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Writing Your Own SharePoint Publishing Approval Workflow

Out of the box SharePoint has a Publishing Approval workflow that’s hooked up to libraries to support approval of published content. It’s possible to modify this workflow to support your own needs – but there may be some times when you want to author a new workflow from scratch. This works fine in SPD, except that once created you can’t associate it so that it is started when someone tries to publish a new major version of the item. Take a look at the following two screen shots:

If you want to enable this option you’ll need to directly edit the workflow’s configuration XML files. To do this go to the All Files option

Then go to _catalogs then wfpub and the name of your workflow. Note that there’s a different location for non-globally published workflows but since you want this to work anywhere in the site collection you’ll want to work with a globally published workflow. Once you have your folder you should see something like:

Right click the .wfconfig.xml file, select open with, and SharePoint Designer (Open as XML)

In the file add AllowStartOnMajorCheckin=”true”

If you created the workflow on a content type you may need to remove the Category and ContentTypeID attributes of the Template node to allow the workflow to be associated with the library. The Start this workflow to approve publishing a major version of an item is only available on the library – this start option isn’t available for a content type.

Announcing the SharePoint Shepherd Presents the Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement

I’ve been working on getting together some videos for some time now. I started working on my video studio in late 2008. I took one run at getting some materials together for Governance together for 2007 but ultimately ran out of time before I could get them done. You see, I’m committed to making video materials the best quality possible. I enjoy video production and I want to leave no question in the mind of the viewer that the video content I create is the best possible content. That has led me to all sorts of crazy lengths to get it right. For instance, I had a custom teleprompter built. I built processes for bringing in PowerPoint slides. I’ve fine tuned the green screen, cameras, and audio. I got to the point where I’m comfortable with the production quality and then it was time to determine what to deliver.

Last time around I started with governance because at the time no one was really talking about governance and there was a ton of information that the market needed to get better at governing (steering) projects. While I still believe that this is an increadible need in the market – not because of the lack of information but rather because of the lack of credible information, I decided that I’d start by talking about adoption and engagement. I expect that I’ll be doing future discs on governance very shortly. The 2007 materials had over 1,200 nodes of information and over 250 slides when I had to set it aside – so once updated there are hours of content about how to get SharePoint governance right.

The need to start with a different topic lead me to the realization that I needed to create a series of videos which are designed to deliver the highest possible content to folks – content that people could trust. It also created the realization that I can’t create all of the material that folks need. I realized that there are topics where I won’t have time to get the DVD’s content together. There are places where I’m just not an expert. So I’ve asked some trusted friends and colleagues to deliver some special topics so that I can get more high-quality content out. I’ve got commitments from Eric Shupps for a Performance session. David Mann’s agreed to do a Workflow session. Matt McDermott has agreed to do one on Search. Todd Baginski will be doing one on Business Connectivity Services. While we don’t have locked timelines on these, I’m excited about the fact that the guys respect what I’m doing enough to be a part of it.

For the first DVD in the series, I decided to start with the adoption problem that too many organizations face. I talk to organizations all the time which face problems getting users to use the platform they’ve delivered and they don’t understand why. I had been speaking about engagement for a long time. Back in August of 2008 my Whitepaper for Microsoft “Increasing Your SharePoint Engagement” was released. Since then I’ve done dozens of presentations on the topic and yet the market hasn’t realized that we’re not shooting for adoption – adoption is the broader effect of some good engagement. That is some solution creation on the platform. Despite these conversations, presentations, and work with clients I wanted to make sure that I was absolutely clear in my conversations and to make sure that I could explain why the things I was suggesting would work and what folks would need to do to ensure that they’d work in their environment so I decided to do some additional research and reading to clarify and support my message. That led to a ton of reading including:

  • Drive, Daniel Pink (Review, Amazon)
  • Leading Change, John Kotter (Review, Amazon)
  • User Adoption Strategies, Michael Sampson (Amazon)
  • 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or No Money, Dianna Podmoroff (Review, Amazon)
  • 42 Rules of Employeee Engagement, Susan Stamm (Review, Amazon)
  • Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life, Fernando Flores and Robert Solomon (Review, Amazon)
  • Trust & Betrayal in the Workspace, Dennis and Michelle Reina (Review, Amazon)

