Sharepoint Saturday was a hit

On Saturday I attended a great event, Sharepoint Saturday, at Microsoft's offices located in Alpharetta, Ga. The weather was perfect yet the event was packed which I think says something positive about the growing popularity of Sharepoint. The event was free of charge with a number of sponsors paying the costs and top notch speakers many of whom flew or drove from out of town on their own dime to present sessions. There were so many great sessions going on simultaneously I had a difficult time choosing which to attend. The first one I attended had a long title, "Building the next Generation of Sharepoint Web Parts - how to leverage JQuery and Silverlight" presented by Phil Wicklund. Phil gave an easy to understand overview of JQuery along with some great tips for getting started...and demonstrated how to easily include JQuery in sharepoint web parts. Phil stressed checking out existing plugins first at http://plugins.jquery.com before writing anything from scratch in JQuery....good tip.  

I actually didn't stay for the 2nd half of Phil's presentation on Silverlight instead I moved over to Dux Raymond's talk on "5 Ways to Enhance Sharepoing Site Usability" where I caught 3 out of the 5 ways.  Sorry I didn't write them down I'm waiting on the slide deck. 

For the next set of sessions I split my time between Jason Storey "Building a Data Centric Portal in Sharepoint" where Jason demonstrated using the data view web part in Sharepoint Designer and "Integrating SQL Server 2005  Reporting Services with Sharepoint" where Chris Regan walked us through step by step the ardious task of installing and configuring reporting services and sharepoint to work together. Interesting that the reporting services configuration wizard sometimes "lies" to you and other times simply doesn't work without manual intervention...whew...it's going to be much tougher than I thought getting reporting services working with my sharepoint server but at least now I know. 

A nice deli box lunch was provided by one of the sponsors and I made the mistake of finding a shady spot in the beautiful outdoors to enjoy it. Which started me thinking what a great day it is and how much I would like to attend the Atlanta Dogwood Festival. I resolve to attend one more session before heading home and to the festival. 

For my last session I picked "Business Intelligence - Build a Dashboard with Excel Services and KPIs" by Jeremy Minich. In the past I've built a BI dashboard in Sharepoint without really understanding all of the steps and have struggled getting a couple of things to work so I thought I would benefit from seeing an expert walk through the process. And I was correct as Jeremy did an outstanding job explaining the various BI features in Sharepoint and demonstrated how to setup dashboards and KPI's step by step exactly what I needed to see. 

I missed a couple of sessions and the give-a-ways at the end of the day by leaving early but I still had a great time at Sharepoint Saturday and accomplished what I needed...a new burst of sharepoint inspiration as well as specific "how to" knowledge of new technologies and techniques.

Thanks to Microsoft and all the other sponsors,  speakers,  and volunteer's who made Sharepoint Saturday a success. I'm looking forward to the next one....and hoping for bad weather on event day.   

 

 

 

2009 Atlanta CodeCamp

The fifth Atlanta Codecamp was held at Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, GA on March 14th. Codecamp is always held on a Saturday and lasts all day....8am until 6pm. This year the weather in Atlanta cooperated...cold and rainy...so it wasn't too hard giving up my Saturday to attend. Highlights for me included the Doug Ware session about running Sharepoint server on Amazon Web Services, and other sessions on Intro to Azure, alternate membership providers for Sharepoint, and ASP.NET 4.0 Ajax. Even with the bad economy there was a pile of swag to give away at the end of the day. I was lucky enough to win a 5 lb book on Sharepoint 2007 development. Codecamp is a wonderful event attended by passionate coders who can't think of anything better than spending all day Saturday soaking up new knowledge and making new tech friends. Looking forward to next year. 

Health IT and the 2009 Stimulus Package

A Health IT TAG (Technology Association of Georgia) event was held on Thursday March 12th 7:30am until 9am and was well worth the $20 admission price.  A panel of experts provided insight into the stimulus and issues associated with Health IT. On the previous day (March 11th) I also attended a private lecture by a top Georgia Tech professor on the topic of Health care, Health IT, and specifically electronic medical records. These two meetings were both revelations to me that drove home the urgency of why we have to gain control over health care costs in the US and why it has to happen right now and the role played by health IT in our health care system. 

Highlights of the two meetings include: 

Health care costs have been rising much faster than inflation. Today they cost 2.5 trillion and by 2015 will cost 4 trillion, which is the entire GDP of Japan. The US pays far more for health care per person than any other industrial country and yet by all measures we are ranked between 23 and 30 in terms of outcome and quality. So we spend more and get less. Our system of health care can best be described as a complex adaptive system where the various agents attempt to optimize benefits for themselves often at odds with the other agents in the system. In other words nobody is in charge. 

While cost of administration is 30% in private health care insurers it is only 3% in medicare and even less in the Veterans Administration hospital system. 

