Blog Entries By Daniel Antion

What’s Upstream of Your Content

When we talk about retention periods with respect to ECM and ERM, we are usually focused on process. “How do we establish the period?” “What happens at the end of the period?” “Can we establish a l... read more

Several years ago, the water line feeding the ice maker in our kitchen burst sometime after the cleaning crew left on a Friday. The spraying fountain was discovered on Monday morning, after it had ... read more

Practioner – Heal Thyself

Sometimes, otherwise intelligent people manage to do stupid things. Yesterday, I was guilty of being such a person; well, I consider myself to be intelligent. We are working on an information manag... read more

Four Fried Chickens and a Coke

Instilling Confidence – or Not

The buzz is starting to build around the 2013 AIIM Conference, and I use the word ‘buzz’ instead of ‘hype’ because this conference delivers on its promises. I will be speaking at this conferenc... read more

Back in the early 1980’s I worked for a partner at KPMG (then, PMM & Co) who always stressed that we “should start writing the final report the minute we begin an engagement.” I hated hearing that ... read more

What Happens in Vegas

You know the rest of that adage, “…stays in Vegas except for the Twitter timeline and Facebook stream”, but what happened in Cambridge, MA was streamed live to CT. What can I say; New Engla... read more

Election Take-Away

Even in my personal blog, I try to keep quiet about politics, religion and the other topics that usually seem to divide people. I don’t care what political party or candidate you support, and I wou... read more

Drop and Give Me 50

I didn’t expect Peggy Winton to start my day with a request like that, but it was the AIIM Boot Camp, so it fit the theme. Listening to Peggy and some of the vendors on the floor and speakers in th... read more

Site vs. Library

Baseball, Big Data and Small Business

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog entry about how we were downsizing several SharePoint sites to document libraries instead. It turned out that the library was the only feature of the sites that were... read more

Every time I read an article about some company analyzing the scary end of the Twitter fire hose, I am convinced that Big Data is the equivalent of Dark Matter – it’s important, but not to me on a ... read more

Major Milestone!

JIG – Just In-time Governance

This is a blog post about one of those feel-good moments that lets you know that dreams do come true (with respect to SharePoint). We have been working with SharePoint since 2005-6 and we have had ... read more

Can you stand one more blog post about governance? How about if I promise to make it short? I have been reading several posts on governance lately, and while I find them impressive and insightful, ... read more

Missing Socks

Sometimes I think the worst computer feature ever developed is the ability to Drag & Drop. Actually, I like the feature when I’m using it to move elements around on a canvas, but I have come to reg... read more

Repurposing Content

(Noun) is Too (adjective)

When I took AIIM’s ECM Master Class, one of the concepts I really didn’t understand very well at the start was ‘repurposing’ – to be honest, it seemed like a marketing buzzword. I give credit to B... read more

Go ahead, fill in the missing parts for your reason for moving to (something)-as-a-service or for moving (noun) to the Cloud. This past weekend, I would have used “printing is too frustrating!” I t... read more

I Wrote This on My iPad

Seriously, is that cool or what? Last week, I was led to an article on Information Week’s site that called Microsoft’s Office Web Apps for iPad a “Game Changer”. I don’t know about that, I see it m... read more

This AIIM Thing

While my daughter was driving the last leg of a nearly 1,700 mile road-trip, I checked my Twitter timeline to find @SharePointMom and @TashaEv both commenting about “checking out this AIIM thing.” ... read more

Communication Failures

I’ve been following a communication disaster on LinkedIn this week that easily could have been avoided. Toastmasters International released a new dashboard for district officials to review their di... read more

SharePoint Production

What if there was a Better Cloud

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending The Great New England Airshow, at Westover ARB in Westover, Ma. Whenever I attend something that runs as well as this event, I try to pay attentio... read more

Is Mobile Really Different

A few minutes ago I followed a link in a Tweet from @petapixel to a story about Instagram coming to the web to do battle with sites like Flickr and Picaso. A sense of fear crept over me as soon as ... read more

What do digital cameras, cell phones, flat-screen TVs, transistor radios, mobile devices, high-priced lawyers, and the International Space Station have in common? The nouns are all modified with wh... read more

