’m flexible on these topics – as most people are. However, these details would make it clear that this isn’t the case.

Conversely, if you ask me about where to go for SharePoint IT Pro training, I’ll have no opinion. I won’t provide any influence to anyone because I simply don’t have an opinion to try to use to influence someone else. You’ll never get enough details to determine where someone will – and won’t have an opinion.

You can’t see the whole picture at one time

I made the point earlier that the question about SharePoint Workflow influencers probably didn’t get asked because that sphere of influencers I know pretty well. I think there’s another truth here that goes beyond asking the right question. The truth is that every market has a certain amount of grouping that happens. For instance, there are a set of instructors that work for Critical Path Training. They tend to talk with and work with folks from Critical Path Training – and some others. If you start with Andrew Connell or Ted Pattison (both on the list) you’re going to hear about the folks that they know well – and you’ll add folks that they believe are influential. You’ll miss folks who they don’t regularly deal with. They may be very influential but they may not be in the normal contacts of a person. Of course, if you go maybe 3 connections out you’ll find every good candidate but if you do that you’ll have thousands of folks you’re evaluating to determine if they’re truly influencers or not.

You either have to constrain your data mining to be very so small as to be incomplete – or you have to make it so large as to make the filtering process very difficult. Andrew Connell has 457 connections on Linked in. Scot Hillier has 182. So for round numbers let’s figure 300 connections per person. For simplicity assume that overlap is half of those contacts so 150 unique contacts per person if you go three levels out and you’re looking at roughly 3 million people. Obviously that’s not possible to even consider.

Let’s look at this from another angle. SharePoint’s a very big product. If you’re working as an IT Pro in a mid-sized organization you probably don’t know Andrew Connell. On the other hand if you’re doing WCM you probably don’t know about Chris Geier, his focus has been in workflow/BPM and more recently in storage management. The product is so big that most folks don’t even try to cover it all. There are folks that know me for the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide and don’t know that I do a ton of high-end SharePoint developer content or that I’m one of the few folks that do workflow in SharePoint. So there are pockets of the SharePoint market that don’t really touch one another – or touch each other so tangentially that it doesn’t cause connectivity. So I don’t believe it’s even possible to define a single set of influencers over SharePoint. I think that it’s like trying to define influencers on Windows – or on Computing in general. Some folks will have great influence in their areas but beyond Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Steve Balmer, and Larry Ellison – who are they? And how influenced by Larry Ellison are you if you’re not running Oracle software?

You can’t influence what you don’t recommend

From my perspective, you can’t influence what you don’t recommend. The nail in the coffin of the SharePoint Influencer50 for me was the inclusion of John Newton – Alfresco’s CTO and Chairman on the list. Their advertising has been consistently anti-SharePoint. In fact, most of the time I see their ads jump up on the search engines when I search for SharePoint. Their ads that try to lure people away from doing SharePoint at all. I suppose there’s an argument that they do have some influence on the market but they don’t have influence on the market once a person has decided to use SharePoint. Their influence is over the initial decision which isn’t the space that we spend most of our time in. I have had a few competitive solutions where the user hadn’t decided on SharePoint yet but I can tell you that none of the questions were about Alfreso. They’ve always been about large WCM implementations and those competitors.

How is it that a person that leads a competitive solution is any influence on the market once the decision is made? What this says to me is that Influencer50 didn’t bother to do any sanity checking on their results to ensure that they were reasonable.

Just Stop it

Before I close out, I have to say congratulations to everyone who has their name on the SharePoint Influencer50 list. I can on the one hand tear apart the exercise’s fallacy and at the same time say that I’m happy that many of the folks that I respect are recognized for their influence. I have not conflict with this. My issue isn’t and has never been the people who were recognized. I’m just convinced that the whole exercise was a fool’s errand.

I wish people would stop trying to publicize a list of the 100 most popular blogs, Top 50 Influencers, etc. Let’s just continue to do the things that are necessary to move the market forward. Bringing things full-circle… I fully support the idea of better understanding the market. I think it’s a monumentally bad idea to pass of this sort of an exercise as a marketing activity in and of itself.

If you agree, I have one small ask. Please post a link to this blog post in a blog post or tweet about this blog post. There’s a delightful irony in making the most influential post about SharePoint one about how bad the influencer list is.

