Author joannecklein

AIP Labels- Keep it Simple (or KISS) (1)Blog Post: 2 minute read

I often give Information Management/Data Protection presentations to discuss the new capabilities existing in Office 365 to help manage it. This typically covers Azure Information Protection (AIP), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and the new Retention Labels. It has become clear to me that a new problem is starting to emerge in this space and for some reason, not many are talking about it. For several years, many of us have been grappling with the concept of “When to Use What Tool” in Office 365 and in fact, an entire school of thought has emerged to answer that question. Whitepapers, blog posts, infographics and presentations have been created covering this misunderstood, and often confusing, aspect of Office 365.

I believe once we get a handle on that issue, another one is hot on its heels. I call it the “When to Choose What Label” dilemma. For organizations scrambling to comply with the new regulatory requirements of GDPR for May 2018 or just needing to comply with their own corporate or industry regulations, this issue is far more concerning than the “When to Use What” question ever was simply due to the potential of some very real negative (financial) consequences if not done right. Let me explain. Continue reading “When to Choose What Label in Office 365 – the new dilemma!” →

When to Choose What Label in Office 365 – the new dilemma!

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Blog post: 3 minute read.

Whether an organization has been using SharePoint for a while or just starting down that road, many will still have large shared network drives holding some content that should rightfully belong in SharePoint. Migrating this content is a challenging and messy task; one that many of us are being asked to do. I am neck-deep in one of these migrations right now and have discovered there are expectations this process should be straightforward and therefore quick. In my experience, this is usually not the case.

For those unfamiliar with the notorious Lucille Ball skit pictured above, here is a link. I don’t mean to suggest wrapping chocolates is like SharePoint migrations, however the conveyer belt analogy partly holds true. The migration process is not a cookie-cutter, conveyer belt one even if people perceive it to be that way. Each migration is unique and requires up-front planning, preparation and therefore time to do it right. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of ending up with a SharePoint mess.

In this post I’ll share my 10 tips for getting thru these messy migrations in a more controlled manner – one that will allow your organization to realize the benefits of having this content stored in SharePoint as opposed to a network drive.

Applies to: SharePoint On-premises, SharePoint Online.

TLDR? I get it, here’s the list…

  1. Get buy-in from your Leadership team.
  2. Don’t just “lift and shift”.
  3. Get a lay of the land.
  4. Clean-up what’s there.
  5. Not everything belongs in SharePoint.
  6. Work with the team to build their new home.
  7. Put your Information Management/Architecture hat on.
  8. Know your migration options.
  9. Break old habits.
  10. Demonstrate ROI.

Continue reading “10 Tips for Navigating Shared Network Drive Migrations to SharePoint” →

10 Tips for Navigating Shared Network Drive Migrations to SharePoint

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SPSBelgiumI am happy to announce I have been accepted to speak at the 2017 SharePoint Saturday event in Brussels, Belgium on October 21. This will be my first trip to Belgium and I am really looking forward to experiencing the culture and meeting new people while I’m there.

The SharePoint Saturday event’s keynote, The Citizen Development Manifesto, will be delivered by Mike Fitzmaurice. The lineup of speakers and sessions looks fantastic – check out this link to get all the details (SharePoint Saturday Belgium sessions).

Travelling to Belgium will be an exciting, new travel adventure for me. I have a personal connection to both Belgium and the Netherlands – two places I will be visiting while in Europe. Read my blog post “My Tech Travels and some Canadian History“, to learn why I’m honoured to be able to visit both of these countries.

I will be presenting a session on Practical Adoption Strategies for Office 365

Synopsis: Office 365 is being rolled out worldwide to organizations of all sizes. Although each is unique and has different needs, they all have one need in common: high end-user adoption. One of the key aspects of Office 365 is collaboration and the numerous services deployed to support it. Ironically, although many of the features are built with ease of use in mind, if you’ve ever watched a first-time user of Office 365 you’ll soon realize it’s not always intuitive for end-users to know how it all works together. To realize the benefits of Office 365, we need to ensure it is fully adopted across the organization and second-nature in users’ day-to-day collaborative work processes. Although you can take the “wing it/organic” approach, you may not get the results you are hoping for.