To that we have to add the books that I had already read and integrated into my work. I decided to review my notes and make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Here’s that list of books I went back through:

  • Peopleware, Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister (Review, Amazon)
  • Outliers, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
  • Blink, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
  • The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
  • The Time Paradox, Phillip Zimbardo and John Boyd (Review, Amazon)
  • Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Review, Amazon)

The end result of all of this hard work was 2 hours and 21 minutes of what the reviewers have called “information dense” and “content heavy.” The content ships as a single DVD that is playable on a standard DVD player. The target was nominally 3 hours. I think I did pretty good for hitting targets without an audience to interact with. The one criticism that I’ve gotten is that while the content is absolutely the right content, it’s not the “how to” that folks expected since that’s all the Shepherd’s Guide for End Users was. In order to address that concern, I’ll be following up the Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement DVD with a “How to do SharePoint Adoption and Engagement” DVD in the next few months. I’ll give you a “bag of tricks” to use when implementing the knowledge you’ll gain from the Psychology DVD.

The DVDs will be available from the SharePointShepherd.com web site as well as through Amazon.com. The price for the “Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement” is $299.99. Until October 31, 2011 I’ll be offering the DVD at a special discounted $249.99 price on the SharePoint Shepherd site.

Autorun.inf is painful – and it doesn’t need to be

I’m finishing up a special promotional DVD project where I’ll be giving out some DVDs of content at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. Those DVDs will contain videos encoded for Silverlight playback at 1024×768 so I can’t transcode them to play on a regular DVD player – I needed to make them automatically start an HTML page which had the Silverlight Video player on it. That’s what autorun.inf is supposed to do – allow you to directly start content when media is inserted. The problem is that it has been exploited on USB drives to spread viruses so now there are all sorts of restrictions and things that used to work don’t necessarily work any longer. The frustrating part is that you won’t know why your file isn’t working because there are all sorts of old posts with success.

The autorun.inf file is a variation of the INI file format which contains a single header, [autorun], followed by a set of values including open, icon, and shellexecute. Open and shellexecute are supposed to be what happens when someone opens the media or when it’s inserted respectfully. Icon is a link to an icon file which should be displayed for the drive. It seems simple enough – except that it’s not.

If you provde an html file the file won’t start. There are enough posts on this on the Internet about how you have to have a "runner" since directly starting html files isn’t supported. OK, I’m good at batch files. I create a .bat file and try it again. That doesn’t work. I try every variation of capitalization and variation of options trying to figure out what’s going on. It doesn’t work and I email a friend who tells me that there are continuing problems and that many folks are using all sorts of pre-made runners. Well, being a developer I decided to write my own – because that’s the way I roll.

Mine I decided should have two modes. The first mode would be accepting parameters on the command line and just running whatever is found there. However, I thought that users might just click on the autorun.exe that I was creating so I needed another way to get the command and parameters and so I created an option that if there were no parameters I’d read from a .cfg file. It’s a .cfg file because it’s a simple text file, it’s not an XML based .config file. Other than some silly bugs because I was tired all worked well and when I used the autorun.exe in the autorun.inf file it started working. This left me with just one problem – and it’s one I chose not to solve. When my DVD pops in I get a dialog:

(I purposefully blurred out the icon and the disc title so you can come ask me about it at the conference if you want to know more about it.) The problem in the dialog is that the Publisher not specified appears. As it turns out the problem is that I don’t have a code signing certificate from a trusted root. As a result the Autoplay dialog won’t show my name. I decided that I didn’t need a code signing certificate for just this. If I were developing lots of software that needed to be signed I’d probably get a cert but at several hundred dollars per year it seemed like overkill for this.