Announcing Availability of The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users: 2010 Book

Robert Bogue September 27, 2010 No Comments

After many months of hard work and more than a few struggles, I’m happy to say that I have in my hands a printed copy of The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users: 2010. Before I talk about the upgrades that the 2010 version of the book has over the 2007 version of the book I want to take a step back and explain the journey that I’ve been on with this project – to tell the story of the book’s existence. While I’ve talked about the self-publishing process, I did so from the perspective of the financial impacts and didn’t focus much time on why I decided to self-publish. However, I think there’s an important story to hear about how the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide came to be. Of course we’re now in our second edition so the story is really about the first version.

For most of my professional career I’ve been a consultant. I’ve worked for myself. I’ve worked for a large accounting firm/consulting company. I’ve worked for smaller consulting companies. I’ve more or less always been doing full solution creation. I’ve been taking a set of parts and assembling them into solutions for customers. Sometimes those solutions involved servers and sometimes those solutions involved software. During that time I noticed a disturbing situation that consulting companies find themselves in – and customers don’t realize that they’re creating such stress inside the consulting companies.

Consulting companies hire consultants – that is they hire folks who can go out and do work at a customer location. They don’t necessarily hire folks who are the best at documenting or writing documentation. In fact, by and large, the consultants I’ve met over the years are challenge oriented – they’re always looking for the next challenge to overcome and while writing documentation can feel challenging, it’s not exactly the kind of challenge most consultants are looking for. Hey want to create the next solution and documentation feels like busywork no matter how important it can be.

On the other hand, customers often wisely ask for documentation on the systems that the consultant has built for them. They want to be able to maintain it once the consultant is gone and they want to make sure that the users use whatever was built because a system that isn’t used is useless. For the most part the only person who can document a system is the person who built it and so consulting companies ask the consultant who did the work to write some documentation. What follows often succeeds but only after a great gnashing of teeth. The consultant begrudgingly does whatever it is the customer wants in the way of documentation – and absolutely not a word more than is required.

The problem is that this sets everyone up for negative feelings. The consultant doesn’t like the work of documenting so feels some angst for both the consulting company and the client for making them do this work. After all, don’t they know that the consultant is highly valuable and can’t be bothered to do such things as documentation? (Tongue planted firmly in cheek) The consulting company is frustrated because they want their consultant on the next project. The customer in the end is rarely truly satisfied with the documentation provided because the goal was “minimally acceptable” rather than excellence.

What’s perhaps more criminal about this whole process is that it’s repeated for each customer … over and over again. Consultants find the end of each project painful. Consulting companies realize that key resources can’t move on to the next project. The customers may like the solution but often struggle with the level of detail in the documentation. Most solutions built on top of SharePoint have a high amount of overlap in what must be documented. After all SharePoint is a platform and the platform does a lot. The way that items are edited, columns are added, lists are created, etc., are all common to most of the solutions built on SharePoint. Most of that documentation isn’t unique or different from one project or customer to the next.

My situation as a consultant is a bit different. While I’ve been consulting I’ve been writing and editing during the nights and weekends. I’ve got over 100 book projects to my credit and counting everything 20 book projects with some sort of author credit. So for me writing isn’t a burden, it’s therapeutic. It’s something that I can do to unwind, to relax at the end of a day or week. As a result I don’t mind writing documentation for customers. To me it’s a nice change of pace. (Yea, I know some of you are reading this thinking that I’m sick – I’m ok with that.)

One day I was going to lunch with my buddy who shared that he was writing the same documentation for how to edit a list item in SharePoint for what seemed to be the millionth time. He was exasperated because every new client meant doing the same stuff over and over – because if they were going to pay to have it custom generated then they expected their screenshots in it. Of course, that just meant he had to redo everything. During the discussion the idea came to me … what if you could standardized most of that and sell it as a package and then you would just have to fill in custom details with a little bit of work – instead of starting from scratch each time. It could dramatically reduce the amount of custom frustration and create a better set of deliverables in a fraction of the time.

Thus was the genesis of the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide. That was the moment that I knew that I needed to generate content that could be reused for corporations who needed documentation for a part of their custom solution – that wasn’t really custom. Thus began the materials that would eventually become the book. I realized that having a set of corporate training materials for end user SharePoint concern was going to be an awareness problem. There are dozens of folks that have materials – if you know where to look. However, most of those organizations struggled to get the message out about their materials. They also didn’t scale down to the smaller organizations. The model for materials really works well for organizations that have 100 people or more but corporate licenses just don’t execute well for smaller organizations. With my background I knew that the answer had to be a book. Smaller organizations could purchase the book itself through distribution and the larger organizations could get the economies of scale with the corporate licensing.

