Christian’s slidedeck on productivity and gamification is certainly worth highlighting…
Michael Sampson recently commented on a statement that SharePoint 2013 had an increased focus on encouraging user adoption.
Michael rightly points out that:
“improvements in features may reduce barriers to usability, but the encouragement of user adoption per se is up to people in the organization who are introducing SharePoint. SharePoint”
I wholeheartedly agree with Michael on this. Bells and whistles (aka features) can seem to be enticing to new users, but without strong top-down enthusiasm for a product/way of working, with a real business application, the chances of user adoption are considerably less.
In his post Michael also mentions his collaboration strategy book, and his user adoption book. I will be open here – I have not read them…yet.
However I know what I’ll be asking Santa for this Christmas year.
CSC have published (not recently) a whitepaper about the capabilities that FirstDoc products provide for compliance with the FDA’s ruling on Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures (fondly known in the Pharma industry as “21 CFR Part 11″).
The whitepaper is a good one. It starts off with a recap of what is contained in 21 CFR Part 11, and then does an itemised breakdown of the capabilities that the FirstDoc products have to meet the compliance requirements.
You can download it here.
Related Post: FirstDoc, FirstPoint, NextDocs – a “rough notes” comparison
The Ultimate Guide To “LinkedIn Today” & How To Optimize Your Presence On It
Modify the SharePoint Help Desk Template and New Request Forrm – YouTube
Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions – Leadership Training from MindTools.com
Are Orphan Drugs Still a Licence to Print Money? by Andrea Charles
Dutch customs and etiquette – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nick Hadlee’s Blog on SharePoint and Other Occasional Rants…
is the circle crumbling?
I decided to sign up for the AIIM Social Business Virtual Conference, scheduled for 8 September 2011.
Looks like an impressive line-up. Really keen to hear what each speaker has to say. (The fact that the sessions will be available for up to a month after the conference is going to be invaluable.)
There are three tracks:
Click here for AIIM’s Conference agenda.
The impressive line-up of speakers includes:
Andrew McAfee – Founder of the term Enterprise 2.0
Keynote Speaker: Driving Collaboration and Engagement with Social Business
Dr. David Weinberger, – Author & Public Speaker
Keynote Speaker: The Network Way of Knowing and Deciding
John Mancini, AIIM, President
Keynote Speaker: Setting up for Success, The Social Business Roadmap; Lessons Learned & Next Steps
Claire Flanagan – CSC, Director, Social Collaboration Strategy
Getting Beyond The Field of Dreams: Building a Successful Social Business Strategy, Inside and Out
John Stepper – Deutsche Bank, Managing Director
Change the Work! Stop Evangelizing and Start Doing
Debra Logan – Gartner, Vice President
Key Issues for Enterprise Information Management, 2011
Edsel David – Fannie Mae, Director, Knowledge Management
Building an Effective Collaboration Framework
Andy MacMillan – Oracle, Vice President of Product Management
Today’s Successful Businesses are Social Businesses
Dianne Kelley – Viacom, Director of Records Management
Records Management in the Social Media World
Dan Latendre – IGLOO, CEO
Social started in the cloud – why should it live anywhere else?
Billy Cripe – BloomThink, Principal BloomThinker
Why Go Mobile? Am I Cool Enough?
Hanns Kohler-Kruner – HKK Consulting, Owner
How to Develop a Governance Policy for Facebook
Jacob Morgan – Chess Media Group, Principal
The Business Impact of Collaboration
Ajay Budhraja – Department of Justice, Chief Technical Officer
Agile Collaboration for the Enterprise
Carl Weise – AIIM, Industry Advisor
Survey of AIIM & ARMA resources
Bert Sandie – Electronic Arts, Director, Technical Excellence – Knowledge Workers
The Emergence of a New Breed of Savvy Employees
Ming Kwan – Nokia, Marketing Manager
Share to Connect at Nokia
Bob Larrivee – AIIM, Director and Industry Advisor
How Mobile Devices Will Transform Paper Processes
Jennifer Leggio – Sourcefire, Senior Director, Online Marketing
The State of Social Business and What to Expect in 2012
Ken Bisconti – IBM Enterprise Content Management, Vice President, Product Marketing and Strategy
Social Business meets Enterprise Content Management
Andrea Baker – Chief Social Engineer
How IT Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Facebook
Gayle Weiswasser – Discovery Communications, Vice-President, Social Media Communications
How Discovery Engages with their Audience
Jesse Wilkins – AIIM, Director Systems of Engagement
How to Develop a Governance Policy for Twitter; Records Management in the Age of Twitter
Steve Ressler – GovLoop, President & Founder
Community Development for Social Business, A GovLoop Story
Speakers :
Wow – call me Happy and knock me to the ground.