Today the US government pays around 47% of health care in America and if you crank in tax breaks enjoyed by companies for paying private insurance premiums the government portion is even higher. 

Life expectancy is governed 40% by behavior (smoking, diet, exercise), 30% by genetics, 20% by environment, and 10% by health care delivery. Since the 1970's when life expectancy increased dramatically from 1900 until the mid 1970's average life expectancy has not increased significantly in spite of the inventions of modern medical technologies during this period. 

44,000 to 98,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical mistakes in hospitals. 

Medical knowledge doubles every eight years and there is no requirement for doctors to "keep up" even if it were possible to do so. 

The chance of a doctor prescribing the "best" treatment is 50% and in chronic care only 25% of patients are on the right treatment. 

75% of all health care is to treat chronic disease and 90% of medicare cost is treating chronic disease. Half of all chronic disease is preventable. 

Evidence based practice (EBP) promotes the collection, interpretation, and integration of valid, important and applicable patient-reported, clinician-observed, and research-derived evidence. The best available evidence, moderated by patient circumstances and preferences, is applied to improve the quality of clinical judgments and facilitate cost-effective care.

EBP represents a solution to the problem of prescribing wrong or less than optimal treatment for chronic illness, and provides a scientific basis for ordering tests...versus ordering tests just to save doctor time or as a defense against malpractice. 

The only way to achieve EBP is through the use of electronic medical records. Without electronic records the data to support EBP simply does not exist. 

It is this relationship between EBP, EMRs, and the subsequent improvement to diagnosis and treatment that was my ephiney during these two meetings. Now it all makes sense...the promanent role of Health IT particulary electronic medical records in the stimulus package. 

In other countries with far better healthcare at far lower cost than the USA, penetration of EMR systems is nearly 100% among physicians of all practice sizes. 

Healthcare is literally going to eat our economy if we don't do something to stop it beginning right now, today. Healthcare is the biggest threat to our economic well being in this century. And all evidence points to electroic medical records as a major piece of the solution. 

 

CloudForce Tour

Salesforce held the first 2009 CloudForce seminar in Atlanta at the Intercontential Hotel Buckhead on March 5th from 2:30 until 5pm with a reception from 5 until 6. I always enjoy catching up on the latest salesforce features and success stories as I'm a big admirer of Salesforce as an early entry into cloud computing and the success they have had. At this event I didn't really hear alot of new information. It was more of a refresher to remind Atlanta customers and potential customers of the value and opportunities available from the Salesforce platform. I get very excited about Force.com as a development platform along with appexchange to provide an easy vehicle for commericalizing applications. 

I do wish Force.com would reduce their monthly subscription fee to be more in line with other cloud application development platforms. But as always I get fired up hearing about the success of force.com from customers...who represent very large as well as very small companies. Which points to a major characteristic and advantage of cloud computing...the smallest company has access to the exact same technologies that are available to the very largest companies for creating innovation and value. 

As usual the reception from 5 to 6 was fantastic with free beer and wine and hot h'ordeurves. I love Salesforce receptions.    

The State of Python

Python Atlanta (PyAtl) got off to a great start in 2009 with their January meeting. Steve Holden, chairman of the Python Software Foundationand the author of the book "Python Web Programming", gave an informative and entertaining talk on the state of the Python community along with some good insight into the workings and objectives of the PSF. As an amusing sidenote Steve mentioned the reason he's in Atlanta this week teaching a workshop on Microsoft Sharepoint.  Another great presentation was given by Chris Johnson,  owner of Atlanta business ifPeople, on the Plone content-managment system. Plone is a python based CMS built on top of the Zope application server. As usual the pyatl meeting started at 7:30pm and was over by around 9:30pm. The meeting is held in a convenient venue the GTRI Food Processing Technology building on the edge of the Georgia Tech campus. 

Discovering eDiscovery

Yesterday I attended a 1/2 day seminar on a new subject for me called eDiscovery. The event was located in the Westen Peachtree Plaza in downtown Atlanta. The speaker was Randy Kahn, an author and consultant specializing in legal and compliance issues of information technology. It wasn't a fun event but I did learn a couple of things in this area. Probably the most important was that unless you are a brokerage company then you have no legal requirement to retain email records of employees....which was news to me. Legal problems around email can arise if a lawsuit is filed against your company and past emails exist either in backups or retention systems. Lawyers can request access to those emails and if the old emails are subsequently deleted in the normal course of backup cycling for example the company can be charged with destruction of evidence.  So the key points here are that the emails EXIST and a lawsuit has started. If the emails don't exist then there's not a problem. Of course the company may loose a case where the emails would have provided evidence in it's favor. But my point is the IT manager isn't legally responsible for emails that have been deleted in the normal course of doing business. Good to know. Another thing I learned is it's important for a company to have a record retention policy in place the defines what kind of documents (contracts for example) will be retained for how long and making sure employees have read the policy. And finally one thing Mr Kahn stressed over and over so I think we all got it was that record retention is NOT backups...which is how most companies handle record retention. Hopefully I won't ever have to be involved in eDiscovery, which is going back through electronic records to recover information that pertains to a lawsuit. If I do then I hope my company employs a real record retention system versus relying on backup tapes. Next subject!  