Sometimes I describe the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide as a book that is not a book. That sounds odd even to me; however, it makes sense when you realize that it’s a way for larger organizations to evaluate the materials and for smaller organizations to buy the materials in a way that works for them. So why am I so happy about the release of the book? Because for me it’s the way that people get to see all of the hard work. It’s the way that more people can benefit from the things we’ve done. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the new book in comparison to the previous edition.

I’ve already given some of the stats for the book in my previous blog post. However, things have changed a bit as I laid things out and got to a final stage. Let’s go through the numbers:

	2007	2010	Increase
Page Count	377	556	47%
Tasks	116	181	56%
Index Pages	0	18
Decision Trees	0	6
Background Chapters	0	4

So what does all of this mean? Well, in short we tried to address every single concern that we heard about the previous version. This includes desires for some different types of content in places as well as the desire for an index –something that is only necessary for the printed book.

I’d encourage you to go learn more, or buy a copy at The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users web site.

SharePoint Workflow and Two Events at Once

Robert Bogue September 4, 2010 1 Comment

SharePoint workflows are really powerful – but debugging any workflow can be a very challenging exercise. You, obviously, have to drive through the process pushing an item one step to the next. That can be difficult if there are mandatory delays, retries, etc. Most of those things are just painful but generally speaking pretty solvable. However, there are some things in workflow that are really hard to get to. I ran into another situation with workflow that was hard to find.

When we were doing some stress testing we managed to break one of my workflows. After some careful work we realized that it happened anytime the workflow got two events at the same time. The second event would disappear. Poof. It just wouldn’t get handled at all. The nastiness of this is that if the second event was a task SharePoint would have locked the task and so it was no longer possible to modify the task – and because of this the workflow would never be able to be moved to completion.

I’m happy to say that the fix for this issue is in the August 2010 Cumulative update for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. I tested it with some really abusive situations. In my validation test, I put the thread to sleep for 30 seconds after getting an event. I can say that the events are eventually delivered. However, I should caution that events aren’t always processed in the order that they came in. If I have three events, 1, 2, and 3 I’ve noticed that event 1 is processed then the workflow waits for the timer job and event 3 is processed and after the workflow goes back to sleep again event 2 is processed.

The net of this is that you should try to avoid scenarios where you have to get events in a prescribed order even after you’ve applied this fix. However, at least your workflows won’t break if two events come in at the same time – like for instance if you are asking for approvals from many people as was the case in our situation.

Capturing Page Load Times – FiddlerScript to the Rescue

Robert Bogue August 23, 2010 1 Comment

So I have a client who has locations all over the world and we’ve been doing some analysis of some performance issues with SharePoint. We believe that we narrowed down the issue to SQL server not having enough memory. The key indicator for SQL Server memory is SQL Server Buffer Manager: Page Life Expectancy (PLE) – anything less than 300 (seconds) isn’t going to perform optimally. However, we needed some “proof” that changing the SQL memory changed the performance – for people across the world. The solution, rather than buying and setting up expensive monitoring all over the world was to get some of the users to run Fiddler. If you’ve never seen the tool you should go check it out now. (You can go look at an article I wrote in 2006 if you want to see what I was thinking 4 years ago.)

The problem was that there’s no quick and simple way to get the session timers out of Fiddler. That is except that Eric Lawrence (the author of Fiddler) is a genius. He added scripting support to Fiddler so you can script the stuff you need. With a few looks at the cookbook, some trial and error, and a few pointers from Eric, I wrote some script that creates a tab separated value file which can be imported into Excel. The file has all of the key timers and the number of milliseconds that elapsed. You can go to Rules-Customize Rules (Ctrl-R) to customize the rules – or you can download the handy script editor. I added a tools menu option to write all of the session timers to a TSV and a context menu option to write the selected session timers to a TSV. The code is below if you want to do this yourself. By the way, I used a tab separated value file because I had a situation where some of my URLs had commas in them. (Don’t ask) I won’t guarantee this is the absolute best way to make this all work – but it’s functional.

