SharePoint 2007 vs SharePoint 2010

Richard Harbridge has done an excellent job of collecting all the comparison information that Microsoft have about SharePoint.

All the text below is his work.

(Alternatively, go directly to his site: Richard Harbridge: Insights)

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Everything on this page is contained in Microsoft documentation, on the Microsoft website, on MSDN, on Technet, or in the Microsoft webcasts and presentations. As you can imagine it is placed in multiple pages, across multiple documents, and some of it is contained within specific Microsoft presentations. My goal with this page is to just have all of the comparison information in one place.

Note: I have used symbols here instead of images so it’s easier to copy and paste into a document or another location. So they may not look as nice, but you can use things like find and replace, as well as filter the values if you merge the tables.

Legend:

○= Feature Included

●= Improved In Office Sharepoint Server 2010

☻= New In Office Sharepoint Server 2010

Sites

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
Office Integration	○	●
Line-Of-Business Integration	○	●
Read/Write Capabilities		☻
Enterprise Management Operations	○	●
Management Tools And Reporting	○	●
Web Analytics		☻
Mobile Connectivity	○	●
Full-Fidelity Viewing		☻
Editing To Mobile		☻
Office Interaction	○	●
Read/Write Capabilities	○	☻
Robust User Experience	○	☻
Contextual Ribbon		☻
Microsoft Silverlight		☻
Office Web Applications		☻
Tagging		☻
Audience Targeting		☻

Communities

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
My Site: People Profile & Personal Site	○	●
Photos And Presence	○	●
Status Updates	○	●
Ask Me About		☻
Note Board		☻
Recent Activities		☻
Organization Browser		☻
Add Colleagues	○	●
Social Bookmarks		☻
Tags		☻
Tag Clouds		☻
Tag Profiles		☻
My Network		☻
Blogs	○	●
Wikis	○	●
Enterprise Wikis		☻
Ratings		☻
Colleague Suggestions	○	●
Keyword Suggestions		☻

Content

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
Compliance Everywhere		☻
Flexible Records Management		☻
Shared Content Types And Managed Metadata Service		☻
Content Organizer		☻
Rich Media Management		☻
Document Sets		☻
Word Automation Services		☻
Support For Accessibility Standards		☻

Search

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
People And Expertise Search	○	●
Search From Windows 7 And Windows Mobile	○	●
Common Connector Framework For Indexing And Federation	○	●
Scale And Performance Via Improved Topology Architecture	○	●
Ability To Build Search-Powered Applications	○	●
Refinement Panel And Sorting		☻
Search In Context		☻
Social Behavior Improves Relevance		☻
Thumbnails, Previews, And View In Browser		☻

Insights

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
KPI Details		☻
Dashboard Designer	○	●
Enhanced Navigation, Including Filtering And Sorting (Top/Bottom 10, Switchable Measures)		☻
Publish More Workbooks		☻
Javascript Object Model		☻
Powershell Scripting		☻
Richer Fidelity With Excel Workbooks		☻
Support For Analytical Services Formatting		☻
Additional Data Sources, Including External Lists And “PowerPivot” Workbooks		☻
Improved Strategy Map Connection And Formatting		☻
Seamless Management Of Dashboard Content	○	●
Integrated Filter Framework		☻
Calculated KPIs		☻
Improved Visualizations		☻
Chart Web Parts		☻
Business Intelligence Center	(Report Center)	☻

Composites

Feature Name / Area	Sharepoint Server 2007	Sharepoint Server 2010
Browser-Based Customizations	○	●
Business Connectivity Services		☻
Sharepoint Designer	○	●
Human Workflows	○	●
Forms Services	○	●
Visio Services		☻
Access Services		☻
Sandboxed Solutions		☻