What are some strategies and tactics you can use to stack the odds in your favour for a high degree of adoption in your organization? I’ve come up with a 3-step strategy and some specific tactics for each so your end-users can thrive in Office 365!

Click here to register now! If you’re at the event, make sure you find me and say hi! I’ll be a long way from home and would love to meet some new Belgian friends!

I will update this post with the link to my presentation after Saturday’s event.

-JCK

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2017

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Web

I am thrilled and honoured to be invited to speak at the SharePoint Unite conference in beautiful Haarlem, Netherlands on October 24-26, 2017. This will be my first trip to the Netherlands and I am really looking forward to experiencing the culture and meeting new people while I’m there.

Travelling to the Netherlands is an exciting, new travel adventure for me. I have a personal connection to both Belgium and the Netherlands – two places I will be visiting while in Europe. Read my blog post “My Tech Travels and some Canadian History“, to learn about why I’m so honoured to be able to visit both of these countries.

This is a great opportunity for me to share my knowledge and experience with others in the European SharePoint/O365 community as well as learn from an impressive lineup of speakers for the event.

If you’re going to be there please find me and say hi. It would be great to meet in person. Click here to register for the event. Make sure you use my discount code, SPKRJOKL10, for 10% off!

I am presenting 2 sessions:

Office 365: Practical Adoption Strategies

Office 365 is being rolled out worldwide to organizations of all sizes. Although each is unique and has different needs, they all have one thing in common: the need for end-user adoption. One of the key aspects of Office 365 is collaboration and the numerous services that are deployed to support it. Ironically, although many of the features are built with ease of use in mind, if you’ve ever watched a first-time user of Office 365, you’ll soon realize it’s not always intuitive for end-users to know how it all works together. To realize the benefits of Office 365, we need to ensure it is fully adopted across the organization and second-nature in users’ day-to-day collaborative work processes. Although you can take the “wing it/organic” approach, you may not get the results you are hoping for. What are some strategies and tactics you can use to stack the odds in your favour for a high degree of adoption in your organization? I’ll share my 3-step strategy and some specific tactics for each so that your end-users can fly with Office 365!

Information Management and Governance in Office 365

What does Information Management and Governance mean within the context of Office 365? What are the tools that allow us to manage it? In this session, we’ll talk about the traditional ways we’ve approached this discipline and how the new collaboration world is disrupting this.

Organizations need to empower employees to reap the benefits of new collaboration tools in the digital workplace, but they can’t compromise the security, compliance, and protection of corporate assets while doing it.

Capabilities are being rolled out to help organizations keep both managed and unmanaged content secure and compliant throughout Office 365. We’ll talk about setting organizations up for success on all fronts from an Information Management perspective.

I hope to see you there!

SharePoint Unite 2017

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SharePoint and Office 365 have expanded my world in ways I never expected.

Not only have they given me tremendous career opportunities and personal growth, they’ve now also given me a chance of a lifetime to visit somewhere my Father could only dream of visiting and has left me feeling both humble and grateful.

Recently I was honoured to learn I would be travelling to Belgium and the Netherlands for several speaking engagements. This trip has special meaning to me…

D-Day-Landing

D-Day landing 1944

My father comes from a large family of 11 brothers and sisters. His oldest brother, Roy, joined the Canadian army in July of 1941. My Uncle Roy served overseas in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and Holland and took part in the liberation of Holland, Belgium and France.

In 1944-45, his military records show he was in the North West Europe Campaign which started with landings in Normandy and ended with the German military surrender of all German forces in Holland. In my uncle’s words “the liberation of Holland was much different than the others as the people of Holland were starving and in dire straits”. Canadians were seen as heroes and to this day there is a strong connection and respect between the people of Canada and the Netherlands.

