Deepening Collaboration through More Effective Document and Content Management

Deepening Collaboration through More Effective Document and Content Management

Successful collaboration depends on a two-fold approach establishing a corporate culture that encourage teamwork between different departments, while providing the tools and training employees need to effectively utilize collaborative systems. This E-guide covers key tips for managers tasked with implementing great collaboration in an enterprise. Needs Everyone on the By: Pamela DeLoatch, Contributor Senior managers might be convinced that rolling out a new technology initiative is a good idea, but if affected employees aren't sold on it, your big plans will never take off. And user buy-in is particularly essential when you're implementing an enterprise collaboration strategy, since its success depends on the regular use of collaboration tools by employees throughout the organization. Analysts who focus on collaboration and social networking say that project managers in charge of deploying an enterprise collaboration system should take a number of steps before launching any technology. The key is to make sure employees fully embrace the new collaboration strategy and the technology platform behind it. Analysts say that by carefully preparing for a deployment in this way, you'll be better positioned to confirm that all levels of the enterprise understand the importance, expected benefits, and business outcomes of the collaboration system; doing so, in turn, can help ensure that the organization derives optimum benefit from its investment. One of the first steps is to determine whether your company is ready for collaboration. Does the corporate culture already encourage information sharing and working across teams and departments, or are business units silos in which people tend to work individually and secretively? This question Page 2 of 9

should be answered at the beginning of any collaboration project to reveal where an organization currently resides on the collaborative spectrum. "If you have a culture where people are rewarded for hoarding information and being experts without sharing, you're not ready," said Carol Rozwell, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Technology will not make an organization collaborative if it does not already support the notion of teams from different business units working in concert on common projects, Rozwell added. Even if the corporate culture does encourage teamwork between different departments, it's still important to enlist senior managers to help drive the use of an enterprise collaboration system and to make sure that the organization is ready for a rollout, said T.J. Keitt, a senior analyst for Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "Executives set the course for the ship. They must articulate and demonstrate the use," he said. Decide how your organization will use collaboration and enterprise social networking tools. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon and incorporating an enterprise collaboration or social networking platform into business processes just because other companies are doing so, examine how the use of such technologies will benefit your business. Companies sometimes use the "provide and pray" method to roll out a collaboration system, Rozwell said. But that is often unsuccessful because the organization has not established specific business purposes for the collaboration program, and business users are not able to see the expected benefits. Eventually, interest from all sides could wane if there is no clear idea of why the system should be used. First, establish your organization's business objectives, then find the type of system that will support those goals, Keitt said. For example, an organization that is interested in simply establishing internal blogs for employees would likely consider different products than, say, a company that wants to enable customers to communicate with employees. Page 3 of 9

Teach your employees how to use a collaboration system effectively. Once your organization has established clear business reasons for an enterprise collaboration strategy and is ready to deploy a system, it is essential to get employees invested in learning about the technology and how best to use it. Human resources, IT and especially departmental managers need to show workers the value of using the collaboration tools, Keitt said. To help get buy-in from employees, demonstrate how using the technology will benefit them in their daily work, Rozwell advised. Once people see -- in clear and individually tailored ways -- that collaboration tools can save steps, time and effort, they'll understand why they should adopt the new technology and workflow processes, she said. An implementation can be especially effective when business managers point out specific ways that their teams can use collaboration and enterprise social networking technology, Rozwell said. What's more, she added, if managers begin to put essential information only on the new system, employees soon learn that they must use it to remain informed. Take the right measurements. As with every new IT initiative, most organizations want proof that a collaboration program is working. But trying to measure the gains from collaboration and enterprise social networking is difficult. "The focus has been on measuring adoption and usage," said Charlene Li, founder of San Mateo, Calif.-based IT research firm Altimeter Group. But instead of counting status updates, it's more meaningful to study the new relationships and forms of employee-to-employee communication that result from the use of the technology, she said. Ideally, that interaction encourages information sharing, knowledge capture and collective action, and empowers employees in ways that the technology alone cannot accomplish. That's why, Li said, organizations should look at the relationships and communication processes that need improving when considering and planning an enterprise collaboration implementation. Then, Page 4 of 9