Microsoft Office 2010 with Different Versions of SharePoint

Feature Name/Area	Description	SharePoint 2010	SharePoint 2007
Coauthor Documents and Presentations	Share ideas with other people simultaneously and see what areas of a document have changed.	With coauthoring, work together in Microsoft Office Word 2010 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2010, and see others’ changes tracked in documents hosted in SharePoint 2010.
Simultaneously Edit Spreadsheets and Notebooks	Work together on content using a Web browser	Work together in Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and Microsoft Office OneNote 2010 Web applications simultaneously and see others’ changes in real time.
Highlight Changes in Shared Notebooks	Enable multiple people to add to and change the same shared notebook. Author names appear in near real time as changes are made.	Shared OneNote 2010 notebooks provide a clear trail of what other authors have changed since the last user opened the notebook.
Broadcast Slide Shows in PowerPoint	Share a PowerPoint presentation over the Web for remote or networked viewers.	Audiences do not need to have PowerPoint 2010 installed; they can see the presentation in high fidelity in a Web browser.
Save Documents and Presentations Directly to SharePoint	Automatically discover SharePoint document libraries to make saving content easier and more intuitive.	People can save Office 2010 documents directly to the SharePoint 2010 document library from Office Backstage view.
PowerPivot	PowerPivot for Excel 2010 provides streamlined integration and Web-based analysis in SharePoint. Use data from multiple sources and manipulate large data sets that have up to hundreds of millions of rows.	Publish and share analysis with less effort and enable others to enjoy the same Data Slicers and fast-query capabilities, even when working in Excel Services reports.
Publish and Share Information Through Excel Services	Share analysis and results across the organization by publishing Excel 2010 spreadsheets to the Web or other SharePoint sites (intranet, extranet).	Use Backstage view in Excel 2010 to selectively publish selective parts of a worksheet, hide formulas, and stage data to SharePoint 2010.	Use Backstage view in Excel 2010 to selectively publish parts of a worksheet to SharePoint 2007.
Microsoft Office Access Design for the Web	Microsoft Office Access 2010 applications developed in Design for Web mode can be designed and edited for publishing to SharePoint, so people can share, collect, and report on data.	Use Access 2010 to publish data, forms, logic/macros, and reports with nearly the same look and feel in the browser as in Access 2010 on a PC.
Automate Metadata Capture	Provide better, automated metadata capture in SharePoint to make information more findable, perceptible, discoverable, navigable, manageable, and re-usable.	Use Word 2010 to provide better and more automated metadata capture from Backstage view, including document information either added automatically or typed quickly in AutoComplete fields.	Word 2010 provides automated metadata capture from Backstage view, including document information added automatically.
Use Office Backstage View	Seamlessly connect Office 2010 applications with SharePoint to provide workflow integration, the ability to enter metadata, and social context.	By using Office Backstage view in Office 2010 applications, people can enter metadata, interact with workflows, access authors’ profiles, view recent content the author has created in SharePoint 2010, and more.	By using Office Backstage view in Office 2010 applications, people can enter metadata and interact with workflows
Access SharePoint Templates	Access Office 2010 document templates stored in SharePoint more quickly and easily.	People can access document templates stored in SharePoint 2010 via the New Document wizard in Office 2010 applications.
Apply PowerPoint Themes to SharePoint	Make customization of SharePoint sites more flexible by using themes used in PowerPoint 2010 presentations.	People can apply themes to SharePoint 2010 sites by using the same themes as in PowerPoint 2010.
Use Reusable Workflows	Support workflows to be used multiple times and provide workflow templates for later use in SharePoint.	SharePoint Designer 2010 supports reusable workflows and workflows attached to content types.
Visualize Workflow	Allow a workflow designer to see the steps in a SharePoint workflow in a visual format.	Workflows developed as drawings and exported from Office Visio 2010 can be imported into SharePoint Designer 2010 for modification and deployment.
Use Forms-Based Applications	Forms-based applications connect with back-end data and include workflow, reporting, custom Web pages, and other components.	Integrate InfoPath 2010 forms with back-end data by using external lists in SharePoint 2010, and include custom sandboxed solution code.
Provide the Office Ribbon for InfoPath Forms Web Services	Provide the Fluent Office Ribbon interface for Web-enabled forms so people can easily find, access, and use the features they want when designing Web-enabled forms.	When used with SharePoint 2010, InfoPath Forms Services provides Web-enabled forms with their commands in a Ribbon interface.
View and Edit Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and Notebooks in the Browser	Allow editing, even if applications are not loaded on a PC.	View and make light edits to documents through Office Web applications in a browser. Document formatting and content are maintained when changes are made in the browser and Web applications can be hosted on the premises running in SharePoint.
Mobile Access Enhancements	View and edit documents from a mobile device even when on the go.	View Office 2010 documents from virtually anywhere by using Web applications, without losing fidelity, and make changes with limited editing capabilities.
Work Offline with an Improved Experience in Microsoft Office Access	Edit Office Access 2010 forms, reports, queries, and macros offline and synchronize changes in SharePoint when reconnected to the network.	Data in SharePoint 2010 list is cached in the Access 2010 by default.
Collaborate Offline and Online	Work offline with SharePoint contents and when reconnected to the network, changes are synchronized.	Work offline in SharePoint 2010 document libraries and lists through SharePoint Workspace 2010.
Fill In Forms Offline	SharePoint list forms are synchronized so people can work offline.	SharePoint 2010 list items open in an InfoPath 2010 form that is hosted in SharePoint for edit in display mode.
Extend the Reach of Forms	Fill in InfoPath 2010 forms in a Web browser, while online or offline, and from a mobile device.	The InfoPath 2010 forms solution offers embedded solutions that use InfoPath controls that can be hosted.
Publish Access Databases to the Web	Securely publish database applications to the Web so IT managers can meet data compliance, backup, and audit requirements.	While publishing data, Access 2010 checks for incompatible objects and builds a report of any runtime differences between the client and server.
Use Business Data Applications	Design forms for SharePoint that create, read, update, and delete business data from a back-end system.	Business data applications start with an external list in SharePoint 2010 and use InfoPath Designer 2010 to create custom forms on top of the list.
Offline and Online LOB Integration	Take LOB data offline and synchronize changes automatically when back online.	Synchronize LOB data in both directions between SharePoint Workspace 2010 and enterprise line-of-business systems by bringing LOB data into SharePoint 2010 Sites and then taking it offline via SharePoint Workspace 2010.
Enhance Information Security and Integrity with Digital Signatures	Help ensure the integrity of information contained in forms with the controls necessary to enable single, co-sign, and counter-sign scenarios for the full form or portions of the form.	InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 support CNG digitally signed content.
Manage Forms More Easily	More easily manage form versions, updates, and upgrades in SharePoint to ensure that team members are working in the correct version of a form.	Automate template version management with SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010 to provide an improved process for checking for template updates.
Use Line of Business data in applications	Provide a SharePoint-based framework for creating Office Business Applications.	Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides the read/write capability to connect SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office client applications to external data sources (such as SQL, Oracle, SAP, CRM, Siebel, Web services, and custom applications).	Use Business Data Catalog within SharePoint to provide read access and surface line of business information in Office client applications
Business Connectivity Services: Use Data as Document Properties	Insert LOB data as document properties to make critical information more findable, perceptible, and re-usable in SharePoint.	Expose BCS data as Word 2010 document properties and insert it into documents.
Package and More Easily Move SharePoint Applications	Move InfoPath applications more easily from site to site and server to server.	Package InfoPath 2010 applications more quickly and easily packaged by using Windows SharePoint Services solutions (.wsp) and SharePoint site template (.stp) file formats.