My Uncle Roy returned home to Canada in June 1945 and has since passed away. In June of this year, his son (my cousin) attended the D-Day commemorative ceremonies in France on behalf of his father for the 73rd anniversary of the landing and the battle of Normandy. It was a tremendously proud and somber moment.

I am honoured to be able to visit both Belgium and the Netherlands after all of these years and feel grateful for the role my Uncle and many others played in their liberation. I hope to visit some of the historic places during my time there.

-JCK

My Tech Travels and some Canadian History

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by Joanne C KleinBlog post: 8 minute read
Date last verified: August 2017

I know what you’re thinking… hasn’t this topic been covered enough already Joanne? Please hear me out…I’ve been around the SharePoint space long enough to have read at least 30-40 different blog posts talking about why the list view threshold limit exists in the first place, correct ways to provision libraries so you don’t run into it and how you can set yourself up for success if you exceed it. Heck, I’ve even written one of them! 😉

Here is the official link from Microsoft on managing them (Manage large lists and libraries in SharePoint) and an important excerpt from it explaining where the number 5000 comes from:

To minimize database contention SQL Server, the back-end database for SharePoint, often uses row-level locking as a strategy to ensure accurate updates without adversely impacting other users who are accessing other rows. However, if a read or write database operation, such as a query, causes more than 5,000 rows to be locked at once, then it’s more efficient for SQL Server to temporarily lock the entire table until the database operation is completed.

NOTE: The actual number is not always 5,000, and can vary depending on your site, the amount of activity in the database, and your site’s configuration.

When the whole table is locked, it prevents other users from accessing the table. If this happens too often, then users will experience a degradation of system performance. Therefore, thresholds and limits are essential to help minimize the impact of resource-intensive database operations and balance the needs of all users.

I understand the technical reason behind the threshold limit but I still wasn’t satisfied with how well I understood the end-user experience. I suspect there are others out there who, like me, weren’t exactly sure what an end-user would see once the threshold limit was exceeded. Yes, I knew it would throw an error but I wanted to test out Microsoft’s recommendations in the link above to see if I could get around the limit if I designed a library using them. I not only wanted to document my observations but since my Office 365 tenants seem to be straddling both classic and modern worlds right now, I also wanted to capture some Modern library screenshots and document what the differences, if any, were between it and a Classic one. Continue reading “SharePoint Online List View Threshold” →

SharePoint Online List View Threshold

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2 Places for Office 365 Retention Policies (1)Blog Post: 1 minute read

Back in May 2017 I wrote a blog post titled Office 365: Certificate of Destruction where I talked about the requirement for a retention review process and a Certificate of Destruction for any content being disposed of within Office 365. This is a must-have requirement for any Information Management team I’ve worked with and, at the time, was a gap in the product.

I suggested an idea on the Uservoice channel called Certificate of destruction. It received 51 votes so clearly there were others feeling the same way.

Roll forward a couple of months and the product team has delivered! If you are fortunate enough to have an Enterprise E5 tenant subscription (this is NOT available for an E3 tenant) you will see a new option when defining a retention label to allow for disposition review.

AIP - Disposition Review

For an overview of this functionality, please refer to this link: Overview of disposition reviews.

For the Certificate of Destruction requirement I previously blogged about, you could export the reviewed content as a .csv and store it in a secure location.

The Security & Compliance center in Office 365 is a quickly changing area right now. If you are in the Information Management/Records Management space you should be encouraged by the capabilities being introduced in the product to address your requirements and should be working with a technical O365 resource who is keeping on top of the latest changes for your tenancy.

Thanks for reading.

-JCK

Office 365 Retention: Disposition Reviews

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by Joanne C Klein (3)Blog post: 1 minute read

A recent post by Jared Matfess, my friend and Office Servers and Services MVP, titled SharePoint Communication Sites for your Office 365 Adoption site, proposed building an O365 Adoption Portal as a use-case for the new SharePoint Communication site. What an excellent idea! If you haven’t read his post yet, head on over and check it out; I’ll be here waiting when you get back. 😉

I often talk about Office 365 adoption at speaking events and Jared’s idea got me thinking about something I espouse in my adoption talks and how well his idea applies to it. Thanks Jared!