So the good news is that I did solve it – and I came up with a good testing process. I’d use Nero Burning ROM to create an ISO image through the image writer virtual burner. I’d then use MagicDisc to mount the ISO on my system. This even would work through VMWare so I could test XP – which is what lead me to the understanding that XP would play my autorun.inf and Windows 7 wouldn’t so it had to be issues w/ protection.

So, how could the experience be better? Windows could tell you it is blocking autorun information because of security concerns and offer to allow you to override it. I would have still worked at a supportable workaround – like the one I found, but it would definitely reduce the head scratching as I’m trying to figure out how I could be messing up something that’s supposed to be drop-dead simple.

I love it when the simple things become complicated – not.

File to SharePoint

Rounding out the set of solutions I’ve been playing with to get data from the File Classification Infrastructure into SharePoint – in a more flexible and supportable way – is a tool for importing files into SharePoint. This solution will read files from the file system and try to pickup optional metadata from a ~~metadata.xml file in the current directory (it follows the same format as the FCI2XML tool outputs.) The tool preserves the creator, creation date/time, last editor, and last edit time when uploading the file. It doesn’t worry about security or versions – but it’s a simple way to import files into SharePoint in a hierarchy.

Changing an Attribute for an XML file with PowerShell

In my little FCI program I output an attribute called author from Word documents – and I wanted to import the FCI data into SharePoint but Author is the internal field name for the creator of a file. SharePoint expects this to be a login name – but out of Word I got a friendly name. So I needed to convert this property to a different name. The first step was getting some XSLT to do this so I came up with:

<?xml version=’1.0′ ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”>
<xsl:output method=”xml” version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ indent=”yes”/>
<xsl:template match=”/” >
<xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match=”/Files/File/Properties/Property/@Name[.=’Author’]” >
<xsl:attribute name=”Name”>DocumentAuthor</xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match=”@*|node()”>
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select=”@*|node()”/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

This worked pretty well but I wanted to run it from PowerShell so how could I do that? Well first I’m lazy so I wanted the Convert-Xml commandlet from the PowerShell Community Extensions. With that I wasn’t quite done. I still needed to process all of my metadata files – and I wanted to refer to my XSLT file relative to the script. So I came up with the following which processes all ~~metadata.xml files, creates ~~spmetadata.xml files, deletes the ~~metadata.xml and then renames all of the ~~spmetadata.xml to ~~metadata.xml.

Import-Module pscx
function Get-ScriptDirectory
{
$Invocation = (Get-Variable MyInvocation -Scope 1).Value
Split-Path $Invocation.MyCommand.Path
}
$scriptLocation = Get-ScriptDirectory
$xsltLocation = Join-Path $scriptLocation “authortransform.xsl”
$files = dir -Recurse -Include “~~metadata.xml”
foreach ($file in $files)
{
$outputPath = Join-Path $file.Directory.FullName “~~spmetadata.xml”
Convert-Xml -path $file.FullName -XsltPath $xsltLocation > $outputPath
}
dir -include “~~metadata.xml” -recurse | remove-item
dir -include “~~spmetadata.xml” -recurse | %{ $newName = join-path $_.Directory.FullName “~~metadata.xml”; move-item $_.FullName $newName }

It took me way to long to put these pieces together but once I did they seem to work pretty well.

File Classification Infrastructure to XML

In Windows 2008 R2 a new feature was added – File Classification Infrastructure (FCI). What FCI does is it allows you to set and keep metadata for files on the file system. Despite the promise of the technology there aren’t a ton of tools which can read or use it so it’s hard to get too excited about the technology. I did, however, think that the ability to apply properties via rules could come in handy from time-to-time. So I wrote a little program that will extract FCI properties and write them to an XML file in the current directory. You can then use this metadata in other programs.

ballot box

Do You Have an Opinion on the SharePoint Community?

