SharePoint Governance is a topic everyone talks about, yet very few actually understand.  The confusion surrounding SharePoint Governance is well-rooted; for one, it’s an incredibly large set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that detail, literally, every aspect of how the SharePoint platform should be used.  For another, successful SharePoint Governance is only achieved when it is tailored for your organization.  SharePoint Governance is not cookie-cutter – it is specific to each organization’s culture, preferences, tendencies, and current processes.
At Perficient, we often participate in Governance Planning engagements for the SharePoint platform.  A typical Governance Planning engagement includes hosting collaborative workshops with stakeholders of all levels within the organization to determine both the current state of collaboration, as well as the desired future state of collaboration.  It is essential that representatives from all parts of the organization are included, as they will all be impacted by the Governance Policy decisions.   A good governance model will not only emphasize ensuring management and control of the platform, but also in driving adoption and maximizing the return on investment.
SharePoint Governance is broken into three major areas:
IT Governance – policies governing the platform itself and the services to be performed by the IT department
Information Management – policies governing the content and information stored on the platform
Application Management – policies governing the use of custom development on the platform
 
The pillars of SharePoint governance are intended to be both mutually exclusive, as well as collectively exhaustive.  While there is inevitably overlap between the three pillars, as you can see above, they govern very different parts of the platform.  There are many resources available to organization’s looking to establish a SharePoint Governance Plan – if that is you, a great place to start is with Microsoft’s interactive “What is Governance” guide.
Formalizing a Governance Plan for SharePoint is key to the successful adoption of the platform, but what happens after all of the workshops, revisions, and documentation are complete?  What happens AFTER the Governance Plan?
SharePoint Governance in Action
Successful SharePoint governance involves an ongoing dialogue between IT, management, and end users throughout the organization.  The goal of SharePoint governance is to ensure that the solution continues to provide ROI throughout the entire lifecycle of the application.  There are two sides of the governance coin: management and control on one side, and driving adoption and value on the other.
SharePoint Governance Committee
At the core of SharePoint Governance is the SharePoint Governance Committee. The role of the Governance Committee is simple:
“Critically evaluate requests from the organization that would violate current governance policies to determine whether they will help the organization to realize the goals and objectives of the SharePoint platform.”
SharePoint Governance is not intended to be immutable; it is intended to evolve and change as the solution evolves and changes.  The Governance Committee’s task is to ensure that any exceptions or modifications made to the Governance policies are reflective of the intended use of the platform.  In doing so, the Governance Committee is able to continually ensure the ROI of the solution.
Governance Committee Composition:
The membership of the SharePoint Governance Committee should reflect the various functions and stakeholders across the organization that will be leveraging the platform.  The committee should hold enough authority to make decisions and enforce policies, but also needs to have input from end users through the company.  To accomplish this, a mix of IT executives, Business Segment leaders, IT managers, and information workers should be included on the Governance Committee.  The exact size and composition of the Governance Committee will be dependent upon the size and composition of your organization.  A typical SharePoint Governance Committee should be a mix of:

• IT Executive Stakeholders
• Compliance Stakeholders
• IT Leaders
• Information Workers
• Application Development Leaders
• Business Segment Leaders

A good rule of thumb is that the Governance Committee should consist of no more than twelve, but no less than four members – no matter the size of the organization.
With a maximum of twelve members on the committee, for large organizations it is not feasible to expect the Governance Committee to hold all the expertise necessary to make well informed decisions on every type of policy related to SharePoint governance; that – is the responsibility of the SharePoint Steering Committee.
SharePoint Steering Committee
While the SharePoint Governance Committee is tasked with ensuring the continual ROI of the platform by evaluating new governance policies in relation to the solution’s goals and objectives, the SharePoint Steering Committee is tasked with providing ongoing guidance regarding the potential technical and user impact of new governance policies. The Steering Committee is designed to collect feedback from the organization and advise the Governance Committee on the best direction for the platform moving forward.  Not all organizations will need a Steering Committee; for some, there will be enough thought leadership on the Governance Committee itself to provide the necessary expertise.  Typically, the larger the organization, the more stakeholders there are in the solution, and more likely a SharePoint Steering Committee will need to be established.
SharePoint Steering Committee Composition:

• IT Governance Subcommittee
• Information Management Subcommittee
• Application Management Subcommittee

A typical Steering Committee is composed of three subcommittees, each related to the three pillars of SharePoint governance: IT Governance, Information Management, and Application Management.  The various subcommittees will be made up of stakeholders representing the different types of policies present within each pillar.
For example, the IT Governance subcommittee will hold a large amount of technical leadership, due to its policies centering on topics such as data protection, deployments, and application costs.  In contrast, the Application Management subcommittee should be more diverse, since Application Management encompasses topics such as application branding, project management, and custom development.
The size of the subcommittees is largely determined by the number of subject matter experts (SMEs) in your organization.  In smaller organizations, it is likely that a single SME might cover multiple topics, such as deployments and service offerings, whereas in larger organizations these roles may be separated.  The Steering Committee should be staffed with enough members to properly provide expertise on the all of the various policy types found in the SharePoint Governance Plan.
SharePoint Governance Request Process
The SharePoint Governance Committee and SharePoint Steering Committee collaborate to make decisions regarding new governance policy requests.  The final element of successful SharePoint governance is the Business Analyst team.  The Business Analyst team acts as a funnel that screens end-user requests to determine if the request will violate current SharePoint governance policies.
If a request is determined to violate current governance policies, then this request is directed to the Governance Committee to evaluate at their next meeting.  When evaluating the request, the committee must determine if they feel they have enough information to make a decision.  If the committee feels they do have enough information to make an informed decisions, they can decide immediately.  If the committee does not feel they can make an informed decision, then they must engage the relevant subcommittee pertaining to the policy.
The Governance Committee ultimately has three options when making a decision regarding governance policies:

• Approve a governance policy change
• Approve a governance policy exception
• Reject the governance policy request

The entirety of the process is shown in the workflow diagram below:

Whether a governance policy change or a governance policy exception is made should be determined by the potential impact of the change.

