View from HQ of Arlington Economic Development in Ballston, originally uploaded by Webworld Technologies.

This is one great reason to come down to Arlington County to meet with Arlington Economic development — the outstanding view they have of the Arlington high-tech corridor from their offices.

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We celebrated by taking our some of our key staff to a meeting and brunch at the famed Volt Restaurant in Frederick, Maryland.  Here are some photos of the excellent meeting we had there:

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Federal SharePoint Users Group at Microsoft, originally uploaded by Webworld Technologies.

Our meeting with the Federal SharePoint Users Group will be at the Microsoft Friendship Heights location at 2pm on 12/3. Hope to join many of you there!

www.webworldtech.com/blog/see-inside-look-us-nrc-sharepoi…

I just (finally) took enough of a break between the sessions to spend some time on SharePoint 2010.  Here’s a video of the massive hands-on lab they made available:

Microsoft really didn’t mess around.  Loaded on each one of the pretty-decent HP Xeon-based workstations was a set of SharePoint 2010 virtual machines, and on the opposite monitor was the display area for the lab manual for whichever of appx 25 different labs they had available for you to work on.

In addition to being able to put the pieces together from the various conferences and let some of it sink in as I got my hands dirty,  there was another epiphany I had while getting to work with SharePoint 2010 beta, as well as the new Office 2010 and web-based Office 2010 beta:

I had always assumed that the entire reason why Microsoft was creating a web-based Office was to directly compete with Google Docs and provide people with a low-cost, cloud based solution for Office.  Whoa – not the case at all.   Now that full display & editing for all office document types is available right from the browser window, there is so much end-user document management that has been dramatically streamlined.  Even the most simplistic of tasks – where you’re trying to just pop open a document to see if it has the correct title and description and is tagged correctly.  Now that one can just directly open a PowerPoint document in-browser, it’s just a seamless set of clicks which allows you to complete the whole task without opening any other windows or tabs, or even leaving your SharePoint navigation.  It really allows (finally) Office documents to participate in the web UX in a totally seamless way – just how we’ve always wanted them to.  And with SharePoint as your workspace for dealing with all forms of Office communication, it makes it so much more compelling to just standardize on.  

Chris started off with some fun facts on Bing Maps – ones I didn’t know, like:

• Bing maps is 2 petabytes of tile & vector data.  I thought that was impressive – especially since the first satellite imaging product I ever saw (waaaay before Google Maps) was the old Microsoft Terraserver demo, which originally (back in 1998) showed that you could actually store a whopping FULL TERABYTE in the “new SQL server 7 beta”.  Now, Bing Maps is over 2 thousand times larger. 
• 3D cities are created by flyovers & lidar – totally created from software.  Nearly zero of the 3D buildings you see in Bing Maps were created with 3Dvia – most were created by aircraft flying over the cities, doing 3D lidar imaging of the city, and then making models of that which textures can be draped over.

  Also, related to that, I asked Chris afterwards how to get 3D buildings in Washington, D.C. Metro, as they’re conspicuously missing.  The answer there is that apparently the government does not want detailed 3D models of the capitol area created.  (??) So, the 3D data is created, and is also available from 3rd-party ISV’s, but will not be posted on the public Bing Maps site.

  So, that’s your answer why DC is flat, when even places like Nashville are fully-rendered in 3D.
   

• Microsoft does Parcel-centroid geocoding – able to put a pushpin in the middle of a land parcel

Now, in terms of integrating this with SharePoint data – I talked with some folks at IDV Solutions at the expo, who had the sexiest SharePoint visualization product.  Here’s a video of that here:

One of those is this:  An experimental feature of SharePoint 2010 is integrating in data from your source control repository into MySite.  Meaning, instead of just “friending” other employees, one could be a “friend” of source files or projects, so that if files change in those projects, that you can be notified, can discuss them, etc.

I don’t know about you, but SVN has saved my butt more times than I can count.  However, unfortunately, many of those “save my butt” moments has happened way after the fact – where a silly change was published that broke everything, or where someone mistakenly commits a change that breaks something, and then the files are then published a month later and everyone looks around in bewilderment as “I haven’t touched the site in months!!”. 

Well, if you were to integrate social alerts & discussion into your SVN or other version control system, you could then nip these problems in the bud – big time.  One could get an instant alert when a change is made to a project you’re working on, and then could discuss this with the person if there was inadequate information in their commit log.

Or, how about taking the concept MUCH bigger, and using SharePoint for external sites, and using it to manage major open-source projects with an open-access SVN repo.  Brilliant!

In talking with @venkyv after the talk, he said that the feature is still in initial work & testing, but by all means – it has my vote, and I hope it makes it into the RTM version of SharePoint 2010! 

* Whoa – SP2010 can be used as a drop-in replacement for social media measurement and handling using tag-based social bookmarking combined with workflow

Amazing Power:  There is just staggering power now built into SharePoint designer for developing extremely custom workflows that handle basically any conceivable scenario.  No code required and a very straightforward approach for specifying start & endpoints, triggers, alternate paths, auto-approvals, and just about anything else you can think of that can be done with a computer and a network.  

