Considerations for Migrating eRoom to SharePoint

I wanted to talk about some considerations for anyone who is deciding to migrate eRoom over to SharePoint.    I’ve been working with eRoom for 10 years now and still think it’s the best and most secure team collaboration tool out there.   However, I’m excited about SharePoint these days as the strong Microsoft developer community continues to build cool stuff to really enhance SharePoint and make it sing.    Of course SharePoint is really a platform that does a whole lot more than just the “team collaboration” that eRoom focuses on.   eRoom is simply the “secure team sites” / collaboration component of the larger SharePoint ecosystem.   How you deal with team sites in SharePoint may be dependent on the larger SharePoint logical design.  And for those who are migrating to SharePoint, you have to think about 3 things:

1. Logical Design – what does an eRoom community map to in SharePoint?  an eRoom facility?  an eRoom itself?

2. Scalability – Physically, eRoom packages content into rooms within facility SQL databases, files stored separately.  SharePoint’s different and how will it handle all that eRoom content within its content databases?

3. Migration of Data – do you want just files or files with all eRoom content?

eRoom to SharePoint is not like comparing apples to apples.   As a general rule, communities in eRoom might equate to a Site Collection in SharePoint and each eRoom might equate to a subsite.   I recommend to create a unique site collection in SharePoint just to administer your secure team workspaces.   You might want to create separate site collections for internal eRooms and external ones.  The Site Collection might have a defined member list and all subsites can then filter members as needed from the larger site collection.    While the majority of eRooms will follow the mapping I just described, there will be cases where one eRoom might equate to a site collection — and that would depend on the use of that eRoom, how large is it, structure and security.   eRoom Site Reports will easily help you identify those really large team workspaces so you can determine how to deal with them in SharePoint.

For the “My eRooms” home page, I’d recommend using My Sites where each individual person can see his/her team sites.   But you’ll need MOSS for My Sites.   If you opt for WSS only, you’ll have to think about something which provides that “portal” view for an individual user listing all their secure team workspaces.   Either way, I still prefer 1 URL to goto that lists all my secure team workspaces no matter where they exist in SharePoint — and I want to see it in a My Sites and a Portal view.

The SharePoint architecture is similar to eRoom in that there is a “logical” side and a “physical” side (or virtual side these days).   The eRoom site logically is a collection of servers, members, communities, and individual eRooms.   The logical side of SharePoint (apps, site collections, sites, etc..) all need to map to the physical (servers, content databases, etc..).    Depending on the scale of your eRoom environment, this is probably the most difficult thing to do in SharePoint.   In some cases, you might have create 1 Site Collection per eRoom or per eRoom Facility – which can make it harder to administer.   What was easy to adminster within the overall eRoom environment becomes harder in SharePoint.  Fortunately there are many good tools out there to help admin SharePoint across sites and site collections.   

Once you figure out the logical and physical design and how eRoom maps to SharePoint, you need to think about migrating data.   I’d recommend you look at a leveraging a migration tool — and there are not many commercially available.   AvePoint seems like a good bet for most.   The word on the Tsunami tool is that it’s too expensive and not worth it.   You can also contact me as I know of a cheaper tool which may work just as well      Save yourself the developer effort as coding this could take many many weeks if not months.    And you don’t have to migrate all of eRoom at once, you can run parallel and migrate over time.   Lastly, test, test, test, and test the migration.

The TCO and ROI of SharePoint

When choosing a team space collaboration technology solution, one should consider both the total cost of ownership (TCO) and the expected return on investment (ROI).   The diagram below shows that a measurable ROI will increase the more structured the context.   In other words, the more structured the context, the easier the ability to measure something which in turn can lead to productivity gains and a higher return on investment. 