SharePoint - No Joke

Sometimes, Tuesday rolls around and I have nothing to say about SharePoint. I don’t stress too much, but I do admit to feeling the “presence of Bryant” when I start thinking “who would care if I sk... read more

Happy Independence Day

Well, for the country, but not for most of us. Those of (you) who are on the ECM\ERM side of SharePoint remain at the mercy of the folks in IT, at least from what I can glean from the stream of com... read more

Often Overlooked

With all the talk about how Microsoft will bundle Yammer with SharePoint and deploy it on 4.6 gazillion Surface ™ tablets and all 42 Windows phones, it seems we are near the end of the “sliced brea... read more

ECM is Dead

Whose SharePoint is It Anyway

When attending a show like Info360, I hope to take away a few nuggets that make me reconsider the world I work in. The keynotes and sessions I attended covered a lot of ground, but here are three t... read more

Big Data or Big Mistake

4 Comments

Big Data is all the rage right now, but like websites, BI and social media before it, I’m betting that most companies will get Big Data all wrong. Maybe I’m being cynical when I say “most companies... read more

Chapter Too

Last week, I talked about a great event that the New England chapter had just held. Today, I want to hang onto the support-your-local-chapter theme for one more post. I know, this is an AIIM Expert... read more

The Chapter Works

Last week, the New England chapter held our final event of the program year. Not only was the event a success, but it was described by many participants as having been the best panel discussion eve... read more

A Few Minutes with an Archivist

Lately, I’ve been reading a series of articles and blog entries aimed at promoting techniques for building solutions faster by using “standard” parts and reusable components – good thoughts, but it... read more

One of the attendees at our recent AIIM New England event in CT was Jennifer Sharp. I’ve been following Jen on Twitter for quite some time, I was very happy to see her at the event, and I thought i... read more

What Do We Know

The Importance of Context

Last year at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Andrew McAfee of MIT quoted Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, who once said “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.” I inc... read more

…and If Elected

Now that, according to most news sources, the presidential election has begun, I think it’s appropriate for me to treat a recent news story in a special way. By that I mean that I feel comfortable ... read more

Excel is Laughing at Me

Well over a year ago, we discovered an error in thinking that caused us to give ourselves a big pat on the back where none was deserved. We had modified the standard New and Edit forms for a custom... read more

The End of Great Mobile

Remember the 90’s? Remember when the web was an awful user experience compared to just about the only thing the web ran on, i.e. a fully capable computer. Whether it was your desktop or your laptop... read more

If I told you that when my daughter was very young, I once let her drink from a glass that had been contaminated with a grainy black particulate matter, you might think I was nuts. If I added that ... read more

Wow – That was Easy

User experience doesn’t always depend upon big initiatives that require moving Heaven and Earth. That’s the lesson I learned yesterday while I was covering the support desk for a while. One of ... read more

West Coast to Western Edge

The AIIM Conference is over, and if you haven't heard, it was remarkable. Launched after being out of the conference business for 10 years, we all had high hopes, but I don't think anyone expected ... read more

All Aboard

I am sure Bryant would let me off the hook for skipping this blog entry, since I’ll be at the AIIM Conference the day my post is due, but something just happened that I want to share Last week,... read more

Too Much Nothing

Asked, Answered and Counted

It never fails; we finish working on an information management solution, we talk about it, we show it off to others and we are quickly made to realize how much work remains. That’s a good thing, it... read more

Big Is Relative

6 Comments

Last November, I had the privilege of listening to a keynote presentation byChrister Johnson from IBM about Big Data at the Gilbane Conference. I wrote about my reaction to that keynote shortly aft... read more

Can I Navigate Here

With all the talk of cloud-based applications, mobile access, digital everything and big data (I know that I’m missing a couple John, but bear with me)is my small shop going to be able to thrive in... read more

A few minutes ago, one of my coworkers stopped in to ask a question that pretty much made my day. The question was simple, “how do I share something I created on My Site with others in my departmen... read more

Product Placement

We all know that the companies who make the stuff that they put on the eye-level shelves in the grocery store, paid a price to get that placement. When you walk in and see one brand of soda on an e... read more

The Road Ahead is Personal

Recently, a very simple decision saved us a lot of development work, in a way that was good for my project list but bad for my blog. We had just wired up a pretty useful management dashboard, and u... read more