• Policy Exceptions should be used when there is a specific, non-threatening, business case for a violation of a governance policy that is still, primarily, a good policy. An exception allows the solution to capture additional ROI in a specific instance, while not opening the application to wide-spread risk if the policy were to be abused.
• Policy Changes, in contrast, should be used when a policy has become outdated, or begins preventing the solution from achieving goals and objectives established for the platform.
• Policy Rejections should be used when the proposed policy request poses a strategic or technical risk to the solution. It is the Governance Committee’s responsibility to evaluate the risk of the request vs. the potential ROI that could be achieved.

Conclusion
SharePoint governance requires input from stakeholders throughout the entire organization and a constant dialogue between the end users, management, and IT department.  SharePoint governance is reliant on two essential bodies:

• SharePoint Governance Committee
• SharePoint Steering Committee

While the Governance Committee is intended to be staffed with members that have the authority to make decisions regarding governance policies, the Steering Committee serves to advise the Governance Committee on the technical and user-impact risks associated with policy decisions.  Together these two committees help to ensure that the governance of the solution continues to change and evolve along with the platform.  SharePoint Governance is a balancing act between management and control on one side and driving user adoption and value on the other.
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Note: Today’s blog post comes from Vadim Tabakman, Technical Evangelist for Nintex with over 8 years of experience in SharePoint and Nintex technologies. He understands how SharePoint, business process automation and forms can join forces successfully in numerous industries and business scenarios to drive business adoption and succeed in SharePoint projects. Vadim brings an excellent technical perspective to the discussion of how to use SharePoint workflow and forms to solve business needs.
As businesses grow, the need for the automation of business processes grows with it.  With that need, the inevitable discussion of  hardware support and scalability comes up.  Can your current hardware and software environment support your ever growing need?  How much of an investment will you need to make, in order to accomplish your automation needs and will there be future investments or upgrades needed as requirements grow even more?
Those are the types of questions that come up and Microsoft and Nintex have expanded their product offerings to help answer those questions.


Firstly, living in a SharePoint world, companies need to consider the investment required for the different types of SharePoint servers.  You have Web Front End servers, Application server, Index servers and Database servers.  Over time, the user base grows and adoption grows with it.  This results in additional servers required in the on-prem environment to cater for that growth.
In comes the world of the cloud and Office 365.  Office 365 takes away the worry of growth and scalability as it is hosted on Azure and that handles all of that for you.  But really, what is SharePoint without Nintex Workflow and Forms?  Nintex Workflow and Forms have been available in the Office 365 SharePoint Store since the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in 2013 and are fundamental tools for companies to help with automating business processes and driving user adoption.

As you consider moving to an Office 365 environment for your business needs, there are many factors to considers. Do you want to move part of your environment from on-premises SharePoint or do you want to go all-in with an Office 365 environment?

Hybrid – Moving from on premises to Office 365

Moving an entire on-prem SharePoint environment to Office 365 can be an enormous undertaking with potential risks involved.  Some companies choose to move parts of the business to the cloud and control the move in parts over time.  In that regard, Nintex Workflow has 23 actions (at the time of this post) that you can use from an on-prem environment, to talk to your Office 365 environment.

Office 365 add user to security group
Office 365 assign license
Office 365 check in license
Office 365 check out items
Office 365 Create List Item or Document Set
Office 365 create site
Office 365 create user
Office 365 delete items
Office 365 delete site
Office 365 discard check out
Office 365 download file
Office 365 new blog post
Office 365 query list
Office 365 remove user from security
Office 365 reset password
Office 365 retrieve license plans
Office 365 send document set to repository
Office 365 send document to repository
Office 365 update item permissions
Office 365 update items
Office 365 upload file
Office 365 user access management
Office 365 wait for check out status change

With these actions and the other 227 actions, the business processes you can build are almost limitless. From onboarding and leave requests, to sales processes and contract management, anyone can build out their processes with Nintex Workflow. Whether they be SharePoint administrators, IT staff or business users. The drag and drop interface in both the on premises and Office 365 versions of Nintex Workflow makes for an intuitive design canvas that requires little training to start building out business processes.
One of the more common practices in the piecemeal approach to moving from on prem to Office 365, is to have some workflows that run on prem, then upload resulting documents to the Office 365 environment. This may happen over time, up to the point that Office 365 adoption is so high in the company, that the entire process moves there. Nintex Workflow make it easier to build out both processes, on prem and in Office 365 with similar user interfaces.

Strictly Office 365

If you are strictly an Office 365 shop, then adding the Nintex Workflow and Forms apps to your site takes almost no time and the sheer number of actions available to you will make the automation of business processes extremely easy.
Not only do you have the actions mentioned above in the Hybrid scenario, but also all the other actions that make up the Nintex Workflow environment.
Automating the onboarding process is usually one of the first business processes that gets built, so that there is instant ROI.  A Nintex Form is used to initiate the process, where a form is filled in and submitted that starts a Human Resource type workflow.  This type of process helps to organize HR to begin the multiple interview process, before approval requests are sent out.  The next part of the process is the creation of the accounts in Office 365 and the assignment of licenses.  All this aides in streamlining business processes and minimizing human intervention so that employees can focus on more important parts of the business.
Since you’re in the cloud, what other line-of-business systems can you talk to?  Nintex Workflow provides the ability to talk important line-of-business systems, such as DocuSign, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SalesForce, SQL Server, OneDrive (and other cloud storage providers) and social media outlets like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Driving Adoption with a Better User Experience
Traversing most web sites on a mobile device browser can sometimes be excruciating.  SharePoint, although having major improvements of late for supporting the mobile form factors, is still going to cause you some grief.  When it comes to filling in forms, other restrictions become visible.
How do I access my forms if I have a team of employees who are out on-site and don’t have online access but still need to complete forms and submit them?

When my employees are filling in forms, rarely do they simply fill in a form and submit it.  They use the forms over a period of time as they gather information, and then need to take photos and annotate them.  This could be a process that takes 20 minutes, and hour or potentially days.  Browser based forms have too many limitations here.
The Nintex Mobile app is perfect in these types of scenarios.  It allows you to access your forms, even though you are offline and also allows you to save drafts and modify image attachments.  Let’s not forget tracking where a form was actually submitted with geolocation tags. This is not to track your employees.  It’s to track where forms are submitted, so that you can take that information and map it to find best routes to send people/teams to resolve the issues.  Think of a group that goes around looking for graffiti that needs to be cleaned up.  You can capture where it’s all found, build out best/fastest routes so that your teams can be more efficient.

