I’ll be performing a ”deep-dive” demonstration of how to satisfy the Control of Documentation requirement for ISO 9001:2008.

Click here for the actual presentation file PMI Atlanta ISO 9001:2008 Presentation.

For More Information on the Event (including directions) Click Here.

Abstract

From http://www.iso.org , “The ISO 9001:2008 standard specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, and aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001: 2004 were implemented by more than a million organizations in 175 countries.”   

Satisfying and implementing all the requirements of the ISO standard is a large undertaking and requires the support of the entire organization. The intent of this presentation is to describe how Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used as a tool during this undertaking, specifically in satisfying the requirements stated in Section 4.2.3 Control of Documentation.  In order to be ISO 9001:2008 certified, your organization must develop and document a procedure to control quality documents. The requirements of ISO 9001:2008 are generic and are intended to be applicable to all organizations, regardless of type, size and product provided. Remember the guidance offered by the standard is prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, how you implement control of quality documents is up to you, as long as you show that you have satisfied the stated requirements.

About PMI Atlanta – Chapter Overview

The Project Management Institute (PMI®), established in 1969 and headquartered near Philadelphia, USA, is the world’s leading not-for-profit project management professional association, with over 200,000 members representing 125 countries. Currently there are over 240 chartered and approximately 20 potential chapters geographically dispersed over 67 countries. PMI professionals come from virtually every major industry including, aerospace, automotive, business management, construction, engineering, financial services, information technology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and telecommunications. PMI establishes Project Management standards, provides Seminars, Educational Programs and Professional Certifications that more and more organizations desire for their project leaders.

PMI is dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art in the management of projects. PMI membership is open to anyone actively engaged or interested in the application, practice, teaching, and researching of project management principles and techniques.

The PMI Atlanta Chapter serves the North Georgia and Metro Atlanta area. Ranked in the top three chapters in the world for Membership, PMI Atlanta’s 4,400+ members are employed across all industries, with a majority in the IT and Telecommunication fields. However, size in itself is not the goal. As a large chapter, we are able to offer quality programs and professional networking. We can also more significantly impact businesses in the metro Atlanta area as we strive to increase the recognition to the profession of Project Management.

All presentations from SharePoint Connections 2010 Amsterdam have been posted here.

The International SharePoint event of the year highlights over 40 sessions for IT-Pro, Developers and end-users. Sessions were delivered by SharePoint Experts from Europe and the USA. 

 
 
A few topics from the conference are:

End user:
Without writing any code or custom solution SharePoint 2010 offers a lot of possibilities to adapt to the end users wishes.

• What’s new for end users
• Using the Business Connectivity Services
• ECM for the Masses – How SharePoint 2010 Delivers on the Promise
• SharePoint Designer
• Rich media in SharePoint 2010
• Creating Workflow
• Social computing

Developer:
SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010; just good friends….

• Advanced Web part development
• Sandboxed Solutions
• BCS solutions
• Client side object model
• Enterprise Search & FAST search
• SharePoint UI customization
• Silverlight

IT-professional:
SharePoint 2010 gives the IT Pro the tooling to create and maintain high performance and high available farms.

• Architecting a fault tolerant, high performance SP 2010 farm
• Backup and restore in SP 2010
• Claim based Identity
• Large scale repositories
• Implementing multi lingual solutions
• Protecting content with SQL server 2008
• Upgrade scenario’s

All presenations from SharePoint Connections 2010 Amsterdam have been posted here.

Click Here to access the TCO and ROI Calculator…

Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of applications off-premises.

The Azure Services Platform uses a specialized operating system, called Windows Azure, to run its “fabric layer” — a cluster hosted at Microsoft’s datacenters that manages computing and storage resources of the computers and provisions the resources (or a subset of them) to applications running on top of Windows Azure. Windows Azure has been described as a “cloud layer” on top of a number of Windows Server systems, which use Windows Server 2008 and a customized version of Hyper-V, known as the Windows Azure Hypervisor to provide virtualization of services.

The platform currently offers five services:

• Live Services
• SQL Services (which is now Microsoft SQL Azure)
• .NET Services
• SharePoint Services
• Dynamics CRM Services 

which developers can use to build the applications that will run in the cloud.

Microsoft offers the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator, which will provide you with a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building on the Windows Azure Platform. Upon completion of the TCO and ROI Calculator profile analysis, you will be presented with a detailed report which shows estimated line item costs for an accurate TCO and a 1 to 3 year ROI analysis for you or your company or organization.