Sigh. It’s time for another round of how the SharePoint Community is broken. For those of you, who aren’t aware, please allow me to catch you up quickly. In round one, we had Joel Olsen’s proposal for the SharePoint Knights. Then we had Global 360 trying to define the key influencers in the market with their SharePoint Influencer50. (Which I responded to here.) Now we’ve got Matt Rackley asking Is the SharePoint Community Past Its Prime? This time the spark was a CMS wire post about the community titled The SharePoint Community: What it is, Why It’s Important and Microsoft’s Role. Despite Barb’s slightly liberal use of quotes potentially out of context, the article is a nice feel-good article. It’s about how a group of people grow up – and share in the community. So why does Mark provide a negative spin? In short, I don’t know. I know that he’s posted several other posts with relatively inflamitory titles (or content.) The most recent one I could find prior to the SharePoint Community post is The Real Value of Microsoft Certification in SharePoint??? Knowing Mark (I like to call him Matt just to mess with his head) I suspect that it’s just who he is. He likes to take or share his controvercial point of view and take a read on the market.

Despite the inflamitory nature of the titles (and content) let’s look to see what Mark has to say this time:

  1. These aren’t the good ole days
  2. Speakers aren’t taunted by hecklers
  3. People have egos
  4. Conference burn out
  5. The MVP program is broken.
  6. Microsoft should do more for the community
  7. SharePoint is different.

Let me try to take these points one-by-one. My apologize for potentially grossly misinterpreting his points.

These Aren’t the Good Ole Days

True. It might be good to read The Time Paradox. There’s a view of things (which is neither right or wrong) which says that the best days are behind us. I personally subscribe to the idea that the best days are ahead of us. I see more interesting people in the community every day. I’ve made a point to go help to fill the spots in the market which I felt were challenges to folks. Whether it’s MSSharePointDeveloper.com, the SharePoint Guidance (for developers) or the ECM Implementer’s Course I’ve been working on trying to get content out there that people can use to better themselves. I believe that if we make information easy to understand and available to people that we’ll help encourage the next generation of community participants.

Speakers Aren’t Taunted by Hecklers

Well, I don’t know that I’d go that far. I think I’d say that in general the presenters are respected by the audiences and the speakers respect and care for their audiences. This – in general – will reduce those hecklers. Having just finished my comedy class, I’m really looking forward to having fun with hecklers. Seriously, we’re all professionals here. I think people are genuinely trying to learn. I’ve not seen hecklers at .NET events for a while. I think the phenomenon happens more in the genesis of a tool than in a maturing state.

People Have Egos

Yes, people have egos. Some are larger than they should be. Some are smaller than they should be. I’d say that we’ve collectively done pretty well as a community at keeping people’s egos in check. While I hear complaints that peoples egos are out of control (mainly mine <grin>) for the most part we’re a community and we’re trying to get along together. I can’t say that I’ve seen anyone snub another person because of their ego.

Conference Burn Out

Wow, here I’m in agreement we’re got a problem – but not because of the reasons laid out in Mark’s post. First, we’re in a transitioning market where we historically had a few conferences each year and those conferences drew folks. It used to be we’d have one or two DevConnections conferences, one or two Advisor conferences, and TechEd. That transitioned to two DevConnections conferences, two Best Practices Conferences, two SPTechCon conferences, a Microsoft SharePoint Conference, and TechEd. (Please excuse the fact that I’ve excluded probably a dozen more conferences in the US alone.) During the transition the idea of a SharePoint Saturday sprung up as a free event that would offer a way to gather SharePoint speakers and get a ton of content to folks in a compressed period of time. This is good – and bad. First, it does provide a forum for emerging speakers to participate. With the users group I run, I have 11 speaking slots. That’s what I’ve got for the year. In a single SharePoint Saturday I’ll have 25 slots – twice as many as I have for a year of users group presentations. I can afford to use some emerging talent (even talent I don’t know) in slots for a SharePoint Saturday. (For the record, I didn’t personally speak at the SharePoint Saturday in Indianapolis to make an extra spot available.) Also for the record, we coach speakers for our regular users group meetings. We’ve got a September meeting which will be a brand new speaker.