Rogue Users

Working in a small company makes it hard to blog about the things people do. You have to be careful when complementing people, so you don’t steer too much credit in any one direction, and you gener... read more

Keeping Success from Breeding Failure

One of the things I am working hard to avoid is having any of our SharePoint solutions morph themselves into a bloated failure. As people see the value in adding metadata to documents, reporting f... read more

Excuse Me - I am Serious About ECM

7 Comments

Apparently, my rant about marketing ploysI will no longer tolerate was written one day too soon. I left out the “when you’re ready for a big-boy bike” technique. I had a call from an ECM vendor yes... read more

Agents of Change

I’ll be speaking at AIIM 2012 (San Francisco. March 20-22.) Part of what I’ll be talking about during my session has to do with changing behavior. Below is a little insight into that session; “Expa... read more

Backfill, requirements

As we finished dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on our recent SharePoint solution (a repository for engineering inspection reports), we inevitably wound up dealing with the question “what do we... read more

Welcome 2012

As far as years go, 2011 wasn’t one of the best. Personally, I started the year in the care of a physical therapist struggling to mend a shoulder injury. Turning to business, and keeping in mind th... read more

Avoid Being the IT Guy

Earlier this week, I added a comment to a SharePoint discussion on LinkedIn. The discussion began with the question “How do I send a file from a SharePoint 2010 Library to someone outside of our en... read more

SharePoint Adoption and Search

You Can’t Start with SharePoint

Last week, I had the privilege of being on a panel at the Gilbane Conferencewith Chris McNultydiscussing SharePoint Adoption. Our moderator, SharePoint guru Marc Andersonran the session as a conver... read more

The Wake-up Call

Having spent most of my career working with structured data, I was initially happy to see that the ECM project plan presented at the AIIM ECM Master class, looked a lot like a systems development p... read more

Happy Thanksgiving

In this part of the world, we are celebrating Thanksgiving and while I am enjoy a few days off; I am trying to avoid SharePoint, ECM and work in general. Still the spirit of the holiday (and the de... read more

An Important Event and A Shameless Plug

I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of people at the University of Connecticut about ECM and SharePoint. One of the things people tell me that they like about my presentations, and m... read more

Usability Revisited

Several months ago, I wrote about how we had begun working to improve the user experience in SharePoint. I ranted about some of the things I don’t like, some of the things our users don’t like and ... read more

A Little Glitz

Selling my peers on the value of Content Management has always been an uphill battle. Of course, they know all the good and valid reasons why ECM is important, but people often point to one or more... read more

Earlier this year, I met Jill Hart at BZ Media’s iPhone/iPad DevCon East in Boston. Jill is a usability consultant, and is a passionate expert on the subject of User Experience. When I first met Ji... read more

From the Trenches – With Apologies to Don

For a variety of really good reasons, I am covering the tech-support help desk for a few weeks. I can safely say that the only people less happy about this than me, are the people who have had or w... read more

You Call That a Worst Case

You don’t choose a career in systems development or content management for the glory. Oh sure, every now and then, you pick up a compliment (usually from another geek) but then there are those time... read more

What Are You Building

We all know the “Field of Dreams” quote: “if you build it, he will come” but we need to stop and remind ourselves that “he” is a baseball player. Here in CT, where we don’t have a major league team... read more

Be Careful What You Repurpose!

Yesterday, I had the privilege of attending AIIM’s Content Management Boot Camp in Boston, MA. During Peggy Winton’s excellent opening session, she talked about “sharing, reusing and repurposing co... read more

Why it’s a POST Implementation Review

When I was taking AIIM’s ECM Master Class, I almost snickered when Bob Larrivieestarted talking about the Post-Implementation Review. As Bob had walked us through the ECM planning process, I observ... read more

After the Aftermath

Last week, like many businesses in Connecticut, we spent a few days without power at our office. The good news is that Tropical Storm Irene hit on a Sunday, and power was restored to our office by ... read more

Two by Two – Part-2

This is part-2 of a short series that I began here last week and completed on my SharePoint Stories blog. Last week, I talked about how we worked around the iPad’s inability to display Datasheet Vi... read more

