Category: SharePoint

Unified Communications. I know now…

Last week, I attended the Microsoft event in Louvain-La-Neuve where they launched their new Unified Communications products. As always, it was a very impressive show with lots of presentations, information, partner boots… Unified Communication will be a great tool to increase productivity and offer new ways of communication to the information workers.

I can’t wait to start using it, but as a trainer, I am also wondering how we will teach people how to use it? Using Office Communicator, is this something that you can learn in a classroom environment? Just imagine 10 students calling each other… Will you learn it using e-learning? Seems rather static and unreal to me. Do you have any suggestions?

One thing I realised is that it will be necessary for the users to understand the full picture of the infrastructure: where is my mailbox, what is happening when I start a voice chat, what happens when someone calls me, when I divert a call…

Another thing that I am always curious about is the different presentation skills and the presentation styles of the presenters. Presentation Zen has a an interesting blog post about the presentation styles of Microsoft’s Number One compared to Apple’s Steve Jobs.
I had the luck of seeing Bill Gates in action on the Vista launch last year, and I can agree with some of the remarks of Garr Reynolds; and as an Apple fan, I never miss a keynote of Steve. But to select a “winner” would be disrespectful for both: they are both passionate about what they do in their own way, and I experienced it again in Louvain-La-Neuve last week.

Content Types – end user experience

I tried to figure out on our portal how the Content Types and their corresponding templates behave, when using Office 2003 and Office 2007. There are 2 main factors that determine the behaviour when a user selects a content type from the “New” button in a document library: the file format of the template and the version of the Office client:

  File format: 2003 File format: 2007
Client: Office 2003 – client app opens with document based on template– user saves the document– user needs to select the correct content type– user needs to fill in the correct metadata – not supported
Client: Office 2007 – client app opens new document based on template– user saves the document– user needs to select the correct content type– user needs to fill in the correct metadata via the document information panel, if metadata is required. Otherwise: NO metadata!(*) – client app opens new document based on template– document information pannel shows metadata immediately after opening the document– user can fill in metadata in dip and save the doc in one move

contenttypes.png

(*) You can optimise this via the document information panel settings of the content type: check Always show Document Information Panel on document open and initial save for this content type.

Conclusion is that the user experience is only optimal when using Office 2007 with templates in the Office 2007 format (or what did you expect…)

 Note: Interesting to know that the “Content type” is stored IN the properties of a document template file. If you use a document template file with such information as a template for an OTHER content type, things get very confusing, as MOSS will still prompt you for the metadata attached to the OLD content type!

A gold mine, not a coal mine

I came across an interesting article that discusses the results of a survey about the satisfaction of business users with their company intranet. As a SharePoint site owner, it is good to have a look a the top 5 of things people want on their intranet:

  1. people information
  2. procedures, policies…
  3. forms
  4. employee benefits
  5. organisation news

Also interesting is the list of improvements:

  1. better content organisation
  2. easier to find information
  3. better search
  4. clear intranet strategy
  5. getting rid of outdated content

If you keep these in mind, you make your intranet a gold mine, not a coal mine.

Reference: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/intranets-what-staff-really-want