Total Economic Impact

As with all software investments, you want to see how it will impact your company from a financial standpoint.  Here is a link to the Total Economic Impact report that was put together by Forrester and it sheds a light on how Nintex Workflow and Forms can be an advantageous investment.

About Nintex

Nintex is the world-leading workflow software company, used by thousands of public and private organizations in 90 countries and serviced by a global network of more than 1,000 high-quality partners and service providers. Nintex delivers innovative software, mobile and cloud services that empower businesses to automate processes quickly and easily. For more information, please visit us online at www.nintex.com or follow Nintex on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Some very exciting new capabilities were announced here (Ignite conference) as part of the Office 365 suite powered by Azure AD and rights management service. I will share two of these here
• Cloud App Discovery
• Document Tracking
Cloud App Discovery
With 365 you’re already setup for SSO but if you require some advanced functionality like adding your third party or on-premises apps to this single sign on experience then this section of the Office 365 portal will be very valuable
Once you have synchronized users with Office 365
• In the Office 365 Admin portal go to azure AD. Go to Cloud App Discovery if you wish to add your apps to single sing on experience (Upgrade to Azure AD premium if u want self service)
• With cloud app discovery you can see how many users using which SAAS apps.
• You can view which users were denied access
• You can assign multi factor authentication (even if the app like twitter comes with single factor OOB)
Password rollover- Every week or two users passwords for SAAS apps is randomly changed. So admins also won’t be privy of user password. Initial password is changed instantaneously
Users can see log reports and incident report.
Document Tracking with Azure RMS
• Recipients can download a mobile RMS sharing app to view shared protected RMS document
• Allows doc owners to track activity on docs they sent
○ Who was denied or accessed
○ Various views – timeline view, category view, chart view, map view with geographically location where files were accessed
• Sender gets Notification email with link to tracking site and it will list all docs he shared externally or internally
• Sender can revoke access from document tracking site. Recipients get notification
There were many other features announced at the Ignite but I think these two at the very least deserve a round of applause !!

Bill Baer today shared and announced some significant changes coming up in SharePoint 2016.
To quote him:
“SharePoint 2016 is the most durable version shipped till date.” (tweet this)
These announcements are very welcoming, not only from a IT admin perspective but also for the end user (file size, list threshold etc.) This might be the best SharePoint version to date.
TOPICS
• Management
• Reliability, performance, scale
• Insights and data
• Cloud accelerated experiences
Management
Convergence
Code base – took a cloud snapshot of SPO. Brought a lot of SPO investments back to on-premises (the one which couldn’t be brought will be covered by cloud accelerators.) Cloud down codebase based on SPO. Backported capabilities for on-premises differentiators
Hardware Reqs
Single – 16-24 memory; x64 processor; 80 GB disk
Farm – 12-16 GB RAM
Pre Requisites
OS
Windows Server 2012 R2, WS 2010
Services
.NET Framework 4.5.2
Windows Server App Fabric
Provides in memory distributed caching
MS Information Protection and Control Client
WCF Data Services – enables creation and consumption of services
Database– 64 bit of SQL 2014
Deployment – unchanged from SP 2013
NOTE: Standalone installations will no longer be supported (Single Server Farm does not include SQL Server Express)
Upgrade – Attach SP 2013 DB to SP 2016. (For SP 2010 scenarios -Upgrade 14.5 mode (SP 2010 mode) site collections to 15 mode)
Migration – Migrate content to SP 2016
NOTE: The services that don’t exist in SPO will be backported to SP 2016 like PerformancePoint
Identity
SAML authentication becomes a first class citizen (default). Normalizes on OAuth and JWT/SAML with WSFED
(Apps will trust Azure AD) (Moving away from windows identity and moving towards cloud based)
SMTP Connection Encryption
Supports sending mail to SMTP servers using STARTTLS connection encryption
No fallback support for unencrypted connections
SMTP can use non-default ports (no more relying on port 25 for mails)
Performance and Reliability
MinRole (Roles and services)
Four discrete roles –
• User services – Any requests coming from the end user will be handled here like sync client; onenote; user profile; page rendering; excel services; sandbox. code; project; subscription settings. These are optimized for low latency
• Robot Services (Application Services) – not end user initiated like provisioning; timer jobs; search. Optimized for high throughput
• Specialized Load – reserved for services that needed to be isolated from other services like 3rd party
• Caching Services – supports for distributed cache (load balances request from end user)
New Role Screen -Specify Server Role (in config wizard) like special load role (third party solutions); web front load role; search; application; distributed cache
NOTE: For automated deployments – use -IsLocalServerRole <RoleName> from PSConfig commandlets to assign role to a server
NOTE: Chose specialty load role for assigning multiple roles to a server
Role Enforcement and Health
Health rule will scan each server in the farm daily (except special load)
Central Administration
New columns in the “servers in farm”- Role; In Compliance (yes or no) with fix button (in cases where one server is assigned multiple roles
PATCHING
Zero downtime patching – 2 MSI’s per service and 1 MSI’s per language pack. Smaller update footprint.
You can install patches middle of day online w/o stopping services.
Boundaries (HUGE HUGE)
Content DB – probably sizing into TB’s
Site Collection per Content DB – 100,000 site collections per content DB
List threshold – well beyond 5000
File Size -10 GB and removed character restrictions
Indexed items – 2x increase in search scale to 500 million items
Performance
Download – byte range HTTP Gets
Upload – BITS specific block-based upload protocol
*Moving away from file sync
Fast site creation – simply copies site collections with SPSite. Copy from already created templated site collections. Mitigation of feature activation.
User profile service
Removed built in FIM service and supports external FIM service.
Durable Links (BIG)
Renaming or moving files in earlier versions broke the link. With SP 2016 links will use Resource ID based URL’s. URL remains intact with rename and move. Enables discrete Url on visibility. Moving between site collections or sites will not change the URL
Insights and Data
Real time telemetry – real user monitoring for Services, Actions, Usage, Engagement, Diagnostics
Compliance
Classification ID – complex query based on complex predicate. 51 classification ID’s OOB provided for SSN, license #, etc.
You can now use Azure RMS and eDiscovery for on-premises SharePoint.
Search Service Application
New application will provide support for Office Graph/Delve. Unifies on-premises and cloud indexes.
Extranet
Site publishing – leverages Office 365 Identity federation services
Team Sites
Hybrid scenarios – Be inclusive of both online and on-premises. e.g. when you follow documents online you should be able to see the same on-premises too.
I am sure you are as excited as I am to get your hands on this new, improved and well-designed version.