public static ToolsAction(“Write all session timers to TSV file”)
function WriteAllSessionTimers()
{
       var fileName = GetSaveFileName();
       if (fileName != null)
       {
              var oSessions : Fiddler.Session[] = FiddlerApplication.UI.GetAllSessions();
              WriteSelectedSessionTimersToFileName(oSessions, fileName);
       }

}

public static ContextAction(“Write selected session timers to TSV file”)
function WriteSelectedSessionTimers(oSessions: Fiddler.Session[])
{
       var fileName = GetSaveFileName();
       if (fileName != null)
       {
              WriteSelectedSessionTimersToFileName(oSessions, fileName);
       }
}

public static function GetSaveFileName()
{
       var sfd : System.Windows.Forms.SaveFileDialog = new System.Windows.Forms.SaveFileDialog();

sfd.Filter = “Tab Separated Value (*.tsv)|*.tsv|All files (*.*)|*.*”;
       if (sfd.ShowDialog() == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)
       {
              return(sfd.FileName);
       }
       else return (null);
}

public static function WriteSelectedSessionTimersToFileName(oSessions: Fiddler.Session[], filename: System.String)
{
       try
{

if (oSessions == null || oSessions.Length == 0)
              {
                     MessageBox.Show(“Please select sessions first”, “Warning”);
                     return;
              }

var sb: System.Text.StringBuilder = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
       sb.Append(“Host\tPathAndQuery\tMimeType\tClientConnected\tClientDoneRequest\tServerConnected\tServerGotRequest\tServerBeginResponse\tServerDoneResponse\tClientBeginResponse\tClientDoneResponse\tTotalTimeMS\r\n”);
              for (var looper=0; looper<oSessions.Length; looper++)
              {
                     var ts: System.TimeSpan = null;
                     var dtStart: DateTime = oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientConnected;
                     var dtEnd: DateTime = oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientDoneResponse;
                     ts = dtEnd – dtStart;
                     var mimeType = null;
                     if (oSessions[looper].oResponse.headers.Exists(“Content-Type”))
                     {
                           mimeType = oSessions[looper].oResponse.headers[“Content-Type”];
                           if (mimeType.indexOf(‘;’) > –1) mimeType = mimeType.substr(0, mimeType.indexOf(‘;’));
                     }

sb.Append(oSessions[looper].host).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].PathAndQuery).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(mimeType).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientConnected.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientDoneRequest.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ServerConnected.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ServerGotRequest.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ServerBeginResponse.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ServerDoneResponse.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientBeginResponse.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(oSessions[looper].Timers.ClientDoneResponse.ToString(“MM/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss.ffff “)).Append(‘\t’)
                           .Append(ts.TotalMilliseconds).Append(“\r\n”);
              }

var sw : System.IO.StreamWriter = System.IO.File.CreateText(filename);
              sw.Write(sb.ToString());
              sw.Close();
              sw.Dispose();
       }
       catch (excpt: System.Exception)
       {
              MessageBox.Show(excpt.ToString());
       }
}

Running Users Groups

Robert Bogue August 10, 2010 4 Comments

A friend of mine, Chris Geier, posted a blog post titled “SharePoint: The User Group Phenomena” (link removed) on the End User SharePoint site. He’s pondering the whole users group question. Having been involved with users groups for just shy of 20 years, I feel like there are a few things that I should say about how users groups form, how they develop their own personality, and how they fail. I should say that I don’t feel like I have the corner on the market here, I am just sharing what I know from my experience.

How Users Groups Form

A few weeks ago I got a message through my friends at Microsoft. A gentleman in town was looking for an users group where he could learn more about Team Foundation Server. He was using it but didn’t feel like he was getting as much out of it as he could – and given the complexity of the product I can support that finding a users group is a good idea. Without getting into details the TFS group locally hasn’t been very successful so there’s no answer for him today. However, folks like myself, and some folks from the Developer Platform Evangelism group at Microsoft are encouraging him to start his own group. I’ve volunteered to reach out to my clients that use TFS and Microsoft has agreed to fund some food for an initial meeting. Will this turn into a new TFS group in Indianapolis? I don’t know. However, this is one of the ways that users groups form. People are looking for a way to learn more about using a product and they try to gather together to share experiences. This is probably one of the best ways that users groups form. It is a pretty simple things.

