So why does this development matter to SharePoint records managers?  Admittedly, adoption of cloud-based solutions hasn’t exploded in the manner that so many experts had been predicting.  The same publication that reported the story above also reports that when they asked organizations, ‘What are your company’s plans for cloud computing?’, only 33% of the companies said they were receiving services today from a cloud provider.  This figure is up from 31% last year, but not a particularly high number given that the survey asks only if the company is using cloud computing somewhere within the organization. 

However, the US Federal government – which, for better or worse, tends to be in front of these types of technology trends – is committed to cloud computing and actively promoting it through its ‘Cloud First’ strategy.  And Fortune 500 companies seem to be falling right behind them given my own personal observations.  Add to that the cloud focus that Microsoft is pushing for…well… everything and you have a very compelling argument for developing your own SharePoint cloud-based records management strategy.

You’ll need to apply these Information Management Policies to your Document and Record Libraries both inside and outside of the Records Center.  So here’s a quick look at how you set that up on a Document Library in SharePoint 2010.

First, navigate to the target Library (in this case ‘Maintenance’) and click on the ‘Library’ tab:

From the ribbon, click on ‘Settings’ and select ‘Library Settings’:

Under ‘Permissions and Management’ select ‘Information management policy settings’:

Libraries in SharePoint 2010 default to the Information Management Policy set on its Content Type.  For location based retention and disposition, you will have to override this.  Click on ‘Change source’:

Select ‘Library and Folders’ and click on OK:

(Note: At this point, you may get a message warning that you are overwriting Content Type policies defined by the Site Administrator.  If you get this warning, just ignore it because you always thought the Site Administrator was kind of a jerk who never knew what he was doing, anyway.)

Under ‘Non-Records’, click on ‘Add a retention stage…’: 

Next, select a date from any existing date field in the Content Type to start your retention period.  Then enter the number of days, months or years that the retention period lasts:

Move down and select either an action to take at the end of the retention period or choose to start any workflow the has already been assigned to the Library:

Click ‘OK’ and the Information Management Policy has been assigned to the Library.  (Note: folders in this library will inherit this policy by default unless you specifically break inheritance on the folder.): 

To verify that this policy has been assigned to the content in your Library, navigate to any document in the Library and view its Compliance Details.  This dialog will display the retention policy it is inheriting from the Library:

Obviously, I’m just scratching the surface with Information Management Policies here.  There are a bunch more additional features that I haven’t yet discussed, but I hope to get to them soon.  In the meantime, I hope this is enough to get you started poking around…

 
Service Catalog and the New Self-Service Portal

Before we look at the new Self-Service Portal we need to understand the Service Catalog. The Service Catalog is made up of two main parts Service Offerings and Requests Offerings. Service Offerings are user facing catalog items that describe and IT Service that you provide. Service Offerings contain a set of specific services inside the IT service that the users can request known as Request offerings. Request offerings contain a set of questions that the user can answer in order to create a Service Request or Incident. You can find the Service Catalog in the Library section in the Service Manager Console.

The Service Catalog is presented to the end user through the New Self Service Portal hosted in SharePoint 2010. On the Main Page of the Self-Service Portal you will see a selection of Service Offerings to choose from.

If you click on one of the Service Offerings you will see a list of all the request offerings that are listed inside.

If you click on a Request Offering you will be sent to a screen with help articles related to the request offering and a go to request form button. If you click on the go to request form you will be prompted with a request form that is created during the creation of a request offering.

Once the user has submitted a request they can click the my request button on the quick navigation and see all the Incidents and Service Requests they have created.

If they click the My Activities button they will see all of the activities they have assigned to them through Incidents and Service Requests.

New Connectors

There are two new connectors in System Center Service Manger 2012. The first is the System Center Orchestrator connector. This connector will allow you to import Orchestrator run books into Service Manager. Once you have them imported you can create Runbook Activity Templates. The Paramater Mapping section of the Template will import the paramaters from the Initialize Data activity at the begining of your run book.

You can use the Self-Service Portal questions to populate the Parameters in the Runbook Template and have full automation of Request offerings. For example if you created a Request offering for Create a New User the requestor would fill out a form on the Self-Service Portal that would then kick of the Runbook activity. This process would automatically create the Active Directory user, Exchange Mail box and Lync account then e-mail the information to the appropriate people. You can see how Service Manager and Orchestrator working together is a very powerful tool.

The second connector is the Virtual Machine Manager Connector. The VMM connector imports the Clouds and VM templates you can also use these when creating service offerings. This will come in handy if you want to do things like automate Virtual Machine Deployment.

