USING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS
To Bridge the Information Access Gap in SharePoint Environments
USING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS TO BRIDGE THE INFORMATION
ACCESS GAP IN SHAREPOINT ENVIRONMENTS
Microsoft® SharePoint® provides an array of functionality that makes it an attractive tool in enterprise collaboration. A recent IDG Research study found that 53 percent of surveyed CIOs are using
SharePoint within their enterprises, and all projections indicate that adoption will continue. However, this same study also found 55 percent of respondents reporting that SharePoint deployments are not without challenges and limitations, especially relating to the information access needs of business users. In addition, it highlighted SharePoint’s tendency to propagate information silos, generate high costs associated with application development and drain resources related to ongoing support and management.
A SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE NETWORK AND SHAREPOINT SYNOPSIS
To frame the relationship between Social Knowledge Networks (SKN) and SharePoint, we’ll first define their purpose.
SKNs are virtual environments organized around high-value business processes or objectives, such as product innovation, proposal development, or competitive intelligence. SKNs span enterprise silos and merge relevant content, search, and community insight to form an environment focused on addressing these business processes.
Inmagic® Presto is an application that enables non-technical business users to create and manage SKNs. Through Presto, subject-matter experts are easily identified and the “wisdom of the community” surfaces valuable content and insight via blogs, comments, and discussions. Because business users spend less time hunting for corporate knowledge, and projects are completed faster, the risk of inaccurate information is reduced – which means that innovation can thrive.
Microsoft SharePoint is somewhat harder to define, partly because it is different things to different people. Microsoft describes SharePoint as supporting “all Intranet, Extranet, and Web applications
across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.”
In a conversation with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, Forrester’s Matthew Brown describes
SharePoint as a “broad platform for rapid application development, Intranet and Internet sites, content
management, search, social computing, and composite applications…”
With a general sense of Presto SKNs and SharePoint, this paper will highlight both the differences and synergies of both solutions, offering knowledge and information professionals a framework for how best to identify, implement and execute Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) strategies as they relate to overall corporate objectives.
THE INFORMATION ACCESS GAP
In virtually all organizations, infrastructure for the storage and retrieval of structured and unstructured content utilizes some combination of the following tools:
Network share drives Wikis
Websites
Content management systems (CMS) Document management (DM) systems Digital asset management (DAM) systems Enterprise search
SharePoint
Network share drives and Wikis require minimal IT resources. They also provide a great deal of freedom and control to non-technical business staff. Business staff can create, modify, and manage the folder structure of the network share drive, or edit a Wiki page without IT involvement.
The remainder of the infrastructure (Websites, search, DAMs, SharePoint applications) is just the opposite. Business users have little or no control; and most modifications, such as those made to information structure for example, must be performed by the IT group. SharePoint My Sites and Team
Sites are an exception to this rule, but anything beyond My Sites and Team Sites requires IT resources, typically dedicated to SharePoint applications.
The following graph represents the relative positions of these systems in relation to IT requirements, capabilities, and time-to-value.
Fig 1: Information Access Gap
As stated, network drives and Wikis provide a great deal of control to business staff and require minimal IT resources, but they also provide relatively minimal functionality and security. Should the business staff require additional functionality, they must cross the “Information Access Gap” to a set of far more expensive solutions built and managed by IT. The result? Business staff loses control, and an already strained IT organization is forced to build and manage an ever-increasing set of solutions.
Presto SKNs are designed to bridge the gap between high-control/low capability solutions and more
complex enterprise platforms that require more resources – providing asset security and a level of capabilities that are beneficial and flexible, and reserving IT resources for more complex projects. For example:
Business staff builds and manages Presto – IT is not required
Presto provides greater asset security and management than Wikis and network drives Presto offers more functionality than Wikis and network drives:
Search
Against full text of document
All metadata associated with the document All community contributions (“social search”) Community tools (rating, tagging, commenting, blogging) Taxonomy engine
Information cart to gather information required for a task Content Actions
Email Save Print Download
RSS alert feeds on new or modified content Metadata engine which enables:
Value-added metadata to enrich content In context display of content and metadata Reporting against metadata
Sorting of search results or reports by metadata components Improved findability and search
Ability to mix top-down and user-generated content in a single record (“fielded Wiki”)
Event tracking and reporting, including: Usage statistics
Highest rated comments and commenters
Security and the ability to permission content on a very granular basis: By type of content
At the document/record level At the field level within a record
SHAREPOINT AND THE INFORMATION ACCESS GAP
Could a SharePoint application fill the Information Access Gap? Technically, yes – an organization could build a SharePoint application to fill the Information Access Gap. But not without repercussions.
As stated in a Forrester study, Identifying When To SharePoint, Or Not, For Business Content Needs, conducted by Kyle McNabb and Tim Walters, PhD, Microsoft acknowledges SharePoint’s limitations as they relate to the Information Access Gap, prompting independent software vendors to start addressing those gaps. As the authors state:
“As more teams use SharePoint in more business areas and deal with more types of enterprise
content, organizations face the question of where SharePoint ends and enterprise content management (ECM) begins.”
The graph below provides a high level view of some major SKN initiatives as they relate to both Presto and SharePoint.