AIIM have just released their standards based Product Guide focused on CMIS. Being an AIIM Professional Member I was quick to download a copy.
For those of you unfamiliar with CMIS (Content Management Interoperable Services), one of my earlier posts “Small Brain Notes on CMIS” explains it more in detail.
About 9 months ago I started writing a blog post that would give an overview on the CMIS market at that stage. A lot of Vendors had recognised the real benefit of CMIS and were all making plans to implement it one way, or another.
My post did have some promise. (Click here if you’d like to view it in it’s unfinished glory). However I was not happy with the incompleteness of it, and decided, at the stage not to publish it.
The AIIM document is not comprehensive (which AIIM states clearly in the Introduction). It covers 13 vendors, and describes the CMIS enabled product of each of them along with more detailed information on the use of the product as well as (where possible) the CMIS capability support of the product.
Products covered in AIIM’s Report:
The authors hope that later versions of the guide will contain more vendors.
In the start of the Guide there is a very good introduction, and an article by David Choy (chair, OASIS CMIS Technical Committee). David Choy has also recorded a brilliant video, awhile ago, in which he explains CMIS. This was a great tool when I was trying to understand what CMIS was all about. (You can view the video here.)
After the vendor review, there are a couple of articles by Laurance Hart (@piewords) and Stephan Waldhauser (@WeWebU).
Following the articles, there is an excellent list of CMIS Resources, which I am going to look through when I get some time.
Taking into account that (at AIIM’s own admission) the Guide is not comprehensive, it is still a very handy document to give a better understanding of the CMIS landscape.
My only criticism is: Guys – when you are creating a PDF – do it properly. Get each section properly bookmarked, as well as the TOC hyperlinked to the corresponding page. It’s not hard to do; it makes the Guide a lot more usable (when viewing on screen).
Click on CMIS in the tag cloud for my other CMIS posts.
Note – this post is in a draft format. It was written in June 2010 and was never published. The information in this post is not complete.
I have released it now as part of my AIIM CMIS Product Guide post.
CMIS 1.0 was ratified in the beginning of May 2010. This is the standard that will allow interoperability between the various content management systems that are currently on the market. For more information on CMIS, refer my Small Brain Notes on CMIS. Go and read it now, and when you are finished, click on the back button. I’ll be waiting…
Ok – now that you understand a bit of what CMIS will offer, let’s ask the question – when will it be available in these disparate content electronic content management systems?
Let’s look at the list of companies that were associated with the creation on CMIS 1.0
These three were there in the beginning, and developed the initial draft.
The following companies also played a part in the moulding and shaping of the CMIS standard:
Here is a list of the vendors with regards CMIS compliance.
| Vendor | Product | CMIS Support Timeline |
| Alfresco | Alfresco 3.2 | Available for testing |
| EMC | Documentum | First half of 2010 |
| IBM | Content Manager | Second First half of 2010 |
| IBM | FileNet P8 | Second First half of 2010 |
| KnowledgeTree | KnowledgeTree 3.7 | Available for testing |
| Microsoft | SharePoint Server 2010 | First half of 2010 |
| Nuxeo | Nuxeo DMS 5.3 | Available for testing |
| Open Text | Enterprise Library Services (ELS-Beta) | CMIS connector available now |
| Open Text | Open Text ECM 10 | Mid 2010 |
| Oracle | Oracle Universal Content Management | Not known |
| SAP | SAP DMS | Not known |
| Sense/Net | Sense/Net 6.0 | Available for testing |
Previous post: FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 3
In Part 3 of the FDUG 2011 series, I described the afternoon session of the first day, which included CSC’s Cloud offering, their UI Strategy, Performance and the social event. In this post, I’ll cover the sessions that took place on the last day.