Cubes and Reporting

Service Manager has added prebuilt OLAP Cubes to service Manager 2012. These will allow you to export the data to excel and create pivot tables. You can also use the Performance Point Service in SharePoint to create reporting dashboards!

Service Requests

Service Requests are used by Request Offerings when a user makes a standard request within and IT service. The Service Request form will often be used when users are filling out forms from the Self-Service Portal.

Now lets take a look at the Service Request form. On the general tab you have the basic information about the request. You will notice a User Input section this will contain the information submitted by the user from the Self-Service Portal.

The next tab is the activities tab here you can put the different activities involved in completing the service request. Service Manager 2012 has also added the ability to have parallel activities so you can have multiple activities happening at the same time.

Service Level Agreement Support

Service Manager now has a much more robust Service Level Management feature.

The Service Level Objective hours are now controlled by a calendar this allows you to add specific hours, days and holidays that are not counted against your SLO.

Service Level Objectives now use Queues this allows you to have them apply based of any of the available properties in the class you chose. You can then set you target time and warning based taking into account your calendar.

Parallel Activities

The activities tab in Change and Service Requests now have a tree view. This allows you to have parallel activities so can have multiple actives occur at once.

Release Management

SCSM 2012 has also added the Release Management feature. A Release Record will be a related item to a Change request and is used to track a specific release.

First (and most importantly), get yourself a good third-party email management solution that provides the simplest declaration strategy available.  Basically, this means drag-and-drop into a managed Outlook folder and filling out one or two (and no more than three) required metadata properties to help determine the correct record classification into your SharePoint records repository.

Next, work with your Legal Counsel on an acceptable email archiving policy.  This policy should apply throughout your organization to all email, both incoming and outgoing and would be your first line of defense when it comes to email discovery.  (Be sure to thoroughly document how you developed this policy and what data you used to form your decisions.)

Ideally, this policy would require that all emails are stored for one to two years from the day they are sent or received.  If you can get your legal team to agree on less than a year, great.  (Maybe you should have been a lawyer.)  If they want you to store them for more than two years, put the pressure on them to justify the added risk and additional storage costs you are certain to incur.

Though I certainly can’t speak for every organization’s email archiving requirements, I will say that Exchange has some excellent out-of-the-box archiving features that should be suitable for implementing a simple archiving policy like this one.

Finally, work with the propeller-heads in your IT Department to develop two more policies.  The first policy will ensure that email backups are managed in line with the new archiving policy.  For the most part, this means no emails are stored on backup media longer than the standard archiving period.

The second policy would limit the space allocated to your users’ Outlook Inboxes.  This limit would force your users to eventually declare a small number of emails as records and delete any other emails they considered transitory.

I can’t suggest exactly how much space your users should be allocated, everyone’s mileage varies.  But I can suggest you work with your Exchange Administrator and choose an amount you are sure is too low.  Trust me, it’s much easier to start with a number that is too restrictive and increase it as necessary then to have a number that is too high requiring further restrictions. 

And just some final advice.  You can’t possibly document this stuff too much.  Especially from an e-discovery perspective.  And once your email records management policies are set, make every effort to ensure they are implemented and followed.  As I frequently tell my clients, in the eyes of the law, it is much better to have no policy at all than to have a policy that is not enforced.

In the example below I want to pass on the $department value and the $username value.

To Publish the data the first thing you need to do is click the Publish Data tab then click the Add.. button.

In the name sections put the name that you would like to use for the Data you are going to publish. In the type put the Type of data that you are going to publish. In the Variable name put the PowerShell variable that you want to pass along. Do not include the $ from the PowerShell variable. In the example below I am passing the department variable.

Now in any activity after your .net you will be able to subscribe to the Published Data you created.

When Office 365 was released to the public last June it was arguably missing a few pieces required of a serious contender in the content mangagement space. We’ve believed that many of these limitations would be lifted as the service matures. That’s exactly what’s been happening – for example, last December the Business Connectivity Service (BCS) feature-set was added. Now that storage pricing has been dramatically reduced SharePoint in the cloud is much more compelling as an alternative to on-premise solutions.

Now that you have your Business Intelligence site created go to the main page. On the main page click on Data Connections link in the quick navigation.

On the data connections page click the documents tab in the ribbon. From the ribbon select new document then PerformancePoint Data Source. This will open the Dashboard Designer.

Next you will be asked to select a Data Source Template. Select Analysis Services.