Two by Two

This is the first part of a 2-part post on how we are making SharePoint work on iOS devices. The second part will be a cross-posted between this and my SharePointStories blog, since I will be on va... read more

How to Confound Search

Do you want to ruin your users’ search experience? Do you want to render search painful? Do you want to add a level of frustration to an otherwise useful function that everyone counts on? If you do... read more

SharePoint Surveys - Design for Analysis

Last week, I spent a good deal of time wiring up Data View Web Parts to display survey results. If you want some background on that, see SharePoint vs. Excel, Round 2, but the background isn’t impo... read more

SharePoint vs. Zoomerang

I get officially involved with less than five surveys a year. I don’t like conducting surveys, heck, I don’t even like responding to surveys, but they have their place in the information gathering ... read more

Can Records Change?

15 Comments

This time, the title is actually a question, and it’s one that we are dealing with right now. We have resolved the issue, but I’m not sure that we fully understand the subject. We resolved it the w... read more

I Want More

4 Comments

So what’s a SharePoint guy like me doing signing up for a Box.net account? Simply put, I am experimenting. You see, I am desktop bound M-F, and I enjoy access to full blown powerful desktop applic... read more

The End of ECM?

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week, Andrew McAfee raised an interesting fear. Could computers using technology like that demonstrated by IBM’s Watson, make E2.0 technologies irrelevant? He ... read more

Social Business 1.0

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the dinner portion of AIIM New England Chapter’s 16thannual golf tournament, a fundraising event for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. AIIM ... read more

User Experience?

Why is it that something with as many functions, uses, applications and game-changing design features as an iPhone is ultimately easy to understand, and something like SharePoint ends up weighed do... read more

Don’t Forget the Fun Stuff

It’s 6:30 am, and my first task of the day is complete; I have just entered my step-count from yesterday into the tracking list for our company Wellness Program. Of course the tracking list is in S... read more

The Right Certification

Be Careful What You Wish For

If you read my introduction, you know that building things is in my blood. I love taking raw material, of almost any kind, and turning it into something useful, and I truly love doing the work myse... read more

Don’t Over Formalize

We recently had a close encounter with an Approval Workflow. We started out in our current SharePoint ECM project with a requirement that “some reports be routed for a supervisor or subject matter ... read more

SharePoint Aware

Earlier today, I found myself unable to resist the urge to verify the fact that Adobe CS 5.5 Design Premium is SharePoint aware. This is one of two pieces of information I have been waiting to hear... read more

A Bad Case of SharePoint

If you have ever had food poisoning, you know that the moment you realize it, your thoughts are highly focused on dealing with the symptoms. Afterwards, you work your way through the recovery proce... read more

A few weeks ago, we went live with a new process that is being managed in SharePoint. One thing we hadn’t planned for was the fact that we were introducing SharePoint to a few people for the first ... read more

Since When Are We Collaborating?

Procedures in an Amorphous World

The title is a question I hear often when extolling the benefits of ECM and SharePoint. I point out how SharePoint fosters collaboration and the person will look at me and say “I work independently... read more

As we were preparing to roll out a new SharePoint solution, one of the users asked us for some screen shots to aid in preparing procedures. I resisted this request because documenting a procedure i... read more

Selling the P.I.R.

When I attended the AIIM ECM Master class, I was amazed at the similarity between the ECM project plan and the typical systems development project plan. From Requirements to Pilot Testing and Imple... read more

What's in a Name?

In the course of modifying some very old code that I inherited, I noticed a strange bit of history. The people using these programs have been dutifully updating a variable to reflect current operat... read more

Meanwhile, Back at the Farm

AiimEx.., er, I Mean Info360

Whenever I go to a conference like Info360, I come back with my head full of ideas, but I like to find one thing I can focus on right away. This year, that will be “Findability”. I’ll pass up the o... read more

Yesterday afternoon, I gave a presentation at Info360. This is the 12thtime I have attended this conference, and the sixth time I have been a presenter. We have been informed that this is the final... read more

Too Much Information?

Is the social nature of SharePoint 2010’s MySites putting your information at risk? Would you know if it was? These are questions I thought I knew the answer to, but now I am not so sure. Late last... read more

Keeping IT Alive

What Would You Say You Do?

