Hi all

A big chunk of last year had me off under a metaphorical mushroom, putting together several days of courseware on the topic of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture. My take on these topics are influenced from some odd places, and the course drew on a lot of the non IT work that I do, that involves collaboration on some very complex problems indeed.

In November and December of 2010, we took this “on the road”, so to speak, firstly in Dublin, then London and Sydney. The courses were sold out and feedback was terrific. Here are a few choice quotes (check out the hyperlinks for full reviews)

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“Did it meet my expectations? Well I’d have to say that it far exceeded them. There had obviously been a large amount of effort in preparing the courseware and modules. They covered the important missing links currently absent from the Microsoft and traditional training courses” – Wes Hackett.

“I’ve just finished the second day of the SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture Master Class presented by Paul Culmsee with the support of Andrew Woodward . I can wholeheartedly say it was one of the best courses I’ve attended both in content and presentation style and they deserve a lot of credit for putting together a fantastic course. Paul in particular has put a huge amount of effort into the slidedeck, sample documents and enormous manual (almost 500 pages worth!) let alone all the great additional insight he could provide in person over both days” – Brendan Newell

“Finally …. after 12 years in the IT industry a course which covers some of the fundamental issues governing project success.   This course is a real eye opener and a must for any IT professional involved in project planning and delivery” -  Stephen McWilliams

“I just came back from the best technology training I have had in years: a world-first Microsoft SharePoint Elite Information Architecture course designed and delivered by Paul Culmsee. It has taught me a great deal across ALL facets of the day-to-day work that I do as a SharePoint architect” – Jess Kim

Based on this and similar feedback, we are going to do it again. Locations confirmed so far are London (#SPIAUK), Sydney (#SPIAAU) and Wellington (#SPIANZ) in February and March 2011 and in the pipeline is The Netherlands (#SPIANL) and at least a couple of US cities!

In addition to the unique content on these classes, I am honoured to announce that I am now authorised to teach the official Cognexus Issue Mapping courseware – the only non Cognexus Dialogue Mapping practitioner authorised to do so. As such, we will be running the inaugural Issue Mapping class in London in late February as well (wohoo!)

So, here are the details for each location:

(Register now) February 21, 2011, London   #SPIAUK SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class (Download Flyer)

(Register now) February 23, 2011, London #IBISUK Issue Mapping Master Class (Download Flyer)

(Register now) March 10, 2011, Sydney  #SPIAAU SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class (Download Flyer)

(Register now)March 14, 2011, Wellington #SPIANZ SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class (Download Flyer)

(Register soon) May 9, 2011, Utrecht, Netherlands (watch this space)

Wondering what to expect in these classes? Read on!

 SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. 2 full days of real world, examples knowledge and techniques

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed. Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock solid, stable, well documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success. Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This master class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot. Paul‘s style takes an ironic and subversive take on how SharePoint governance really works within organisations, while presenting a model and the tools necessary get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul has distilled the “what” and “how” of governance down a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organisations large and small can utilise to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become successful.

Master class aims:

• Present SharePoint governance and Information Architecture in a new light – focus on the “blind spots” where the current published material is inadequate
• Cover lessons learned from Paul’s non IT work as a facilitator and sensemaker in complex large scale projects
• Examine the latest trends in the information landscape for industry and government and review studies that inform governance and Information Architecture efforts
• Present an alternative approach to business-as-usual SharePoint governance planning that focuses on real collaboration
• Provide quality information that is rigorous yet accessible, entertaining and interesting

Master class outcomes:

• Understand the SharePoint governance lens beyond an IT service delivery focus
• Develop your ‘wicked problem’ radar and apply appropriate governance practices, tools and techniques accordingly
• Learn how to align SharePoint projects to broad organisational goals, avoid chasing platitudes and ensure that the problem being solved is the right problem
• Learn how to account for cognitive bias and utilise tools and techniques that help stakeholders align to a common vision
• Understand the relationship between governance and assurance, why both are needed and how they affect innovation and user engagement
• Understand the underlying, often hidden forces of organisational chaos that underpins projects like SharePoint
• Understand the key challenges and opportunities that SharePoint presents for Information Architecture
• Learn how to document your information architecture
• Practical knowledge: Add lots more tools to your governance and IA toolkit!

Course Structure: The course is split into 7 modules, run across the two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata.

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

As a take home, we will also supply a USB stick for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement “out in the field” and until now have never been released to the public.

Note: The workshop sessions will be hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Issue Mapping Master Class. Your path towards shared understanding and shared commitment

“Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them.” Laurence J. Peter

Presented by: Paul Culmsee

Courseware by: Cognexus Institute and Seven Sigma

“Not another $#%@*$ meeting!”

