Time for a workflow audit

Go find a geek. Someone who understands gmail, Outlook, Excel and other basic tools.

Pay her to sit next to you for an hour and watch you work.

Then say, “tell me five ways I can save an hour a day.”

Whatever you need to pay for this service, it will pay for itself in a week.

[source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/07/time-for-a-workflow-audit.html]



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IBF-24 2011 Next week. 24hrs of Intranet Madness!

     

I’ve signed up for this years’ IBF-24 Event.

IBF 24 is a FREE 24 hour online interactive broadcast from the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, showcasing live intranet tours and the latest from industry thought leaders.

I believe this to be a unique peak in to the kitchens of the bigger companies’ intranets, their communication strategies and tools and the implementation of social tools.

The latter is especially something I’m interested in as there is some resistance within a lot of bigger companies to many of these tools because they put the emphasis on the word “Social” while the core functionality allows easier and more fluid communication among staff.

The sit is quite long, as it goes around the world and around the clock. For people in the same time zone as me, it’s running from 12.00 noon on the 17th of May to 12 the next day!

I have made a selection of the ones I am most interested in and would like to follow. Because of the schedule posted on the site, contains the times in the different time zones, I’ve added the GMT+2 Local time (where I’m currently at). This can help you to convert them all to your own a bit easier.

More information here: http://members.ibforum.com/?ibf24what

My Schedule:

IBS-24 2011
17/05/2011 
12.00 – 13.00 Welcome to IBF 24
Co-anchors: Paul Miller & Paul Levy

Guest hosts: Amy Kornbluth, Rebecca Richmond & Sharon
O'Dea
13.00 – 14.00 BT live intranet tour
Richard Dennison showcases the BT intranet, consistently
one of the world's best. As well as covering some
of the main features, Richard will talk about the
roll-out of SharePoint 2010 My Profile pages, and
also cover the take-up of Office Talk, Microsoft's
enterprise micro-blogging product
14.00 – 15.00 "What CEOs Want", Rebecca Richmond from Melcrum
Rebecca Richmond, Group Director of Research & Content
at Melcrum, talks about what CEOs want from internal
communications and relevant channels such as intranets.
Melcrum have interviewed CEOs from around the world
and Rebecca will reveal what internal comms functions
are doing and need to do to meet their expectations.
British American Tobacco live intranet tour
Richard Hare takes us on a tour of Interact, British
American Tobacco's intranet. Built entirely in-house
using Notes Domino, Richard will show how Connect,
a social networking tool, has evolved to be the
platform's centerpiece. Richard will also talk about
how personalisation and a recent project to standardise
design have helped Interact to balance both central
and end market expectations.
17.00 – 18.00 National Field / Organizing for America
Organizing for America and National Field tell the
fascinating story of how they built a social collaboration
platform during the Obama presidential campaign,
providing an essential communication tool to coordinate
the efforts of millions of volunteers. We'll get
a demo of the OFA social network, hear about its
unique hierarchical structure and how National Field
is now bringing that approach to the enterprise.
19.00 – 20.00 Google
Google opens their doors for an hour to give us
an in-depth look on how they innovate and collaborate
day in and day out. We'll hear about the culture
of innovation at Google and how this manifests itself
in different programs. We'll have live demos of
some of the Apps they use, and a live tour of Google's
intranet, MOMA. We'll learn about Google's internal
mobile app store and hear about how Google's powerful
search underpins their collaboration efforts.
20.00 – 21.00 Booz Allen Hamilton live intranet tour
Walton Smith takes us on a tour of Booz Allen Hamilton's
award-winning intranet "Hello." Walton will show
us how they have successfully integrated a number
of best-of-breed collaborative tools built in Open
Source into their SharePoint environment, an achievement
recognized in their Enterprise 2.0 award.
21.00 – 22.00 Duke Energy live intranet tour
Martha Brown and James Bowen present a live tour
of Duke Energy's intranet, named one of Jakob Nielsen's
top ten intranets of 2011. Martha and James will
show how a combination of clever homepage formatting,
people-centric features, good search, task oriented
navigation and a robust content management model
has resulted in a highly successful intranet.
23.00 – 00.00 Megan Berry, KLOUT
Megan Berry is the Affiliate Marketing Manager at
Klout, a US-based company which measures influence
of social media channels including Twitter and Facebook. 
Megan will demonstrate how Klout calculates its
scores and how this is being used by businesses.
18/05/2011  
01.00 – 02.00 Tibbr
Tibbr claims to be "the first social computing tool
specifically built for the workplace that allows
the right information to find you."  Rather
than follow people you can follow activity streams
by subject, event, and even internal-facing applications. 
We'll get a live demo of Tibbr and hear how it is
being used in different organizations, including
Tibco itself
04.00 – 05.00 Google live intranet tour
We're going to take a second tour around Google's
intranet MOMA and some of their related workplace
technologies, with a benefit of any input and questions
which arose from the first tour
06.00 – 07.00 Michael Sampson

