Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 2

In my last post about governance, risk, and compliance, I have described why information governance is important and where to begin with the information governance. Today, I will describe what needs to be considered in information governance polices and will give some recommendations.

What needs to be considered in information governance polices?

Government mandates - If you are in a regulated industry, you need to consider first and foremost government mandates such as GMP/GxP, ISO 9001. You need to make sure that your documents management and IT are compliant with these requirements.

Proliferation of content - there has been explosive growth in the creation and collection of content by organization and individuals. Content is stored in CMS, data warehouses, physical warehouses, desktop computers, file shares, back-up archives, mobile devices, cloud services, employees personal computers and other devices such as tablets, smart phones, etc. To complicate matters this information is also geographically disbursed.

In SharePoint, for example, you get a small department that has a site, other departments take notice and start their own sites. Suddenly you have small SharePoint instances pervading everywhere. What organization should do instead is take those separate silos of SharePoint and combine them into one centrally managed environment. It is the matter of having a plan in place first, then applying the technology to achieve those business goals.

Information governance policies should cover desktops and shared drives, CMSs, databases and data warehouses, email systems, cloud based apps, social media platforms, physical warehouses. Content may be stored with the 3rd party, this needs to be considered.

Employees send email with documents attachments. This email and attachments have significant value to the business whether they contain contract terms, meeting notes or even employees opinions on a given topic. Email requires governance and so it needs to be included in your information governance policies.

Big data – are you prepared? What measures your IT has taken to help with this issue?

Cloud computing – If you use cloud computing, you need to create governance policy for it.

Mobile Devices - Employees use mobile devices to do their job. Many companies don’t have policies that cover things like tablets and handhelds. They are starting to, but it is just a beginning. You need to create polices for mobile devices and a mechanism to enforce those policies. And in the regulated environment, you would need to prove that you are enforcing those policies.

Social media - effectively leveraging social media while protecting the organization from non-compliance.

Create comprehensive social media governance plan. It should include compliance, supervision to interactive social content; perform conceptual search and policy-based monitoring of all info, inside and outside the firewall; establish social media usage policies and procedures and then train staff on them; preserve and collect relevant social media content for compliance and litigation purposes.

Consider all content and access methods involved as users connect via smartphones and tablets.

Employ solutions that capture additional approval on a site-by-site basis to verify assent for capturing and monitoring.

Wherever possible create separate business identities for social media to minimize capture of personal or private information.

Govern employees interactions. Most regulated organizations are taking a measured approach to social media, starting with small number of employees and approved social media sites.

Monitor and capture inside-based interactions within a corporate networks. Moderate inside-based interactions. Be mindful of legal and regulatory guidelines.

BYOD phenomena – “bring your own device”. People bring their iPads, iPhones, etc. to conferences, work, taking notes, making presentations, responding to email, updating pipeline, etc. All this content belongs to the organization but the device is not. What happens when this employee leaves the company? Or that employee loses the tablet? What happens to information?

I read about the case where a doctor had all his patients’ medical records unencrypted on his laptop. The laptop was stolen.

It could also be that there are multiple versions of documents floating around, gets passed from one person to another person, may be tweaked a little along the way. And they each are legally discoverable.

Be sure that the official version of the document is stored in your CMS and managed by your governance program.

It is imperative to have a policy to protect this information and to enforce that policy across all those devices.

Security – sensitive information must be protected – encrypted. LinkedIn got hacked and all passwords got stolen. What are you going to do that this does not happen to your organization?

Intellectual property - What about a pharmaceutical company developing a new drug, not yet under patent protection, and an employee takes that information to a competitor?

Of special importance is information related to future revenue. For example, a pharmaceutical company should place a high priority on protecting information related to future products which are not covered by patents.

It is vital for companies to have a system in place to protect sensitive content such as for example product roadmaps, manufacturing plans, vendor supply lists, marketing and promotional strategies.

In my next post, I will describe information governance for crisis management and e-discovery.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 1

Governance is about securing the information and also about using information for greater value. People don’t talk much about value of information but information is strategic asset of a company.

What makes a company great among other things is the ability to take information and use it as an asset. Information is what drives an organization, whether it is through development of new drugs, new products, looking into new geographic regions to expand to, etc.