I have been reading many predictions from the modern Nostradamus’ out there (should that be Nostradami?) that the end of the IT department is near. Rigid, stingy and mean seem to be the characteriz... read more

If you recognize the title as the line being uttered in frustration by one of the Bob’s in Office Space, you have connected with me on a higher (ok, perhaps lower) level. Still, if you’re an in-hou... read more

Learning How to do SharePoint Right

Six years ago, I gave a presentation at AIIM Expo called “Robust Communication on a Modest Budget”. One of the 10 take away ideas in that presentation was to use SharePoint Services a.k.a WSS a.k.a... read more

Ready For Prime Time

I love it when somebody does something that inspires a blog entry. Trying to write two SharePoint blogs each week, and keeping them useful, can be challenging, so it’s nice when someone helps. What... read more

Permissions v Structure

Our view of SharePoint includes our content and the content to which we have been granted permissions, but what if we need to see something else?. If we remember Set Theory, the documents we can’t ... read more

Can We Bend This Rule?

You probably know by now that SharePoint 2010 includes a feature called Managed Metadata. If you haven’t yet used it, you may not know how absolutely cool this feature is. In fact, it goes beyond c... read more

Was it Something I Said John?

One of the things you can count on at a SharePoint event is a bit of IT-Bashing. Last week, it spilled over onto the Web when our very own John Mancini said in his blog: “Many organizations wil... read more

My Wish for 2011

As I wrote the title, I reminded myself that I know this wish won’t come true; still, it’s a slow week so I’ll share it with you. I want a SharePoint that can stay up. Actually, I want a Windows en... read more

The K: Drive

Whither Work in Progress?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to say something I could have only dreamt about as recently as a year ago: “beginning 2nd quarter 2011, the K: drive will be read-only!” I can’t tell you how good th... read more

SharePoint might always be an ECM destination, but I am finding that it isn’t always the means of travel. We are working on a significant ECM project right now; collecting, processing and storing e... read more

Then Don’t Do That…

Most of you will recognize the title from the old “Doctor, it hurts when I do this” joke. Some of you will find yourself wanting to say that in response to SharePoint users who complain about their... read more

Now, Teach Them to Fish

About a year ago, I wrote a blog entry called “Window Dressing” that talked about how we rearranged the landing page for one of our Board committees so they didn’t have to navigate anywhere. We cus... read more

Wants vs. Needs

If you develop systems for any length of time, you get a feel for the line that divides “what we need” and “what we want”. If you perform this type of development long enough, you will realize that... read more

Designing Control

Yesterday, we began laying out the design of a simple but important SharePoint system. SharePoint system? Well, I haven’t yet figured out a better phrase for application systems that get removed fr... read more

Anti-Social?

6 Comments

Last week, I was introducing my new employee to her My Site when we paused for a minute at the My Profile page. I have to wonder if I am alone in thinking that too much is being made of the Social ... read more

Is ECM Second Tier?

Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation at SPTechCon where I talked about some of the best practices that I have come to rely upon when interfacing production systems with SharePoint. I received some ... read more

Be the Ball

NPR recently ran an article about the predictions for what life in 2010 was supposed to be like. The article states: “One key to divining trends or developments is to pay attention to "material... read more

Selling SharePoint

Remember – They Have a Day Job

Once you have decided to use SharePoint, you need to sell that solution to others. I am not talking about the ROI discussion you might have to have with your boss; I am talking about convincing you... read more

Budgeting for SharePoint

Our fiscal year-end is November 30 so it is budget time for us. It was five short years ago that we were considering SharePoint to be a “free” solution. We brought our first SharePoint server up on... read more

4 Comments

Today’s title is the most important bit of advice I can give you to consider about your users when deploying SharePoint. Seriously, your job is SharePoint, or something that caused you to select Sh... read more

How do I Teach Them SharePoint?

One of the broad subjects that was suggested for us to write about was “what keeps you up at night?” Well, truth be told, nothing keeps me up at night; I tend to sleep like a baby. That doesn’t mea... read more

Beyond Audit Trails

In our small shop, I function in multiple roles, including database administrator. Occasionally, we have to make changes to production data due to problems that slipped by us in testing or scenario... read more

Minimum Code Required