What do I love about SharePoint Communication sites?

You can use the SharePoint Communication site template right out-of-the-box to build a beautiful, responsive website where the content authors can curate content from across your organization to share in a matter of minutes. It is definitely a “self-serve” model where focus can be placed on the content and its layout and not on the technical back-end building of the site.

Communication site template

Default SharePoint Communication Topic site – a great place to start!

What does this have to do with adoption?

I believe Office 365 adoption starts with learning the basics. Once users have them nailed down, more advanced features and capabilities can be layered on top of it. Examples of things that might fall into the basics are:

  • How to share your desktop via Skype
  • Where to find the SharePoint recycle bin and how to use it
  • How to share a document from either OneDrive for Business or SharePoint
  • How to organize a OneNote notebook
  • How to manage your calendar and task list in Outlook

I call this type of training the ‘tactical’ side of Office 365. Yes, it’s important and in fact critical for users to know how to use the tools and do these things, but true O365 adoption is so much more than this.

I believe it is extremely important to demonstrate the way the tools are being used in  your organization and how it has improved the way real work gets done. What better way to do this than using the new SharePoint Communication site in an O365 Adoption Portal as proposed in Jared’s blog?

How can this help with adoption?

By provisioning a SharePoint Communication site as an O365 Adoption Portal and sharing employee success stories front and centre on either the Hero web part and/or a News web part you give a glimpse of this success to the entire organization. Why does this matter? The employee success stories are an excellent way for users to see HOW the tools are effectively being used in your organization.

By including Yammer conversations around adoption/training activities right from the Yammer web part, users also have a great place to go for getting questions answered. This is where you can advertise upcoming Office 365 corporate training events, share training videos and materials and even link to the FastTrack resource centre to cover the more tactical knowledge I talked about earlier. All of this can be part of the one-stop-shop O365 Adoption Portal.

Conclusion

Office 365 adoption is more than the tactical know-how of using the tools within it. The idea of an O365 Adoption Portal layers employee success stories and  conversations around Office 365 on top of the skills employees have already learned and is a fantastic way to demonstrate the real business value of the tool. This is also an effective way to tie back to the business drivers for the Executive team as to why Office 365 was brought into the organization in the first place.

I plan on recommending an O365 Adoption Portal like this instead of the tactical Training Resource Centre I typically see in most organizations I work with. After all, adoption is so much more than training.

How do you drive Office 365 adoption in your organization? Have you/will you build a portal with adoption success stories, upcoming training events and conversations, etc. to help drive it? I’d love to know.

Thanks for reading.

-JCK

O365 Adoption: Much more than training

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SPSToronto

I’m happy to announce I’ve been selected to speak at this year’s SharePoint Saturday event in Toronto on August 19. I’m looking forward to heading East to attend the event as both an attendee and a speaker, to meet new people and hang out with friends. It is sure to be a fantastic event from start to finish!

There’s a great lineup of sessions – check them out here.

In my session I’ll be talking about Information Management in an Office 365 Collaboration world.

Synopsis: What does Information Management and Data Governance mean within the context of Office 365? What are some tools we can use to manage it?

Organizations need to empower employees to  reap the benefits of new collaboration services in the digital workplace, but they can’t compromise the security, compliance and protection of  corporate assets while doing it. Capabilities are being rolled out to help organizations keep both managed and unmanaged content secure and compliant throughout and beyond O365.

This session covers setting organizations up for success from an Information Management perspective without hindering usage and adoption of O365. Discussion covers DLP, AIP, and Retention.

If this is something you’re trying to manage, come on by! I’d love to talk about it.

[Update – session added] I will also be sharing some practical adoption ideas for O365 in an additional session as well. If you have ideas to share or want to get some new ones, join me!

Registration details are HERE.

[Update August 20, 2017] Here are the links to my 2 presentations:

Thanks for coming to the event!

-JCK

SPS Toronto August 2017

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