All of us have felt the frustration of walking from yet another unproductive meeting, wondering where the agenda went. Yet, as problems become more complex, meetings are still the place where critical strategic decisions are made.

What is Issue Mapping?

Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) is a sense-making framework used to support group discussions to assist all involved to come to a shared understanding. It visually maps participants’ points of views, problems voiced, the rationale and reasons leading up to decision(s). The maps can be easily read and understood by everyone, even by those not part of the discussion group.

Why Issue Mapping?

• Maps detailed rationale behind decision-making as well as the decision; maps the thinking process of the group
• Concentrates on pros and cons to an idea, encourages and explores all views, taking the sting out of differences
• Represents and clarifies diverse points of views, conflicting interpretations and goals, inconsistent information and other forms of complexity
• Everyone gets a chance to speak, if they want. People are heard and contributions are acknowledged. Interruptions, repetition and dominance of the loudest decreases
• Keeps participants on topic because they can visually see the progress of the discussion
• Keeps everyone’s attention
• Meeting progress/result can be seen
• Map helps participants come up with ideas/arguments
• Visual display of progress to review summary if need so the brain can absorb the bigger picture and appreciate the validity and value of a larger perspective
• Avoids jumping to easy answers or superficial conclusions
• Promotes deeper reasoning, rigor and even wisdom
• Everyone can visually see everything discussed- leaves no room for misunderstandings
• Documents can easily be attached to map to back up ideas
• Participants can see effectiveness of mapping and genuine will try to make it more productive

About Seven Sigma

Issue Mapping is a life skill that can be applied to many different problem domains and scenarios. Participants will gain proficiency in a craft that can be applied long into the future, to help them and others bring clarity and convergence to the management of complex problems. At Seven Sigma, we practice Issue and Dialogue Mapping routinely and this has brought us many satisfied clients. The Mapping in itself is part of the ‘secret sauce’ that makes Seven Sigma’s reputation renowned.

Seven Sigma Business Solutions is the only recognised designated partner of Cognexus Institute, founder of the art of Issue Mapping, in the world. We recognise that without reaching shared understanding, you will find yourself at yet another meeting, rehashing the same unresolved problems, listening to the same arguments month after month. Or, if a decision has been made, it has not been followed up to fruition due to lack of commitment/buy-in.

We are proud to be part of your journey towards shared understanding and shared commitment.

Master Class aims and outcomes:

• Be able to create great maps – issue maps that are clear, coherent, and inviting
• Immediately start using Issue Mapping effectively in your work and life; the class will focus on practical experience and map building
• Command a rich range of options for publishing and sharing maps
• Lead with maps: create direction, momentum, and energy with issue maps
• Quickly and effectively do critical analysis in dynamic situations
• Organize unstructured information and discover patterns and connections within it
• Make critical thinking visible for inspection and analysis
• Recognise early, the symptoms of wicked problems and the forces behind group divergence
• Recognise the importance of capturing the rationale behind decisions, as well as the decisions themselves
• Rethink the traditional approach to meetings and decision making
• Start capturing the rationale leading up to the decisions by using IBIS and Compendium software

It will also give you a deeper understanding of:

• The fundamentals of IBIS and Compendium
• The structural patterns that give clarity and power to issue maps
• How decision rationale is represented in a map

This master class will be hands on – please bring your own laptop with Compendium software (freeware) installed.

Duration: 2 days, with homework after the first day

Audience: For both IT and non-IT audience; those involved in highly complex projects including leaders, consultants, facilitators, organisational development professionals, change agents, managers and engineers.

Prerequisite: An open mind geared for shared understanding and shared commitment

Hiya

[Note: I have written another article that illustrates a process for migrating the entire term store between farms.]

My colleague Chris Tomich, recently saved the day with a nice PowerShell script that makes the management and migration of managed metadata between farms easier. If you are an elite developer type, you can scroll down to the end of this post. if you are a normal human, read on for background and context.

The Issue

Recently, I had a client who was decommissioning an old active directory domain and starting afresh. Unfortunately for me, there was a SharePoint 2010 farm on the old domain and they had made considerable effort in leveraging managed metadata.

Under normal circumstances, migrating SharePoint in this scenario is usually done via a content database migration into a newly set up farm. This is because the built in SharePoint 2010 backup/restore, although better than 2007, presumes that the underlying domain that you are restoring to is the same (bad things happen if it is not). Additionally, the complex interdependencies between service applications (especially the user profile service) means that restoring one service application like Managed metadata is fiddly and difficult.

I was constrained severely by time, so I decided to try a quick and dirty approach to see what would happen. I created a new, clean farm and provisioned a managed metadata service application. The client in question had half a dozen term sets in the old SP2010 farm and around 20 managed metadata columns in the site collection that leveraged them. I migrated the content database from the old farm to the new farm via the database attach method and that worked fine.