Michael Sampson is a New Zealand-based Collaboration
Strategist who advises end-user organizations all
over the world.  He is also the author of several
works including "User Adoption Strategies." 
Michael will talk to us about how to drive user
adoption in social tools and intranets.
NPS live tour
Jess Wong, SharePoint Developer / Administrator
at NPS will show us their intranet, freshly upgraded
to SharePoint 2010.  NPS has more than doubled
in size over the past few years, so Jess has built
in a number of features to help welcome new employees
to NPS and help people in their different office
locations feel connected to each other and to the
organization.  This tour is a must-see for
anyone involved with SharePoint.
07.00-08.00 European Space Agency live intranet tour
Chloe Chavardes (based in Paris) and Sarah Muirhead
(based in Holland) take us on a tour of the European
Space Agency intranet.  A previous winner of
IBF 24's own "My Beautiful Intranet" contest, Chloe
and Sarah will show us how a combination of content,
useful apps and community tools helps bring an organization
spread over several countries together.
Dirk W. Bijl
Dutch consultant and author, Dirk Bijl, talks about
the "Het Nieuwe Werken" movement and the themes
of his new book, "Journey towards the New World
of Work".  HNW is a big theme in the Netherlands
- a holistic view of the future of work which encompasses
improved office design, technology, remote working,
HR policy and management philosophy.  Dirk
will tell us why the Netherlands leads the world
in this area and how it is being applied by many
companies.
09.00 – 10.00 IKEA live intranet tour
Susanne Rolf will take us on a tour of the IKEA
intranet. Susanne will show how the company managed
to establish a common navigation across all its
countries and divisions for one true intranet, and
how translation tools and accurate employee profiling
helped achieve this. Susanne will also highlight
some recent improvements and planned changes.
10.00 – 11.00 Oxfam International live intranet tour
Pilar Barroso
from Oxfam International shares a live tour of their
new intranet and global platform "Sumus" which has
been built in Drupal, a potential Open Source alternative
to SharePoint. Pilar will take us through some of
Sumus' key features and talk about the challenges
of implementing a platform across a federation of
member organizations.
11.00 – 12.00 Elegant tweeting contest results
Who's produced the most elegant tweet over the past
24 hours?  We'll be announcing the winner.
My Beautiful Intranet results
The announcement of the winner and a review of the
best entries into our regular beauty contest. 
Who has the most beautiful intranet home page?
Final reflections and wrap-up
The past 24 hours in review and a final word from
IBF's CEO and founder, Paul Miller.


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Planning The Intranet V

It’s been a while since I posted about the evolution of the corporate intranet I am working on for the last 2 years. Because these posts cover only a few things that happened over time and are spread across these 2 years, I’ll try re-cap the most important steps of the evolution here:

 

0 – Start

We started building our first Sharepoint services server 2 years ago. We are an office that is part of a major IT Services Company and the Global Intranet did not serve it’s purpose in many way’s:

  • Site was too head-office centred, Most of the available information was not applicable to oversees users.
  • Site was too corporate. Staff does not want to log on every morning, open their browser and read the same story from the director. Staff needs information that is applicable to them.
  • Centralised Ownership. This cause a small team of administrators to have too much work to be able to maintain the site. the result was that a lot of information was out of date and updates took too long to be published.