Governance is like an insurance policy that you feel like you are paying for nothing, until you need it. You don’t know when and if an “accident” will happen and you don’t know how big it will be, but when it does happen, you are very happy that you have that insurance policy. Until then you resent having to pay for it. Governance which is controls is your insurance policy.

KM can be costly in terms of fines, brand reputation, legal fees. In case of a legal discovery, the lack of documents means a disaster. Absence of document control in place will result in violating regulatory compliance.

To an increasing extent, organizations are focusing on risk management as a central issue in GRC equation. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is now a bigger driver for GRC than Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance requirements. Organizations want a top-down viewpoint on risk, whether it is resulting from non-compliance or operational issues and want to know what is being done to mitigate it. ERM is increasingly considered as a strategic tool to support governance and improve business performance.

Governance and compliance are essential business functions. Risks need to be understood and managed. Risk management does not mean that every risk can be anticipated but it can plan for the risk and have alternatives ready.

Information governance – effective content controls, allowing all info to be securely and properly shared across departments, geographic locations, and systems.

Organizations need a closed loop environment for assessing business risks, documenting compliance and automating control monitors to sift through their business systems.

For example, SharePoint is widely adopted system for knowledge management. According to a recent AIIM report, more than 60% of organizations have yet to bring their SharePoint deployment into existing compliance, retention, and long-term archive policies.

To prevent potential exposure of sensitive or classified information, it is imperative for organizations to bring their SharePoint in line with existing compliance policies.

Benefits of information governance: helps management to enforce focus on business mission, employees have information that is accurate, current and is in suitable format for their use; employees are more efficient and productive; removing duplicate and unnecessary content reduces the time needed to find information, derive higher profits; operational cost is lowered; retention management optimizes cost-effectiveness of storage platforms; legal fees are reduced in case of litigation.

Where to begin?

To start information governance initiative, create steering committee – CIO, legal officer, compliance officer, other main stakeholders.

Outline the scope, timeline, and budget.

It should be rolled out from the top. This way everybody will be on the same page.

Have a strategy. Strategy should drive what is measured and monitored for compliance and performance.

Information governance strategy must account for the value of information and how it is classified and accessed.

Information governance policies should support all of the organization’s governance controls – retention, disposition, legal hold, data privacy and security.

Policies need to be scalable, enforceable, and measurable. It is better not to have a policy than to have a policy which can’t be enforced.

Policies should change depending on new business requirements, regulatory demands, rising costs, litigation. Companies must have a process to update, validate, deploy, and enforce these policies. They should be deployed without negatively impacting users and operations.

Rank the value of information depending on its type and where it is coming from. For example, information created by VP of sales should be ranked higher that information created by a marketing intern.

More about governance in the next post.

Knowledge Management - 5 Steps to Do IT Right the First Time

A strategically implemented knowledge management solution is the answer to the growing need to do more with less. It can reduce costs and increase efficiency and productivity.

But while a carefully implemented knowledge management initiative can transform employees experiences and organizational efficiency, a poor implemented initiative can have a negative impact.

Here are five steps for optimizing customer service and support with an effective, best practice led knowledge management initiative.

1. Define and phase your knowledge management initiative.

Start with clear goals and objectives, and roll out your implementation in stages. Implementing knowledge management in only few departments at a time, offers a chance to fine-tune knowledge management in few departments before expanding to the rest of your organization.

2. Target and tailor your employees interactions.

Be sure you understand the context and intent of your employees queries for information. Choose knowledge management tools that enable you to avoid overloading your employees with information and would deliver tailored, interactive, accurate answers to their queries.

3. Foster collaborative knowledge creation.

Encourage collaboration during knowledge creation making sure that your knowledge capitalizes on the collective knowledge of your organization employees. This collective knowledge might be included in social networks of your organization.

4. Analyze the Performance.

Powerful analytics are vital to optimizing your knowledge management initiative. They should be used on an ongoing basis to identify opportunities for improvement, emerging questions trends, and common employees information seeking behavior. You should monitor the performance of your knowledge management initiative and adjust practices accordingly.

5. Think enterprise-wide.

But where do you begin? Start with one group or department but think enterprise-wide. During early stages, be sure to involve all those who would benefit from future roll-outs. Knowledge management can ultimately deliver benefits across enterprise - from expanding the scope of marketing campaigns and supporting the development of departmental intranets and portals, to enhancing relationship with partners and vendors.