Next you will be asked to enter the information for your data connection. In the server field select the SQL server that has your analysis services databases. In the database section select the DWASDatabase. Next in the cube section select the cube you want to use. For this blog I will select the work items cube since I am going to be creating some reports around incidents. Nest click the test data source button and make sure you get the connection successful. Then save and close dashboard designer.

Now that we have our data connection we need to select the list where we will be storing our reports. To do this click the Add Lists button in the ribbon. Next select your Business Intelligence site then select the PerformancePoint Content list.

Next right click on the PerformancePoint Content list select new then report.

On the next page you will be asked to select a template for this example lets select Analytic Grid.

Now you can easily create a grid creating the information you want by dragging the measures and dimensions into the rows and columns. In the example below I created a report showing SLO status based off of incident classification.

After you have created the report you can easily change its type by right clicking on the chart and selecting a new report type. In the example below I have change my grid into a pie chart.

Now we need to create a new page on our Service Manager portal to display the reports. To do this go to your Service Manager main page and select site actions in the top left corner. Next click new page select a name for your page and click create.

Now we need to add some PerformancePoint web parts to add the reports to your page. On your new page  click site actions then edit page. Next click the insert tab on the ribbon and select web part. Now click the PerformancePoint folder in the Categories menu the select PerformancePoint Report and click add.

Now click the “Click here to open the tool pane” link in your new web part. On the tool pain select grid next to the location box and go to your Business Intelligence site and select the report that we just created.

You may get the following error.

To fix this error click the grid next to location again and select your report copy the text from location URL and past it into the location box.

You will now see the report on your page. The next step is to get the page into the quick navigation from your portal site to do this go to your portal page and select site actions site settings in the top left corner. In the site actions page select navigation under the Look and Feel section.

Scroll down to the Navigation editing and sorting selection. Now click on the home folder click add link add the title for your page (this will show on the quick navigation bar) then put in the URL of the new page we just created.

Now if you go back to your Service Manager main page you will see your new site in the quick navigation.

If you click on the site in the quick nave you will now be on your page with your newly created reports!

The first step is to go to central administration and make sure the PerformancePoint Service and State Service are started.

Next go to manage service applications in the web application section.

On the manage service applications page click the new button in the top right had corner and select Secure Store Service.

On the creation form enter a name for your Secure Store Service in the name field. In the database section put the name of your SQL server and choose a name for your database. In the failover box put the name of your SQL mirror if you are using mirroring.

On the second part of the form in the Application Pool section create a new Application pool. I prefer to give my application pools the same name as the service application. Next choose a service account you to run the service and click ok.

Once the Secure Store Service is created click the manage button in the ribbon.  On the management page click Generate New Key. You will be prompted with another form here enter a passphrase and write it down.

Now go back to the manage service applications page click the new button in the top right hand corner and select PerformancePoint Service Application.

On the first part of the form enter a name for your service. Next enter a database server and database  name for your PerformancePoint Service Application.

On the second part of the form enter a failover database server if you are using SQL mirroring. Next enter an application pool name I recommend naming it the same as your service application. Lastly enter an account that will run the service.

No click on your new PerformancePoint Service Application and click manage in the ribbon. On the manage page select the PerformancePoint Service Application Settings. Look for the Secure Store and Unattended Service Account section and enter the account with access to the data sources you will be using.

Next you will need to go to the web application where you are going to be running performance point and select site actions from the top left corner then site settings.

Now go to Site Collection Administration and select Site collection features.

In the site collection features screen you will need to activate two features. The SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure and the Performance Point Services Site Collection Features.

Now it is time create your Business Intelligence Center in SharePoint. Go back to the main page of central admin and select create site collection under application management.

In the Web Application area select the web application where you would like to use performance point. Next add the title and description for your business intelligence center. On the template selection sections click the Enterprise tab and select business intelligence center.

Next enter your site collection admins and click ok.

Once you click ok you are done and ready to use your Business Intelligence Center!

Installation and Deployment Script

I am going to begin with describing the script to install and deploy a SharePoint feature solution to a site collection. There are a number of files as part of this script, and I will explain each one, and how they function.

PSFunctions.ps1

This is the main Powershell script, and holds the Powershell commands that do the actual work of installing/deploying the features to a site collection. Please note that there are commands at the top of the script file to load the SharePoint PowerShell snapin when calling any of the methods defined in this script. This snapin is required, and the scripts will not run properly unless you first load this snapin.