Putting on my speaker hat for a moment, I want to support SharePoint Saturday events. I make an effort to do the events which are drivable from Indy. Chicago and Columbus get proposals from me. I personally make a point of not flying to events. I think that we do need to allow local talent to contribute. While we gave a stipend to the people from out of town who flew into support SharePoint Saturday Indy, I personally think that those events are best with local/regional speakers. (We accepted all serious local speakers first.)

So SharePoint Saturday is good for speakers – but it’s REALLY bad for the conference market. Part of the problem is that we’re making the market too thin. There are too many of conferences in the first place. I’ll speak at 11 national events this year. All of the events are on SharePoint. I do 5 times as much traveling for conferences as I do for clients. That level of diffusion in the market makes it hard for conference organizers to make money. Add to that the amount of free content they’re getting at SharePoint Saturday events and there’s an immense amount of coverage for content. He’re a secret… conferences are a volume game. There are a ton of fixed costs. The variable costs (like food) are not a substantial part of the cost. So when they have a large number of attendees they make good money. When the attendees aren’t where they need to be they lose money. If they lose money too long they go out of business. So while I absolutely support SharePoint Saturday and volunteers making content available to everyone – it does come with a cost.

As for vendors and their willingness to continue to sponsor the events, I have to say as a business owner wanting to market a product there are too few good ways to market for SharePoint. So I don’t anticipate problems there. I know there’s some pressure on the conference organizers because vendors can sponsor a handful (or several) SharePoint Saturday events for the cost of a conference sponsorship – however, the experience isn’t the same. Chris Geier summarized his experience at SharePoint Saturday Indy here. He points out that in Indy we took care of the sponsors – because we want them back when we run the next event – and also he implies that others don’t keep the awareness on the fact that sponsors are required for the events.

The MVP Program is Broken

Sure. It is broken. Of course, it’s broken. How could it possibly not be broken? Look, I’m honored to be a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint. I am in awe of some of my fellow MVPs who have skils with SharePoint I simply don’t have. I joke in the Shepherd’s Guide that I get to play Who Wants to be a Millionare? everyday but I get an infinite number of phone a friend lifelines. Last week I called Matt McDermott to ask about some MySite / Social things – I love that. Here’s the thing. That’s not about being an MVP or not being an MVP. That’s about being a part of the community – and answering Matt’s calls when he has a question.

Building and maintaining the MVP program is an impossible task. It’s always going to be slightly wrong, slightly broken, and slightly askew. Here’s the thing the program has been moving in the direction of greater clarity since its introduction (with the exception of a notable stumble or two). Toby Richards has been driving the program to more solid metrics and fewer “feelings” about MVPs. On one hand I hate this. It’s hard to quantify the value of a touch. If I have a 5,000 readers of my blog and I post something is that more or less valuable than a conference session where I’m speaking to 20 people (because it’s the last session of the conference.) I don’t know. On the other hand, I love that there is that effort to try to make it less subjective and more about how people are contributing. I know that the program is always trying to improve and I respect that.

I’ll say that I don’t believe everyone with an MVP award deserves it. There are some days when I don’t feel like I deserve it. However, the program has to make an attempt to do something – because shutting down the MVP program isn’t a better option. I’ve heard all of the options people have proposed about the program – and honestly, I’ve not heard anything said that would be a better deal than what the community has now. It’s not perfect but it’s got a lot of people who truly care about the community and people who want to make it better.

I would like to say that there’s confusion about what the MVP program is. Being an MVP has no bearing on whether you actually know what you’re doing or not. There’s no certification exam demonstrating a minimum level of knowledge about the product. There’s no oral examination or review board that you have to confront. It’s simply a measure of how you support the community. Is it a bad measure? Maybe. Is it better than any other community program by any other software company – absolutely.

I’ve personally recommended folks for an MVP award who are great community contributors. They pour their heart out to help grow the SharePoint community. They didn’t get the award. I’m disappointed but not in them – and not in the program. The program has to have a cap – some way to control costs. Honestly, I’ve told the MVP program management team that the cap for SharePoint MVPs is too high. I believe that we need to raise the bar. They’ve not taken my input on this matter – but that’s OK.