Architecture Comparison

Web Services/Object Model

Available with SharePoint 2007:

• Administration
• Alerts
• Authentication
• Data Retrieval
• Permissions
• Sites
• Search
• People and Profiles
• Workflow

New with SharePoint 2010:

• List REST access with ADO.NET Data Services
• Excel Services REST access
• Client Object Model
• WSRP (v1.1) Consumer Web Part

Editions

• Enterprise Client Access License
• Standard Client Access License
• SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Enterprise
• SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites, Standard
• SharePoint Foundation 2010 (Free)
• SharePoint Designer 2010 (Free)

Microsoft has created a fantastic interactive chart here that goes through each edition.

What’s New For Administrators

Available in SharePoint 2010:

IT Pro Productivity

SharePoint Best Practices Analyzer

Backup And Restore Configuration Data

Site Collection Migration

Content Recovery Down To The Site And List Level

Content Restore Of Site Or List

Windows PowerShell™ Snap-Ins And Commands

Managed Accounts

Correlation IDs

Scalable Unified Infrastructure

Shared Service Applications

Hosting And Multi-Tenancy Architecture With Site Subscriptions

Claims-Based Authentication

Profile Synchronization

High Availability Automatic Failover

Content Type Syndication

Sandbox Solutions

List Throttling

Remote Blog Storage

Flexible Deployment

Prerequisite Installer

Visual Upgrade

Configuration Wizards

Scriptable Deployment

On-Premise Or Online

Diagnostics

Unified Logging Service (ULS)

Usage Database

Developer Dashboard

Reliability and Monitoring

SharePoint Maintenance Engine (SPME) Rules

System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Monitoring

Reporting

Out of the Box Usage Reports

SCOM Reports

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Thanks to Richard Harbridge – Richard Harbridge: Insights

ECM Noir – Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 7

…continued from Part 6 –  [Other Episodes]

Killa Hertz’ friend Mike Budrewski had analysed the eResults logs, and had determined that their was a Java memory error. Killa was investigating further.

“Trudy – I need to look at the web server.” Trudy looked up with a puppy dog look in her eyes. She quickly opened up a new remote session, and logged me onto the web server. “OK”, I said to myself, “somehow this thing is throwing a memory error.” I fired up the task manager. The thing was using a little more memory than normal, but it looked OK.

Suddenly my mobile phone rang. Trudy jumped. The girl was skittery. I answered the phone, and heard Mike’s voice. “Killa, I was able to find some documentation about this eResults application. There’s nothing explicit about the error, but it clearly states  that it requires 2Gigabytes RAM. How much is that thing running?” “1 gig” I replied. I was happy. It looked like an open and  closed case. At the same time I was annoyed. Why the hell was a law firm skimping on things like memory?

I looked over at Trudy – she was busy staring at numbers in a spreadsheet. “Trudy – this server doesn’t have enough memory. What you can you do to get another gig installed?”. She looked up. She wrinkled her nose, and trundled her chair next to mine. Her perfume was clearly set on “Kill” this morning..

“Umm, let’s have a look.” The web service server was a virtual one. That meant that, in principle, it should be easy to increase the memory. “Yes” she said, in that excited voice of hers. “However, I’ll have to let the boss know. We’ll probably need to take the server off-line.” I went and grabbed a coffee while she called her boss.

After 5 minutes, she came into the coffee room. “Sure thing Killa, we can do it tonight.” I put down my cup. “Trudy – how long does it take to crawl all the documents in the docbase?” “Well…” she started. “The last time we did it, it took about a week.” Suddenly, I had the urge to be sitting on a stool at O’Learys with a glass of Jack.

“A week is a long time to see if this is going to work.” Even though I was getting paid by the day, there were still limits.

“Let’s see if we can split up the load.” Trudy’s eyes opened wide. She was a good kid. “Look – you’ve got over 800,000 documents in there. We’ll split up the documents into smaller groups. Then we start a crawl on each group of documents. If this memory increase doesn’t help, and a crawl doesn’t work properly, then it doesn’t mean we have to recrawl all the documents.”