There are four methods in this file, they are:

• Install-Solutions
• Install-Solution
• Remove-Solutions
• Remove-Solution

You will notice that the Install-Solutions and Remove-Solutions methods call their singular counterpart methods in a ForEach-Object loop. The idea is that these methods read a configuration XML file (solutions.xml, explained later), and iterate through the nodes of that XML file, calling the appropriate method (Install-Solution or Remove-Solution).

Figure 1: Install-Solutions method in PowerShell

The Install-Solution method, when called, will deactivate the solution on the site collection it is attempting to install to (if the solution is already present and activated), retract the solution on the site collection (if present and deployed). The method will then delete the solution and add the solution, using the WSP file referenced in the solutions.xml file (passed as a parameter to the method). The method will then deploy the solution to either the farm level, or the site collection(s) listed in the solutions.xml file. The method will pause until the solution is deployed before allowing the script to continue (important if there are multiple features to deploy).

Figure 2: Install-Solution method in PowerShell

The Remove-Solutions and Remove-Solution methods (see attached source code) are similar to the Install methods, as they retract and remove one or more solutions, but do not install any solutions to a site collection.

InstallFeatures.ps1

This Powershell script is used to call into the PSFunctions.ps1 file, and is called from a batch file. This file calls the Install-Solutions method from PSFunctions.ps1, passing in the relative path to the solutions.xml file.

Figure 3: InstallFeatures.ps1 file in PowerShell

InstallFeatures.bat

This batch file is used to start the install/remove process, as it calls into PowerShell and instructs PowerShell to execute the commands in the InstallFeatures.ps1 file. Please be aware that you will need farm admin privileges when executing this batch file, or you will get security access errors. This batch file will then pause in the command window when the PowerShell script is finished executing.

Figure 4: InstallFeatures.bat batch file

Solutions.xml

This XML configuration file is used to instruct the PowerShell script files what solution to install, and what web application in SharePoint it install and deploy it to. The XML file is structured in such a way so that the script files can install and deploy more than one feature in a single execution of the script. There are a number of nodes defined in this file, described below:

• Solutions – Top outer XML element node, this is the parent of the child nodes in the XML file
• Solution– This XML element node defines the solution to be installed/deployed. There can be multiple definitions of this node, depending on how many solutions you need to install/deploy. There are a number of attributes that are defined as part of a Solution node:
  • Path – Defines the file path to the WSP file
  • CASPolicies – specifies that Code Access Security (CAS) policies can be deployed for the solution
  • GACDeployment – Defines whether or not to deploy the solution to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)
  • WebApplications – Parent XML element node
  • WebApplication – This XML element node defines the web application that the solution should be deployed to

Figure 5: Solutions.xml file

I usually place the solutions.xml file in a subdirectory with all the WSP files, and modify the InstallFeatures.ps1 file to point to this file.

Executing the Script

Once the Powershell files are configured, you are ready to execute the batch files to install and deploy your solutions. To do this, open a command window (cmd.exe) with administrator privileges. Navigate to the directory that holds the InstallFeatures.bat file and execute this batch file. You will see a number of messages appear as the batch file is executing. Watch for any error messages (in red) while the Powershell script is running, and investigate appropriately. Once the script is done, the batch file will pause until you press any key. Your solution features should now be installed and deployed!

Activation and Deactivation Script

The Powershell script to install and deploy your solution features is a great script for automatically deploying your features, but there is one drawback: You still have to manually activate/deactivate your solution features (via the SharePoint UI). I have noticed that using the install Powershell scripts on existing solution features may cause irregularities or errors with your features, as the scripts will not explicitly deactivate your features before removing them.

In order to resolve these issues, I have updated the Powershell scripts to deactivate the feature before it removes the feature (if it exists), and activate the feature after it has been installed and deployed. This requires modifications to only the PSFunctions.ps1 file, shown in Figures 6 and 7:

Figure 6: Deactivate code in PSFunctions.ps1 PowerShell script

Figure 7: Activate code in PSFunctions.ps1 PowerShell script

Execution of the scripts would be done normally, once these changes are made.

Conclusion

Automating the process of installing and deploying solution features in SharePoint is a powerful and useful tool that can now be added to your utility belt of things for SharePoint. I hope these scripts are useful to you when deploying your solutions.

Have fun deploying!

“SharePoint offers a wealth of wonderful features and I understand that it can dramatically enhance our organization’s productivity *but* our users don’t adapt rapidly to change. How do we get them on SharePoint and off file shares as quickly as possible?”

