I always find it surprising that Microsoft don’t release more information and guidance about SharePoint based on their own implementation and experiences. But recently I’ve noticed a few webcasts and references regarding Microsoft’s Next Generation Intranet (NGI) project, an internal MSIT project to update or ‘fix’ the Microsoft Intranet which is known as MSWeb (MSW) and is built on SharePoint technologies. The most revealing of the webcasts was, “Implementing Social Computing at Microsoft“. In very simplistic terms the NGI will provide each user with their own Homepage based on the SharePoint Mysite Activity Feed, with a number of customisations including a Twitter like feature called OfficeTalk. This post summarises the key points of the webcast for those just too busy to watch it themselves; and I’ve taken the liberty of adding a few thoughts of my own at the end :)

Summary of the Webcast

The following sections briefly summarise the key points from the webcast

 

The Current Situation

The following points briefly summarise the webcasts description of the current situation at Microsoft.

• The Next Generation Intranet project is trying to ‘fix’ the Microsoft Intranet and Social Computing is seen as the core element
• The MS IT Environment
  • 121,000 end users
  • 98 countries
  • 3 million internal emails per day
  • 10 million inbound emails per day
  • 33 thousand IM per day

 

Drivers for Enterprise Social Computing

The following list summarises the high-level business drivers for social computing at Microsoft identified in the webcast:

• Empowerment and Governance
• Privacy and compliance
• Agility
• Talent management
• Knowledge retention
• Learning
• Engagement

The presenter notes that these are pretty much the same things that were the drivers for email, and intranets; and comments that, “Business is inherently social”.

 

The Business Challenge

The current Intranet model is considered too complex; this has been caused by company growth

• Innovation thrives with more agility and transparency which is delivered by social computing
• Consumerisation of IT: employees are demanding a modern intranet and are putting IP at risk by supplanting it with consumer experiences
• New hires are surprised at the email centric culture of the business

Vision

There are three core principals driving the NGI project:

• Connected
  • User profile (Mysite) at the centre
  • Brings together information from Lync; Phone; Outlook; Corporate Portal; Video site; CRM; Team Sites; and Careers
• Simple
  • Move away from old school tasks to next generation activity feeds and alerts
• Personal
  • Includes; business information; interests; preferences; community; content and contributions

 

What Does Success Look Like?

The NGI project has the following metrics:

1. Fewer portals
2. Less, “Where do I find …?”, emails
3. Higher employee satisfaction
4. Showcase of both services and surfaces
5. Innovation: embrace proven improvements

Future LOB metrics could include:

1. Faster sales close
2. Fewer regression bugs in products
3. Faster support resolution

Demonstration

The demonstration shows the concept of each user’s Intranet homepage being based on the MySite Activity Feed. By default the SharePoint 2010 Activity Feed shows activities including; content rating; activities relating to Tags that the employee is following; or activities relating to the employees contacts or connections. It’s noted that there are two problems with the out-of-the-box Activity Feed:

1. Social tagging is very useful but that adoption is difficult to achieve, perhaps because the value proposition is difficult to articulate to the average user.
2. The feed is informational but is not conversational (i.e. the employee is informed of events but is not able to comment on them or to provide feedback or suggestions)

So MSIT have customised the MySite has been customised quite heavily. Two of the custom features are demonstrated. Firstly we see the, ‘Send Kudos’ feature which enables one employee to send publically visible praise to another. Secondly we see a Twitter like micro-blogging feature based on ‘OfficeTalk’, a technology produced by the Microsoft Office Labs team and not (yet) publically available (you can find out more about this more on the Office Labs blog). The micro-blogging feature includes the ability to create and follow hash tags (#likethis) and the customised MySite interface shows the Activity Feed being filtered into different subject related streams.

Technical Challenges

The following list summarise the main technical challenges described in the webcast:

• Activity Feed is informational not conversational
• Lack of Social business intelligence (e.g. Who are the most followed people? Or whose posts are most often clicked through?)
• Lost social RSS with FAST integration
• Security defaults are too conservative
  • The main issue discussed was that any content not indexed by search would be security trimmed by default and this meant that any external content tagged would be trimmed from the activity feed. Apparently there’s a simple XML file based fix that you can find on TechNet or MSDN
• Still no private groups
• Profile sync across the three MS MySite farms was a problem
• Using Dogfood (early beta software)

 

Cultural Challenges

The was emphasised that the cultural and adoption challenges outweighed the technical challenges.

The following lists summarises the cultural challenges discussed in the Webcast:

• Initially there was no top level business ownership that could provide a view and leadership across the organisation
• Initially there was a perception by some that, ‘social’, equated to wasting time and didn’t deliver business value
  • Ensuring that positive stories relating the to use of the Social features were widely shared was key to overcoming these perceptions
  • It was noted that overcoming these perceptions quickly was important
• Privacy in EMEA
  • Noted that where the user explicitly chooses to publish content there are no issues but if the system starts to publish things automatically then the employee needs to have opted into first
• Portal owners
  • Portal owners have spent a long time and significant effort in developing their Portals. Now they need to get used to the idea that the Portals are no longer a destination but are a source of information that is surfaced and presented through other means.
• Email addiction: positioning the news feed
  • There was confusion amongst some users regarding when to use the micro-blogging and when to use other communication methods such as email
  • The Activity Feed was viewed by some as another inbox that needed to be managed.