The single biggest benefit of this new Migration PowerShell API is speed. Close to 5 times faster than CSOM calls. The new API was released today and is available for public consumption.
An Overview

• Source – file share, SharePoint on-prem, potentially any other data source
• Package – create package for the API to be able to accept it
• Azure temporary holding storage – use power of Azure to bring content faster in MSFT network
• SharePoint /OD4b final destination – timer job based import in a scalable way that will not hurt the service using back-end resources

Who is it for?
IT admin and developers
Best Sources
On-prem and file shares in OD4B
Why use API?

• Resources dedicated to ISV and IT admin
• Limited calls to end user entry points, meaning this won’t get impacted by the CSOM throttling.
• Better equipped to scale to the demand

What about Speed?
Type of content does impact the rate of ingestion; using backed resources; lots of small, scenario specific, tweaking that can help get best out of API, preliminary data suggest 5X the speed of CSOM before throttling.
The Flow

• Package is created
• Gets uploaded to azure blob storage
• One CSOM call is made to start the migration process
• Azure queue gets real time updates
• Once complete the logs in the package get updated

Create Package
Generate the appropriate XML to go with the files – resemble a lot to the PRIME package, 8 xml in a package + the content (don’t preserve taxonomy, workflow metadata)
Upload to Azure Blob
For each package you’ll need to have two containers: 1 for manifest and 1 for content. It uses the same queue for all packages.
The Queue and Logs
Use same queue for multiple packages – will get update for job started and completed. The log file is stored in each manifest container (will get error and warning for each log)

Following on my previous posts in series “Office 365 – A day in life of an end user”, today I bring to you a recent discussion between the Microsoft team and Office 365 community around Delve. It touches on some real great areas on how this new feature enhances the people experience.

————————————————–

Overview 

On April 15th Microsoft and the Delve product team hosted the People Experiences YamJam to answer questions about enhancements to the user profile experience, the new Office 365 page authoring canvas and new mobile apps for Android and iPhone. Below is a summary of what was discussed during the YamJam. We hope you join us live next time!

Resources 

• Office Blog Announcement  
• How you can find people and information in Delve  
• View and edit your profile  
• Office Delve for Android  
• Delve User Voice  

Topics 

• General Questions & Functionality 
• Search and Content Sources 
• Rollout 

General Questions & Functionality  

Q: How long will the current profile page be supported if Delve is replacing it and what is the road map for replacing the profile page?

A: We will start redirecting user to the new profile starting next week for first release customers.

Q: When will the old profile page be taken down for non-first release tenants?

A: We will do the redirect in waves. The tenants who customize their profile will be in the last waves which may happen later this summer.

Q: Can the cover photo of the profile be changed? 

A: This will be supported in the future release.

Q: Can Administrators select which “Cards” are displayed on a Delve profile page? I’ve noticed that my Delve profile is showing one card per custom User profile property. E.g. Region and Business Division. We may want to remove those cards and have those fields in card called “Location” or logically reorder the cards. Business Division before Region. 

A: We are looking at extensibility of the profile so that is great feedback for us.

Q: Is it possible to pin cards at the top? 

A: Not currently. You can create a Board to pin cards that you want to get back to.

Q: Are there “groups” within Delve?

A: Please come to Ignite or definitely check out the recorded session aftwerwards! We are working on Groups integration in Delve and appreciate hearing your scenarios and feedback. We will share any announcements in this group.

Q: Will the future profile customization tools be available to end users as a self service feature or will be an admin feature that can be used to create a custom profile at the organization level? 

A: Once extensibility is in place, end users would be able to add an app from the Office App Store. For developers, they could further customize the experience using the public APIs.

Q: Where is the Skills metadata being stored? How many Skills can people have on their profile?

A: The skills are stored in the Office Graph and there is no limit on the number of skills. The current profile still uses UPA to store skills. We will be using Office Graph to store the skills. In the mean time, you can continue to use the current way to update skills. We plan to simplify the user properties and focus on working on (what you do) and skills (what you know).

The “working on” section is intended to describe what the employees are working on (such as projects, campaign). We will try to automate this as much as possible to make it easier for the employees to update. This will also be based on permissions from that user.

Q: At the moment, it feels like two experiences. Microsoft has said there is a going to be some reconciling of the experiences – About Me and the new Delve profile. Do we enter in two places for now, or recommend to start using the new Delve “Me” page?

A: In the next few weeks the profile entry points will change to point to the Delve profile. All roads will lead to a singular destination – lots of on-ramps, so charge your all-electric batteries.

Q: We have Delve turned off in our tenant. What will happen for us in a few weeks? Will we keep the old About Me page or will we still get the new Delve profile?

A: You would get the new profile experience, but it will be homed under Sites, not Delve – so no Activity feed, just the new look and feel and the Profile tab.

Q: Can users add and maintain the links in the Links card? It would be grand if users can have one central place to store links to internal and external resources.

A: This feature is not available in the moment. We are open for ideas of extensions, feel free to provide a few scenarios/examples in this group.

Q: Is there any direct URL for the new profile page?

A: The most direct looks like this: https://tenantName-my.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/me.aspx?v=p…

Q: Will there be an org chart that you can add in the new Profile page in Delve?

A: Take a look at this blog to learn about the org chart in Delve. http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/14/new-office-delve-people-experiences-in-office-365/

Q: Will the org chart in the Profile page in delve pull from the org chart in the UP that already exists? 

A: Yes, there is an org chart in the new Profile in Delve.

Q: Is there a community administrator that can see all content, people, places within Delve?

A: Delve does not change any permissions and inherits the permission from the underlying sources. Users or admins will only be able to see content they have already permissions for.

Q: A question on Mobile App, what is the link/synergy or what will be the link/synergy between Office Video Mobile App and Delve Mobile App? If Delve surface Video as key content what will be the user experience at the end? Will the end user will switch between  two Mobile Apps?

A: This is an area we are working on. Right now Delve mobile does not yet surface videos from Office 365 Video, like the Web interface does. Once enabled for mobile, the first experience will be to launch the video in the native mobile browser – where we’re releasing new work to enable responsive design and HTML-5 playback to support good page experience and playback across devices. We then will focus on the better cross-app integration.