Comprehensive knowledge management solution helps organizations strategically transform the customer service and support experience - and drive customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, increased sales and reduced costs.

10 Signs Your Search Engine is Stalling

An integral part of your content management strategy is enterprise search. Your users need to be able to find information and documents they are looking for. However, enterprise search does not always work properly. Users have to get more creative to compensate for the lack of good search but is this what you really want?

Creative ways which users use to find information is a sign that your search engine is stalling. If you recognize any of these symptoms below in your content management system, take it as a call to action: your search engine needs a tune-up!

1. Querying With Magic Cookies: If your users are memorizing document IDs or using some other "magic" unrelated to natural search queries to find content, your search has a problem.

2. Off-Roading to Google: If your users are proudly (or surreptitiously) resorting to Google to get answers, take a hard look at your search tools. Google is good. But if your search engine can't outperform a generic Web search engine, given it has a much tighter domain of content and context and can be tuned to your goals -you can do better.

3. Gaming Learning: Today's search engines are "smart". No doubt-click-stream feedback is a powerful tool for improving search relevance. But, if users are expending time repeatedly running the same search and clicking on the "right" document to force it to the top of the results list, your search engine isn't learning, it has a learning disability. Search engines should not have to be gamed.

4. Using Cliff Notes: If users use everything from note cards to the back of their hands to scribble titles and key phrases for frequently utilized content, if your users have taken to cliff-noting content to prime their searches, the search engine is not working.

5. Paper Chasing: Are your users printing out content, littering their cubes with hard copies? That is just another form of cliff-noting. Using functioning search is easier than a paper chase, not to mention more reliable.

6. Doing the Link Tango: Badly tuned search engines tend to "fixate" on certain content, especially content with lots of links to other content. Smart users often take advantage of this tendency to click through on anchor articles and then ricochet through the link structure to find the actual content they need. If your users are doing the "link tango" for information, you know that your users are great, but your search does not work.

7. Lots of "Game Over" Search Sessions: When search strings bring back large amount of content that is not earning click-through (document views), your users are having the "game over" experience. Unable to identify what is relevant in this sea of material, they are forced to cheat to stay in the game. Smart search engines provide navigation, faceted guidance or clarifying questions to prevent "game over" interactions.

8. Dumbing it Down: Your users are verbally adept, and they would love to ask questions "naturally". If your analytics are telling you that most users' searches have disintegrated into 1-2 word queries, take it as a direct reflection of your search engine's lack of intelligence. A search engine competent in natural language typically receives 20% of queries in seven words or more and about half in three, with fewer than 20% as 1-2 word queries.

9. Easter Eggs: If your users tell you they often find interesting new content by stumbling upon it, your search engine is delivering "Easter Eggs." Finding good content by accident, especially good content, signals a poorly tuned search engine. New content is usually highly relevant content and ought to be preferred by smart retrieval algorithms.

10. Taxi Driver Syndrome: Taxi drivers will tell you that they don't want a map, that they don't need a map because they memorized the map. Unlike a city topography, a knowledge base changes frequently. So, if your users are saying they don't want or need search, it's not because they have memorized all your content. What they are realy saying is: we don't need search that doesn't work.

If your users have to get more and more creative to get the job done, thank them. And then reward them and your business by tuning or upgrading your search engine. It will pay off in efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employees and customers retention.

Website Usability

Web usability is an approach to make a web site easy to use for a user, without the requirement that any specialized training is undertaken or any special manual is read. Users should be able to intuitively determine the actions they need or can perform on the web page s, e.g., press a button to perform some action.

Some broad goals of usability could be: present the information to the user in a clear and concise way, give the correct choices to the users in an obvious way, remove any ambiguity regarding the consequences of an action (e.g. clicking on delete/remove/purchase), place important items in an appropriate area on a web page or a web application.

When you designed your web site, you want to promote it everywhere with big bold letters saying, "Hello everybody! Come and look at my web site! It is just great!" When you submit your web site to forums for web site reviews, you may write, "What do you think of my web site?"