With the above points as the main ones, we took the decision we needed an intranet tool to manage our information. Since the company decided around that time to stop using Lotus Notes and Domino servers for our Email and switch to exchange, we had the opportunity to have a look at Microsoft’s options.(The original Idea was to build the intranet on a Lotus Domino 7 server).

A very convenient side-effect was, that while I was working as a technical Lead and was not really line-managed by anyone, after 2 weeks in this situation,  I started looking into this out of boredom. This to my managers’ credit :)

Since this was not something coming from the main organisation, there was a very limited budget available. After investigation of the different flavours we could go for, we found that we could get most of the required functionality or value for money from the Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services, that is included for free with a Windows Server licence.

 

1 – First Intranet server launched

Shortly after making the decision, we drafted a layout, checked in with the different teams and departments for their requirements and started building.

We had a virtual Windows 2003 server set-up, completely standard. Then we ran the manage this server wizard and turned it in to a Application server running Windows Services. Bang!, we had an Intranet.

The site grew very fast. Mainly (I Like to believe) due to the empowerment we implemented on site-ownership and the lack of a communication platform for the last years.

 

2 – First Crash

And Bang! 2 months after we lost the intranet. Our Networking team pushed a set of updates causing the server to reboot. This happened right in the middle of a backup I scheduled.

Result: Server Unreachable, Backup Corrupted. “Of course, resilience!” There was a lot to learn and improve here.

 

3 – Second Server

From the previous lesson, we’ve learnt a lot:

  • Confirm Successful Backups frequently and store them away.
  • Save Custom lists as Personal Web Packages.
  • For minimal resilience, you need a failover server.

These are the core lessons we learned from this exercise. When we started re-building we actually had no map or plan whatsoever. This made this lesson even more valuable.

 

It took me about a month to have the site rebuilt. More or less as it was before. We ordered a second server to work as a failover and made sure our backups are copied to a remote location.

 

4 – Site will go Global

We are now almost 2 years away from all the previous. In the meantime we did quite some spectacular things with our Intranet. Especially if you take in account that we did not have anything in place before.

Most of these things are things that help us as employees on a daily basis or workflows that automate manual tasks for us. We started looking into the processes and managed to make most of them quite a bit. Because we used WSS out of the box on a small VM Server, we decided that document storage should not be used yet. Basically because of lacking processes and policies and the 4GB size limitations on the SQL express database.

As a result from this, more and more people from other parts of the company started to take interest in our site. Communication, Cooperation , Automation where things that was quite new to them.

I was approached by different business units from within the company to set-up similar sites to ours for their teams and eventually link them through in a main portal sites.

 

In the meantime, somewhere else in the company a new intranet environment was being developed….

Read the rest of this entry »



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Packaging Service In A Global Environment

The work we have been doing with our relatively new Service Assurance team has not gone unnoticed in the company. In the last 8 months, we have set-up quite some processes that improved the quality and effectiveness of the work done and time spent, and we cut cost by standardising and automating many manual processes and actions. It is a good start, even thought there will always be more to work on.

Now we are asked to apply all this to other offices of the company, under the name of Service Industrialisation. Now I know that in the strict sense, what we’ll be doing will not be industrializing, but applying best practice identified elsewhere.

Many of the problems that can be foreseen in these kind of projects are related to the differences between the organisational structure of these offices, the acceptance of change, and other (mostly cultural) indicators.

In this case the main issues we foresee is the fact that each office is ran completely different, different management structures, with more or less hierarchy and is geographically linked to very different cultures.