Q: Will the non core profile properties be sourced from the SharePoint user profile service? This seems to be the case now, where even custom profile properties appear on the new profile. Will this continue in the future or the idea is to shift toward using Azure AD or a different repository? 

A: The non-core (custom) properties will continue to be supported from SharePoint user profile services.

Q: Is there a “Share this” feature there for the iOS App? I search for stuff people need, and I want to share it with the person who needs it. 

A: Thanks for the feedback! We currently support that with a very simple gesture that pulls up the Share experience for iOS and Android, respectively. You can do this by going into a document, tapping the button on the bottom right of the view, and tapping Share.

We hope to support sharing that also modify permissions in the future.

Q: What does the pencil mean next to people’s names?

A: It’s the last document that person modified. We realize it’s a bit misleading because it looks like you can edit. We’re looking into how to make it clearer!

Q: Can a user’s profile show who he/she interacts with the most?

A: Right now the profile org chart is based on hierarchy/AD. People are certainly a part of the Delve discovery experience – and this is driven by who you work with, not just who you work for.

The item of feedback that you wouldn’t directly see today is a distinct list that shows who others are working with. That data is in the Office Graph, but today is not represented as a list – but incorporated in the discovery results.

You can learn who someone is mostly working with by clicking on the right corner box in the activity tab.

Q: For education – It would be great to control Delve by (class) groups. That way we could control what individual classes would see. 

A: You could explore using Boards for this. Perhaps a board for each class code.

Q: Can someone tell me more about the new “authoring” options? Will it replace the “blog” now? And – will it allow people to comment in Yammer on your blog post? 

A: The new authoring does replace the “old” SharePoint blog. If you have a SharePoint blog you will still have access to it, we’ve made sure to incorporate links into the new experiences that will get you to your blog if you have one. If you don’t have an existing blog you will only be able to start with the new experience.

On the question of Yammer integration, it won’t show up initially but we’re working on it. Being able to comment on blog posts is something we know lots of people will want to do.

Q: Blogs, in my opinion, should be a “conversation” not only about informing people. The clunkiness of the current blog commenting engine of SharePoint blogs keeps me from it. The fact that I can’t be alerted automatically on people commenting on my blog (unless I set up an alert) and the fact that the questioner does not get a notification that I replied seems to just kill the conversation.

A: Totally agree with you both on the importance of having the conversation be a part of blogging and the pain points you described with old SharePoint blogs, we hope to have commenting enabled soon after our initial rollout to First Release customers.

Q: Will we be able to customize the profiles at organizational level? We’ve done quite a bit of work on the user profiles in SharePoint (including brining in data from other systems) and would like to be able to incorporate some of that into the new profiles.

A: We are working on the extensibility support for profile. We would love to understand more about your customizations.

Q: Will any part of the Delve People experience be available in standalone SharePoint Online tenants? SharePoint Server?

A: The Profile experience will be available for the SharePoint standalone in the following weeks. We’re focused on Delve from a hybrid perspective that will allow on-premises signals to be fed into the Office Graph within Office 365, and then custom solutions can consume the Office Graph data using the future Office Graph APIs.

Q: How can we spin this around and easily surface Delve within SharePoint. Our clients’ strategies are based on the intranet being the place to go.

We want to embed a view of Delve content on the intranet home page/sub-site landing pages.

A: The Delve team and the NextGen Portals team are working hand in hand on future Office Graph powered experiences across the portals. You see this today in Office 365 Video with the “Popular” channel and “You might also like” – both powered by the Office Graph. And once the Office Graph APIs are released, we do expect that portals and sites will light up with more apps and zones populated from intelligence coming from the Office Graph.

Q: How does a Yammer User Profile and a SharePoint Online User Profile and a Delve Profile and an Office 365 User Profile all mesh? Are they the same? Are they synch’ed? Is the key to it all working to just use Azure AD?

A: It is a focus to further unify the profile experience across Office 365. The goal is to continue to lessen the number of profiles and to ensure all entry points lead to a common profile end point. And yes, the value of AAD being the initial source for core profile information is key, whether you’re federated or not via ADFS.

Q: The Profile integration story should be fully baked before this is rolled out, it Can NOT be something that comes later. Having a future “goal” to get the profiles integrated sounds backwards to me. The functionality to have one profile should be rolled out before the fancy UI stuff.

A: We’re in the process of unifying and consolidating. We’re not adding more, we are working over the next few weeks to ensure main entry points lead to this new profile – but it’s not net new in the sense of another profile to manage.

Appreciate the sentiment and feedback, and we’re on a path of continuous innovation and want to ensure we inform everyone of the steps we’re taking along the way. Yesterday and the weeks coming are significant enough of a first step that we wanted to articulate what we’re doing.

Q: Anyone know if/when the API to report your own “signals” to the Office Graph will be available?

A: The Delve and Office Graph team will share more at Ignite in this session: “Building Solutions with Office Graph”:http://ignite.microsoft.com/session/sessionmoreinfo/?topicid…

Q: Is the Praise in Delve profile from Yammer?

A:  The Praise feature is not yet released. For the first version it will not be integrated with the Yammer Praise feature, but we will explore that for the future.

Q: I spotted a small bug in the Delve profile. It shows the blog ection even if a users hasn’t ever created a blog – in which case it links to an error page. It should probably hide the Blog option if there isn’t one (and it would be nice if it showed a headline from the latest blog post if there is).

A: The link that goes to a 404 is a bug that we are tracking and working on getting resolved. The blog section on the page will evolve with the rest of the profile so I’d expect to see improvements over time as well. The experience will be slightly different when you’re looking at your own profile vs. someone else’s.

Q: Any next level links you have in your back pocket? Looking to understand it a deeper technical level (architecturally and how it fits in with SP personalization and target content delivery). 

A: We will share more at Ignite and Build. Stay tuned, we will share links in this group.

Q: Can someone give me a sound-byte that I can get back to my team on about what “this” is? I can’t put my finger on what the whole “people experiences” means. Let’s face it, depending on your company, people experiences will get a bit of an eyebrow raise. 

A: Improvements to how people find other people when they are in search of answers – even on the go – along with the power of people being able to better express themselves. Most companies are an average split of 80% consumer, 20% creation – and we want to focus on experiences for both.