This is the big mistake to ask someone to look at your web site. There is never a single answer. To understand if your web site meets its usability requirements, ask people to try it out. They should be able to answer the following questions: what is the purpose of this web site? what can I do here? what needs does it fulfill?

The 5 seconds test tool is one way to explore immediate impressions of the web site users. You can experiment by asking them what the site is about, to see if the site’s purpose is communicated clearly.

The biggest mistake is to believe that web site appearance matters the most. How it looks is only one part of the process. How it performs is another. What it can give back to site visitors and how effectively it conveys that information will matter even more.

Writing content for web users is an important task. The main goal of this task is the ease with which the web site content is read and understood by your users. When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them.

Keep the web site content as concise as possible. Users have very short attention spans and they are not going to read articles thoroughly and in their entirety. So, get to the point as quickly as possible. Place your most important content high on the page. Think of a newspaper: the top story is always prominently displayed above the fold. Use headings to break up long text. Use bulleted lists where possible.

Format the text in such a way that it is easy to read it and just to scan a web page.Keep colors and typefaces consistent. Visitors should never click on an internal link in your site and wonder if they've left your web site. Choose your colors and fonts carefully and use them consistently throughout the site.

Keep page layout consistent. Use a Web site template to enforce a uniform page structure. Visitors should be able to predict the location of important page elements after visiting just one page in your site.

Design a clear and simple navigation system. a good navigation system should answer three questions: Where am I? Where have I been? Where can I go?

The navigation system should be in the same place on every page and have the same format. Visitors will get confused and frustrated if links appear and disappear unpredictably. Don't make your visitors guess where a link is going to take them. Visitors should be able to anticipate a link's destination by reading the text in the link or on the navigation button. Users don't have time or patience to guess.

Large or complex sites should always have a text-based site map in addition to text links. Every page should contain a text link to the site map. Lost visitors will use it to find their way, while search engines spiders will have reliable access to all your pages.

Include a home page link inside your main navigation system. Visitors may enter your site via an internal page, but hopefully they will want to head for the home page. Link the site logo to the home page. Most sites include their logo somewhere at the top of every page - generally in the top, left-hand corner. Visitors expect this logo to be a link to your site's home page. They'll often go there before looking for the home link in the navigation system.

Include a site search box. A robust site search feature helps visitors quickly locate the information they want. Make the search box prominent and be sure that it searches all of your site, and only your site.

Check your page display at in a number of different screen resolutions to make sure that your most important content is visible when the page loads.

Include a form for users' feedback on your site.

A good brand creates or reinforces a user's impression of the site. When your site is strongly branded, that means that visitors will think of you first when they go shopping for your product or service.

Conduct usability testing. Usability testing helps you to replicate the experience of the average web site user and correct problems before real users find them.

Content Management Systems Review - Confluence

Confluence means "a coming together" and has been helping workers do just that since 2004. Starting out as an enterprise wiki, it has evolved through the years into an all-round collaboration tool. Confluence is available as a SaaS or hosted product, powered by Java. It is the Atlassian product and it is designed to work with other Atlassian products.

Confluence has the widest spread application of Atlassian's products, it could be applied in almost any environment. It is free to open source institutions and non-profits. Pricing starts at just a charity donation of US$ 10 for hosted smaller installations for less than 10 users.

Price breaks go neatly up through the ranks until you are only paying US$ 1 per user, if you have 2,000 of them for the Hosted version.

Features

Confluence offers the ability to create one or many sites, for the whole company, different teams, groups or classes of worker. Managing them is done through an elegant set of administration tools and dashboards.

Setting permissions is very easy.

Sites can be styled and formatted as needed. With styles for the most typical areas such as human resources, design projects, along with templates for common tasks like meetings, project plans, intranet or team project page can be created very quickly.

Communities are presented through bios, pictures, home pages. Users can find each other by holding the cursor over someone's name. To see a brief bio, they need to click on that name and they visit the main page.

Users can chart work progress through blogs, their status updates can be seen by other users in the group and home pages. There are also YouTube videos and Twitter-style updates.

Users will also get notifications (or can create an RSS feed) when someone edits an entry or changes a file.

All documents can be kept in one place accessible to all relevant users.

When combined with Atlassian's JIRA, users can create step-by-step workflows that will see tasks completed in a by-the-numbers fashion and everyone's contributions and input can be tracked.