Another group that I’m a part of is a rather informal meeting of the technical directors from various Christian churches around Indianapolis. It’s candidly driven by one guy, Daryl Crype. Daryl is the technical director for Grace Community Church. Four years ago I reached out to him because I was being asked to support the production of our Sunday morning worship services at Hazel Dell Christian Church and I was completely out of my league. The entire depth of the group is a meeting roughly once a month at a restaurant where we each buy our own food and talk about the things that we’re working on. It’s an users group – but one with a lot less structure.

The SharePoint Users Group of Indiana which I lead (I’ve really got to fix that at some point) was born out of the passion of Bess Wuertz who was at the time it was launched working for the Indianapolis Airport. It was SharePoint 2003 in 2005 or 2006 (I don’t remember) and the product was a lot less popular than it is now. Bess wanted to get folks together to share their experiences with the product. I stepped in after there were several meetings that Bess could no longer support. We agreed that I’d help bring some of my experience to ensure that the group continued to run. We’ve been running continuously since Bess and my discussion. We draw 30-50 people every other month. We’ve just introduced new leadership to the group and we’re adding a second meeting for a slightly different audience of folks (end users and business users). We typically have a meeting every other month in the evening. Our end user/business user meeting will be done during the lunch hour on the intervening months.

Last year Darrin Bishop approached me about creating an users group for SharePoint in Illinois. Darrin’s interest is in supporting the community and in creating a better group of people using the product so that folks can be successful. His group is growing and looks to be on the right track at the moment. For him the meetings are

And those are the good ways that users group form. They’re born out of someone’s need, a philanthropic desire to help the technical community, or out of a set of random conversations. I will say that there are a few “users groups” that are not exactly that. The other thing that can happen is that an individual or organization can decide that they need a marketing vehicle and that starting an users group is the answer. As a result the users group takes on a marketing slant. This clamps down on user interaction (after all if users help each other how will the consultant get work?) The bigger problem is that it tends to block out other consultants that might want to participate. (I believe that clients are like flowers and consultants are like bees – consultants cross pollinate ideas between clients. As a result they’re an essential part of the ecosystem.)

I should say that not all users groups run by organizations are bad. It really depends on who’s running them and whether they’re trying to extract value out of the group itself or whether they’re using the group to grow the potential opportunities in the market. It’s a subtle but big difference.

Given that I run the SPIN users group and I run a consulting company I feel like I have to explain that I *NEVER* market my services from the front of the users group. As a point of fact, I don’t even list my organization as a sponsor for the group. I put the same amount of money in as the other sponsors but I personally don’t feel like it’s “my” group. It’s a community service. I do get people contact me because I lead the group to ask if I do consulting – I’ll answer them but I am really conscious of the need to keep the group as a community group. To that end, I seek out ALL the consulting organizations doing SharePoint work in town and ask them for a small sponsorship rather than looking for a few high dollar sponsorships. I want everyone to have a small buy in for the groups long term success.

How Users Groups Run

I’ve seen many different ways of running. Evenings. Mornings. Lunch. Formal sponsors. Small per user fees. One presentation per meeting. Multiple presentations per meeting. Sponsors can present. Sponsors pay to present. While I have a few of my own thoughts I don’t think these are the only answers. A few of the things that I’ve learned are:

Consistency is important – but not the only thing. Meeting in the same place at the same time on the same day of the month matters. Make a change and you’ll see a drop in attendance. Depending on the change it can be 10% or so … but as much as 50%.
Communication is CRITICAL – If I want to control our meeting size down it’s easy. Just don’t communicate. Don’t send the note out 3 weeks ahead of time. Don’t send the reminder. I’ve used this technique when I’ve had problems with space to ensure that the people who were really interested could attend. Failing to send out a last minute reminder can be 20% of your audience.
Timing influences passion – If you do meetings at night you know that you’re getting the folks who are truly passionate. If you do the events during the day you’ll get folks who want to get out of work. I personally know a single mother who arranges for a baby sitter to be able to make some of our meetings because she’s passionate about what she does and the content we deliver. It’s easier for most folks – except consultants – to do meetings during the middle of the work day where they can block it off on their calendar.
Leave open space – One of the key things that Bess started with our group and a thing that I vigorously protect is the time that is designed for folks to talk – to socialize – and to get to know one another. One of the reasons we have a single presentation for an hour is to create extra time for folks to talk to each other. With two presentations or a longer presentation groups end up doing only presentations and no one talks.
Presentations provide focus – With a handful of exceptions, presentations are necessary to provide focus. Without them people show up and wonder what to talk about. We use presentations as our tool for getting folks together around a central topic. We give them a topic to discuss.