Trudy ran over to her desk, and grabbed a pad of paper (it had roses in the corner of each pad) and a pen. “Let me get this down” she said.

“Ok Trudy, let me show you what needs to be done.”

to be continued…

… Part 8

8 Things You Wanted to Know About SharePoint – But Were Afraid to Ask

AIIM are offering a free SharePoint eBook. Check out their site:

8 Things You Wanted to Know About SharePoint – But Were Afraid to Ask.

Captain Kirk is killing Innovation

Through one means or another (I think I saw a Tweet about it). I “discovered” a presentation on Innovation. It was given by Scott Berkun at the Carnegie Mellon University.

I was really inspired by Berkun’s presentation. I watched it once, and then again, and then tried to make notes of what he was saying during the presentation.

Berkun talks about how much of what we know about innovation is wrong as he explored the history of innovation and creative thinking.

The notes I took take up eight pages. These are available via the links below. However, in a nutshell, Berkun points out that innovation is not some magical thing that just happens. It requires a lot of hard work, and a lot of failure. Often when we look at someone/something successful, we don’t see the work that was put in to get to that point.

Berkun gives many examples of people famous in history for their discoveries, and points out that it is the “mythology” surrounding that discovery that we actually remember without being aware of the hours put in to get to that it. Two examples he gives are Newton who is remembered for discovering gravity when he got hit on the head by an apple, Archimedes who cried Eureka! when he was in the bath.

He goes onto to illustrate how failure is also a part of innovation. The Colloseum in Rome is lauded as being an amazing piece of architecture, and shows what great builders the Roman’s were. However, we don’t get to see the attempts that failed. They don’t exist any more. We just have remaining the attempt that was successful. There are several modern examples also that include Google, Apple, Flickr.

At one point in the presentation, Berkun claims that James T Kirk is responsible for killing innovation. Why? Because, James T Kirk is the only modern day icon for exploration that we have today. The main story of exploration that is widely known is that of Captain Kirk, and the Enterprise and it’s ongoing mission to seek out new life, etc, etc.

The problem with this is that within the first few opening minutes of the program Star Trek, a new planet has been discovered. And then with the next few minutes, something exciting has happened. And so it goes on. We don’t get to see the boring bits. We don’t get to see the time spent just trying to find a new planet. And this is what happens a lot in real life . A new “discovery” is being made. There is a lot of excitement, and then…nothing. This is because it usually takes years, and years, and years before the new discovery is something useful, viable, or commercially profitable.

As I mentioned, Scott Berkun’s presentation really caught my attention. He had a very dynamic way of presenting this information. I recommend you follow the links below to learn more.

My Notes from Berkun’s presentation

Scott Berkun’s presentation on YouTube

Scott Berkun’s Homepage.

Related Articles

• O’Reilly Releases “The Myths of Innovation” in Paperback (geardiary.com)
• Assumptions About Innovation And Greatness (forbes.com)
• Be innovative, but don’t use that word (radar.oreilly.com)
• The Myths of Innovation (oreilly.com)
• Technical writers and public speaking (ffeathers.wordpress.com)

My (rough) Notes on Scott Berkun’s ”Lecture on the Myths of Innovation”

As mentioned in my post “Captain Kirk is killing Innovation“, below are my notes on a presentation that Scott Berkun gave at Carnegie Mellon University.

==================================

Lecture on the Myths of Innovation (link to presentation on YouTube)

Worked at Microsoft for about 10 years. Team Leader role. Worked on Internet Explorer for about 6 years. His job was to lead a project team to think up new ideas to make using the internet easier. He would work with designers and engineers, and lead the team to develop the ideas, and put the ideas into a specification and getting it out the door.

The problem he didn’t know “how do you innovate?”, “how do you manage a team that’s supposed to be innovating, and creating new stuff?”

Scott knew a lot of people at MS, many who had been there longer than he was, many “inventors” – people who had worked on Mac, and UNIX. He tried to get information about what the process is, what the plan is, how do you do this. What most people knew where pet theories. There were stories, legends, mythologies, and a lot of people, even though they had a lot of experience and had been successful, put their faith in something that didn’t have a lot of substance. He decided that he had to become informed about this. To find out how people who had done this before him had done it. Not what we think that they did, not what is mythologized in films, but actually what they did.

He started reading about reading about Edison, da Vinci, Ford. He wanted to understand “how did they think about what they did”. This was as a “side project”. Wasn’t ever interested in history.

He left MS in 2003. Ambition to write books. First book was about management.”How do you manage teams of people?” The book sold well, and he was asked to write a second book. Second book was about innovation. So many books on innovation are based on hype, and mythology and romance. And this is not so handy if you want to be a practitioner.

A lot of people want to be innovator’s (especially in America). The lecture is not the same as what is in the book, but the themes are the same.

