SharePoint and Assessment Blog

SharePoint 15 will allow quizzes?

Posted on April 22, 2012 by johnkleeman

It looks likely that the next version of SharePoint will allow you to make simple quizzes inside SharePoint, just like you can currently make surveys.

It’s widely rumoured that SharePoint 15 (currently under wraps but expected out early in 2013) will have an education module – an addition to SharePoint that will allow courses, lessons, assignments and grades. It will support IMS Common Cartridge format, which will allow SharePoint users to import courses published for Blackboard and Moodle. See zdnet or Bjørn Furuknap’s blog for more on the SharePoint 15 education module.

Of particular interest for this blog is that it looks as though SharePoint 15 (or its add-on education module) will allow creation of quizzes inside SharePoint. The evidence for this is contained within an “Education Quiz Client-Side Object Model Protocol Specification” (MS-QUIZCSOM), downloadable here. It’s a 73 page technical document describing the draft API to the quiz module. Reading the specification:

SharePoint will have a new concept of a quiz – an assessment tool used to determine users’ knowledge of course material.
A quiz can be assigned either for unlimited attempts or for 1-5 attempts.
Quizzes contain questions, that can be computer graded or manually graded.
Supported question types are fill-in-blanks, multiple choice, essay and rating scale.
Multiple choice questions can include true/false and multiple response questions
Feedback can be given for correct and incorrect answers
There is a rudimentary concept of question difficulty (a number between 1 and 5)
There is no concept of “topic” to group questions in and give feedback in
There also is no concept of shuffling choices nor randomizing questions from an item bank.
There is no mention of any support of assessment standards – for example no support of IMS QTI.

The capabilities and question types are quite limited, but it will be useful for basic quizzes. It’s not clear if the feature will be available as part of standard SharePoint or in some chargeable add-on.

What does this mean?

Microsoft may change some of these features before release, but it does look as though learning scenarios will be addressed seriously for the first time by Microsoft in SharePoint 15, replacing the existing quasi-supported Learning Kit. It seems this will be aimed more at schools, colleges and universities than corporate training.

I see this as good news for all in education and training who are interested in using SharePoint. The basic out-of-the-box capabilities look limited, but capable enough to be useful for simple use cases. And it will encourage the community to think of SharePoint as a learning system – using both the Microsoft built-capabilities and third-party systems.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged API, IMS, MS-QUIZCSOM, SharePoint 15 | 3 Comments

How Microsoft themselves use SharePoint to help 45,000 employees learn better

Posted on March 24, 2012 by johnkleeman

Thought leader interview with Jim Federico of Microsoft on how Microsoft use SharePoint internally for learning. Jim is a Sr. Director of Operations and Platforms at Microsoft, responsible for training and readiness for the customer facing roles at Microsoft.

Jim, what is your background?

I spent 13 years running technology and product strategy for SumTotal Systems. I started in learning technology developing and then managing a product called Ingenium (Jim and I first met back then) at a company called Meliora Systems. We sold that company to Asymetrix. We took that company public in 1998 and rebranded it as Click2learn. This company eventually became SumTotal Systems after a merger with Docent. The products I managed and helped design still live within Sum Total Systems’ current suite. After a 12 month stint at a start-up where we built an analytics solution for large strategic consulting organizations, I joined Microsoft 5 years ago.

What is your role at Microsoft?

I am Senior Director of Operations and Platform for what we call the Readiness Organization in Microsoft.

I am responsible for a variety of things including reporting, quality, tools & platform, technology, innovation and the operational services necessary to deliver nearly 2 million hours of training per year to 45,000 employees. This includes product and solution readiness which contains technical, licensing, industry knowledge, compete, and go-to-market readiness as well as professional skills training that we primarily deliver within a curricula framework we call Academies.

How does Microsoft use SharePoint for learning?

We’ve got a notion at Microsoft of “first and best”, which essentially says that it’s our job to use (and occasionally misuse!) products ahead of customers and better than any customers. This makes two things happen. One is we can take what we’ve learned and share it with our customers. The second is we make our products better by finding any problems – often before products are released to market. For example, the Windows 8 Consumer Preview was released recently and the very next day a substantial portion of Microsoft employees were already running the beta.

I believe we’re the world’s largest SharePoint implementation. From a training perspective, we use SharePoint in a few interesting ways.