The morning started with feedback. The points compiled from yesterday User session were presented to CSC. These were graciously received, and even a few suggestions where made by CSC staff about ways they, themselves, could address the concern.
Following the user session, there was a panel discussion involving three of CSC’s clients that had implemented SPX in their environment. For more on SPX, click here (PDF).
It seems that while there was a lot of interest in the technology, and implementing it, this came from a very small group of people. This group, however, were very interested in a number of things, and many questions were still being asked after the session had ended.
After the coffee break, another CSC customer gave a presentation on their journey from a manual system for managing their Trial Master Files (TMF) to an electronic system.
This was packed with some very interesting information, and it is always good to learn from others.
As discussed in earlier “Look back” posts, CSC are offering “Total Solutions”. The “Total Regulatory Solution” has been discussed, and now we had a chance to learn more about the “Total Clinical Solution”. Fransiska Darma (who I had met the night before) gave this presentation.
Often, in clinical trials, the research is outsourced to a Clinical Research Organisation CRO), and involves collaboration between the CRO and the pharma company. In other word – moving documents between the external CRO, and the internal groups involved.
To achieve this requires being able to capture document, and somehow allow the external party to upload it to the pharma company’s EDMS. Further to this, to allow for an increase in reporting and tracking, documents need to have an expansive amount of metadata.
As with CSC’s Total Regulatory Solution, CSC are trying to leverage the fact that they now have a full range of products to implement these “Total” solutions. For their “Total Clinical Solution” this includes making use of FirstDoc (on Documentum), along with SPX (on SharePoint), as well as other tools that facilitate planning and managing, tracking and reporting, and the auditing process.
This was another customer presented session. It was very, very interesting. In this case, the customer had done an Usability Assessment of FirstDoc 6.1.
The presenter started off asking why, when we search for, review & order something on a site like Amazon, we can do it easily, without any real effort, while, when do something similar inside a business, a 3 hour training course is required.
The presenter followed this up with the statement that “solutions should not require user to change their way of working for the sake of the system.”
To assess their own system (based on FirstDoc 6.1) the customer did 2 assessments, each time where 28 normal employees (i.e. not specially trained testers), were asked to perform a specific task – review & approve a document.
Using a tool that allowed the user’s mouse movements to be tracked, along with a camera that allowed the user’s face to be seen, gave the testers a good insight into how a new user uses an interface.
Some of the findings were shared with us.
These include the fact that the steps required to accomplish the actual task were not obvious. We were shown a film of the mouse movements of one of the testers as they tried to work out the steps required to complete the task. At the same time, a small screen showed the user face and body. There was a lot of “i know that feeling” laughter amongst the audience as we watched.
This particular customer had also created a mock-up of an improved design. This included less “clutter” and prompts that would guide the user.
On the one hand, having guidance can be very useful for users who are not familiar with the steps required for the task. And often, even after doing the task for a couple of times, if the same user did not repeat the actions for several months, then that same “learning time” is required. On the other hand, users who perform the task multiple times a day can get frustrated with guidance. In this case, what would be good is if the application had a “dummy mode” for new, or infrequent users, and an “expert mode” for those more “experienced” users. (This was something that was introduced into WebTop – a “simple” user interface, and a more detailed one.)
Tim Marsh from EMC gave us a presentation on Records Management, and Information Governance, and the solutions and tools that EMC has in the area.
The last session of the day was presented by Peter Branstetter, a Senior Consultant from Arcondis.
Peter’s presentation was a very educational trip through validation. Starting with GAMP5 (Good Automated Manufacturing Process) he touched upon Risk-based approach, and the GAMP V model. Included in the journey we got to see example of this in use.
