SharePoint, WordPress and Me

It’s been about 2 weeks since I last posted and my god it feels like an age. I’ve been a touch busy lately and the first thing that falls by the wayside is my blogging usually followed by my twittering.

So, what’s been going on?

Well, a few weeks ago I swapped jobs. I’ve moved out of a scientific department in into a corporate IT role. Same company but different people. To be honest the size of the place means it may well as be a new company. It’s only a secondment lasting 10 months but it’s a step in the right direction for me. It puts me closer to social computing, it puts me closer to SharePoint and it means I can start to bite off some big things rather nibble around the edges when I get chance. The first few weeks have been going well, I think anyway.

At the minute I’m delving deep into some SharePoint functionality. I’ve mentioned before I have a love hate relationship with SharePoint and that is continuing. The problem is when it comes to anything E2 related. SharePoint just doesn’t cut it. The blogging is getting better and there’s a couple of tag cloud work arounds that mean you can start to employ folksonomy rather than those terrible categories that SP blogging relies upon. The wiki is just a bit rubbish, nowhere near as good as any other wiki. After spending a lot of time in MediaWiki I also find it weird to move back to a WYSIWYG editor. Once you get used to wiki markup I actually think it’s quicker and easier than WYSIWYG. No deciding on what font or size a title is going to be, no figuring out how indented your bullets are. There’s other things I’m not to keen on in SP wiki but I’ll not go on.

Then we get onto SPs strengths and there are quite a few. The best one is the content web editor. With it you can do some wonderful things to dress up a lot of dull stuff. So far I’ve used it for simple instruction panels and also to embed video into sites. Then there’s the functionality it offers out of the box. Task scheduling, notification, meeting workspaces etc are all a massive step forward compared to what used to be available inside the corporation. Integration with InfoPath is pretty impressive as is the way you can manipulate your document management systems to work with both folksonomy and taxonomy. The way I’m looking at SP is that it’s a stepping stone. It’s starting to get people out of the silos they so enjoy and out into the open for the benefit of everyone. At first I actually hated the access control but it’s so bad it’s good. People hate it so much that they try and avoid it like the plague. The easiest way to do that is just to leave everything open.

Outside of work I’ve been messing around setting up my own site. After a few teething issues I finally got www.danielsiddle.co.uk and www.danielsiddle.com registered and I got myself some hosting space. At the minute I’m trying out streamline.net but I must say I’m not liking them too much. Any suggestions would be welcomed before my free trial runs out! The plan is to sort that out as my wordpress blog and move all the action over there. I don’t want to do that until I get my theme sorted and until I get onto some hosting that I like. The theme could take a while because I’m learning CSS from scratch and want to write my own.

Other than that my massage course is going OK. Haven’t had much time to practise, much to the disappointment of my girlfriend. I start my case studies soon though so that means I’ll be getting my teeth into it. If anyone wants to volunteer as an Indian Head Massage test case then just drop me a line.

That’s all for now.

A Complete Communication Plan?

I’ve heard rumours on the grapevine that the leadership of my department are about to embark on asking how they can communicate with us worker bees a little better. It seems that they’re now conscious their waggle dance ain’t waggling much.

I’m seeing this chance as a good opportunity to spread the word of social software. It’s not often you get them all listening at the same time so it’s probably too good a chance to pass up. The way they’re going to go about it is like when you cautiously open the door and, whilst the security chain is still on, peer round and check who is their. What I want to do is kick the door in, walk smack in the middle of the room and slap down a whole detailed communication strategy with bells and whistles on. In fact, let’s set the bloody thing on fire too so they have to pay attention.

The topics I’m probably going to cover are:

• E.mail – You can’t ignore it and you shouldn’t ignore it. It’s often used and often abused. People just need to get better with it.
• Blogging – Something I think the enterprise is missing badly and something I think a lot of us are overlooking as a useful tool.
• Instant Messaging – For those conversational moments when you are listening to music and can’t be bothered to take your headphones out to use the phone.
• The Phone – When should you call someone? Some people like it some people hate being put on the spot. Not many things out on the web tell you about good phone etiquette, it’s just kind of assumed we know about it because it’s been around ages. Also, how do you run a good teleconference?
• Wikis – A very useful tool but a lot of people still see it as just a publishing tool.
• RSS – An essential piece of kit but what’s the best way to use an RSS reader?
• Static Old Skool Web Pages – Do they still have a place?
• Presentations – A presentation is not a document etc etc.
• Social Bookmarking – Very subtle but powerful way of leading by example.
• Face to face – What makes a good meeting?
• Status updates and presence detection – Not quite twitter but not far off.
• Podcasting – Nearly forgot about it but it’s fairly important.

I think that’s about all I’ve come up with. So here comes the cheeky bit.

Has anyone got any good references they’d like to share? Or have I missed some things that are out there and ready for wide-scale adoption by the enterprise?

I’ve got some references myself but I really want to immerse myself in this stuff right now. In return I promise to post all my thoughts on here and quote who gave me what.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Sid.

What a weird day.

I was going to say what a crappy day but on reflection it’s not been too crappy, just weird.

For the first time I heard the words “governance panel” and “social software” in the same sentence.  Quite strange.  It was OK though since I was being asked to be on the governance panel.  Not sure what I’m going to govern with the other people on there but I guess we’ll figure it out.  The good thing about it is that we’re seriously moving forward with social software at work and that can only be a good thing.

The other weird thing was I found myself waxing lyrical about SharePoint which I haven’t done for a while.  I was explaining to someone about how to create simple to-do lists and run labs based on them and how they could ditch about 5 different excel sheets in favour of one list with a variety of views (See I’m even getting excited about it now!)  That was counter balanced with the look on her face when I started talking about access control.  There was a look of relief when I said she could just ignore it and in true social style just leave it open to everyone.  (Microsoft – If you’re listening, ditch all of the access control in SharePoint and replace it with two options, you can do everything or you can do nothing, I’ll even let you have a read only option if you want.)

Then the other thing, the one that nearly pushed the day into the crappy category, was the amount of corporate crap I had to wade through today.  One thing you can get used to, addicted to even, when you start living the social software lifestyle is the ease and simplicity that accompanies everything.  You ask someone to do something and if they can then they say yes, if they can’t they say no.  You suggest something and people tell you when it’s a good idea and even better they tell you unanimously when it’s a rubbish one.  With the old school corporate rubbish you waste three hours in meetings while someone with an over-inflated ego tells you why you should do something a certain way because that’s what he thinks.  Anyway, let’s forget about that shall we and focus on how good social software makes life in general.

Right, I’m off to watch the rest of Fifth Gear (much better than Top Gear these days!), then plan my weekend of rugby watching and then get stuck into a book I bought when I was having coffee after work.

Laters.