Click Here to access the TCO and ROI Calculator…

NOTE: You should not interpret the analysis report you receive as a part of this process to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy of any information presented in the report. You should not view the results of this report as a substitute for engaging with a third party expert to independently evaluate you or your company’s specific computing needs. The analysis report you will receive is for informational purposes only.

Microsoft has just released a SharePoint 2010 VM…

Click Here to download            

This download contains two Virtual Machines for evaluating and demonstrating Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Virtual machine “a” contains the following pre-configured software:

1. Windows Server 2008 SP2 Standard Edition x64, running as an Active Directory Domain Controller for the “CONTOSO.COM” domain with DNS and WINS
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP2 Enterprise Edition with Analysis, Notification, and Reporting Services
3. Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 R2
4. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition
5. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition Beta 2
6. Microsoft Office Web Applications Beta 2
7. FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 Beta 2
8. Microsoft Project Server 2010 Beta 2
9. Microsoft Office 2010 Beta 2
10. Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

Virtual machine “b” contains the following pre-configured software:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Evaluation Edition x64, joined to the “CONTOSO.COM” domain
2. Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

Active directory has been preconfigured with over 200 “demo” users with metadata in an organizational structure. All of these user profiles have been imported and indexed for search within SharePoint Server 2010, with “contoso\administrator” granted administrator permissions. SharePoint Server 2010 has been configured in a “Complete” farm using Kerberos authentication and the default SQL Server 2008 instance for data, and has a site collection created using the Team Site template at http://intranet.contoso.com/ and a FAST Search Center at http://intranet.contoso.com/search/. Performance Considerations 1. If possible, unpack and run the VM image on a separate, fast hard drive (7200 RPM or better) from the operating system of the host machine. If this is being done on a laptop, a second internal drive or external eSATA drive works best, though USB 2.0 (make sure it’s 2.0, 1.1 is too slow) or Firewire is acceptable. For absolute best performance use a second internal SSD drive.

Presentation Abstract

In today’s economy, providing a product of the highest quality will help differentiate your product line from your competitor’s, and provide a strategic advantage. Many customers are now demanding that their suppliers conform to the ISO 9001: 2008 standard.

From http://www.iso.org/, The ISO 9001:2008 standard specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, and aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements. ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001: 2004 were implemented by more than a million organizations in 175 countries.

Satisfying and implementing all the requirements of the ISO standard is a large undertaking and requires the support of the entire organization. The intent of this presentation is to describe how Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used as a tool during this undertaking, specifically in satisfying the requirements stated in Section 4.2.3 Control of Documentation. In order to be ISO 9001:2008 certified, your organization must develop and document a procedure to control quality documents. The requirements of ISO 9001:2008 are generic and are intended to be applicable to all organizations, regardless of type, size and product provided. Remember the guidance offered by the standard is prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, how you implement control of quality documents is up to you, as long as you show that you have satisfied the stated requirements.

Additional Information

I’ve attached the Atlanta SPIN presentation for reference (click here to download).

For more information on this topic, please see my previous post Build an ISO 9001:2008 Compliant Document Management System with SharePoint.

About Atlanta SPIN

The vision of Atlanta SPIN is to help create a business community competitive in a twenty-first century global marketplace through proactive sharing of process and product development improvement models, ideas, and techniques. Our mission is to provide educational, scientific, and practical information about process and development improvement for its members, other SPIN and professional organizations and the business community in furtherance of our vision.

Atlanta SPIN provides a forum for the free and open exchange of experiences and ideas in process, people and enabling technologies. Our purpose is to: 1) to enhance our membership’s knowledge and skills through an active program of networking, publication, recognition of excellence, and mutual support, and, 2) to help sustain organizational commitment to the improvement of quality, process capability and organizational maturity for software and systems development, acquisition, and delivery of related services.

When the architecture includes SharePoint in the solution platform, the next step in our process is to determine what functionality / web parts can be re-used to help satisfy the business requirements (whether out-of-the-box, a third party tool, or an internally developed web part). 

Because I cannot develop web parts on my own (we have a team of developers that do that at Abel Solutions), I have become very familiar with third party vendors that supply commonly used functionality in robust, easy to deploy web parts.  Bamboo Solutions is one of the vendors that I have become most familiar with (so much so that I actually assisted the Bamboo Team at SharePoint Conference 2009 for a couple of hours in Las Vegas on Monday, October 19, 2009).