Search and Content Sources

Q: What baseline information does Delve monitor to come up with its suggestions?

A: If you are signed up for First Release, Delve these content sources: Office Docs (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) from OneDrive and SharePoint sites, Email attachments, videos from Office 365 Video, and external links from public discussions in Yammer.

Q: Why is there no “Search” for files in the Delve iOS app? There is a search for people – but not files or Yammer posts or emails. Why?

A: Thanks for the feedback. We launched intentionally with a subset of the features of the full Delve web experience. We’ll use feedback from customers to help determine the next features to add to the app!

Q: When I think Delve I think Search. They’re the same thing in my brain.

A: Interesting to hear. We also get a lot of feedback that Delve is a great people experience and our usage data showed that customers were using Delve to find content through people so we decided to lead with that first on the Delve mobile app.

We do want to make sure everyone is aware we do support People search in Delve for iOS and Android right now. You can do this by going to the People tab on either app.

Q: When you search within Delve, will it classify what you are looking for? For instance, if I search the word “mickey”, will docs, emails, and people information come up in the search result? And can I choose to narrow down?

A: At this point there are no results refinements in Delve discovery. If you performed a search in the main SharePoint search center, you could refine the search results. The base technology is common to both Delve and Search Center, with the added layer of the Office Graph for Delve which targets relevancy based on user actions. You will see docs, email attachments, people, etc. in Delve, but filtered for you via relevance and the goal of enabling discovery intelligently based on what you do and who you are working with.

If you search for mickey then Delve will propose you people results with Mikey (e.g. Mikey Smith), documents edited or created by Mikey(s), boards that contain mickey in their name as well as documents that contain the keyword mikey.

Q: Will there be a narrow down function for “only docs” or “only people,” etc.?

A: The result sets are separated: you get people and board results in the left side and document results on the main area.

Q: The refinements need will become increasingly important. Delve does a surprisingly good job of surfacing relevant content – but users need to be able to help it by refining the results further. Otherwise we end up with just a smarter Google (or Bing) search and that is not what we need in a corporate environment. We have carefully designed Information Architecture, with relevant metadata, so we want to be able to get additional value from that via Delve.

A: Thank you for your feedback, we’ll be looking into providing end users ways to refine Delve results.

Q: I have only seen documents in my Delve results to date, is this just me or is Delve designed for documents only? 

A: Delve will show more than documents. You will see documents, people, email attachments, external links shared in Yammer, based on what the Office Graph tunes for the user. The Office Graph incorporates signals across various workloads and content primarily from OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online team sites, O365 Video portal and Exchange Online email attachments and external links shared in public Yammer groups.

Q: Will Delve utilize the new SharePoint algorithms for “suggested people. sites, documents, etc…”?

A: The Delve user experience derives insights from the Office Graph – the Office Graph represents a collection of signals comprising content and activity, and the relationships between them that happen across the entire Office suite. From email, social conversations, instant messages and meetings, to documents, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive for Business folders, the Office Graph maps the relationships among people and information, and acts as the foundation for Office experiences that are more relevant, personal and personalized to each individual. The Office Graph uses sophisticated machine learning techniques to connect people to the relevant content, conversations and people around them.

In essence you are correct, and the real juice providing insights is the Office Graph on top of the index.

Delve utilizes a number of signals to suggest documents, people, etc. The signals include signals from SharePoint as well as signals from Exchange as well. (and graph). Learn more about the Office Graph here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV1Sc6UW8-o&feature=youtu.be

Q: What determines or populates the “working on” section shown in the screenshot on the blog yesterday?

A: The “working on” is a combination of group users are member of as well as user curated information. the Working On feature has not been released yet. It will be available in the coming months.

Q: I could see a case where I might have some photos taken from a company picnic that I save to a Team Site or my OneDrive for Business library. If that surfaces under what I am “working on” that could cause issues with an uptight manager. 

A: What will be shown on “working on” will be the name of Office 365 public groups you are member of. In addition, users will be provided with suggestions and users will manually confirm to accept the suggestions.

Q: Will Office 365 compliance features pick up all the same data that are being used to power Delve features? For example, will eDiscovery searches find everything a Delve search would?

A: eDiscovery is a different entry point based on the same index with greater access afforded to the compliance officer (the person who has been granted use rights to the compliance center, or eDiscovery site) for visibility. So, yes, it is based on the same data set, but is used in a very different way.

Q: We just finished a fun offline discussion of Delve. One of the more legal-minded of us pointed out that the Office Graph poses risks for organizations subject to ethical wall or insider trading investigations. That “X works with Y” relationship would be highly relevant to such investigations and so subject to eDiscovery. Can the existing eDiscovery tools capture those data, or is that something that organizations will have to wait for?

A: We don’t actually provide insights such as “X works with Y”, or any “X has viewed Y”, those are considered private signals. You can learn more on privacy in Delve here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Are-my-documents-safe-in-Office-Delve-f5f409a2-37ed-4452-8f61-681e5e1836f3?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Q: Clearly this feature should emphasize the need to assure your documents and information are secured correctly! I always tell my SP folks to secure correctly as “search WILL find it”, now I guess I need to add Delve to that. 

A: It’s important to know that Delve does not break any permissions, and yes, it will add visibility to how permissions are applied. Good to add it to the adoption planning, in context with how search works and how users can manage their own permissions on documents and such to the requirements of the information being shared (or not).

As mentioned Delve only inherits permissions from existing content. In addition, based on early First Release feedback we’ve added a admin control to “hide” certain sensitive content from Delve discovery… Admin’s in addition ensuring they have correct permissions set can also use this as needed…

The Delve and Office Graph intent is to be aware of all Office 365 activity and source signals from many of the actions people take across the suite of services.

Rollout

Q: When will Delve for iOS be released for my country? 

A: The Delve app for Android and iPhone will be available in the U.S., Ireland and Norway markets and will expand to all supported markets in the following weeks. Hold tight, should be on it’s way soon.

Q: Somehow it seems the new profile page is available only through Delve. However, the announcement says it will be available through everywhere, OWA, People, About Me etc. Everywhere else, it takes me to the old “my sites” profile page. When will be this “new profile” page experience available from throughout Office365?

A: The Profile will be accessible from these locations within the next few weeks.