Started with some information trivia. Showed some pictures of famous innovators:

• Van Gogh
• Edison
• Micheal Angelo
• Bob Dylan
• Newton
• Einstein

"Innovators"

 

The common thing about these people is that none of them got a degree in innovation, or read a book about how innovation happens, or took a creative thinking class. None of the things that, today, are promoted as “that’s how you do it”. They just had an idea which they thought was interesting, and they cared about, and they followed it. Sometimes at the expense of their mental health, or finance (Edison)

Innovation is not reached by a specific type of people, of a particular pedigree, following a set of rules. It is usually the renegades, and delinquents who are innovators. The people who say they not going to follow what everyone else is doing. There is no official pedigree needed to be an innovator. However, we like to believe there is. There  is a romantic and popular notion that creativity is something that gifted people are born with One particular part of that mythology is the myth of epiphany. That is – there are “magic moments” that define what innovation is.

Newton – the “canonical epiphany story” – because it implies that there is one particular, “special” moment when an individual accidentally was struck “violently” by a piece of fruit and that’s why we know about gravity.

People tend not to think about the mythology, and, when we’re not paying attention, it influences what we believe should be happening – when we are working hard trying to solve a problem, there’s no magic moment, no epiphany, so we feel we are not doing it right.

With the apple story and Newton – a) it probably didn’t happen, but if it did happen, the true value of the story is not that it happened, because he had probably been thinking about gravity for a long time. He didn’t “discover” gravity. He was alive in the late 17th century. We knew about gravity for a long time before that. What he was actually famous for was proving the mathematics of gravity, to be predictive about how gravitational fields worked. It took him about 15 years to do that. However the myth remains. And the epiphany mythologies absolve us of the pressure of the work involved behind any break or innovation that we have heard of.

Archimedes is credited with having an epiphany while he was in the bath. The fact that he was “in the bath” is what most people remember. However, it is a comical story that makes the whole idea of innovation seem trivial.

These epiphany stories can be found everywhere – business success, literature success, everywhere. This is because they are comfortable, entertaining, and amusing, but they deflate all the hard work behind the success.

In Archimedes’ case, it is most likely that the “reported” moment was not the only time he spent thinking about the problem.

A big part of innovation is “creative thinking”. How do you invent? How do you develop a new idea? How do you find alternative ways that people haven’t thought of before? In preparation for the book, Scott became a student of psychological literature of creative thinking. He read journals, and books, and there is a popular notion about creativity, which is reflected in all these epiphany stories and that is, that an idea is a discrete thing. That it happens in a moment of time. This is how we conventionally think creative thinking is.

All the psychology behind creative thinking, and how our brains work, and how we develop ideas, talks about the value of “habits”. Creative people have different habits for how they use ideas, and how they play with ideas, and how much time is spent seeking alternatives. They are more comfortable entertaining odd, crazy, scary ideas longer than most people who dismiss them quickly).

So – it’s about habits, and when you hear about a story of an epiphany, or a magic moment, the magic moment isn’t going to inform you, but what happening 10 minutes, an hour, before that magic moment. What was that person doing?

How does this magic moment fit into the person’s pattern of behaviour. If you can learn the patterns of behaviour then there is something that you can replicate, or emulate, or borrow from to inform you about what process you have to follow to be creative. The “moments” are not important, it’s the habits that lead to the moments.

It’s like an iceberg…

Another example is the invention of the telephone. The “story” goes that the first words spoken were “Watson, come here”. If you were to invent a replacement to the telephone, what value would knowing “the first words spoken” have? It is useless information. What we mostly know about creative thinking is trivia. It’s interesting, but not going to help you be creative.

There is also the mythology in science. Often a lot of the way we learn science is following the footsteps of others, and what has been done before. So even though the words “experiment”, and “scientific method” show up in scientific education, is it very rare for people to do an experiment themselves, or ask a question and don’t have clear answers. So even though we talk about science, and “scientific method” we have a very biased sense of what that means. When talking about breakthroughs in science, the patterns that we follow are more comfortable to human nature than we realize.

Scott refers to the book “The Double Helix” which he read to understand what creative process was used. Did they follow the same iterative process that he had for software, did they have hypothesis, and explored outcomes. The book actually has very little about science in it. It is largely about a bunch of people who had an idea, who most people didn’t agree that it was possible. The people involved were, effectively, pursuing hunches and instinctive motivation. Even though backed up by science the motivating force was purely human. It was an intuitive and ad-hoc process. Anytime we talk about discovery, or break through, this is true.

Failure is also a part of break-through. Failures are essential. Often we do not see the failures. For example, the Colosseum in Rome. We marvel at what a great building it is, and how advanced the architects and builders must have been. What we don’t see are all the other buildings that are not standing today. The one’s that failed. This is common in the history of innovation. We never see the failures. So if you want to follow someone’s path to success, their innovation, you want to look at their failures. What mistake did they make, that they learnt something from, and was able to apply to something else.

This can be found everywhere. YouTube is an example. Originally the company was trying to create a video alternative to “Hot or Not”, a online dating site where photos could be posted and then people could vote whether the person in the photo was “hot” or “not”. In the course of building the “alternative” they recognized that there was better use for it in a more general direction. Flickr started out as a software game development company for an online, multiplayer game. After about a year they ran out of funding, but they were able to recognize that part of the thing they were building was a part where there was the ability to share photos. They realized that this little part had actually more chance of being successful than the game itself. They made a mistake, they learnt from it, and they went in a different direction.

Apple also had a similar story. Way back at the beginning, Steve Wozinack worked at HP, and he tried to get HP interested in making a personal computer. HP didn’t want to so Steve W. and Steve Jobs went off and did it their way.