The site has search function. Searches, updates and other entries can also be filtered to limit the search. There is autocomplete feature for the search.

Confluence has the ability to connect to applications like SharePoint. Confluence has a SharePoint connector. It also has full MS Office compatibility and smartphone access.

Confluence has Sandbox where you can try its features.

Content Management Systems Reviews - Open Text - ECM Suite - Auto Classification

For records managers and others responsible for building and enforcing classification policies, retention schedules, and other aspects of records management plan, the problem with traditional, manual classification methods can be overwhelming.

Content needs to be classified or understood in order to determine why it must be retained, how long it must be retained, and when it can be dispositioned. Managing the retention and disposition of information reduces litigation risk, reduces discovery and storage costs, and ensures that organizations maintain regulatory compliance.

Classification is the last thing end-users want (or are able) to do. Users see the process of sorting records from transient content as intrusive, complex, and counterproductive. On top of this, the popularity of mobile devices and social media applications has effectively fragmented the content authoring market and has eliminated any chance of building consistent classification tools into end-user applications.

However, if classification is not being carried out there are serious implications when asked by regulators or auditors to provide reports to defend the organization’s records and retention management program.

User concerns aside, records managers also struggle with enforcing policies that rely on manual, human-based approaches. Accuracy and consistency in applying classification is often inadequate when left up to users, the costs in terms of productivity loss are high, and these issues, in turn, result in increased business and legal risk as well as the potential for the entire records management program to quickly become unsustainable in terms of its ability to scale.

So what is the answer? How can organizations overcome the challenges posed by classification?

The answer is a solution that provides automatic identification, classification, retrieval, archival, and disposal capabilities for electronic records as required by the records management policy.

OpenText Auto-Classification is the solution that combines records management with cutting edge semantic capabilities for classification of content. It eliminates the need for users to manually identify records and apply requisite classification. By taking the burden of classification off users, records managers can improve consistency of classification and better enforce rules and policies.

OpenText Auto-Classification makes it possible for records managers to easily demonstrate a defensible approach to classification based on statistically relevant sampling and quality control. Consequently, this minimizes the risk of regulatory fines and eDiscovery sanctions.

It provides a solution that eliminates the need for users to sort and classify a growing volume of content while offering records managers and the organization as a whole the ability to establish completely transparent records management program as part of their broader information governance strategy.

Auto-Classification uses OpenText analytics engine to go through documents and codifies language-specific nuances identified by linguistic experts.

Features

Automated Classification: Automate the classification of content in OpenText Content Server inline with existing records management classifications.

Advanced Techniques: Classification process based on a hybrid approach that combines machine learning, rules, and content analytics.

Flexible Classification: Ability to define classification rules using keywords or metadata.

Policy-Driven Configuration: Ability to configure and optimize the classification process with an easy step-by-step tuning guide.

Advanced Optimization Tools: Reports make it easy to examine classification results, identify potential accuracy issues, and then fix those issues by leveraging the provided optimization hints.

Sophisticated Relevancy and Accuracy Assurance: Automatic sampling and benchmarking with a complete set of metrics to assess the quality of the classification process.

Quality Assurance Workbench: Advanced reports on a statistically relevant sample to review and code documents that have been automatically classified to manually assess the quality of the classification results when desired.

Auto-Classification works with OpenText Records Management so existing classifications and documents can be used during the tuning process.

OpenText Auto-Classification was developed in close partnership with customers using the OpenText ECM Suite, and works in conjunction with OpenText Records Management so that existing classifications and classified documents can be used in the tuning process.

Viewing Documents in the Cloud Repository

More and more organizations are moving to solutions where documents are stored in cloud-based systems. Implementing a solution in which documents are stored in a cloud-based system, such as a content management system, engineering drawing repository or a technical publication library, can present some challenges. You need to consider these challenges carefully so that you could provide the optimal experience for your users.

These are most important challenges to consider when implementing a cloud-based documents repository: working with multiple file formats; variations in document size; browser-compatibility with HTML5; and viewing documents on mobile devices.