instead of measuring the number of conversations or other engagement metrics -- as is commonly done -- companies should track the relationships that form and whether gaps in communication narrow as a result of using a collaboration system; they should do this with the aim of helping achieve business goals, she said. Keep participation moving forward. Even if employees see the benefits of a collaboration system, it is all too easy to slip back into old habits. Continue to offer incentives for using the system and make improvements to collaboration processes, Li said. iness users will begin to see positive changes as collaboration becomes embedded in the organizational workflow and their work becomes more streamlined, she added. Eventually, Li said, using the collaboration system will become the norm as it continues to be enhanced, encouraging users to more readily adopt the technology and new processes, with the ultimate goal of improving business efficiency and performance. About the Author Pamela DeLoatch is a freelance writer in the B2B and technology environments. She has written articles, profiles and case studies for numerous organizations. By: Brien M. Posey, Contributor Let s face it, the usual method of using email to request information from a business partner for a joint project is inefficient. Someone in one organization typically sends a message to someone in the other, then must wait for a response and hope that it contains all of the information they needed. In today s fast-expanding information environment, there are better ways for enterprises to collaborate. Among SharePoint users, extending SharePoint 2010 capabilities beyond organizational walls can enable partners, Page 5 of 9

customers, suppliers and even remote employees to easily and efficiently access the content they require to join forces effectively. One approach is to set up an extranet environment as part of your SharePoint strategy. Authorized users from other organizations can navigate to a SharePoint site on the extranet and retrieve the information themselves. Furthermore, because the entire process is Web-based, it s possible to build SharePoint applications that are designed to make business-to-business collaboration easier. For example, a customer might use a dedicated SharePoint application to access your product inventory to determine what he or she can order. But while opening SharePoint 2010 capabilities and content to customers and other external users can ease workflow issues in collaborative processes, enabling extranet-level collaboration for all concerned comes with challenges. Among them are security issues such as user authentication and access control. Authentication, Web applications Authentication, of course, is the process of confirming a user s identity. SharePoint does not perform its own authentication. Normally, the authentication process is tied to the Kerberos protocol and Microsoft s Active Directory service. That made providing extranet access very challenging in SharePoint 2007, but the entire authentication model was changed in SharePoint 2010, making it easier to extend access to users via an extranet. SharePoint 2010 was designed to use claims-based authentication (though legacy SharePoint 2007 authentication is still supported). The primary benefit of this new authentication model is that it means SharePoint can support multiple authentication providers, an external mechanism that proves the identity of users. That makes it possible to authenticate external users without requiring them to sign in to your Active Directory and without requiring a federated trust, which is a trust relationship between two Active Directory forests. Page 6 of 9

There often will be reasons to make certain content available to external users without exposing an entire SharePoint site to them. For example, a project partner might only need access to a subset of the information that is available on a site. Another common situation is that there might be multiple external users (e.g., different partners, customers or suppliers) who need access to the same content and yet should be shielded from one another. In such situations, the best thing to do is to extend a SharePoint Web application to support different users in different domains. When you develop a Web application in SharePoint, you either create an Internet Information Services (IIS) website that acts as a gateway to the application for users or you choose to use an existing IIS site for that purpose. Since each Web application has its own content database, you can t just build a separate application for every external user that requires access to a particular database. Instead, extend your Web application by linking a single content database to multiple IIS sites. That enables you to set up a separate site for each external user but in a way that lets him or her all access the same content. The process of extending a Web application is relatively straightforward. The SharePoint Central Administration site contains a Create or extend Web application option that can be found in the SharePoint Web Application Management section; full instructions on how to use that option are available in the Microsoft TechNet library. Network topology requirements Microsoft recommends that you make SharePoint resources available to external users by placing its Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) remote access control server at the network perimeter. Forefront UAG allows for the secure publishing of internal Web resources using the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. While it is possible to publish SharePoint resources through other types of firewalls, Forefront UAG offers a few distinct advantages when it comes to SharePoint extranet access. The most important of these advantages is something that Microsoft calls information leakage mitigation. Forefront UAG cleans up client devices by Page 7 of 9

flushing cached content and removing temporary files and cookies in an effort to protect your SharePoint data. Additionally, Forefront UAG supports the use of health-based endpoint authorization, enabling administrators to define a series of security requirements that client systems must adhere to before being granted access to SharePoint resources. For example, it is common to require users to install updated antivirus software on their systems and the Windows Firewall. There are at least six different network topologies available for providing external users with access to SharePoint. The simplest architecture involves placing a Forefront UAG server in the network perimeter and operating all of your SharePoint servers within the corporate network. Although that architecture is cost-effective and easy to deploy, using it means that authenticated external users will access SharePoint servers inside your corporate network. Some organizations prefer to move some SharePoint resources to their perimeter network to prevent external users from connecting directly to corporate servers. content to outside users on an extranet creates security issues that each organization must assess and plan for as part of its ongoing collaboration process. Don t get caught without adequate safeguards and protections when you make your data available beyond the confines of your company. About the Author Brien M. Posey is a Microsoft MVP with two decades of IT experience. Before becoming a freelance technical writer, Posey was chief information officer for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities and a network administrator for insurance companies and the Department of Defense. Page 8 of 9

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