Q: I  was noticing this morning that I was seeing the new Delve Profile experience, but not the new Blog authoring experience. Is the new Blog authoring a separate piece being rolled out?

A: The new Blog is one of the profile elements that will ship a little later, within 1-2 months from this initial profile update.

Q: When will Boards be released?

A: Boards is current available for those who have opted in to First Release. Boards will be soon be graduating out of First Release, stay tuned!

Q: How do I turn on First Release in my tenant?

A: To learn more about First Release, check out this link : https://support.office.com/en-US/Article/Office-365-release-programs-3b3adfa4-1777-4ff0-b606-fb8732101f47

Q: Can you share any timeline for the Windows Phone version?

A: We are working on it but don’t have a timeline to share right now.

Q: On the iOS app, what do the pencils mean next to people’s names?

A: It’s the last document that person modified. We realize it’s a bit misleading because it looks like you can edit. We’re looking into how to make it more clear!

———————————————–

Microsoft has been spearheading the security campaign across cloud services. This week has been in focus with announcements of new capabilities affecting SharePoint Online (SPO), Email, and customer controls. I’ve been involved in numerous customer strategy sessions where similar concerns were raised. It is becoming increasingly clear that customers are expecting higher level of security controls across all Office 365 workloads. The vision has always been to extend these controls to services beyond email.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) has been part of Exchange since 2013. In this post I explain how DLP feature extends within SPO and OneDrive for Business (OD4B). Last year DLP was added to SPO, where it provided capability to find sensitive information by searching and querying the data. This helped organizations to surface sensitive content, put them on hold for legal benefits, and take manual actions (like export). In Exchange, it provided with policy tips and notification emails. It is this capability that is now being extended to SPO and OD4B which in turn means greater proactive control over sensitive data.

These policies include simple “if-else-then conditions” and actions. It also provides preconfigured templates to start from. Users get real time notification if working within the context of SPO and OneDrive for Business

Within SPO and OD4B it will detect if the user is sharing content externally and provide the user with policy tips. Furthermore it’ll go one level deeper by scanning for document metadata.

Admins will get built in reports for incident and tracking

If until now you were on the edge, concerned with the SPO security capabilities then hang on just a bit more until second quarter of 2015 when it rolls out as public preview.

Image source: Office blogs

This post goes one level further in showcasing features within Office 365 which makes day in life more productive (Read the previous post in this series)
In order to get more background on Delve, read my previous articles here
1. Delve
2. Everything about Delve
3. How Delve makes life easier
4. Global Rollout
“Check out your personalized feed of relevant documents. What you see is based on what you and your colleagues are working on. You can easily find colleagues to learn more about them and what they’re working on. Type your name now to see your own page”
This is what it says when you first sign in to Delve. The focus here is around the most important assets for any organization, “People”. Delve is more than just search. It brings over the content and people you have been working with, content and people trending around you, and it does so by learning your behavior over time. I bring here few quick nuggets of information which can help with your everyday work.
Can’t seem to remember the document(s) you’ve been working on or worked on in the past month or so? Go to Delve and select “Me” on the left panel.

 
Do you miss the organization chart from MySite in the past? Select “Profile” and you see their contact information, organization chart, OneDrive, blog information etc.

 

 
Want to find what your coworker is working on? Get to someone’s profile from Delve screen by searching with their name

 
Note: Security is still very much respected and others won’t see the content if permissions don’t allow. Here is a message on your Delve home screen to confirm

All this is fine but you are a mobile worker and this alone does make the cut for you. Looking for similar experience on mobile devices? Look no further
Note: mobile app only available on android and iPhone
  

This guest post is brought to you by our friends and partner, K2. For more than a decade, K2 has been helping customers rapidly transform their companies with applications that connect the right people to the right information and work. With offices and distributors all over the globe and a powerful partner network, more than a million users in 40 countries rely on K2 to streamline operations, save money and reduce risk. You can learn more by visiting www.k2.com.
Many organizations are upgrading to the newest versions of SharePoint and Office 365. As this migration moves across enterprises and industries, more and more users are running into upgrade challenges.
A recent survey, conducted by K2 and AIIM, discovered some of the biggest issues organizations have experienced with SharePoint 2013. Here are four top issues:

Businesses Want More Out of SharePoint

• “Expanding the use of SharePoint for more business processes” was a top concern for SharePoint administrators.
• Despite improvements in the standard feature set, 67% still see third-party products as important for process and records management activities.
• Workflow and Business Process Management (BPM)-related solutions are a top expected area of investment in supplemental technology.

Driving End User Adoption of SharePoint is Tough

• The majority of organizations cited end-user adoption as the number one ongoing issue with SharePoint.
• Less than half of SharePoint users are considered “active” by the majority (64%) of organizations.
• “Unified interfaces” is the top area of planned implementation using third party technology.

Data Fragmentation Just Adds to the Complexity

• Almost 80% of organizations cite integration of SharePoint from the cloud to on-premise systems as a major concern.
• Forty-seven percent of SharePoint installations access content stored within other enterprise systems.
• “Integration of SharePoint to other repositories” was the number one reason for increased spend on SharePoint related projects.

SharePoint is Scattered Everywhere

• Only 24% of organizations plan to deploy SharePoint 100% on-premises in the foreseeable future.
• Only 51% of organizations are managing one live version of SharePoint – 38% are managing two or more versions.

We understand the new issues and adoption considerations that SharePoint 2013 brings to our customers. Watch the on-demand webinar to learn how you can make the transition easier for your organization, getting more out of SharePoint by automating business processes and streamlining work, giving users the interfaces they want on any device, bringing together data from disparate sources across business systems and the web, and delivering apps that span SharePoint versions including Office 365.
For more information regarding K2’s offerings for SharePoint integration, visit Appit.com or K2.com/sharepoint-workflow.