 

 

Products like MS SharePoint or Lotus Quickr provide a cost effective solution for basic ad-hoc file sharing and project collaboration.  However, additional licensing, applications, and/or custom development may be required the more structured the context thus increasing the TCO and ongoing maintenance of these applications.   Furthermore, ROI may be difficult to calculate as hard numbers are not always easily identified.  The calculation of ROI might need to be focused to a particular business unit use case(s), business process, and might also consider the following:

• Adoption of Tools: Ensuring users adopt and properly leverage the technology.
• Perceived Benefits: Ensure the link between technology and (perceived) business value is clear.
• Timeframe: Establish a timeframe within a realized return on investment could be achieved.
• Metrics: Attempt to establish both hard and soft metrics in an attempt to measure ROI.

Natural units of collaboration…

I came across an interesting discussion on another blog about the natural units of collaboration.  There were some posts on “ideas” being a natural unit.   And I’m not sure ideas are a natural “unit” of collaboration. Ideas can lead to collaboration or can simply be the focus of a collaborative event or project(ideation, sharing and commenting on ideas, innovation, etc..).  Ideas, in effect, are simply a form of the broader theme of “content”.  

So content (be it ideas, files, discussions, blogs, Q&A, wikis, etc..) is really the first natural unit of collaboration. 

Second, people are a natural unit.  Collaboration being the interaction between 2 or more people. 

A third natural unit of collaboration is the “Degree of Openness” or lack there of.  Openness in the form of the internet (the whole community thing) is great — but the reality is businesses need secure collaboration and secure communities to protect IP and maintain whatever competitive advantage they have.  And communities tend to be less secure the more people involved.   And it is much easier to collaborate (and establish trust, commitment, team spirit) in smaller groups….    Likewise, as we’ve seen with the open internet (with youtube/facebook/myspace/etc) — openness is okay and works to some degree, but it still needs to be “policed” and monitored and people still want control of their privacy.  There’s probably a broader political theme I could expand on here…but won’t.

The final unit of collaboration is time.  Is it a project with a beginning and end, an ongoing project/event/business process?     Time affects resources involved too.  It also affects how we collaborate and overall scope of the collaboration itself.  The shorter the time, the less unstructured you want the collaboration to be.    In the case of an ongoing business process — you probably want that a little more structured.   Shorter time = more stress too and can affect the quality of effort. 

Content, People, Degree of Openness, and Time — there maybe more — but these 4 are the “units” of collaboration that come to my mind.   And anyone whose studied basic project management – schedule, scope, resources come to mind here. 

 

The Buzz on Buzz Words

There’s alot written about collaboration and innovation today.   More buzz than anything else.   It’s actually kind of funny to read how companies will not survive if they don’t innovate in the future and collaboration is the key to innovation.   Okay, I do not think there are any new revelations here and if I’m a CEO of a company, you’re probably telling me something I aleady know.   

But I often wonder how this buzz starts and spreads like a virus.    Perhaps it’s when someone writes a book about how the flat world is at a tipping point.     I mean if I hear one more person talk about tipping points, I might have to drink myself into oblivion until I reach my tipping point.    Maybe it’s the management consultants who need to dream up new ways of making businesses think they need their services.   Better yet, it starts in universities where MBA students pick up these buzz words from professors who invent them as if they discovered a vaccine for polio.   And the MBA students feel the need to use these buzz words to sound intelligent….resulting in MBA-speak or MBA-ese.     Now I have my MBA and it’s a great experience and I was lucky that my program discriminated against anyone who spoke MBA-ese.   

Anyway, I figured I’d look up “buzzword” and here is the definition.   A buzzword (also known as a fashion word or vogue word) is a vague idiom, or a neologism, that is commonly used in managerial, technical, administrative, and sometimes political environments.   

Wow!   “a vague idiom” or “neologism”.   I didn’t think you could define buzzword with other buzzwords!   Would it not be easier to simply say “buzzword” = B.S.    Wikipedia even compiles a list of popular buzz words and links to a bunch of websites that attempt to compile them all.    One of my all time favorites is “low hanging fruit”.   And “peel back the onion”.   I also love “resource action” which means you’re fired, layed off, terminated, thanks for playing and game over!      Ah…then there is “synergies” and you always have to say that word with both hands and fingers together.  I also had one manager who always talked about how he’d “circle-back”.   With all the circling back he was doing, it was pretty obvious that nothing and no one was moving forward.   

