Blog Entries By Marc Solomon

Occupy IT: John Mancini Peers Behind the Fire Curtain

When we win new customers who doesn’t want to go public? it’s easy to think in external terms. No doubt the proposal team’s dancing in the end zone. And who’s inspiring them to spike the ball more ... read more

Foresight 2020

From Handhelds to Eyeholds You might have heard about Google Goggles. It's the first shot across the new mobile bow. Here devices crawl out of pockets and frame themselves between our ears. The... read more

Big Data Meets the Search Media

John Mancini is the CEO of AIIM. But I've come to regard him as a one man reality check -- someone who deals in the day-to-day operational slog of a trade group with the big picture capacity to: (1... read more

Big data is one of those instantly graspable buzz terms. The only new ground it breaks is putting a faceless name to purposeful data capture. After all, it's not smog if the data engineers are donn... read more

The Battle Ahead: Information Governance and the Need for Social ECM

Open for Social Business ... Open for Social Discussion?

“Gartner predicts by 2016, 20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully.” Houston, we have a metadata... read more

Outside the In-Box

If your social media platform was a parking plaza in an office park you'd be seeing more campaign stickers than vanity plates. The tagline: vote for me. The party line? There is no party -- everyon... read more

Who puts in the plumbing on corporate Facebook? Infrastructure-wise we understand that corporate IT are the implementers and early adopters. Culturally, I get that the community manager is charged ... read more

WYSIWYG 2.0

Psst ... hey ... yeah you. You social engineers getting certified in Business Facebook applications! Remember what-you-see-is-what-you-get? Probably not unless reinventing yourself for a l... read more

Turning Users into Producers

It hardly seems worth the fuss? If all firewall-dwelling professionals did in the information-seeking moments of their work days was to consume content, why bother with firewalls? After all, a... read more

Taking Merger Integration All the Way to the Knowledge Bank (Part 2)

The Slow, Tentative Rise of the Knowledge Professional

After three SharePoint migrations plus an acquisition and a merger thrown in for good measure I'm starting to believe that SharePoint integrations are a little like childbirth: if the mother honest... read more

There may be no SharePoint proletariat. There may be no guild of usability artists or local brotherhood of global search configurators. But there are scores of unsung working stiffs attempting to c... read more

Least Content Denominator

It's 1997 and you just saw the future: your food service specials in your corporate cafeteria for the coming week. Now it's 2004 and the read/writing is on the wall: your file server has been r... read more

Advertising for Intranets

"We felt like, well, the ad had nothing to do with the search. Why would we show it? It's distracting." - Sergey Brin I've been reading an outdated retro book about Google's early rise from a... read more

We Have Machines That Can Do This

There are two basic math problems on the chalkboards of our earthly cosmos: A. Quantification: How much of something there is. B. Qualification: How to set up an equation that helps resolve... read more

Why KM Sucks (and what not to do about it)

The Five Second Rule of ECM Content

My users hate KM: · It delivers too many untimely materials and receives little in the form of stale boilerplates. · It's hard to reach through an implacable router and enti... read more

"Making decisions is easy. Making decisions that people will support is not so easy." - Peter Block, Flawless Consulting We all have our holding patterns around found objects -- whether it's... read more

Taking Merger Integration All the Way to the Knowledge Bank

All is fair in love, football, and mergers and acquisitions. In fact if corporations were afforded the same rights of family law as free speech, the divorce rate among agrieved merger partners coul... read more

Speaking Truth to SharePoint

7 Comments

We all know the first signs that our politicians are not being entirely candid -- when their lips move. We all know that banks get robbed because that's where the money is -- even by their own bank... read more

How do you spell IP?

How do you spell I.P.? IP is a system problem if you're steeped in process. There are all kinds of hard stops and high boundaries for containing what the organization knows in order to pe... read more

Knowledge Transference through Document Sets

KM people and organizational gurus romanticize that most hallowed of all transactions between two human brains -- the knowledge transfer. In my knowledge neighborhood that's an act of sincerest des... read more

Not so ... FAST

""What a seamless integration with SharePoint..." "It's really, really fast (duh)..." "See those Refiners on the left? That tells you who edited what file format and when -- coooolnes... read more

Lousy Ratings, Part 2

Last week we considered how binary logic is about as helpful for writing code as it is useless for assessing information quality. Our non-working model? The I-like button version of content analyti... read more

Lousy Ratings (Part One)

Engineers are the master technician/carpenters that hold and pass electronic charges -- a circuitry that corresponds to a binary set of numbers. Instead of hammers chasing nails, every byte is redu... read more

Death of a Trade Show

The Migration Email No One Will Get

I've never actually planned a trade show. I've never assembled an email blast or followed up with a courtesy voicemail in the wake of a direct mailing. I have never actively campaigned to lead a ro... read more

Strategic Planning for Human Memory Machines

Is 2011 just another synonym for moving in your shop to SharePoint 2010? Have you been in stealth mode all along? Or have you put yourself on the line? That's right. Announced the move with a drumb... read more

An Extra Set of Brains

One of the slamdunkiest decisions I've made as an ECM manager is to hire summer interns. I trade on the attraction of my adopted industry (management consulting) to enlist the help of grateful and ... read more

Big SharePoint Tent

SharePoint's most availing attribute has nothing to do with its features, functions, or custom sleights of hand. The best thing about it? It's that ever-engulfing big SharePoint tent. You can't rea... read more