Let me return to my point above… MVP means nothing, participating in the community means everything. I have numerous friends who I’d recommend BEFORE an MVP because they are participating and they are caring.

Microsoft Should Do More for the Community

As a business statement I agree. Microsoft invests millions of dollars in advertising a small fraction of that amount would make a huge difference in the community. However, that being said, I don’t believe the community “deserves” it. I am irked by the sense of entitlement that we (I’ll include myself) sometimes get. Microsoft doesn’t owe us personally or the community anything.

SharePoint is Different

Yes, and no. Both Andrew Connell (comment) and Ruven have very good points. SharePoint isn’t any different than any other technical community. I believe that we’re fundamentally dealing with a community. Communities are the same in .NET, SQL, and SharePoint. If you want to learn quickly and thoroughly, I’d recommend you embrace the community.

Parting Thoughts

From my perspective, there has never been a better time to be a part of the SharePoint community. Never. We’ve got more free and paid resources to learn than we ever had. We have a wonderful set of leaders (MVPs and non-MVPs) who are there to help the community succeed. We’ve got support from Microsoft for giving away conference passes to the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. There are users groups in most of the major markets (and more than a trivial number of the secondary markets). There are more books on SharePoint than there have ever been. I guess I don’t understand all of the negativity about the community.

Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace

Book Review-Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace

I’ve been trying to crystallize some thinking on building adoption and engagement for SharePoint implementations which lead me to models for change and John Kotter’s Leading Change book. Step 2 of his 8 step process is to Creating a Guiding Coalition. There are aspects of building the coalition that Kotter covers well: Position Power, Expertise, Credibility, and Leadership – however, inherently there’s the component of trust that’s missing in his discussion of this topic. Credibility touches ever so slightly on it. Credibility is a specific trust around someone but I believe this issue of trust and being a part of a team is much more.

I read the book Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life – but it was a philosophy discussion not a discussion of how to break down trust and how to create it. I picked up Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace by Dennis and Michelle Reina looking for something more solid and direct. I was very pleased to see them take trust and break it into components. To look at each part and way that we trust – and in so doing created the opportunity to realize what builds trust – and what destroys it.

Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace defines three types of transactional trust and associated components (I paraphrased some of the below to match my thinking):

  • Contractual
    • Managing Expectations
    • Establishing Boundaries
    • Delegating Appropriately
    • Mutual Intentions
    • Keep Agreements
    • Being Congruent
  • Communication
    • Share Information
    • Tell the Truth
    • Admit Mistakes
    • Give/Receive Feedback
    • Maintain Confidentiality
    • Speak Directly
  • Competence
    • Acknowledge Skills/Talents
    • Allow Decisions
    • Involve Others/Seek Input
    • Encourage Learning

In addition to the awareness of different kinds of trust, there are also models for recovering from betrayal – which is a natural part of trusting someone. You’re going to find that you are betrayed sometimes. Most of those betrayals will be small and unintentional – but not all of them.

The end of the book includes a concept of transformative trust that relies on conviction, courage, compassion, and community. In my opinion, this “higher level” trust is the kind of trust which radiates and encourages others to trust – and it’s the kind of trust that’s demonstrated by some of the best leaders.

If you’re struggling with an organization where there’s little trust and lots of betrayal you may find that the book Trust & Betrayal in the Workplace is just what the doctor ordered.

Building Trust: in business, politics, relationships, and life

Book Review-Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life

In a former life I ran a Novell MHS based mail delivery system. This was before the Internet was commercial and when I was working with suppliers from across the globe. We found that faxes weren’t very reliable and we needed a better way to deliver mail. The email client was The Coordinator by Action Technologies. It had the distinction of mapping email messages into types of commitments that we were making with one another (request for action, request for meeting, etc.) It was based on the thinking of Fernando Flores and to a lesser extent his book (together with Terry Winograd) Understsanding Computers and Cognition. Because of this I had a sense of nostalgia when I was researching building trust and saw Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life by Fernanando Flores and Robert Solomon.