I’m sure there are tons of other things that we do that I don’t even think of any more. If you are running a group and want to run an idea, thought, or problem by me feel free.

How Users Groups Fail

I’ve watched more than a few groups fail over the years, even one where I was officially holding the reigns. I can honestly say that groups ALWAYS fall apart from the leadership. Maybe they’re not managing the political wars. Maybe all of the passion has gone out of the group. Maybe they’ve developed commitment cancer. Whatever the official cause of death for an users group it’s always leaderships’ fault.

I want to address three key problems because they’re critically important to me.

Politics

There are cities where the business environment is so politically charged that I believe it’s difficult to run a successful group. Let me pick on my neighbors in Chicago since I’m close enough to see what’s happening and far enough away to not be able to fix it. The business market in Chicago is hyper competitive. Consulting companies always seem to be hungry and they always seem to be competing with one another for that one deal that will keep them afloat. The problem with this is that it makes it really hard for anyone (particularly sales and marketing folks) to come together for the common good of the market. As a result groups end up getting pulled in weird ways as the consulting companies protect their own interests. Chicago has what amounts to two SharePoint users groups because the respective consulting companies are controlling the group too tightly. Interestingly both are near failure. One of these days it’s my hope that they’ll figure out that there should be one group and everyone should focus on the development of the community and not on individual consulting company gains. (I guess I don’t have to worry about speaking in Chicago for a while now.)

If leadership fails to put the users and the community first then there will be problems.

Commitment Cancer

In an users group you have a motivation problem. You can’t motivate another person really. You don’t have a financial incentive to offer them. You can’t really publicly shame them. You’ve got to rely on people’s character to create the right results. One of the COMMON problems that I see with users groups is that they develop commitment cancer and it spreads. What is commitment cancer? Well, it’s where someone on the steering committee or board makes a commitment and doesn’t meet it. It is quietly pushed aside as people don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Pretty soon there’s another member who’s not meeting their commitments – why should they? Where does it end? Most of the time, commitment cancer ends with the group shutting down. Why? Because nothing gets done. It’s that network of commitments that keeps pushing the group forward. Without that commitment the group will wither and die. I’ve got one users group in Indianapolis that I’m no longer a part of because it has commitment cancer and the leadership is refusing to get treatment.

The Passion is gone

Another way an users group can fail is that the passion dies. This is a hard one. It’s a hard one to see and it’s a hard one to fix. Sometimes the market moves on. Sometimes the group was needed to fill a particular training need. Sometimes the leadership just isn’t passionate about the spot in the community any longer. For instance, there was a time I was passionate about SQL server. I’m not really that passionate about it any longer. I feel like the information that needs to be out there is out there. While there’s a vibrant SQL users group in Indy, it’s not a place that I can spend my time. The one thing I can say about this is that everything has SOMEONE who’s passionate about it.

In Parting…

I’ve seen people use users groups to help them find a job – good for them. However, it would be nice if they would repay what they got out of the group by coming back and supporting it.

Conferences for the second half of 2010

Robert Bogue August 9, 2010 No Comments

I’m such a delinquent. I’ve got all of these great conferences that I’m doing the second half of the year and I’ve not had a chance to share what I’m up to.

First, I’ll be at SharePoint Saturday Columbus next weekend. I’m doing a session titled “Solution Creation for the IT Pro without Semicolons” — it’s a lot of fun to put away Visual Studio and show folks what can be done without compiling anything. I spent a year where I was in Columbus every week for a few days – so it will be good to get back over and visit with folks I’ve not seen in a while.

August 24^th-27^th I’ll be joining an absolutely stellar set of speakers at the Best Practices Conference SharePoint. I’m presenting a session titled “Making Development Design Decisions for SharePoint” and a session titled “Working Smartly with Workflow.” The first session is some of the things that didn’t fit into the SharePoint Guidance. Expect a raw look at the ways to look at making decisions on SharePoint. The second session will encompass more of the work from the SharePoint Guidance as well as work on the Microsoft Learning instructor lead course “Designing Applications for Microsoft SharePoint 2010” (10232). I’ll also be sharing my love – and hatred – for SharePoint workflow. I can honestly say that I’ve done things that no one else has done with Workflow. Some of it I won’t be doing again. Expect you’ll know what’s broken and what works when you walk out.