We had such a success with the Bamboo Alert Plus web part on one project (an ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System), that we were asked to create a Partner Success Story.

Tonight I was browsing the Bamboo Solutions site (as we are using some additional web parts on a current project) and I ran across a post that Jill Kunkel posted that recaps the week at SharePoint Conference 2009 (click here to view the post).

“What will the Alert Plus web part do for me?” you might ask yourself. I think the following (from the Bamboo web site) says it best:

The functionality described above takes a developer a significant amount of time to create.  Once testing, configuration and deployment are also considered, being able to depend on a well tested web part that is utilized by hundreds of other clients (Bamboo has indicated that this is their most popular selling web part) makes the build versus buy decision (in this case “buy”) a fairly easy one.

In summary, if you need additional functionality to determine the “what”, “where”, “when”,  and “why” for sending out alerts from your SharePoint site (which results in fewer and more focused alerts/notifications to your users) you should download and test the trial version of Alert Plus to help you determine the “how”.

Since I specialize in the use of SharePoint, I always keep my eyes open for documentation that helps support the business case for SharePoint.  Whether you are currently in the process of creating a business case for a solution, or you have already made your selection and are in the process of implementing your solution, I think you will want to review/print/download the following research, to add to your toolbox and support your decision making process.

The links below contain the Title, Date and source of information, along with a brief summary.  In addition to these summary pieces of information about the report, there are direct links, each to the actual research itself.  Of course one link allows you to purchase the information (for as much as $2,000.00), whereas the other link takes you directly to the report, FREE of any charges.  Why would these reports be offered for free?  Vendors that are listed in the report pay the fees for reprints to be available free of charge and have secured all copyright and publishing privileges with the research firms to include the reports available for all audiences.  

NOTE:  All reports were researched and funded by the analyst firms themselves.

As you can see by the dates of the articles, most have been published/updated within the past month and are therefore very relevant. 

So you decide, pay for all the research (make sure you have $10,819.00) or access for FREE!  I know you’ll make the right decision …

From www.iso.org, “The ISO 9001:2008 standard specifies requirements for a quality management system where an organization

• needs to demonstrate its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, and
• aims to enhance customer satisfaction through the effective application of the system, including processes for continual improvement of the system and the assurance of conformity to customer and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.

ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001: 2004 were implemented by more than a million organizations in 175 countries.”

Satisfying and implementing all the requirements of the ISO standard is a large undertaking and requires the support of the entire organization. The intent of this article is to describe how Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used as a tool during this undertaking, specifically in satisfying the requirements stated in Section 4.2.3 Control of Documentation. The aforementioned section of the ISO standard offers guidance for the requirements (represented by “”) that must be met in regards to control of documents throughout their life cycle, and is summarized below, along with SharePoint features (represented by “”) that may be utilized to satisfy these requirements:

  Documents must be approved before they are distributed.

  SharePoint’s fundamental building blocks of document libraries and workflow offer out of the box solutions (workflows) for approving documents. In some cases customization might be necessary to achieve the desired approval flows set forth by the quality policy, but in many cases the out of the box workflow will suffice.

  Documents must be reviewed/updated/re-approved on a periodic basis.

  SharePoint provides “Information Management Policies” (that are Content Type specific) that can automatically initiate workflows (based on document specific metadata). For example, the Information Management Policy for a document type of “Procedure” would automatically kick-off the “Document Review and Approval” workflow one year following the “Last Review Date” value for the document. Both the timeframe (e.g. days, months, years) and workflow triggered (e.g. Review, Approve, Archive, Delete) can be configured as needed.

  The correct version of document(s) must be made available at point of use.

  SharePoint offers several options to satisfy this requirement:

• A secured “Draft Working Library” may be utilized for content owners and authors to collaborate on documents before they are “published” to the “Final Document Library” that all members of the organization have view access to.
• Enabling “Document Version History” on a document library causes SharePoint to maintain a version of the document each time the document is updated. Major or Minor versions can be utilized, and authorized users can be granted access to see all revisions to the documents, whereas other users can be granted access to see only the latest version.

  The current revision status of documents is identified.

  “Document Version History” captures metadata properties associated with the document that might have changed from one version of the document to the next, along with the actual changes to the document itself. Since the entire document is saved as part of the revision history, this functionality can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Office Word 2007 and tools like “Compare Documents” and “Track Changes” to easily show changes from one version to the next. NOTE: Although these tools can be used to see updates that occurred between different versions of the document, it is still a best practice to include and maintain a Revision History section in the document itself.