And for the longest time I thought off-shoring and outsourcing were the same until someone explained it to me.  Thank goodness I now know the difference because I recently spoke with the store I ordered furniture from … and they told me that our furniture was outsourced to a manufacturer in China who in turn off-shored it to Vietnam and that’s why it is taking over 5 months to be delivered.  

So what does this all have to with collaboration technology?   There must be a point to all this…. maybe it’s that collaborative technology connects people and in some strange way actually enables all this off-shoring and out-sourcing to occur much easier.   Well, sure, in some way it does.   But I think the bigger point here is that before you go and create a wiki for your project or company and start defining all the company acronyms or decide to promulgate your esoteric cogitations — goto wikipedia first and look up the definition of  buzzwords  to remind yourself that the intended use of this technology is to provide clarity and visibility and actually reduce complexities…..

eRoom created a mess. Was it the software or IT?

I came across a post by an individual sharing their story of how they made a mess with eRoom.  He talked of communities and openness and how eRoom prevented that — creating a “debacle”.   My response to his blog post was that I agreed and disagreed.  And I’d like to elaborate on that….

eRoom is a business tool like anything else.  If you don’t use the tool the right way, or educate users on how to use the tool the right way…then you just might make a mess.   I’ve seen some great uses of eRoom and in other cases, it was just a place to dump files. 

I’d argue the problem was in the way this organization deployed and managed eRoom.  The IT was not CLOSE enough to the business to understand exactly how people were using the tool and educating them on how they should be using the tool.   eRoom is not a tool for building open communities within or outside an organization and is not about love, peace, and the 1960s.   I “heart” eRoom was just not part of the marketing strategy from what I remember.   eRoom is a tool for secure workgroup and team collaboration!!!   Plain and simple.

Yes, people want communities and openness to share knowledge and connect and locate expertise….all that great web 2.0 stuff.   And we’ve seen a new set of tools to help address that.  However, the demand for eRoom grew because customers wanted to put content on their extranet and securely work with suppliers, partners, clients, contractors, and everyone in their extended enterprise.  

The point here is that you need to think about CONTEXT before you rollout this type of technology and make it too CONVENIENT for people to start creating messes in.   What’s the business focus?  Who is using it?  Why?  How do they want to use it?    Synchronously?  Asynchronously?  Are the users on the road alot?   What is the business context? 

Now I’m not opposed to openness and community.  However, you also need secure collaboration for projects, client work, product development, mergers & acquistions, etc….  And as much as the 20th century command-control organization might be slanting towards openness and community — I have to point to Tom Davenport (one of the foremost thought leaders for years on all this knowledge stuff) who believes that companies compete an analytics.   And my take on that is as follows — you need to take those analytics and provide visibility, transparency, measurability, and accountability to managers and partners and customers — IN A SECURE collaborative context to protect the single most important competitive advantage that companies have in this copy cat world we live in.   And that is what eRoom is best at — both inside a company and outside.  

Sharepoint – the new intranet

It seems that many businesses out there are looking at Sharepoint not just as a portal, collaboration & content management solution …. but as a replacement to their current intranet … in effect Sharepoint becomes THE intranet.   This is an interesting revelation and one way to view Sharepoint within an organization.    I can definitely see small and midsize businesses thinking of sharepoint that way.  For a large organization, I’m not sure sharepoint is quite there yet to replace the corporate intranet….

Sharepoint replacing your intranet — becoming the intranet — that’s a big deal.  A lot of planning & analysis, a lot of time, a lot of effort and headaches.  Does it make sense in the long run? Yes.   But you will need to consider some type of phased approach.   Like getting shared team workspaces out there first so users become familiar with them and start to adopt them and see the ease of integration with MS office.   Then introduce other parts to the equation as you slowly migrate your entire intranet over to sharepoint.  Don’t just rush into rolling out Sharepoint because you think it will solve all your business problems.   Otherwise, Sharepoint will just become another problem by itself.