CSC offer a Validation Package which contains all the components needed to meet compliance. This allows the customer to fill in the details as required.
This session generated some very interesting discussions. It seems that “what”, or “how much” is required to meet compliance can vary depending on who is making the company policy. As such, the answers to some of the “do I need to do x,y, or z” questions were often – “that depends on what your QA department wants.”
This was the last session of the conference – about a quarter of the participants had already left. However, this topic, whether we love it, or curse it, was something that a lot of people wanted to know about, and Peter definitely seemed knowledgeable about it.
So – that was the end of the FirstDoc User Group – Europe Conference. For me, this was one of the best FDUG conference that I have been too. I got a lot of value out of the sessions.
The FirstDoc User Group conference is organised by the FDUG – Europe Steering Committee This is made up of 3 representative from CSC Life Sciences customer base.
They did a really good job this year!
Image via Wikipedia
This post continues from the previous one where I debated some of the draw-backs of using a network file share.
In that last post I mentioned there are some situations where using a file share can still be useful.
Company A has been storing content on a file share for many, many years. People have the been granted access to specific folders, and they also have the freedom of creating sub-folders (which they do).
Over time, the file share becomes unmanageable. As Adrian pointed out in his post, this has several disadvantages: nothing can be easily found; a lot of the information ins inaccessible; collaboration is not as effective as it could be, etc.
Recently Company A became aware of SharePoint. “Cool!” they thought, let’s move everything into a document library. Then we won’t have problems any more.
I certainly agree that a product like SharePoint can be useful. Once the content is in SharePoint, it can be further categorized using metadata, made accessible through the use of views, etc, and can be easily searched. Company A also thought this way.
Company A considered a couple of options here:
Both option 1 and 2 are good options. Having all the content in SharePoint means that it’s all there in one place. Security can be applied, as well as versioning.
Option 2 increases the findability of the content even more by adding rich, meaningful metadata. Company A can create a taxonomy that allows the content to be suitably categorised. Combined with customizable views, users can display the content of the document libraries in multiple different ways.
The file share has worked well for a long time. The main concerns were:
a. manageability – it was hard to manage security to the fileshares, as well as keeping track of when files were modified. It was also extremely difficult to navigate the folder structure; and
b. findability – It was almost impossible to locate any files (unless you knew where they were in the first place.
Keeping this in mind, here are a couple of alternatives Company A could consider:
The advantages of the first scenario is that you avoid that very, very large database. By setting up the fileshare as a content source, you can configure SharePoint to crawl it. And, as a result users can perform searches to find what they want. Scheduling incremental crawls allows SharePoint to pick up any changes that are made to the content of the files.
The disadvantage of this becomes obvious when the security changes on the file. A full crawl is necessary to pick up any security changes. This means that if there are regular security changes (new users being granted access to the share, access to documents being changed, etc) a full crawl is required. This can take a very long time (especially with a slow/busy network).
In this second scenario, a little bit of work is required to identify all the documents that are not “active” documents (i.e. the documents that users are not currently modifying). This would include films, images, executables, and any files taht are not “dynamic”.
Then the company could move any documents that are “dynamic” (still being edited, etc) into SharePoint. Then, as described above, extra metadata can be added to improve findability.
The fileshare can then be treated as an “archive”, and the security changed to be Read Only. This will ensure that no documents get modified. And therefore the content only has to be crawl once.
Alternatively, lock down the file share so that no one can modify the permissions on folders or documents. Because there is no security change, no full crawl is required. Regular incremental crawls can be scheduled to pick up an changes to the content of the document.
The other day I was watching a demo of AvePoint’s File Share Connector. This connector allowed users working in SharePoint to interact seamlessly with the documents that were actually in the file share.
The obvious advantage of this is that SharePoint functionality is available, without jamming all the files in the database.
I was pretty impressed with what I saw. However – I haven’t used the connector myself, in a real-live situation, so I cannot make any comments on it. If you have used it, please feel free to let me know.