Our office, as the “template” is a fairly new one, with a slimmed down management structure. We are increasingly empowering employees on all levels to take decisions and take part in different types of projects aside from their standard day-to-day job, creating a high sense of responsibility and involvement. Also being based in the centre of Barcelona, Spain enables a “relaxed” culture,  that when well managed, adds up to a very nice atmosphere.

If we look at these parameters elsewhere, for example an office somewhere in the south of England, we look at a completely different situation. They work with a complex and strict hierarchy and employees are boxed within their job descriptions. Empowerment is strictly defined per level within the complex many-layered org chart. The office in this example is located in an area, or in the middle of nowhere in an about 3 hours drive from London.

This is just an example of the diversity, between two offices that are geographically not very far apart. Other examples, with even more extreme differences can be found in South Africa, or Malaysia.

I strongly believe that what we have started achieving in our office is due to only a few factors:

  • Empowerment, though the Continuous Improvement feedback cycle, in which employees on all levels give ideas, and volunteer to form task/project teams to work on them and more simple things like assigning intranet admin tasks to them.
  • An Open atmosphere, mostly due to the multicultural aspects (around 20 Nationalities in 1 office) and the location of the office.
  • Improved Communication, thanks to new platforms as the Intranet, or TalkFreely, People are made more aware and participate more with what is playing on all levels, giving a greater sense of involvement.

Now applying these factors to other offices will be the real challenge due to their cultural differences characteristics.

As a start we have identified several risks and dependencies, not surprisingly related to all the above. I believe that there are certain elements we have looked at, that are not packagable or exportable. Mainly because it is not each element as such, but a complex mix, that delivers such an effective outcome. Fine-tuning that mix or modifying it to fit the cultural and organisational characteristics of each office might make exporting our local setup completely unnecessary. If, on the contrary we try to apply this as-is, we might be running into brick walls wherever we go.

The project is still in its initial phase; we are meeting people and will start auditing other teams and other locations soon. I will write about our progress here, as I believe this is or can turn out to be a very interesting challenge.



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WSS_Content Log Growing Too Big

As mentioned in previous posts, we are running a WSS3 intranet in our office. Due to several reasons, the server we are running the intranet from, is a very small Virtual Server. The performance of the server is fine, the disc-space however is not.

The server has a hard disk of 20 Gb. What I was not aware of is that when you install the standard out-of-the-box WSS, that the Internal SQL Database it sets-up is using the Full Logging feature. This caused my installation to have a content database of 320 MB, but a log file of 9+ Gig!!

The first thing I did was move some unused install files off the server to create a bit of space. The I had to find out how to connect to the database to see what was going on (by then, I did not know what exactly filled up the hard disk).

WinDirStat

I found out it was the log file by a tool called windirstat, a great (portable) tool that shows the file on the hard disk in a graphical way. This showed directly where the problem was. In the Log file…

This in most tutorials and how-to’s they explain to get the SQL Management Studio express edition and connect to the database. There are 2 things I missed in most explanations.

1. The install must be on the server itself and

2. you have to connect using a pipe. (the connection string: \\.\pipe\MSSQL$MICROSOFT##SSEE\sql\query)

Once connected the most logical and straightforward thing to do was to find the log databases and shrink them, like I read on most posts about this. I did this, and freed up about 200 MB of free space. I felt I bought some time to look into this further, but to my surprise, these 200MB were filled up again in about 3 minutes!

So back to reading…. I found that the correct way to proceed (be ware that correct in this sense is related to freeing up as much space as possible!) would be to change the logging of the content database from Full to Simple first, then truncate the database(BACKUP LOG WSS_Content WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY) and as a last step Shrink it (Instead of using the context menu, I used the SQL Command DBCC SHRINKFILE(WSS_Content_log, 1)
).  Now the Log database size went from the 9.4GB to a mere 2MB!

This all happened a couple of day’s ago, and I have just checked the server and the log files hardly moved!! Thanks to Paramesh @ http://sharepointstuff4u.blogspot.com/

!Update [06/04/2010] !  It has been two weeks now and she is still fooiinnee!!!



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