One of the things that separate information managers from IT folks is that IMers can't tell their left from their right. We don't write code. We decode. We don't wire offices. We observe how the fo... read more

Setting the Terms in SharePoint 2010

Casual SharePoint Friday on My Mind

Tagging is based on two units -- the link, which points to any page within the range of your security settings, and the tag, which names or labels the link. Taxonomies on the other hand answer to a... read more

There are fashionistas and clothes horsemen. Then there are people who suit up on game day without a clue. Yes, I'm referring to shuffling office park jetsetters like me who answer fashion statemen... read more

Managed Metadata Services -- Mediation for Knowledge Planners

I can always tell when I'm about to stretch the limits of what I've come to know as the SharePoint homestead or "KM System." That's when I leave SharePoint for an extended period and tease through ... read more

Maybe Documents Need to Get a Life?

"(I Don't Care What You Say Anymore...) This is My Sites"

I mean, for crying out loud, it's just a TV show! I mean, look at you, look at the way you're dressed! You've turned an enjoyable little job, that I did as a lark for a few years, into a COLOSSAL W... read more

Purge Baby Purge!

In this Lenten season we shed our wintery garments for the faster step of a lighter spring, How light our step depends on how much baggage we're willing to haul to the next station. When it com... read more

Creativity: Better in Idea Form than in Practice?

You know when you're a KM grunt? It's when the sheen of a cool new application pales in comparison to a core component that learns new tricks while maintaining its humble basic, unassuming identity... read more

Last week the online business Journal Knowledge at Wharton alerted its readers to a fascinating new management study that creativity is delivered better as a lip service than on listening mode. Act... read more

SharePoint: The World's Most Impersonal Network

The Format is the Message

What we value most about social networks isn't the number of friends, invites, reconnects, or diversions from the dullness of rote tasks. It's more basic that that. It's that we know where they... read more

Migrating to SharePoint 2010: Home Makeover MOSS Edition

Here's a little known secret that's not so little or secretive. Most knowledge work is reformatting. That's right. No big thoughts to cloud out rebuilding that table. No mind cramps for fre... read more

It's snowtime ... no, showtime. What I mean is migrating +100 GIG of documents, schematics, and media files from our MOSS production server to our looming SharePoint 2010 launch. The snow metap... read more

It's the Metadata, Stupid: SharePoint 2010 in the Twittersphere, Part 1

The Secret Life of Documents

I did a few controlled media cycles to measure the frequencies of Twitter mentions addressing SharePoint 2010. What was least interesting is the sustained buzz. It's fairly even without a whole lot... read more

Work Finding Us

I just completed a definitive focus group of one on the only topic that voters, clergy members, politicians, porn stars, cab drivers, and SharePoint communities really care about -- that's the econ... read more

I was listening recently to a podcast of On Point my favorite NPR talk radio and the episode was about how talk was losing out to texting for supremacy of message control, if not as the de facto co... read more

Many Happy Returns on 2011 SharePoint Investments

Oxymorons R Us -- The Coming of Social Email

The lame duck Congress had just tackled an entire term's worth of legislation and I heard one pundit say "it's time to get out of the prediction business." It is amazing what a public shaming and s... read more

Social Email -- Did I hear that right? How about nonverbal communication? Graphics-based texting anyone? The IPhone -- personal edition? Didn't think so. If this was purely a ... read more

Governance for Dunces

The Adjacent Possibilities of SharePoint 2010

Governance -- you can't come within a custom webpart of a SharePoint best practice webinar without the presenter drumming the governance refrain into every PMO ("program management office") slide. ... read more

In a recent issue of Wired Magazine Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson ruminate on Where Ideas Come From with a knowing glance towards the arc of innovation -- especially factors pushing on the cultura... read more

MOSS to MOSS Resuscitation

Information Today's KMWorld held its first ever SharePoint Symposium this past week in Washington DC. A personal highlight was when one of the presenters summoned the cognitive glue that drew an af... read more

The Great SharePoint Migration

SharePoint Upgrades -- Blueprints Anybody?

You can't hire some guys and a van to move and unpack your MOSS 2007 crates unless you're sticking with MOSS in a new box. Hiring movers in that case makes about as much sense as moving out of your... read more

SharePoint as Stimulus Package

I have a piece out this week in KMWorld where I interview John Mongell, an IT consultant with Boston-based RSM McGladrey and well acquainted with the initial tire-kicking and eventual blocking/tack... read more

Having weathered the Great Recession so far and being conversant in deploying and maintaining SharePoint-based ECM are not inseparable but they are more than complementary in ways that Microsoft ma... read more

Some of my best friends are engineers

I was listening to an NPR interview with Ken Auletta on tonight's commute. The Googlarchy was searching for its next growth engine and cheap, green power in the form of offshore football fields ful... read more

When IT "Gets" it

Internal SharePoint Marketing -- Tipping the Balance towards Power Users

The 900 pound gorilla cuts a fat two way profile in our community of SharePoint users. Mention obesity in a crowded server farm and that usually means that Microsoft has layered more arterial-clogg... read more

The Next SharePoint Upgrade Through 2010 Hindsight

Of all the interviews conducted for an ongoing SharePoint Reality Series in KMWorld, one of the simplest and most compelling ingredients of a successful deployment is put forth by EPC Group's Errin... read more