Jive Software seminar on social media strategy

Today I attend the Jive seminar on social media strategy and thought I would try blogging live during the event...taking notes directly into my blog just to see how well the approach works. 

First the seminar  is packed with around 60 attendees. Just about every seat is taken so they managed a pretty good turnout for the event. The venue is Twelve Hotel on West Peachtree beside the Civic Center Marta station...a nice botique hotel that provides free wifi in the meeting rooms for a change. I'm so tired of those big downtown Atlanta hotels that do not provide free wifi. One observation...people are dressed very "upscale" compared to the typical IT event I'm used to attending. Not sure what this means just an observation. Also there are as many women attending as men...another difference from the typical IT event. Social media is not like traditional IT maybe? 

The presentation is being led by Barry Tallis. Starting off with a hilarious video of a couple spliting up because they don't communiate one on one but instead the guy uses traditional marketing communication channels like a web site and brochure.  Barry says social media is about taking your normal everyday social interactions and putting them online. He isn't talking specifically about Jive Software but instead is keeping the disucssion focused on how to build a social media strategy for your organization...off to a great start. 

I like the idea that people find your site via searches on content that is generated in conversations. It's all about the content and specifically content generated by site members NOT by the corporate marketing department. 

Here's one excellent reason to encourage your site visitor to become site members...survey shows members purchase twice as often and 5X more than the average visitor. So you want to turn those visitors into members ASAP.  

I like the case studies portion of the seminar especially when Premier Global Services discussed issues around creation of their new social media community, PGiConnect. Their biggest challenge is one I am faced with often, asking internal staff to began posting community content to the site. They gave a number of useful tips on how to get internal staff engaged such as using rewards based profiling with expertise searching. Results so far are the staff is posting and are even somewhat competitive about posting...who has highest number of posts for example. One of the major concerns they had to overcome was "we're gonna let people drive up and have conversations with us without controls" which is a major concern I hear from people considering implementing a social media site. The answer to the question, Why launch PGiConnect? is that it's going to make it easier for customers to do business with us. Something every business or government agency would aspire to I'm guessing. The biggest risk is "what if they don't show up?" (customers that is). 

One thing they did to help insure success is creation of an editorial calendar and tying mbo's to the internal core team with expectations for contributing content. They also identified other sites where core team members are expected to contribute content with expectations that these external sites will link back to pgiconnect. 

Some tips for success are (1) If operations becomes the primary creator of content then subtantial training is needed.  (2) If someone starts a discussion it is really important to engage that person to reward them.  (3) Mandated usage by internal staff and also rewarded them for using the site. 

One benefit discovered by internal staff is it allows them to speak directly with tech staff of customers thus bypassing marketing. How do you get non tech people to engage? By understanding your core business and putting the community right in the middle of the process stream. Have a very specific set of goals when you build your community. And you may have multiple communities. 

Have a content plan...decide how to keep content coming in. When asking what and why are we building the first question is "what's in it for them (the customer)?" Why would they come and why would they come back? 2nd question and focus is on the type of visitor...are they technology or business types for example. What activities are they doing or expected to do? Which demographic is most willing to create content and share? 

There are five approaches to engaging the community. One approach is to sit back and lisetn. Another approach is where you are involved in the discussion. Third is energizing where you proactively push info to the community. 4th is where you provide learning and support. Last approach is embracing where you ask the question "what do you want us to do for you?"

 Last thing to think about is the technology. What characteristics are most valuable in helping you achieve your goals and plans.  

Different types of communities are Loyalty, Enthusiast, Innovation, and Partner. 

Plan user workflows. People need to understand what to do and where to go. Make sure it's clear and simple.  If a person comes in and they don't know what to do then they are gone. You need a content programming schedule. Create Polls maybe every day or week.  Other good ideas include tech talk,  seeding the conversations, and establishment of a 3rd party blog. 

Plan the lifecycle of a successful community by opening a step at a time to establish a certain tone and foundation up front.  You want people to understand the personality. Know that you will have peaks and valleys. Target the right people at the right time and constantly promote. Know that your community is going to evolve. 

Evangelist, manager, moderator are the three key roles necessary to create a successful community. Evangelist represents to internal members...creates a governance model for communities within the organization. Communication manager is inward facing into the community...keeps track of pulse of the community...knows what's going on. Moderator polices, removes inappropriate content, and contacts internal staff to respond to posts. The moderator should monitor content daily. 

Finally you want employees to be visible and real to the community with real names and faces.