I was concerned because I rememebered that Understanding Computers and Cognition was a bit philosophical and hard to convert into practical use. It’s a good thing to think about – but difficult to leverage. In fact, that was one of the things I admired about The Coordinator, it was a good way to take the philosophy and turn it into something real.

Unfortunately, Building Trust is similar as it reads more like a philosophy discertation than a mass-market book. However, it’s not without merit if you’re struggling to understand what trust is – and how it works. Perhaps my favorite piece in the book is an exercise where the authors would ask audiences to complete the following: “Trust is _____.” The most common answer is “earned” and in all candor that’s the answer I would have given before reading the book. Instead through reading the book I would say that “Trustworthiness is earned.” And that “Trust is given.”

The book sets out many examples of how we confuse trust and trustworthiness as well as how trust must sometimes be given when the other person isn’t trustworthy and importantly how trust has limits.

The book describes three kinds of trust:

  • Basic Trust – Un tested often overlooked trust. The authors assert that most trust is basic – and unconscious.
  • Blind Trust – Trust that ignores all factors including evidence (or lack there of) of trustworthiness on the part of the recepient. This is also called naieve trust.
  • Authentic Trust – A conscious form of trust where the limits of trust are exposed and thought about.

One key point is that while we tend to believe that trust is an absolute, the reality is that trust does – and should – have limits. You wouldn’t necessarily trust your attorney to watch your children – though you almost certainly trust his advice on legal matters.

If you’re up for challenging your beliefs on trust, you should pickup Building Trust.

The Making of Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Content Management Implementers Course

I’m happy to report that the Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Implementer’s course is live. I wanted to take a moment and talk about the course that is 15 modules long – and designed so that you can consume it via the videos that are posted or as an instructor lead class. The work done on the course has spanned a year, has involved MVPs, Microsoft product and program managers, and a host of experts to design the course content and to provide feedback along the way.

A year or so ago, Paul Andrew, and I started talking about a ECM course that was 300 level. We created an engagement to build the course outline for the course which included several brainstorming and review sessions. During that scoping and design engagement we had meetings with SharePoint experts – including both MVPs and non-MVPs, product team members, and members of Microsoft Consulting Services. It wasn’t one meeting but a set of meetings starting with brainstorming and a set of meeetings to refine the outline. Once we got to an outline of topics we designed a set of instructional modules to support that outline.

The process we used leveraged the best things of what we had seen with the Microsoft Learning process, while recognizing that the course was designed to educate the market – not to drive to certify people for a technology. I sincerely believe the process for developing the outline lead us to a set of important activities for anyone implementing an ECM system.

The writing was a separate engagement and as the lead author I was thrilled that the authoring team we put together for the course included four MVPs:

I also got some help from Kevin Dostalek for one of my modules. In addition, Spence Harbar was our technical editor. Spence is both a Microsoft MVP and a Microsoft Certified Master – not to mention one of the most knowledgable people on SharePoint on the planet.

The immense amount of talent I was able to draw from for writing the course was awe inspiring. I can’t tell you how big a deal it is for me to get such a talented team on the project. There are two challenges you have in assembling an authoring team – experience with the topic and experience with writing. The team is comprised of accomplished authors and communicators and with the editing team – including myself – I believe we ended up with some truly great content.

In short, I feel like we got the right topics in the course and we created the instructional content to make sure that the topics are covered well. I won’t tell you the course is perfect – no course ever is. However, I will tell you that there’s a great wealth of experience that’s been poured into creating the content.

As a point of clarification, the course is an implementers course – that means server administrator (or records manager) – it’s not a development focused course. In 2009 and 2010 I worked with the Patterns and Practices team on the SharePoint Guidance which is all for developers. There’s absolutely a developer story for ECM, however, there’s a ton of things that need to be done on the server administrator side of things – these feel like the more critical items for most ECM implementations.

I am absolutely commited to the quality of the course. If you’ve got feedback about the content you’re welcome to send it to me. If you’re looking for an instructor for the content for your organization, please let me know. I’ll be working with selected clients to teach the course in its 5 day instructor lead form.

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