On October 20^th, I’ll be delivering the first public session based on the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users 2010 at SPTechCon. In the session sub-titled “A day’s walk in SharePoint with the Shepherd” should be a lot of fun as we walk through the key things that end users need to do – and some cool things that folks don’t know that can be done. Later in the week I’ll be doing a presentation “Protecting your SharePoint Farm from Evil Developers” which is particularly humorous since I do mostly development. I aim to strike a balance between IT Pro needs and Developer needs. The Friday’s session is “Playing in the Sandbox: What an IT Admin Should Know” – We’ll tear apart the idea of the sandbox, figure out what goes where, and how it impacts the farm. In this session we’re focused on understanding how all of the pieces fit together. SPTechCon is a great place to go if you’re in charge of a SharePoint deployment in your organization and you don’t feel like you’re really up to the challenge – you’ll get what you need to be successful.

On November 1^st, I get the distinct pleasure to share the stage with Eric Shupps. We’ll be delivering a SharePoint 2010 Professional Development Workshop at SharePoint Connections. This will be an action packed day of content as we try to cram the key things that you need to know to develop for SharePoint into a day. We’re skipping right over the basics and dropping you in the land of hard decisions as we walk you through whether you should put your data in a standalone SQL database or in SharePoint – and what it means no matter what you decide. I don’t know of another day session where you can grab two of the leading experts on SharePoint Development and drink from a fire hose of information.

If you haven’t had an opportunity to go to a national SharePoint conference – this year is the year. It’s some great content from the leading experts on SharePoint at all of the conferences.

Book Review-The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life

Robert Bogue August 6, 2010 3 Comments

The Time Paradox – The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life may have a hyperbole for a sub-title but the insights that it provides are valuable. I try to look for new perspectives to view the world around me. Being a consultant and speaker means I meet lots of people and it helps to be able to understand where they’re coming from. This book provided me another way to frame my thinking about how others think differently.

The short summary is that people have different ways that they view time. Some folks look to the past and view it negatively – -reflecting and remembering only those things that happened that were bad. Some look to the past and draw from it the warm moments like roasting marshmallows and making smores. Some folks are more focused on living for the moment, what the book calls a present hedonistic focus. Still others view the present from a fatalistic point of view. That is they believe everything is fated and that what they do doesn’t matter. Finally, there are folks that focus on the future. They’re willing to sacrifice today for a better tomorrow.

In reality there are aspects of each of these in every person. Sometimes we are able to live in the moment. Sometimes we’re willing to remember those camping trips with our family. However, we all have tendencies towards one or more time perspectives. For instance, I have an interesting mix of future orientation and present orientation.

The book’s web site allows you to calculate your perspectives on time using a standard scale. My future score is 4.15. (Pretty high) This isn’t a surprise to the folks who know me. I replaced mulch beds with rock beds in places because it had a lower long term maintenance cost. I’ve replaced the siding on my house with concrete board that can’t rot. My deck is made of composite materials that won’t rot. My furnaces are both heat pumps with gas backup which is more expensive to install but has the best long term operational costs. I drive a 12 year old Lexus ES 300 because it’s reliable. If you offer me a choice between something that’s slightly cheaper today or has good long term benefits I almost always choose the option which will have the best long term benefits.

I also tend to view the past relatively positively (3.3 past-positive vs. 2.8 past-negative). On the present measurements I score very low on the present-fatalistic measurement (1.2) and moderately on hedonistic (3.7). I’m sure that I could improve my perception of the past to improve my overall outlook – and I know that I can get better at living in the moment (present-hedonistic) – but that’s actually one of the points of the book. Once you know what your time perspectives are you can work to gently nudge them into a more healthy perspective. (At least more happy, see my book review of Stumbling on Happiness.)

For me the book provides a context for evaluating my own perspectives and for understanding why other folks might not understand the inherent benefits of solutions that have long term rewards. If you’re interested in psychology, how you think or how to relate to others I think you’ll like The Time Paradox – The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life.

What is SharePoint?

