SharePoint Tech Report

IN THE COMMUNITY

Call him "The SharePoint Shrink." Rob Bogue, who is well known in the community as "The SharePoint Shepherd" (I’m sure you’ve seen him at industry events with his shepherd's staff), has decided to take a look at the psychology behind software adoption, with the idea of helping organizations understand why users do or do not use SharePoint when it’s implemented. "I’d work with organizations to build a platform that looked good, was stable and worked, yet no one used it or cared about it," he said. Rob said he wanted to understand why this was happening and what the barriers were. At first, he found that people had trouble with tasks and knowing what to do. But when he looked more deeply, he learned that IT organizations are not trained to understand the business value that helps create change. With a new DVD series called "The Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement," Bogue crystallizes the things organizations need to know to get people engaged. "You don’t really want adoption; that’s passive. You want engagement. Are you building solutions on the platform? Are you billing on it, or delivering product on it? If so, then adoption comes naturally because users are engaged with it." He also tackles some fuzzy issues, such as trust and measuring success. "We all believe we know what trust is, but if I ask you right now what is trust, you don’t have an answer," he said. "When pushed, people will start to define trustworthy, but not trust." This shows, he said, that there are a lot of dynamics at play under the tent of change, and in the steps necessary to facilitate that change. The DVD, which runs two hours and 21 minutes, is the first in a series he’ll be doing with other experts in the community. The next topics he plans to tackle are information architecture and search. The cost is US$299, but he’s discounting it to $249 until the end of the month, so as they say on late-night TV, "act now." —David

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IN THE NEWS

Axceler unveils migration, governance tools

By David Rubinstein SharePoint administration tool company Axceler has released new tools to help companies migrate workflows to SharePoint 2010 and to govern their environments. Davinci Migrator 2.0 for SharePoint 2010 enables organizations to move both out-of-the-box and custom workflows to SharePoint 2010. "There’s been a gap in the SharePoint migration marketplace that Axceler now fills with our newest release of Davinci Migrator," said Michael Alden, president and CEO of Axceler, in a statement announcing the products. "Our customers need migration products that are flexible enough to anticipate and plan out the migration process, able to migrate SharePoint workflows with full fidelity, and move content as quickly as possible when ready." Davinci Migrator 2.0 is expected to be released next month. The company has also released ControlPoint 4.5, an update to its governance solution that now covers governance on premises and in the cloud. The software helps managers prevent non-compliant activities, to manage SharePoint in Office 365, and to clean up their environments before and after migration, according to the company. The product will be available early in the fourth quarter this year. "SharePoint governance is not just about products, but about a broad process that involves effective policy management at multiple levels of an organization. And just as SharePoint continues to evolve, ControlPoint’s capabilities have expanded to help our customers improve all aspects of their SharePoint governance," Alden said.

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New Study on SharePoint as a Business-critical Application

Microsoft SharePoint deployments have exploded in the past several years and the platform's influence continues to grow. A recent study conducted by ESG for Metalogix found that nearly two-thirds of companies in North America and Western Europe are now using SharePoint. The result has been soaring demand on IT. Read the complete results to learn how IT professionals are responding to the challenges of managing infrastructure, security, content, storage and migration to SharePoint 2010 needs. » Download the Results Here!

LINKAPALOOZA

The Linker is still waiting for his left ear to pop after last week’s long flight back to New York from the SharePoint Conference in Anaheim. It’s so annoying to hear you own voice way loud in your head while not being able to hear anything going on outside. Gum-chewing and yawning have proved ineffective; the last resort for The Linker is pinching his nostrils and blowing hard. Huh? What’s that? Did someone say something about that not being such a good idea? He couldn’t hear you. Microsoft’s wrap-up from its conference... FREE TRIAL: MetaVis Architect for creating taxonomies... Office 365 Developer Hub... Changing a SharePoint 2010 Web application port number... SharePoint 2010 site templates... Not-so-random Wikipedia entry: Eustachian tubes

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SHAREPOINTERS

A SharePoint Marketplace

By David Rubinstein Much like how the stockphoto.com website opened up the Internet to photographers who want to share or sell their photos, Darrell Trimble and Earl Libby have worked to create the same thing for developers of SharePoint application templates and Web Parts. Trimble is a partner and Libby is CTO of SharePoint Marketplace, and they’ve put together a process that assembles quality application packages and brings them to market at reasonable prices. Trimble came from the CRM service desk world, where he saw that "folks wanted less-expensive versions of these applications, but there wasn’t anyplace to get them." Further, he noted, "We had developers who had created applications but had no marketing arm." READ MORE David Rubinstein is editor of SPTechReport.

BRONZE SPONSOR

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