This graphic is a screen shot from the Webcast that shows how the Activity Feed was positioned with users in relation to other communication methods. (I like this a suspect I’ll be using it in future client workshops). It was also noted that the Activity Feed isn’t an Inbox that needs to be managed; it’s a flow of information that you choose to dip in and out of.

Figure 1: Positioning communication tools

 

Micro-blogging Metrics

The following statistics were presented showing the adoption of the OfficeTalk based Micro-blogging features:

• 110,000 visitors worldwide
  • Top 10% of posters contribute 75% of the posts
  • Top 1% of poster contribute 37% of the posts
• 7,250 posters (3% participation in any one day)
  • Noted that this would ideally be higher
• 400 – 500 online at any one time
• 12,000 posts
• 17 new hashtags per day

 

Observed Use Cases For Micro-blogging

The following list summarises the reported use cases for the micro-blogging service:

• Improve business processes / promote best practices
• Engage executives
• Share news and information
• Provide status updates
• Celebrate achievements
• Offer praise to others
• Advertise upcoming events
• Make announcements
• Communicate in different languages
• Customer information
• Ask for feedback
• Seek expertise

 

Selected Survey Results

The following list summarise some of the key findings in a user survey:

• The biggest adoption blockers were:
  • Don’t know why they should adopt
  • Not integrated with day to day tools
• Top request: more integration
• Heavy users 4X more likely to be Twitter users and 50% more likely to be Facebook users
• Want to use it for expertise location

 

Reflections On The Webcast

 This is an excellent webcast and I strongly recommend you watch it yourself. The following sections present some of my thoughts on Microsoft’s reported experiences.

User Centric Intranet Design

 Microsoft have recognised that their current intranet model doesn’t support the increasing complexity of their growing business; they recognise that they need to, “Fix”, it. This is a common problem faced by many of the organisations that I talk to. But Microsoft’s intranet isn’t a traditional Intranet. This week I responded to an Tweet promoting a definition of an Intranet which was based on the idea that an Intranet is an internal web site with various features and functionality such as Search, Collaboration and Content Management. An intranet in the true sense isn’t a single site it’s a series of computers inside a corporate firewall which communicate using TCP/IP to create a private network that supports a wide variety of web sites web services, and web based applications. The current MSWeb is based on this concept. Rather than a single website with a common landing page MSWeb consists of many unconnected SharePoint portals such as HRWeb, FinanceWeb, and Academy (an internal YouTube type site); and services which allow employees to create collaboration and extranet sites. As a result the ‘intranet’ consists of over 325,000 SharePoint sites and Search is the glue that holds them together.

With the Next Generation Intranet project Microsoft are moving towards a User Centric, or Social intranet design where every user has their own ‘homepage’ based on an Activity Feed. For me this represents the cutting edge of Intranet design. Why? Because it reflects the way the Internet works; many sites and services with search and social based navigation. I don’t know about you but I find the Internet a pretty successful information management tool and think it makes an excellent basis for an Intranet design in a large and complex environment. I’d encourage any organisation thinking about the future of their Intranet to seriously evaluate this approach. It’s one I’ve been advocating for a while now, but in my experience only a few organisations have the vision to recognise its value.

The Need For Customisations And Hints For SharePoint Wave 15

 It’s interesting to note that Microsoft have found that the SharePoint 2010 MySites, and the Activity Feed in particular don’t quite cut the mustard and are basing their intranet on customisations such as OfficeTalk that aren’t available to the rest of us yet without customisations or third party tools such as Newsgator. I know from talking to contacts at Microsoft that there is an expectation that along the big focus areas in SharePoint Wave 15 will be Digital Marketing (websites) and the Social features. Will we see OfficeTalk in the next version? There’s clearly a need for something like it.

Cultural Challenges, User Adoption, and Success Metrics

For me the most telling part of the Webcast is Microsoft’s experiences relating to cultural challenges and user adoption. Their user survey shows that one of the biggest reported blockers to adoption is that the users don’t know why they should use the tool; in other words the value proposition isn’t clear. The business drivers, challenges and success metrics mentioned at the beginning of the presentation such as empowerment; agility; learning; and innovation don’t get a mention in the later parts. There’s no mention of how these metrics are monitored or what the results are. This is typical of many organisations that I talk to; everyone, including Microsoft, seems to have difficulty in linking the use of the technology back to the business benefits. But if I understand the figures presented correctly around 25,000 people are using the micro-blogging features each week and that’s approaching 25% of the total user base. Research shows that 16% penetration is the magic number for user adoption, when use of a new technology moves beyond the innovators and visionary groups and into the early majority. At this point adoption of technology gains critical momentum. So the outlook for the success of the NGI seems good.

The figures for the number of posts and posters are reflective of those for public services such as Facebook and Twitter. The most recent statistics I’ve seen show that 80% of Facebook content is posted by 20% of the users; and for Twitter 90% of the content is posted by just 10% of the users, and 1 in 5 Twitter accounts have never posted anything. So if sharing best practices, or finding expertise are key drivers for the use of a Social intranet then the question is, how do you know that a practice is indeed a best one? And how do you know that the person that answers a question posted on a Micro-blogging service is indeed an expert? Who says they are an expert?

Conclusions

As we’d expect Microsoft are leading the way with the implementation of SharePoint based business services and intranet design, but to do so they are using beta tools that aren’t available to the rest of us. Although the levels of adoption they have achieved are excellent and in my view increased communication between employees will bring positive results Microsoft like everyone else are struggling to explicitly link communication capability with specific business outcomes and that makes the business case argument difficult to win. Does investment in enterprise social computing simply require a leap of faith?