Same with Google. In the beginning when the founders had a “page ranking algorithm” they were looking at selling their ideas to a search engine company. They were told by every search engine company that search engines weren’t very profitable. In 1999 this was true. They were told by Yahoo, and some other search engine companies, that they should really go out on their own if they want the idea to materialize.

So, the real value is looking at the mistakes to understand the process of innovation.

However, stories about failures are very rare.

If you hear about a company that has just had a breakthrough, or a magic moment, and you want to be an innovator yourself, you need to ask yourselves some questions:

Lessons Learned so far

• What happened before the magic?
• What mistakes did they learn from?
• What ideas did they reuse?
• What did they think of what they were making while they were making it?

INNOVATION HISTORY

Scott gives an example. “Imagine” he says “that you are working together on a project. The goal is to innovate – to create Web 4.0.”

We start with a prototype – we build some code. It goes so well, that some people who thought you were crazy to start with, start showing interest, and want to know more, and get involved. The project starts to grow, and we get more support behind it.” Interest starts growing even more, and there are blog posts about it, and articles are written in magazines about how this is the next new thing.”

What generally happens next is … nothing.

Scott goes on to talk about exploration. Exploration has many similarities to innovation.

He shows a photo of Captain James Kirk from Star Trek. He points out that James T Kirk is the only modern day icon for exploration that we have today.

Most of the planet has been “discovered”, and the main story that gets told these days, over and over, in the movies, on TV, involving exploration is that of Captain James T Kirk.

The problem with this, of course, is that Captain James T Kirk is not a real person. He’s just a character in a TV show. Looking at real explorers – Magellan, Cook, da Gama – they all spent most of their time failing. They started with a map with outlined “the world”, and then went “off the map”. And during this time, there were many unpleasant things that happened – mutinies, scurvy, etc – as well as lots, and lots of uninteresting stuff. The main point is that most of exploration is taken up with uninteresting hard work. This is the parallel with innovation. All the hard work is not as sexy as the point where the flag is put in the ground, or that “Eureka” moment.

The problem with James T Kirk is that, normally, within the first minute of the show, a new planet is discovered., in the next couple of minutes something dramatic happens. And then a commercial break. All the hard bits that make up exploration are skipped. The Teleporter, transporter, warp drive – these are all narrative devices to get you past the hard work parts of exploration.

Looking at real explorers, Magellan was famous for circumnavigating the globe. But there is actually many, many events that took place during this that people are not aware of.

According to Berkun, Cook was actually the model for James T Kirk, and the reason that the “red coat” is always the one that dies, is because the British marines wore red coats and they were always the ones sent in first and died.

Berkun brings the talk back to the fact that the time between when something (technology, etc) is thought to be “interesting” by the people working on it, and when it is considered a “breakthrough” by the mass market is often 15-20 years. Example – the mouse, the cell phone

Means in our example project above, once success is achieved, it now has to fit into the “narrative” of innovations. That is it becomes the latest of a long line of other innovative achievements that led up to it. The “details” about the pain, or mistakes, or the boring bits, doesn’t get recorded. This makes it seem ordinary, simple and obvious despite how complicated or risky it was to do.

O’Reilly Publishers created a diagram that describe the history of programming languages and how they are all related to each other (http://oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html). It is an excellent way to get an overview of the languages, and allows you to get some perspective. However there is no language listed that was invented through using the diagram. It is not a tool used to invent. It gives a “god” perspective. It is easy to look at the diagram, at Object Pascal for example, and pass judgment. This is the risk of the chronological accounts of innovation.

Lessons Learned so far

• Good history=fact-based stories, not trivia.
• Seek out first and second person.
• Study the origins of an ordinary thing.
• Everything was once an innovation.

Berkun starts talking about Luddites. He tells that how in the circles he was working, the term Luddite was a slur, meaning that you are trying to resist something (new technology) that is going to become inevitable.  Of course, the real story is that during the Industrial Revolution in England, people who worked in the textile industry operating the looms were replaced by technology that did the same. The workers (supposedly lead by “Ned Ludd”) responded by destroying the technology with sledge hammers

He then asks his audience to imagine coming to work to find they have been replaced by a small box, and to be told that all other employees have done this. He suggests that people would have a violent response to the box, an emotional response and an awareness of how much the box would be taking away from their lives.

The lesson here is about innovation, because innovation is effectively a kind of change. It may be a positive change, but, in general, people fear change. And as an innovator, you are introducing change somewhere – your workplace, your work colleagues, your family, your customers. As an innovator, if you are not aware of the change, or the ramifications of the change, then the innovation is likely to fail. For example, if you introduce a new innovation in the work place, then maybe your co-workers will resist the change, because they didn’t think of it. Your boss might be embarrassed because he didn’t think of the idea, so he might suppress the idea. So Innovation is more about sociology than technology. This can frustrate technologists, who may have a technically superior product, but it takes a long time for it to be “accepted”.