I then used the SolidQ export tool from codeplex to export those term sets from the managed metadata service of the source farm. Since the new SP2010 farm had a freshly provisioned managed metadata service application, re-importing those terms and term sets into this farm was a trivial process and went without a hitch.

I knew that managed metadata stores each term as a unique identifier (GUID I presume because programmers love GUID’s). Since I was migrating a content database to a different farm there were two implications.

1. The terms stored in lists and libraries in that database would reference the GUID’s of the original managed metadata service
2. The site columns themselves, would reference the GUID of the term sets of the source managed metadata service

But the GUIDs on the managed metadata service on the new farm will not match the originals. I did not import the terms with their GUID’s intact. Instead I simply imported terms which created new GUID’s. Now everything was orphaned. Managed metadata columns would not know which term store they are assigned to. For example: just because a term set called, say “Clients” exists in the source farm, when a term set is created in the destination farm with the same name, the managed metadata columns will not automatically “re-link” to the clients term set.

So what does a managed metadata column orphaned from a term set look like? Fortunately, SharePoint handles this gracefully. The leftmost image below shows a managed metadata column happily linked to its term set. The rightmost image shows what it looks like when that term set is deleted while the column remains. As you can see we now have no reference to a term set. However, it is easy to re-point the column to another term set.

When you examine list or library items that have managed metadata entered for them prior to the term set being deleted, SharePoint prevents the managed metadata control from being used (the Project Phase column below is greyed out). Importantly, the original data is not lost since SharePoint actually stores the term along with the rest of the item metadata, but the term cannot be updated of course as there is no term set to refer to.

Once you reconnect a managed metadata column to a term set, the existing term will still be orphaned. The process of reconnecting does not do any sort of processing of terms to reconnect them. I show this below. In the example below, notice how this time, the managed metadata control is enabled again (as it has a valid term set), but the terms within it are marked red, signalling that they are invalid terms that do not exist in this term set. Notice though the second screen. By clicking on the orphaned term, managed metadata finds it in the associated term set and offers the right suggestion. With a single click, the term is re-linked back to the term store and the updated GUID is stored for the item. Too easy.

As the sequence of events above show, it is fairly easy to re-link a term to the term set by clicking on it and letting managed metadata find that term in the term set. However, it is not something you would want to do for 10000 items in a list! In addition, the relative ease of relinking a term like the Location column above is elegant only because it is a single term that does not show the hierarchy. This is not the only configuration available for managed metadata though.

If you have set up your column to use multiple managed metadata entries, as well as allow multiple entries, you will have something like the screen below. In this example, we have three terms selected. “Borough”, “District” and “Neighbourhood”. All three of these terms are at the bottom of a deep hierarchy of terms. (eg Continent > Political Entity > Country > province or State > County or Region > City). As a result, things look ugly.

Unfortunately in this use-case, our single click method will not work. Firstly, we have to click each and every term that has been added to this column one at a time. Secondly and more importantly, even if we do click it, the term will not be found in in the new term set. The only way to deal with this is to manually remove the term and re-enter or use the rather clumsy term picker as the sequence below shows.

Note how as each term is selected, it is marked in black. We have to manually delete the orphaned terms in red.

Finally, after far too many mouse clicks, we are back in business.

A better approach?

I showed this behaviour to my Seven Sigma colleague, Chris Tomich. Chris took a look at this issue and within a few hours trotted out a terrific PowerShell script to programmatically reconnect terms to a new term set. You can grab the source code for this script from Chris’s blog. The one thing Chris did tell me was that he wasn’t able to re-link a site or list column to its replacement term set. That bit you have to do yourself. This is because only the GUID of a term set is used against a column, which means without access to the original server, you do not know which term set to reattach.

Fortunately, there are not that many term sets to deal with, and the real pain is reattaching orphaned terms anyway.

Chris also added a ‘test’ mode to the script, so that it will flag if a field is currently connected to an invalid term set. This is very handy because you can run the script against a site collection and it will help you narrow down which columns are managed metadata and which need to be updated.

From the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell, the script syntax is: (assuming you call your script ReloadTermSets.ps1) –

.\ReloadTermSets.ps1 -web “http://localhost” -test -recurse

web – This is the web address to use. test – This uses a ‘test’ mode that will output lines detailing found fields and the values found for them in the term store and won’t save the items. recurse – This flag will cause the script to recurse through all child sites.

Of course, the usual disclaimers apply. Use the script/advice at your own risk. By using/viewing/distributing it you accept responsibility for any loss/corruption of data that may be incurred by said actions.

I hope that people find this useful. I sure did

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au