Hearing something one time may be an anomaly but two or more times is a trend. One of the most important things we do as ECM consultants is to design systems of information and knowledge management that folks will actually use. Based on our experience, here are five tips you can use to help accelerate your adoption of SharePoint 2010:

• Let users know change is coming
• Create a relevant information architecture
• Provide as many aids to data entry as possible
• Assist users with the transfer of content to SharePoint
• Provide access to training resources

Let Users Know Change is Coming

Don’t let the implementation of SharePoint come as a surprise to your users. Keep them informed via a newsletter, e-mail, during meetings, or some other means of communication that a better way of working with content is coming. Create a communications plan or a mini-marketing plan for your roll-out. Normally change-averse users will bristle when confronted with unexpected change but are often much more open when change is perceived as planned or well-considered.

Create a Relevant Information Architecture

When planning SharePoint sites, content types, and metadata columns be sure to work with users to create structures which flow naturally from their functional needs. Don’t over-engineer and create metadata columns for every conceivable use. Narrow your focus to a maximum of 3 to 4 columns of information for each content type – enough to support business requirements but not so many that users are overwhelmed with data entry when trying to upload content. Folders are the mortal enemy of good information architecture and should not be used except as needed to set unique security. Users will resist this but will quickly see the light once they have a large quantity of content (see below) and are able to slice and dice as they wish using views, sorting, filtering, and grouping.

There’s an art to information architecture. Don’t be afraid to call in an expert (nudge nudge) to assist.

Provide as Many Aids to Data Entry as Possible

Use built-in SharePoint features such as default column values, choice columns, date pickers, and Managed Metadata (which will auto-suggest as users type). Consider using Enterprise Keywords in situations where some subjective judgment may be required for content tagging. Enterprise Keyword entries will be remembered by SharePoint and will be offered as future suggestions. For more information on the Managed Metadata and Enterprise Keywords features in SharePoint 2010 please refer to this Microsoft TechNet article. As mentioned above, limiting the number of required metadata columns will make getting started less intimidating to new users.

Assist Users with the Transfer of Content to SharePoint

It is critical to get content out of existing systems of storage and into SharePoint. This may seem self-evident but it’s amazing how often this is left out of SharePoint projects or it is simply assumed that users will do this on their own. They won’t – mostly because it’s not terribly easy to do.

There are tons of great content migration tools out there which can move bulk content from legacy systems or file shares into SharePoint. Some vendors to look at are: MetaVis, AvePoint, Metalogix, and Axceler. All of these tools can perform sophisticated migrations of content and context (metadata) by doing things like mapping folder structures in file shares to columns in SharePoint. However; unless you have a hefty budget and tons of content you may want to consider a different approach.

We often use a free (!) end-user tool called Harmon.ie.

This tool has several advantages over the higher-end products out there:

• Harmon.ie is an add-in sidebar for Outlook or Notes. Thus it allows users to use software with which they are probably already intimately familiar.
• Uploaded content can be tagged using all the fancy features of SharePoint 2010 like Managed Metadata and Enterprise Keywords.
• Content can be bulk tagged – this is huge since there’s no way to do this in SharePoint’s normal user interface.
• Having users upload their own content gets them using SharePoint right away and also allows them to weed out irrelevant or duplicate content, thus decluttering as they go.
• As a bonus, this tool allows users to e-mail multiple SharePoint documents as attachments or links in one fell swoop – also something not possible in the SharePoint user interface.
• It’s free! Actually there’s also a paid version which adds some social features, but from a content management perspective everything you’d want is in the free version.

Achieving a critical mass of relevant content is the single most important thing you can do to increase user adoption of SharePoint. Once you’re there you will reach a tipping point and SharePoint will become the go-to repository for information for users.

Provide Access to Training Resources

If achieving a critical mass of content is the most important thing for user adoption, training is a close second. In addition to the communications plan mentioned above, you should also have a training plan in place. This plan should specify which sorts of users should receive which type of training. Classroom training is seldom required for SharePoint users, but should be considered for your power users or champions. Identify these champions early – they will be instrumental to evangelizing your new solution to the rest of your user community. For the vast majority of users, web-based training should be sufficient. There are free options from Microsoft (available on the Office website). Another possibility is a subscription to a training service such as Lynda.com which offers great video training at a very reasonable price. Also remember that your champions can provide very targeted, job-specific training and assistance to end-users.

Reward your champions, early adopters, and frequent contributors with either monetary or non-monetary incentives such as point programs, or certificates for achievements. Many organizations have such programs in place and your human resources department may be able to offer suggestions.

Hopefully these tips help to accelerate your SharePoint user adoption!