There is a book called “Diffusion of Innovations” by Evett M. Rogers, an anthropologist, which looks at “history of technological advancement from a sociological standpoint”. Rogers focused on why certain cultures adopted certain innovations. For example – why did one culture adopt clubs, another better cooking innovations, etc. From this, he concluded that it is culture that precipitates, or enables, innovation. A quote from his book is:

“The diffusion of innovation is a social process, based more on psychology and sociology than technology”.

If you want to instigate change, you have to ask “who is negatively affected by change, and how do I negotiate that?” “How do I persuade them, negotiate with them, convince them?” If you do not have answers to these questions, it may not matter how great your innovation is.

Berkun finished his presentation with a story about 3M. 3M stands for “Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing”. Now, one of the best known products from 3M is the yellow Post-its. There does not seem to be much of a connection between yellow sticky notes, and the name “Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing”. It is an amazing leap to go from mining to Post-its.

In the early 20^th century, the Industrial revolution was still big. Machinery was a product of these, and for these steel is needed. A group of entrepreneurs in Minnesota decided they were going to start a mining company so that they could make grinding wheels. They bought a mine, and started mining, but it turned out that they mined the wrong mineral. They held a meeting, and decided to go in a different direction – sandpaper. With this came a new set of mistakes, and problems, but after about 5 years they started a profitable sandpaper company.

One of their sandpaper engineers, Richard Drew, was working on a project where he had prototypes of new types of sandpaper. He went to one of his customers – an automobile manufacture – who happen to have a problem painting their cars two tones (blue and grey). They didn’t have a reliable way of separating the two colours. Drew noticed this, and said that he could probably come up with a way to solve it. He goes back to 3M and starts working on prototypes. Eventually his boss, William McNight, tells him to start concentrating on 3M’s products. Drew does this, but is still busy with a solution for this problem, and carries on working on it. Several times he is told to get back to his real work. However he carries on with the problem, and eventually comes up with a prototype which he takes to the automobile company. They love it, so drew shows it to his boss who agrees that it is OK, and that is how Masking Tape originated. Drew would go on to invent cellophane tape (“scotch tape”/ “sellotape”)

The interesting part of this story is not what Drew achieved, but more how William McNight reacted. Sells of masking tape, and cellophane tape far exceed those of sandpaper. These new things became 3M’s most successful product lines. McNight acknowledge that he had screwed up. Originally he had wanted to stop the development of these products. He decided to change his business philosophy to encourage the Richard Drews, to encourage new ideas. So he changed the company, and the direction of the company, and eventually became CEO of 3M, and made this philosophy a core part the company philosophy.

Berkun displayed a three paragraph piece from a report McNight had written on 3M’s business philosophy:

“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility, and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative.

This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes that he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiatives if we are to continue to grow.”

- William McKnight, 3M Chairman, 1948.

Berkun points out that this was from about years ago, and is hardly ever seen in action with other companies today.

The main things that McKnight is saying are:

1. Delegation – trust that a employee will do the right thing.
2. Mistakes will be made – innovation means risks, and risks mean mistakes – a commitment is needed that mistakes will be made, and allowed.
3. Initiative –must be encouraged.

Google have a rule where employees are allowed to spend 20% of their time working on something innovative. However, 3M came up with the concept originally.

Berkun maintains that if McKnight’s philosophy is followed, then innovation will occur. And this is also on a personal level. People are “trained” to follow the rules, and not to make mistakes. If you want to be innovative, you need to find a way to allow yourself to make mistakes. To be less critical of their creative ideas, and to follow them further before trashing them. Also – being innovative is a personal responsibility. No one is going to say “OK – now break the rules”.

Related Articles

• Where is your place within Gen X cultural mythology? (jenx67.com)

Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Collaboration Alignment

Originally from “Enterprise Collaboration – What’s Your Problem?“

Related articles

• Social Collaboration to Spread Enterprise Wide (prweb.com)
• Inching Towards Enterprise 2.0 (serve4impact.com)
• The First Two Steps Toward Breaking Down Silos in Your Organization (blogs.hbr.org)
• Designing the Collaborative Enterprise (fastforwardblog.com)

Edge: BRAIN TIME By David M. Eagleman

Wow!

A incredibly fascinating article on how the brain handles the sensory stimuli that is receiving.

Edge: BRAIN TIME By David M. Eagleman.

The importance of Real testing

I was involved in a project for a client once that involved running some updates for a SharePoint-Documentum connector. (The connector was essentially a protocol handler that allowed SharePoint to index documents in a Documentum repository, as well as ensuring security was honored.)

The tech guy doing the upgrade had worked many, many hours. The job itself was not complex, but the server on which the application was installed was also used for other things and so, there were starts and stops as others demanded their own slice of time to do maintenance on other apps running on the system unabatted.

Finally Techguy had finished the upgrade. He set up a brand new content source that pointed at the repository, and had generated the correct list of crawled properties (these were generated from the Documentum database). Security was also working fine (the connector translated the Documentum security into Active Directory groups/users).

Techguy ran a crawl of the Documentum repository, and checked that there were no errors. Everything looked fine. He performed a search in SharePoint. Yep, the documents were being returned OK. He did further testing, by physically eyeballing a document in the system, checking the content, and then doing searches on various metadata, as well as content searching. Yep, system worked well.

