Our move to SharePoint / Social Sites 2010 Part I

So I’m a little late in writing this.  NewsGator officially flipped the switch almost three months ago from SharePoint 2007 with Social Sites to SharePoint 2010 with Social Sites.  (For those of you out there that don’t use SharePoint or Social Sites, don’t worry – I may use some product specific terms but a lot of the concepts will apply no matter your collaboration platform.)  In my last post, “You Are not Alone”, I wrote about the steps we were taking in our migration planning.  Here are the steps as we had them planned:

 

• Step 1 - Work with the lines of business to understand their needs.  Were they being met before or are there things we could do better?  If they keep existing team sites we will set expectations and deadlines on content clean up.
• Step 2 - Evaluate the current communities, review statistics, and combine, close, create where it make sense.  Set expectations with community managers on content clean up.
• Step 3 - Write governance plan.  We were a startup and our intranet kept growing without any planned structure, roles, or responsibilities except for some internal volunteer work on the technical side.  If we put a better structure in place it should take us much longer to make a mess of things.  (We have an added challenge in that we do testing of alpha and beta code on our intranet.)
• Step 4 - Work closely with our technical resources.  They have done great work on supporting our intranet but a key to a successful E2.0 deployment is having IT and business work together.  One without the other is like peanut butter without jelly.
• Step 5 - Educate and communicate.  Have you heard the one about the cobbler’s children having no shoes?  NewsGator employees often run around barefoot when it comes to what we are doing on our own intranet.  We will run a number of lunch ‘n learns to cover the new 2010 capabilities and any restructuring we’ve done of the site.  In addition we’ll keep everyone updated as we release new features.

In this post I’m going to share how we accomplished steps 1 and 2 along with another piece that I threw in at the last minute that I can’t believe I almost skipped – user feedback.  These three steps helped us re-imagine what our new intranet looked like and how the users interact with it.

Talk with the Lines of Business regarding their existing team sites.  In our company (and what I see at almost every company with SharePoint) team sites are typically departmental in nature and are a place to go to get authoritative resources.  They are not by nature collaborative spaces where everyone can contribute.  There is a need for a place where you know that all of the content is authoritative.  Can you imagine an HR collaborative community where anyone can contribute their own version of the employee policies guide?  So my technical counterpart, Jason, and I met with the different departments to discuss their current team sites.  How are they using them (are they using them), does a team site continue to make sense or does a collaborative community make more sense, do they have stale content on their site that should be cleaned up, are there any changes they’d like to make before our migration?  We ended up moving some team sites to communities, doing away with others, and keeping about half of our existing team sites with some guidelines to the owners for cleaning up stale content.

Evaluate current communities.  (By communities I mean NewsGator Social Sites communities.)  Because we had an open community creation model and continue to have a fun, open culture at NewsGator, we had a lot of communities.  They tend to run the gamut from customer-based communities to the wine-lovers community.  Every quarter I run an audit of communities and inactivate those with no members, no recent activity, etc.  For migration we ended up purging half of our communities (about 150).  We wanted to migrate only clean, current data and sites (community or team site).

From an end-user perspective our integration of Social Sites within SharePoint has always been key because it means our users have always had ONE intranet.  That means just one place to go, which we all know is an important part of adoption.   But within that intranet we had siloed our team sites from our communities.  If you wanted to go to a community you navigated one way and if you wanted to go to a team site you navigated a different way.  So what we decided to do was simplify navigation so that users wouldn’t have to remember if they are going to a team site or a community, they navigate to that “place” they need in the same way.  We also activated a feature so that all the activities from a team site would flow into the users’ personal activity streams in the same way that activities from their communities would.  I thought this was a fabulous idea – why do the user need to remember if a place they need is technically a team site or a community?  This was a big change from our 2007 implementation as well as a big change from a traditional intranet.  So we decided to hold a focus group of our users to confirm this was a good idea.

In this focus group we showed them a mockup up of the new, simplified combo navigation and it was a hit.  But what I hadn’t thought about nor did I expect was another key piece to navigation.  Almost unanimously the users wanted the landing page of our new 2010 intranet to be their My Newsfeed page.  With the addition of NewsGator Social  Sites the My Newsfeed page is where the user microblogs, sees his activity stream, and navigates to all of his places (be they communities or team sites).  I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it but it made a lot more sense to have people land on an individualized page rather than a more corporate landing page.  Our users certainly see more value and as a result I’ve seen higher usage rates.  Holding the focus group was an important step for us to take in order to make sure we were designing the user experience for our users rather than what the migration team (a mix of business and IT) had built out in our heads.  I almost missed it by not holding a focus group (pressed for time you know) but I’m SO glad I didn’t.

In the next blog post I’ll talk about how we handled the other steps involved with our migration.  The steps I just wrote about were so key to our migration and I see them skipped much of the time.  Too many companies (and I see more and more planning their migration to SharePoint 2010) are strictly looking at migration from a technical aspect.  Don’t forget to take advantage of this opportunity to clean up and re-imagine the way you are doing things and serving your internal customers.  I look at it like when you have to move homes.  Not many people like to move.  But, it is a great chance to go through all of your clutter, get rid of it, and have a fresh start.

What have you done as part of a migration process to ensure a fresh start for your users?

Comments

[Tania]

Good post... Thanks for sharing this info with us.

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[Astried Djafar]

waiting for part II

[Christy Schoon]

I finally got it done, Astried. Would love feedback. have you or are you migrating to 2010 soon? If so, have you planned on anything we missed at NewsGator?

[lexapro online]

This is really the great way you discuss this kind of topic. Good job.

[Sally Gomez]

Thank you for taking the time to post this information, it is really informative.