Lost your /dev/null by accidently shoving a file there as root? Use the following to recreate:

rm /dev/null; mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3

From a quick scan of the blogosphere its become pretty apparent I’m not the only one questioning what exactly Microsoft have been up to with Sharepoint?!? Have their software architects been sitting completely siloed and at the last moment bolted together various ‘bits’ to make the overall “Sharepoint” product.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic application, but when you see time and time again how people use it “out-the-box” you baulk! It can most definitely be twisted into something more than a very expensive semi-website-thing or ‘fancy’ collaborative shared drive – that is its power.

Though when dumped out as purely an “out-the-box” solution one really has to explain Sharepoint: “Please suspend your understanding of what a shared drive is and also please suspend how you understand you might navigate through a website – neither of these learned concepts are going to suffice here, sorry!”

Breadcrumbs for one thing. Eh? Breadcrumbs here and breadcrumbs there and they all point to different areas and change strangely depending on what you happen to be viewing at the time. Not that intuitive to the average joe punter especially when the screen jumps between lists and webpages.

At least thats where the SharePoint consultancy comes in I guess?! Maybe Microsoft do know what they’re doing ;)

You’d be absolutely amazed at how many people are still using Internet Explorer 6! One of the hardest things I’ve had to explain is this very thing; some people just don’t comprehend anyone can be on anything less as the latest bleeding edge browser since they are!

There are however, many companies still using this very browser, not least due to the massive undertaking that it might be for them to upgrade away from it. For instance, think mission critical legacy applications working fine right now – how can senior colleagues be assured they’ll still work as intended after any upgrade? Long lengthy expensive test plans and presentation layer upgrades prior to any painful upgrade most likely.

Think then of the vast swaith of potential website users sitting in offices browsing the web in their lunch hour being discriminated against?

Should Internet Explorer 6 not be part of your ‘progressive’ web development you’re quite probably damaging your own clients revenue potential! Not sure they’d like that if they knew ;)

Making nice graphs with such volume measures as “documents added, documents downloaded, community members etc.”, is all well and done, but the question that must resonate is “What real use are these to show how my business operates?!“.

Instead value drivers pushing forward action such as quality of information and process efficiency are the key to a successful and vibrant Intranet engaging employees.

“But how do I measure these intangible elements?”

Ensure a governance and architecture process around the information posted to your Intranet. Allowing a swaith of colleagues to upload anything and everything will soon clog your Intranet with information, firstly that doesn’t respond well to web technologies (think PowerPoint slides), and secondly creates an undefinable dumping ground and mess.

Then your job is to design value driven indicators assessing the performance of these intangible elements guiding your strategic decision making and learning; organisational value derived from indicators assisting day-to-day decision making processes and organisational learning! Not data volume!

You may find that colleagues, especailly senior colleagues are cautious over the implimentation of so-called community building or collaborative software. However, with the correct departmental governance and policing, and best practice of this area, community software can be utilised to its full benefit as a useful and integrated business tool.

Community building software can promote organic connections between colleagues. This will, as a by-product, act as a structured storage mechanism for unstructured corporate knowledge which otherwise would only be held between individuals in an un-retrievable unstructured manner.

These types of electronic storage mechanisms are used to great effect within industry leading technology companies such as IBM and Microsoft. Organically structured groups of colleagues are able to liaise from a single recordable point removing the obvious issues of geographical displacement. There is also an instant removal of cottage industries updating and managing phone lists, structure charts, etc. The community area can remove pressure from traditional means of business communication such as email.

Software such as Microsoft SharePoint MySite’s potential, for instance, can be realised if embedded within already established business processes. For the majority, people associate social networking with Internet based networks such as Facebook and MySpace; certainly at the opposite end of the spectrum and barely recognisable as productivity tools! The potential though to improve performance and cut costs is certainly possible should such an Intranet community be used productively and ring-fenced in a business setting.

The key to successfully utilising social media at work lies in comprehending it is very different in nature to its vaguely similar consumer cousins. With a different approach social networking can exploit the simple rationale pulling individuals into consumer resources: that of a simple purpose! Business social networking requires a defined business purpose with specific usage guidelines providing real leverage such as building teamwork, organisation around projects, and organically building a corporate knowledge base.

A community Wiki building a corporate knowledge base, for instance, categorising and built from what would otherwise be unobtainable unstructured data kept in varying hetrogeneous systems, paperwork, peoples heads, can be fashioned to store searchable data and information access to the entire organisation – of what would generally only be available to the few.

Historically, teamwork built through staff meetings, company team building workshops, team nights out, departmental parties, etc. are face-to-face interactions. The flip-side can be an electronically stored impressionistic sense of business activity formed around colleagues actively publishing activities around them. Largely self-organising and leaving a permanent organic record of communication around, say, a project otherwise not existing, can generate implicit awareness to colleague work groups.

Ultimately this can replace, but probably not in its entirety, traditional communication mediums such as the email list which lacks structure and is difficult to manage. An Intranet social network on the other hand provides many-to-many communication within a structured and collaborative environment.