  Identify, control and monitor documents from external sources.

  The open architecture with SharePoint allows integration with external sources:

• Documents that are received from external sources via email (or other electronic sources), can be transferred to SharePoint, and “tagged” with the appropriate metadata so that the same policies that are applied to internal documents can be applied to documents received from an external source.
• Documents that are received in hard copy form can be scanned/tagged and loaded into SharePoint. Features of this functionality are based on the scanning hardware/software utilized.

  Prevent the accidental/unintended use of obsolete documents.

  Many of the features already discussed above are utilized to satisfy this requirement, for example:

• Only the latest/approved version of documents are available for viewing by employees
• Information Management Policies may be used to archive/destroy documents based on the rules specified

  Preserve the usability of documents.

  The documents must remain legible (accomplished by storing the documents electronically) and easily identifiable (accomplished using the metadata properties associated with the document) which again are fundamental features of SharePoint.

Of course email notifications alerts, workflow to escalate tasks not being completed in a timely manner, auditing and the historical tracking of all the tasks as they are completed, is all native SharePoint functionality that facilitates the processes described above.

In order to be ISO 9001:2008 certified, your organization must develop and document a procedure to control quality documents. The requirements of ISO 9001:2008 are generic and are intended to be applicable to all organizations, regardless of type, size and product provided.

Remember the guidance offered by the standard is prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, how you implement control of quality documents is up to you, as long as you show that you have satisfied the stated requirements.

NOTE: I’ve added a presentation that can be viewed by clicking here.

The content in this post was originally published as the Abel Solutions Tip of the Month for March 2009

Presenter: Scott Jamison – Managing Partner – Jornata

The Challenge of Adoption

Scott started with the analogy of VHS vs. Beta and how VHS was adopted over Beta and achieved the critical mass. 

SharePoint Adoption can be hard…even Steve Ballmer indicated in his keynote address that he still gets asked “What is SharePoint?”…the problem is, it is EVERYTHING.  Another reason that the adoption of SharePoint can be difficult is that users do not necessarily “have” to use SharePoint (i.e. they can use file shares and email instead).

Some of the new functionality in SharePoint 2010 (for example Social Computing) will most likely take 18-36 months, as it is something new to the organization.  The Adoption Curve of Awareness, Trial and Adoption was discussed.

User Enlightenment Stages  - Based on Perceived Value and Conquered Skills and Confidence

• Clueless
• Skeptic
• Aware
• Productive
• Advocate – These users are required to tell everyone else in the organization how great SharePoint is.  Advocates must be identified and “championed” to speak to the organization.
• Inventor

What Users Want

• The ability to Connect and Understand SharePoint’s ability to Solve Business Goals – Outcomes not requirements
• Elegant Solution Design – Don’t make users go through five screens to do one task
• WIIFM – What’s in it for me? – Users need to understand how they benefit from what they are entering into the system (e.g. metadata entry, records, document management, etc.)

Must-Have Elements in Your Adoption Strategy

The following items MUST be on your Project Plan for implementing SharePoint

• Communication Plan
  • Identify and Leverage Experts and Champions – Perform a Pilot, spread the word via peers
  • CEO Memos – Someone in the organization understands and agrees with the vision
  • Town Hall Meetings
  • Break Room Posters – One example of a company was mentioned that put the posters on the back of doors in the bathroom…your results may vary
  • Online Scavenger Hunts
  • “Birth” Announcements
  • Launch Parties

NOTE: Make sure you have an ongoing plan for continuous communication (it’s not a one-time event).  Especially since most organizations roll-out separate pieces of functionality over time.

• Training Plan
  • Not just for Developers and IT
  • Power Users / Site Owners – Maybe even establish an internal “certification” program where the developers walk the end users on what to DO and what NOT to do.  This could also be a video to save time.  Also, there is a Microsoft “Buzz” kit that can be accessed and downloaded online.
  • Visitors
  • Members
  • Web Content Contributors
  • Workflow Approvers
  • Remember: “Just-in-time and just enough”

• Content Conversion Plan
  • It’s critical that important information gets moved to the new system, there are basically three options:
  • 1. Clean and Migrate everything
  • 2. Migrate nothing; Index the old content – New content only in the new system
  • 3. Clean and migrate recent content only
  • Remember: Don’t Migrate without Cleaning!