Multiple File Formats

The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. They may be PDF, TIFF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CAD or many others. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

This issue is further complicated by the varying number of devices that the content will be viewed on. A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size

It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document. The system can also provide quick initial view of the first few pages of the document allows a user to begin reading content while the rest of the document downloads. This increases worker productivity and can even reduce traffic if the user quickly determines that they do not wish to continue reading the document.

Browser compatibility

Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. The four major browsers are Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Document viewing technology is dependent on some level of support within the browser. For example some browsers support Flash and some do not. HTML5 is only supported on recently updated versions of some browsers, so older browsers can create problems. Even where HTML5 is supported, different browsers have different levels of support. Sometimes the differences are subtle and only cosmetic, while others, like complex formatting, can cause significant display issues.

Mobile viewing

With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

Is HTML5 the Answer?

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. However, there is a misconception that the adoption of HTML5 is the answer to all problems. It is not. The four major browsers have been implementing HTML5 over time and how much of the standard that is supported varies greatly with the version of the browser. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system. With that knowledge you can successfully promote a good experience for your users and overcome the major pitfalls faced by so many organizations today.

SharePoint 2013 - Adopt it or Not?

You may have just finished with upgrading your SharePoint to 2010 version and now we are hearing about SharePoint 2013. What is this all about? And are you going to adopt it or not?

Microsoft releases a major version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2013 is a significant release with many new great features. However, you may find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 release in the near future, unless you can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

I am going to highlight new features of SharePoint 2013 to help you with this decision.

Reuse Content Across Multiple Sites

One of the pain points experienced in previous versions of SharePoint was around the fact that content that was created within one site collection could not easily be reused in a separate site collection. Since many organizations required multiple site collections, this limitation created a few cases where duplicate content was required.

With 2013, the concept of Cross-Site publishing has been introduced. When using this feature you can store and manage content in one location and then display the content in other site collections. Using this approach you can display the data in as many places that are needed, while still only managing and maintaining one single point of truth.

Navigation and User Friendly Links

There are new navigation features and the ability to base a navigation structure of an existing term set. This allows organizations to centrally manage their content and to provide meaningful navigation structures within the multiple site collections. You can also create friendlier names when linking to pages and content within SharePoint.

In previous versions of SharePoint you were required to have longer URLs that contained references to the specific location you were trying to access. Within SharePoint 2013 you can now configure the URL so that it can be more easily referenced.

An example of this would be the following two URLs:

Previous SharePoint Versions:

http://www.contoso.com/Pages/Computers.aspx#/ID=453&Source=http%3A%2F1010101

SharePoint 2013 Friendly URL: http://www.contoso.com/Computers/model101

You can see that by removing the required URL parameters for ID and Source you are able to create friendly, memorable URLs for your sites and pages.

Changing Web Parts

There is a need to be able to "gather" and "present" data to users. In previous versions of SharePoint this was done through either the Content Query Web Part or a custom Roll Up solution.

Because of limitations in performance, the Content Query Web Part was restricted in how it could be utilized across organizations. If you had many users who needed to roll up a large amount of content it is likely that you could experience performance issues in using the web part.

SharePoint 2013 adds a new web part that will allow you to provide the same functionality as the Content Query Web Part, but is instead based on the search functionality available within SharePoint. Because this web part is based on search, many of the existing limitations have been reduced.

Design Changes

In SharePoint 2013 there are many new techniques that can be used to aide in the branding and customization of your sites. One of the biggest impacts is the ability to create a SharePoint custom design in any design tool of choice. This means your designers are not limited to only working within SharePoint Designer to build their custom design.

Social Features

The list of new features in Social Enterprise include: micro blogs, activity feeds, community sites, Following, Likes and Reputations.

Community templates have been designed in a way that allows anyone within the organization to join a community and to begin discussions on things relevant to the community. These communities are a great way to share information in a collaborative way, at the same time making intellectual property with the organization available to a larger audience.

In addition to making it easier for people to come together, SharePoint community templates also provide some features that allow for them to be easily managed, including built-in moderation features. This means that you can still maintain a level of control within the discussions that are had over certain sensitive topics.

With the newest microblogging features, users will be able to start threads that include tags of other people and links to relevant content.

Following adds the ability to "follow" people, sites, documents and topics, with subsequent actions of the followed entity appearing in the user's activity stream. By following other users within the organization users will be able to see items within their feeds and follow things that are relevant to them.