Some economics to consider

eRoom’s days are numbered.  I remain a fan but I’m realistic.  Why?  Simple economics.   Sharepoint Services is free — and customers are looking to reduce costs today wherever possible.  And switching off of eRoom will save money in the short run.   The return on investment to hire some consultant or 2 to migrate off of eRoom will be recouped in a year as companies save the maintenance/support they used to pay EMC.  

Now MOSS will cost them down the road and it’s unsure if these eRoom customers actually consider the total cost of ownership and how Sharepoint might affect that over time.   The reality is that Sharepoint is untested in a large deployment — and no one really knows what type of mess it might create down the road.  You just might be migrating one mess of eroom, documentum, notes, fileshares to an even bigger consolidated mess in sharepoint —  that is if its deployment and growth are not managed properly.  

And keep in mind that it’s not easy to do migrate off a platform like eRoom…as eRoom in most organizations as mission critical an application as email.   The switching costs are high.  Even a small installation with 1 eRoom server and a few hundred rooms and a few hundred gb of data is not a trivial migration.   Imagine 7 servers or 20 servers and terabytes of data.   Sure you can write some code that dumps data out of eRoom and puts it into Sharepoint.   However, the project planning and change management planning that needs to go into this does takes many months if not longer and is a significant investment.   I think the point here is simple economics. 

I think EMC shouldn’t forget why thousands of customers use eRoom today and grew eRoom so quickly in their organization….it’s called user adoption as eRoom was easier to setup,  easy to install, easy to use (compared to the alternatives) — which made it a very economical application with a solid ROI.   And customers paid for that convenience (with licensing costs).  However, today customers no longer have to pay for the same convenience as Microsoft gives WSS away and offers a comparative collaboration and content management alternative.   And you’ve got other web 2.0 competitors jumping on the bandwagon making it a more competitive landscape now.  So you have to look at simple economics if you want to compete.  

Anyway, one word of caution for anyone thinking of migrating to Sharepoint….eRoom and Documentum have been battle tested for many years — and Sharepoint has not been tested.   And as someone who has spent years traveling the globe making this technology work over the last decade, troubleshooted headache after headache after headache — it is NOT easy to scale and manage any collaboration & content management application.   Sure, sharepoint has tight integration with office and WSS is free and there are some very positive feature of the application as a whole.   HOWEVER…I leave you with this final thought….

Collaboration & content management technology has become and will continue to become mission criticial for managing projects and streamlining and running your business processes.   Economics is really important to consider….   But so is reliability and scalability.   Think about it – can you live without email today?   Yes and no…but if email is down, it’s a headache for a CIO to hear the user complaints.   So if I’m a CIO — do you want to trust your mission critical business processes to something that has not been tested and proven????    If it goes down….if it doesn’t quite work right….or doesn’t scale right…. do you want to trust your business on it?    So seriously think about that as you think about saving costs in the short run.   Take baby steps if you are going to migrate…. think about context, make sure you are close your users, and get the right advice.  Be skeptical of the cool demos, song and dance, and marketing before you make an investment in this type of technology – no matter what platform you choose.

 

Facebook: The New Portal….

Facebook started out as a simple app to rate other college kids at Harvard. It evolved into what is today “finding friends and doing cool fun stuff online”.  What facebook does really well — they say “I do this in my real life with my friends….how do I do this in an online world that is convenient , easy, and fits my lifestyle.”

My prediction is that Facebook will ultimately become the portal of choice (where people won’t goto Yahoo…they’ll goto their own facebook page). The real power in facebook is that it aggregates other technology into it. Take a facebook application like Trip Advisor for example — that’s not just “cool fun stuff” to do with friends — that’s called online marketing by word of mouth. What restaurant is good in Charlotte, NC? Let me ask my friends or my friends friends. I’m a restaurant in the area — do I market with flyers, tv, google search? No. You market inside Facebook.

Facebook has single handedly turned marketing on its head — as businesses can no longer shout out information about their products or services via TV and other means — they need to penetrate your social networks from the ground up virally.   Ultimately….it’s all about the Facebook platform — and Facebook being “THE platform”….