• User Support Plan
  • Have a “Contact Person” for every page
  • Establish Internal Site Owner User Groups – empower users to help each other
  • Get the IT Help Desk on board
  • End-User Feedback Loop – Metrics Based (number of users, rating scale, etc.) or Anecdotes Evidence (gather good/bad experiences and get quotes and self promote the site)
  • Provide End-User Resources (guides, training tools, help, etc.)
• Incentives and Reward Plan
  • Answer the WIIFM question – show (with their real data) why something will work
  • Make it fun!
  • Provide Recognition for Content Contribution – Money Talks; so do Titles & Certificates
  • Have a Fantastic User Experience – Invest in an Information Architecture

Must-Have (Free) Resources

• SharePoint Buzz Kit – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/rampup/Pages/default.aspx
• SharePoint Training Kit – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=673dc932-626a-4e59-9dca-16d685600a51&displaylang=en  
• The Productivity Hub – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=277fefca-d62f-41bc-943d-79002254cfee&displaylang=en
• Get the Point Blog – http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/GetThePoint/default.aspx
• YouTube – SharePoint Channel – http://www.youtube.com/sharepoint
• Computer-Based Training – http://learning.microsoft.com/manager/catalog.aspx

Presenter(s): Dana Berg and John Roe – speakTECH

The presenter started the meeting with asking how many people had lost money in Las Vegas and about 50% of the people raised their hand (including me).  He then asked how many people had WON money, and only 1 person raised their hand…lesson learned…

Is there still a need for governance? YES…Now more than ever…

What is Governance?

The set of processes, procedures, policies, guidelines and tools affecting the way people direct, administer or use specific IT Services with a corporation.

There must be a balance between Information Technology and Systems Management, and End Users utilization of Applications.  These discussions must be captured and documented, but more importantly, the document (and process) must be a “living document” can continue to be updated based on the experiences of the actual implementation.

Steps to Follow – Method of Enforcement

• Someone has a Need or Concern about a service (The “Need” is identified)
• That need is assessed against several things
  • Capabilities of SharePoint
  • Design Principles of the Organization
  • Vision for the Service
  • Current Architecture
• Determination is made on the “Appropriate Method of Enforcement”
• An Enforcement Method is documented and implemented
  • Communication / Training of Policy r Best Practice
  • Procedure
  • Configuration / Customization / 3^rd Party Tool

SharePoint 2010 Specific Functionality Requiring Governance

The following are examples of updated and/or new functionality that is introduced in SharePoint 2010 that will require an organization to define new policies in their Governance Plan.  These are broken out based on whether they are Process/Procedural or Design/Configuration in nature.

Process/Procedural

• Executing Legal Holds
• Training on Social Networking Policy
• Deploying Custom Web Parts
• Community Involvement Incentives
• Managing Server Accounts
• Certifying Delegated Administrators
• Record Disposal Process
• Reporting Abuse

Design / Configuration

• Sandbox Solutions
• Document Sets
• Custom Help
• Granular Backups
• In-place Records Management
• Managed Metadata
• Tags
• Tag Inheritance
• Feedback Ratings
• Offline Workspace
• User Site Themes
• Unique Doc IDs
• Activity Feeds
• Server Resources Quota
• Advanced Document Routing
• Staged Retention

Examples of Governance Topics to be considered with SharePoint 2010 Implementation

• Custom Help – SharePoint 2010 provides the ability for users to enter/maintain Custom Help for their sites…This is a nice feature and I think one that should be well utilized.  However, there will need to be guidelines around what information is entered into custom help.
• SharePoint Designer – As a Site Collection administrator, you can control the use of SharePoint Designer.  This is one example of “Certifying Delegated Administrators”. You can turn SharePoint Designer On/Off. You can determine whether a user can update the Master Page of the site or not
• In-place Records Management – Users can make documents records by “Declare as Record” from context menu.  This functionality can be turned on/off by Document Library.  Organizations need to determine if/how they will use this functionality.
• Retention Policy Maintenance – SharePoint 2010 offers the ability to specify multiple stages (not just one) and the ability to define policies for records that are different than policies for documents.
• Request New Site Functionality – An example of an automated workflow based Site Provisioning application was shown.  This is NOT out of the box, but an organization might want to consider building their own process that governs how this process can be utilized by end users.
• Quota Management – The business value of quota management is to show content owners that it is their responsibility to be a good “Content Steward” and to maintain the amount of data (and usefulness) of data on their site.  The Records Center functionality (archive) can be used effectively in SharePoint 2010 to allow users to manage their content effectively.