My Site

In SharePoint 2013 saving documents into My Sites is going to get a lot easier. There is a single document library, not two as in SharePoint 2010, and the permissions have been simplified, making it easier to share documents with colleagues. My Site document library can be synced with a local drive to enable offline access so you can access your documents even when the server is unavailable.

Mobility

It is easier to access SharePoint content from a mobile device in the 2013 version. Adding to the existing classic view, SharePoint 2013 offers two new views for mobile devices, including a contemporary view for optimized mobile browser experience and a full-screen view which enables the user to have a full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a smartphone device.

Site Permissions

SharePoint 2013 includes new, simplified sharing based model for site permissions management.

Themes

SharePoint 2013 will bring richer themes and even the ability to add a background image to the page.

Metro

Microsoft is using the new term "Metro" to describe its new, radical UI design of SharePoint. It is supposed to be easier to use. Microsoft is planning to use Metro as the default UI for SharePoint as well as user tools like Office, Windows, Xbox and mobile devices.

Using SharePoint to Create a Blog

A blog is a Web site that enables you or your organization to quickly share ideas and information. Blogs contain posts that are dated and listed in reverse chronological order. People can comment on your posts, as well as provide links to interesting sites, photos, and related blogs.

Blogs posts can be created quickly, and they often have an informal tone or provide a unique perspective. Although blogs are frequently used for commentary on the Internet, they can be used in several ways in a corporate environment. For example, one of my clients used SharePoint blog for facility maintenance notes.

SharePoint Services provides a blog template that makes creating a blog easy. A blog is a site that contains lists and libraries, such as a list of blog posts, a list of other blogs, and a library for photos. Once you create a blog, you can set up categories, and then customize the blog settings.

When you create a blog, you need to decide whether you want the blog to inherit permissions from the parent site or set up unique permissions manually. In most cases, you should set up unique permissions for the blog to ensure that you can manage its site settings, lists, and libraries independently of its parent site. For example, you might want to grant less restrictive permissions on your blog than on the parent site, such as enabling all authenticated users on your intranet to read and comment on the blog.

Before you start adding content to your blog, you will want to make sure that your site, lists, and libraries are set up the way that you want. For example, you may want to edit the description of a list to help your readers understand its purpose, change permissions for the blog or the Other Blogs list, or track versions of your blog posts so that you can restore a previous version of a post if necessary.

Once you've customized the settings for your blog, then you can set up categories to help you organize your posts. Categories are especially helpful if you create blog posts about different subjects or for different purposes, such as current events, brainstorming for a special project, or a technology or hobby. When posts are organized by categories, people can more easily find the posts that fit their interests by clicking the appropriate category in the Categories list.

To create a blog, you must have permission to create sites. Click "View All Site Content", and then click "Create" on the "All Site Content" page. You can use the "Site Actions" menu to complete this step.

Next set up categories. You can add more categories or edit the category names later. If you don't want to use categories, you can choose "None" for the category when you create a post.

Under "Admin Links", click "All content". Under "Lists", click "Categories". The Categories list appears. If you have not set up categories on the blog before, the list contains category placeholders, such as Category 1 and Category 2. In the "Categories" list, click the "Edit" button to the right of the category placeholder that you want to change. Select the placeholder text, type the new text that you want, and then click OK. Repeat steps 3 through 5 to replace the existing placeholder categories with your own categories. To add additional categories, click "New on the list toolbar, and then type a name for the category in the "Title" box. To delete a category, point to its name, click the arrow that appears, and then click "Delete Item".

Once created, you may want to customize settings for your blog, or for its lists and libraries. In your blog, under "Admin Links", do one of the following:

• to customize the Posts list, click Manage posts;
• to customize the Comments list, click Manage comments;
• to customize the Other Blogs list, click All content. Under Lists, click Other Blogs;
• to customize any other lists or libraries in the blog — such as the Links list or Photos picture library — click All content, and then click the list that you want to change.

On the Settings menu, click "List Settings" or click the settings for the type of library that you are opening, such as "Picture Library Settings". Click the type of setting that you want to change, such as "Versioning" settings or "Permissions" for this list, and then make the appropriate changes. Repeat this procedure for any other settings, lists, or libraries that you want to change.