Action Presto SharePoint application
Business user creation of new SKN without IT involvement
Yes Possible
Business user creation of multiple taxonomies or categories
Yes Not possible
Assets can reside in multiple categories
Yes Not possible
Business user creation of multiple landing pages for different roles or groups
Yes Possible
Index content from multiple SharePoint sites
Link ratings to search results to surface more valuable content
Yes Not possible
Search by tags Yes Problematic – requires third-party tools Integrated Library System (ILS) Yes Possible Actions and information
shopping cart
Yes Possible
Manage >50GB of content Yes Problematic
Underscoring the challenges relating to deploying applications developed solely in SharePoint, John
Mancini, President of AIIM, highlighted some statistics on ECM, enterprise resource management (ERM), and E2.0 from the organization's variety of market intelligence reports.
In 36% of large organizations, IT is managing the SharePoint roll out with no input from the Records Management Department. A further 14% admit that no one is in charge and it's completely out-of-control.
Add to these development complexities the expense of a larger platform footprint and the distance IT can create between business users and actionable content, and the impediment to collaboration is evident.
To put the cost/labor relationship into context, Inmagic has invested well over 20 person-years into the development of the Presto SKN application. In addition, an organization has to weigh the consequences of committing its IT resources to providing lifetime maintenance and support, often calculated to be 50 to 70 percent of the development cost.
Presto licensing, maintenance and support are a fraction of these costs. Combining reduced costs with
the benefits offered by Inmagic’s dedicated development and support teams for Presto customers makes a compelling case for Presto as the preferred SKN solution to enhance SharePoint.
SHAREPOINT AND PRESTO:
A COMPLEMENTARY INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Many organizations with SharePoint implementations use Team Sites and My Sites. In fact, one major U.S. insurance company currently has more than 2,000 SharePoint sites. The problem?
1. The information generated within a SharePoint Team Site is generally not available to other users, and;
2. Information locked in non-SharePoint silos is not accessible by Team Site and My Site workgroups.
So while these mini-sites might enhance collaboration on a project level, they tend to isolate content into thousands of micro-silos that are inaccessible to others within the organization.
As visualized in the diagram below, Presto helps to solve organizational micro-silo problems.
As they relate to SharePoint specifically, Presto spans the various repositories via repository connectors, including SharePoint Sites, to index pertinent content and make it available via Presto Search. When a new Team Site is created – to create a complex proposal, for example – the team can search Presto from within SharePoint (Fig 4) to retrieve relevant proposals, images, and contracts, all of which are rated so that the best of each float to the top.
© 2009 Inmagic, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Social Knowledge Networks 44
-SharePoint
SharePoint
Integration
Integration
• Inmagic Search Web Part embedded in SharePoint
• Search Presto directly from SharePoint • Return results from Presto in SharePoint
Fig 4: SharePoint integration: search Presto from within SharePoint
That's where complementary technologies like Presto come into play to help organizations extract the most value from their investments.
Through SharePoint-compatible Web Parts (Fig 5) and a Web Services API, Presto easily integrates with other applications, including SharePoint. Through Presto, business users can create secure knowledge networks around enterprise content with sophisticated social, search, security, and library workflow capabilities not found in SharePoint.
© 2009 Inmagic, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Social Knowledge Networks 45
-SharePoint
SharePoint
Integration
Integration
• Standard Windows installation
• Easy to Install • Easy to Configure
Fig 5: Presto integrates with SharePoint via Web Parts
By augmenting against existing infrastructure, Presto enables organizations to maximize and improve upon SharePoint and other existing technology investments.
CONCLUSION
The rapid adoption of SharePoint raises questions within an organization about how to extract the most value while at the same time avoiding issues of information silos and large, ongoing internal
development costs. Organizations embracing SharePoint as part of their collaboration strategy should also consider value-added applications and solutions to augment their SharePoint strategy and maximize value.
If a Wiki or network drive is functionally insufficient, and the only alternative is a custom Website or SharePoint application, then IT will continue to be overrun by requests, costs will continue to climb, and business will be frustrated by lack of control and the long time-to-value.
Rather than custom building end-user applications within SharePoint, Presto enables organizations to leverage their investments while delivering, quickly and cost effectively, a very productive means for filling the Information Access Gap.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In his role as Vice President of Products at Inmagic, Bob Warren is responsible for driving the company’s global product strategy and aligning product development efforts with customer needs and Inmagic strategic initiatives. He brings more than twenty years of leadership experience in product management, sales, and marketing in the information technology industry to the company.
ABOUT INMAGIC
Inmagic® is a leader in developing and implementing Social Knowledge Networks (SKN) for enterprise organizations. The award winning Inmagic® Presto, an SKN application, builds upon a rich 30-year history of helping over 5,000 organizations with their information and knowledge management needs. Today, SKNs break down information silos, allowing non-technical business users to access and search relevant content to create true knowledge-based communities that are focused on addressing high-value business processes and objectives. Industry leading organizations such as ACLU, City of Edmonton, Laureate Education, Maple Leaf Foods, MRA, NASA, The Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, the San Francisco Symphony and Wyeth Consumer Healthcare (now Pfizer), rely on Inmagic to improve productivity and collaboration, retain and preserve knowledge and foster greater innovation. Visit Inmagic at www.inmagic.com.
Inmagic is a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner
Contact Inmagic:
200 Unicorn Park Drive Woburn, MA 01801 USA Phone: 781.938.4444 Toll-free: 1.800.229.8398 Fax: 781.938.4446 Email: [email protected] Web: www.inmagic.com