Techguy even performed Regression Testing, following a scripted Regression Test that he had written. It went through the whole shabang of creating a document, sending in for review, getting it approved, changing the status of the document back to draft, making a modification, again for review, again for approval, until the document was effectively a usable document. Everything checked out beautifully.Techguy proudly confirmed that the system was working fine.

The the users were allowed back onto the system. Within hours tickets issues were being lodged. It seemed that the documents that were being returned in a Search were not opening. The user would click on a search result, and get greeted with a page not found error.

Techguy was called back in. He started looking at the system. Everything looked OK. He was told to look harder. After much scratching of head, and flicking back and forth between various screens Techguy looked up. “I forgot to set up the web service address properly”.

It turns out that SharePoint was able to communicate with the Document repository OK when it came to doing the indexing, but when a request was made to open a document from the search results, a different mechanism was used. If the address of another server is not correctly entered, then a big fat nothing happens when a user clicks on a search result.

Techguy was just that – a tech guy. He was also a user of the system, but when he wrote the regression test document, he was a tech guy. When he did the upgrade he was a tech guy, and when he did the testing he was a tech guy. And as a tech guy he had focused on the technical side. He had made sure that all the main knobs had been turned, he had made sure that the process of indexing was working fine. He had even made sure that the system was returning search results as expected. The one thing that he hadn’t done was to try and open one of the documents that was returned!

Techguy’s oversight raised a very important point. As well as technical guys for technical testing, end users are also required to do end-user testing. Because the end user does stupid things that the technical people never expect…they actually use the system.

A post worth looking at – Searching versus Discovery

Thanks to the fact that one of the people I am following on Twitter is Jordan Julian (@thejordanrules), it was brought to my attention that this chap had just published a new post on his blog.

The post is Understanding The Cognitive Value of Searching v. Discovering, and is quite interesting.

Worth checking it out. (I know I have saved it to my delicious bookmarks.)

ECM Noir – Killa Hertz & The Case of the Missing Documents – Part 6

…continued from Part 5 –  [All Episodes]

Killa Hertz had worked through the night with help from Trudy. They had gone through the indexing process. It looked like the answer could be in the eResults log. Killa had sent it to his super-geek friend Mike to see if he could make sense of it.

The alarm clock went off at 8am. Swinging my arm I knocked the thing off the bedside table. Being electric, it just keep beeping. I pull the plug out of the wall.

After leaving Trudy’s office last night, I made a phone call. My friend Mike was awake. I expected that. He liked his internet games. I swung past his place with the CD. Trudy had made sure that there was only the eResults log on it.

Mike invited me to stay while he analysed the log.  His flat was small, and messy, and there was no bourbon. I declined. “Mike – call me in the morning when you have an answer.”

So now – it was morning. Still hot, and as sticky as it was last night. After swallowing two cups of coffee, I headed into Trudy’s office. She was there looking at the system. “Hi Killa!” she squeaked far too enthusiastically. I hate morning people. “Have you heard anything?”. I told her that Mike would call me as soon as he had news for me.

“But you know Trudy, it could be that the system is choking while it’s doing the indexing. Let’s have another look at it.”

She logged onto the system for me, and then let me sit in her chair. I had a look at the Crawler Impact Rules in SharePoint. There were none. I poked around and checked out a few other things. There system was 32 bit. Not the best, but didn’t explain why the crawls were suddenly stopping short. There were a few settings in the registry that could be tweaked to increase the amount of memory used. But, again, no point changing those…yet. I made note of them anyway.

Around 9:30, my cell phone rang. It was Mike. He wanted me to come around.

Knocking on his door, I was met by Mike in the same clothes that he had on the last time I saw him. He was talking fast. Clearly a sign of too many caffeine-loaded energy drinks. I didn’t want to be around when those wore off.

Mike pulled a stool over next to his chair. The computer screen was filled with the error logs. “I looked through the logs, Killa. There’s a hellova lot of information in there. I went through each line. This is a smart app.” I could hear that Mike was impressed. “There are a lot of errors, but they are nothing to be worried about. It looks like the system is just reporting that it couldn’t find certain things. These don’t look like they are causing the crawl to fail. I double-checked them anyway. It took me awhile, but about an hour ago I think I finally pinned it down”

I glanced at Mike. He liked his moment of importance. “So what do ya think it is?”, I asked. Mike continued “Memory” he said.”But their SharePoint system is running fine” I said. “No – not the SharePoint server – it’s a Java error.”

“I need coffee” I said. His response was to thrust a can of energy drink in my hand. It was better than nothing.

I thought back over the process. SharePoint indexed the docs. But that didn’t use Java. The documents were transferred in batches from the Documentum docbase to the SharePoint server first. And this was via a web server that did use Java.

“Mike – I’ve gotta go check something. I’ll call you.” Mike handed me a pile of paper. It was a printout of the error log with the Java error highlighted. “As always – Thanks”.

I arrived back at Trudy’s office. “Trudy – give me access to your web server.”

to be continued…

… Part 7

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager: set DedicatedFilterProcessMemoryQuota = 200000000 Decimal
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\12.0\Search\Global\Gathering Manager: set FilterProcessMemoryQuota = 200000000 Decimal