Robert Bogue July 30, 2010 No Comments

I vividly remember working the ask the experts floor in Orlando at Tech Ed 2007 and Tech Ed 2008. I remember a picture of people waiting four and five deep as a group of what must have been 10 of us including Microsoft employees and MVPs were trying to answer questions for customers. You see, the product was just starting to get a real buzz behind it and as a result more and more people were coming over and asking “What is SharePoint?” I also remember the struggle that even the experts had explaining what SharePoint really was.

As a part of the new writing for the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users 2010, I realized that there are still many folks – and many end users – who’ve never been introduced to what SharePoint is. So I spent some time to try to put together a thumbnail sketch of what SharePoint can be used for. The material is an appendix to the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide – but I’m making it available to everyone for free from the web site. My hope is that it will be something that folks can share with their users to help them understand what we mean when we talk about SharePoint.

So go grab “What is SharePoint?” and let me know what you think.

The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users: 2010 Book Cover

Announcing the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users 2010

Robert Bogue July 30, 2010 No Comments

I’ve been honored to receive accolades for the work that I did on the SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users (2007 Edition) which was written and delivered in 2008. You can take a look at the tracking list – or just look at the Amazon.com listing. The book is 116 tasks that users need to know how to do. The book itself remains a strong seller more than two years after its release. It has outsold almost every other book I’ve written. (The other 17 released books.) I have felt a strong compulsion to ensure that the 2010 version would be better than the 2007 version. That is the reason that I’ve been largely silent on the issue of where the book is or whether I’d be updating the book for SharePoint 2010. However, today I’d like to announce that we’re in the final editing process for the book – this should put the book on the shelves in less than 60 days and means that we can offer corporate licenses immediately.

Let me talk, for a moment about the difference between the 2007 version and the 2010 version. The 2007 version was 377 pages (7.44″x9.68″) and 116 tasks. The 2010 version has over 411 (8.5×11) pages and 175 tasks – and we’re still tweaking the final number as we see things that we missed so it may go up. We’ve not decided on a final trim size for the book –so our page count will definitely increase over this 411 pages. That means we’ve got somewhere between25 and 75% more content. We specifically added tasks around areas where our customers (of both the book and the corporate licenses) told us we were weak. Further, I got one negative comment (ever) about the book not having an index. I’m happy to say that the 2010 edition of the book will have an index. In short, I tried to ensure that we were addressing every comment about the previous version.

In addition, I’m trying to take the same approach to decision making that you’ll find in the Patterns and Practices SharePoint Guidance for describing how decisions can be made between options in SharePoint to the book. So the intent is to provide consumable chunks of content around the decision between creating a list or a library – or choosing to create a choice field versus a lookup. The idea is that these guides will be small enough to be consumed quickly and will be written with the end user (and not the developer or administrator) in mind. This was one of the things that I had hoped we would get to for the 2007 book but we just couldn’t make it happen. In all candor this is the hard stuff to write and it’s the one part of the book that’s not written (thus isn’t in the increase estimates above.)

So why am I announcing the book on my blog? Well, I’m starting to get more specific inquiries about corporate licensing and SharePoint 2010. I felt like it was time to explain where I’m at, what I’m doing, and why it’s taking so long. I don’t expect the explanation above really resolves the final question – but at the very least I expect that you’ll get a glimpse into the fact that I’m putting substantial effort into improving the book.

So as of today, I’ll accept orders for the corporate editions of the 2010 version. The same non-printable PDF, printable PDF, Word (editable), and Wiki versions will be available. Corporate customers will also be able to pre-purchase the videos for the 2010 version. (They’re not done until after edits are done on the tasks.)

I’ve kept pricing at the same levels as the 2007 corporate licenses. (Email my sales manager at [email protected] to get a specific quote) I’m also offering my existing corporate customers a 50% discount on the new materials for the next 60 days. Finally, new customers who order in the next 60 days will receive a 50% discount on the 2007 materials when they order both sets of materials together. The idea of this discount is that organizations can purchase their 2007 needs and 2010 needs at the same time.

We should have the outline and some samples of the content up for review in the next two weeks. In the mean time if you’ve got a short term need please send my sales manager an email and we’ll get you the outline and a few samples.

Public Speaking

You cannot measure what you cannot see

You cannot predict the weather

You can’t see the whole picture at one time

You can’t influence what you don’t recommend

Just Stop it

How Users Groups Form

How Users Groups Run

How Users Groups Fail

Politics

Commitment Cancer

The Passion is gone

In Parting…

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