Visio Integration: An amazing plus is to be able to import and export workflows straight out of Visio, so that one can simply visualize the workflow in Visio, and then pull that right into SharePoint and then let it rip.  

Mobile:  With all of the ways that SharePoint can now be rapidly used to replace hardcopy workflows and other “understood workflows” (i.e. ones that are known about, but never actually formalized, documented or recorded, like many development teams), that immediately brings to mind the new mobile focus of SharePoint, which unfortunately wasn’t demo’ed in this track.

With the fact that SharePoint now works with XHTML-compliant, cross-browser web parts, one could now easily create SharePoint workflows that utilize handheld computers to be able to allow people to interact with the approval process. 

Sometimes the particle being dealt with is a document, in which case the traditional SharePoint desktop already handles everything out of the box.  But what about a doctor’s office where you’re routing people through the office, and want to formalize your workflows there?  

Now, with the combination of these sorts of rich design tools, plus the ability to tie in little iPhone or Windows Mobile devices as input & interaction mechanisms for the workflow, literally any workflow can now be monitored, controlled, analyzed and run inexpensively and quickly using SharePoint 2010.

Brilliant.

My first impression of the stats package for SharePoint was sort of a “finally!” so that there could be some means of seeing if people were using your SharePoint site without having to go to web logs or some sort of 3rd-party analytics package.  But then, after the analytics break-out session, it became pretty apparent to me that this was a real powerful “sleeper” feature that is really a lot more important and profound than most anyone else besides someone like Avinash Kaushik might think. 

First of all, yes – it will be nice for content stewards and IT managers to be able to use the new build-in analytics package to tell if people are logging on to their SharePoint site or not.  However, the value is a bit deeper here, and that is that SharePoint – by original design – is a distributed content platform, where the people who really care whether or not content is being viewed is the people who created the content themselves, or the content stewards that really want to make sure that the information is being distributed around the company. 

In addition to the reporting console features that admins can use, there is also an analytics web part that can then be packaged back into the site, and can be used to highlight popular tags, highly-rated files, and other such analytics data, which can then be visible for all SharePoint users.

Making this sort of analytical data broadly available then enhances and drives the whole SharePoint ecosystem within the company, as then everyone can rapidly see what sorts of things are popular, or what sorts of things are being searched for a lot which they have information for.

The presenter at this breakout had a nice slide that depicted the phenomena:

NOTE:  Flickr is currently down right now, so I’ll post more photos of this event once Flickr comes back up.

Just attended a great breakout session at the Sharepoint 2009 Conference on Social Media, and the business case for social media in the enterprise.  The person presenting at the conference was a Daniel Rasmus, Director of Business Insights at Microsoft.  Per him, his job is to utilize advanced crystal ball methodology to give as best an insight on the future as possible, and as such he had some great things to say on the place of social media in the workplace.

First off, he noted that you can’t stop social media in the enterprise – if nothing else, smartphones make such a thing impossible.  So, firewalling off Twitter and Facebook and such is a silly exercise. 

I’ll go down some other bullets from his talk, and insert some of his slides as well:

84% of people don’t / can’t measure ROI from social computing.  Why?  The probably don’t know how, as it’s a bit different than the traditional ROI calculation.

What is ROI for Soc Computing?

• Quality of dialog
• Reduced storage costs due to centralized /de-duplicated storage
• Communal information – tap in to corporate knowledge better
• More rapid peer-to-peer computing
• Collaborative problem solving
• There’s a lot of BI that you can’t easily abstract with a chart or a spreadsheet – it’s a question that gets answered by SOMEBODY and that’s social networking to solve that
• Decreased time-to-value for new employees

Note: Click-throughs are not enough from viral video, need to give the visitor value.

Things that get placed in social media can have a long tail – i.e. a magazine ad goes away when the mag dies, but some things that are placed in the social media space keep delivering after even years.

Posts in the social media space are usually “small atoms”.  I.e. you don’t usually see someone pop up on Facebook and say, “here is the 67 page strategic plan for my company, what do you think?”  Usually more like, “OMG WTF??”

Differences between Enterprise & Personal Social Media:

No problem with “migrating from MySpace to Facebook”, but migrating from legacy systems is a big deal in the enterprise.  Also, enterprise is very document-centric, so one then does have much more of a hump to cross to implement in the business space.

Also, you need to manage how social media is treated in the corporate culture, as there will be a fear that if in corporate knowledge management, if you share all you know, then you are either “not doing your job” as you’re ‘not working’, or you won’t share all you know because then you won’t be necessary anymore.

Social Media:  Be strategic about it.  Don’t just do silly & random experiments, work out a strategy and do it.

And if you don’t build it, they will go someplace else.

Risks of not adopting social computing:

Steve Ballmer introduced SharePoint 2010 at the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas today.  While I’m still doing some postprocessing on his opening speech (which is a great commentary on the duty of IT professionals and SharePoint engineers to really affect the global economic situation) he had equally smart words to say on the use of Social Media in the corporate space.

As the last convention that Webworld Technologies attended was the Gov 2.0 Expo in Washington, DC, this is an intriguing look on another angle toward getting Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 principles inserted into the communications media used by government and big business alike.