This is the third post in this series. In the last two posts (here and here), we implemented a custom token for the logged in user which filters incoming content in the search index based on the user’s profile attributes, and then creating display templates to render custom result URLs. Today we will dive into
extending this concept to the search results hover panel.
Scenario
An internal portal accessed by employees and contractors in three dozen locations comprising of countries and/or regions. Authoring takes place in a separate content site and content is rendered on the publishing site. All content is targeted with three important profile attributes –
a. Location (comprises of country and it’s region)
b. Role
c. Business Unit
Each piece of content/link takes the user to the publishing site keeping authoring unexposed to the end user. What this means for search results is
1. The results should be targeted based on user profile properties (mentioned above)
2. Customizing search results URL to point to publishing site
3. Customizing hover preview to display publishing pages (instead of the authoring site content pages)
4. Customizing Control template to implement custom paging
The focus of today’s article will be #3. When SharePoint 2013 came out, the focus was primarily on making sure each result is quick and easy to find and read, while still displaying as much relevant information as possible to the end user.
When the user wants to learn more about a result, they hover their cursor over that result to see the hover panel dialog box.  The hover panel contains rich metadata that enables users to investigate a result more thoroughly, without having to click through and load the document. Hover Panel is broken into three sections
a. Header
b. Body
c. Footer Actions
The files which provide these sections are *HoverPanel.js , *HoverPanel.html, and then html and JS file for each of the following: *HoverPanel_Body, *HoverPanel_Actions, *HoverPanel_Header. These files could be found in the /search center site Master Page gallery.
In order to display the publishing site page in the hover preview we’ll need to make few changes to the OOB hover panel. Let’s start with making a copy of the “Item_DefaultHoverPanel_Actions.html”. This ensures keeping our customization separate.
Step 1
Update the managed property mapping section with our custom properties. In this case RefinableString00 and RefinableString01

 
Step 2
Snippet to build the linkURL. This linkURL points to the publishing site (instead of authoring)

Step 3
Render the hover panel header

Step 4
Render the body section

 
Step 5

Towards the end of the above DIV block, add this snippet to enable rendering of your custom preview

 
 

As a healthcare organization, being able to easily locate and capture information is critical when it comes to providing quality patient care and maintaining the financial health of the business.
For accountable care organizations (ACOs), managing population health successfully requires the gathering of insights that comes only from a combination of data – data from outside the organization, as well as clinical, operational and financial data that’s internal.
Last week, Dr. Dennis Schmuland, Chief Health Strategy Officer, U.S. Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, interviewed Christine Bessler, CIO at ProHealth Care, on how the organization stood up an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) to provide value based care, reduce superfluous costs, and diminish the need for costly care. Using EPIC’s Cogito data warehouse as their EDW foundation, ProHealth Care was able to combine clinical, financial, and operational data across 15 primary care clinics, three hospitals, home health care, home hospice service, and long-term care facilities with outside data sources to meet the current needs of their ACO.  Read the full interview here.
Better together: How ProHealth was the first to stand up EPIC’s Cogito data warehouse in a production environment, and how they’ve extended Cogito with Microsoft BI tools…

Bessler: When we made the decision for our ACO to be part of the MSSP Program, we knew we had to also make an organizational commitment to develop a long-term strategic BI roadmap that we could implement in manageable phases, based on our health system’s stage of maturity. To accelerate time-to-benefit, we knew we had to find the most expedient and cost-effective way to maximally leverage our existing investments in EPIC, as well as our other technologies. We needed to extract and integrate EPIC data with data from a myriad of non-EPIC systems, including our operational data and financial data, as well as external data sources like Medicare claims and HCAHPS scores.

With a scope of that magnitude, we knew that complexity would be the biggest threat to our vision and budget. After an extensive evaluation process to consider all the alternatives, we chose Microsoft’s BI stack and tools because of their simplicity, interoperability, and familiarity to both financial and clinical frontline teams. By adding simple and familiar tools like SharePoint 2013, Excel, Power Pivot and PowerQuery to Cogito, we were able to fulfill our vision to make BI self-service. This enabled us to empower executives and frontline employees and clinicians to turn a sea of otherwise blinding data into actionable insights within the context of their day-to-day workflow.

One question that came up was how did ProHealth Care stand up the EDW in record time (six months)?

Bessler: When you’re an integrated delivery system made up of many semi-autonomous facilities, you have to engage every facility in the vision, design and future governance of your EDW program. To do that, we knew our best choice would be to partner with a national-scale systems integrator that would be accountable to help weave a multitude of loose ends into a unified strategic plan, a future-proof architecture, implement the plan, train and support the users, and roll out each subsequent phase. We ultimately chose Perficient because of their broad expertise across our existing application portfolio and because of their specialized expertise in Microsoft’s BI stack and tools. There was one other area of expertise that Perficient brought to the table that was mission-critical for us—the skill they brought to help us build our physician profiles, which is how we empower our physicians to view their performance anytime across their quality metrics and identify gaps in care among their patients.

If you’d like to learn more about Perficient’s work with ProHealth Care and how the organization is innovative in population health management, check out the case study.

This post is a continuation of my previous blog post explaining advanced content targeting using SharePoint search. We saw earlier how to implement a custom token for the logged in user which filters incoming content in the search index based on the user’s profile attributes. Today we are going to look into creating display templates to render custom result URLs. Before we begin let’s refresh our memory with the scenario here

Scenario

An internal portal accessed by employees and contractors in three dozen locations comprising of countries and/or regions. Authoring takes place in a separate content site and content is rendered on the publishing site. All content is targeted with three important profile attributes –

a. Location (comprises of country and their region)
b. Role
c. Business Unit

Each piece of content/link takes the user to the publishing site keeping authoring unexposed to the end user. What this means for search results is

1. The results should be targeted based on user profile properties (mentioned above)
2. Customizing search results URL to point to publishing site
3. Customizing hover preview to display publishing pages (instead of the authoring site content pages)
4. Customizing Control template to implement custom paging

Solution

In the previous post we covered #1 above. This post will focus on #2.

By default all the search results points the user to the actual authoring pages which is (in this case) sitting in a separate site. Because the authoring site (usually) does not have any branding or targeting enabled, we do not want our users to lose their place in the navigation. In order to avoid that we came up with top level category pages with each of them having sub category sections which render page content from the authoring site. So in essence the publishing site URL for any piece of content will look like this: http://inranetportal.com/pages/[categoryname].aspx#[subcategory]. The hash tag in the URL is to enable anchor links (bookmark) feature. It’s not relevant in this context so we’ll leave it out.

1. We declare the managed property mappings – Here we used RefinableString0 and RefinableString1 to map the category and sub category metadata fields.

2. Build a custom linkURL

3. This leads us to the html section to render the linkURL

4. And this is how the result URL look like