We’re just wrapping up a project to build a SharePoint search experience for training. The outcome is that Training becomes discoverable from across the intranet. This is a really simple thing to do and I encourage all customers running SharePoint to consider doing the same.

The screen shot to the right is of our SharePoint search experience. Notice the facets to the left that allow for quick filtering of the catalog by taxonomies that are meaningful to people looking for training.

One benefit of this approach is that we are able to provide employees with a single training discovery experience even though we have two primary learning management systems in service of employees. With the SharePoint search scope, we have both LMSs being indexed in the same way, we have a common taxonomy that makes up the filters that learners search, and so we’ve unified searching across multiple LMSs, and we’ve brought training to where the people are, which is often better than forcing them to go directly into the LMSs.

I suspect that could be a quick win for a lot of people, as that’s the sort of thing SharePoint is good at – searching in external systems.

Yes, the investment involved is really very small, from a technical perspective. You can do this with a variety of techniques, the one we used was very simple – we wrote a query to write out a single file that ends up becoming a SharePoint list. The list gets indexed by SharePoint once or twice a day. And SharePoint knows how to index SharePoint lists, so there’s nothing complicated about it.

You can do this in more sophisticated ways, but this technique works fine.

Lots of people I speak to want to use SharePoint for knowledge management and aggregating and making information easy to find. I suspect a lot of people don’t realize how easy it is to index external systems like this with SharePoint search?

Yes, we’ve taken the LMS out of the ‘walled garden’ as it were, and made learning a proper ‘intranet citizen’.

What else do you do with SharePoint for learning?

The cleverest thing we’ve done with SharePoint is a site we call internally “Academy”, you can think of this as YouTube for the enterprise. We’ve done some white papers on this in the past (see for example here). It’s a podcasting platform, an executive communication platform, a training platform, a social networking platform, an expert-finder platform, it does all of those things for us. (See the screenshot right.)

It really leverages some of SharePoint’s unique strengths. We’ve put a podcasting experience in front of SharePoint that resembles YouTube with little squares that show a snippet of the video, star ratings, the name of the author, how many times it’s been downloaded and played. Content is accessible via a browser, via an RSS reader, can be easily downloaded to Windows Phone via the Zune software and we’ve recently released a Windows Phone app. In fact 30% of the content is being consumed from mobile devices – people browse the content on their Windows mobile phone and play it there.

I think that you let SharePoint users see the learning available to them and take it in a SharePoint web part?

Yes, we created what we call landing pages for learners in SharePoint. We built these in Silverlight because we wanted it to be cinematic, with animation, and it’s really easy to host Silverlight in SharePoint. It pulls content and the content structure and completion status from the LMS and marries that with the profile of the user who’s logged into SharePoint. Thus, if you or I looked at one of these landing pages, what we’d see would be different depending on our profile. You might require different training than I do, and we might recommend different training depending on job roles and geography. It takes the profile from SharePoint and presents a unique view. When the user wants to engage in the course, they click through and end up watching the content player from the LMS, or can also download and take it offline.

We’re in the process of improving this by building a Windows 8 app, with a Metro design, a touch-first app, that is on top of SharePoint. It will be available as an internal-only application for Microsoft employees and will become the primary way that Microsoft employees consume training. We’re also in the process of re-building our content player, using HTML5, making it suitable for touch mobile devices. One of the things we’re keen on in Microsoft is making an immersive experience, for instance you click on a course and it plays in the window you are in. The trend in Windows 8 is that controls are hidden unless you need them, the chrome of the experience fades away, with the content in the forefront. We’re also designing our user interface for touch and figuring smart ways of integrating this with SharePoint and our LMS.

Are you running the new version of SharePoint under development (version 15) internally or do you use SharePoint 2010 internally?

Microsoft is running SharePoint 2010. There are areas that are working with SharePoint 15, but it hasn’t been rolled out across the company. In the training organization, we’re experimented with it and we’re building our strategies around how to leverage some of the new capabilities in the context of training. I suspect that within 18 months, most of the platforms I’m responsible for will be running in the Cloud and will leverage Azure and Office 15.

Another thing we’ve built internally is something we call OfficeTalk. This is a custom application that is essentially Twitter for the enterprise. It has the notion of hashtags, which allows you to keep track of conversations. There’s a web part that allows you to integrate it with SharePoint sites. It’s getting quite a lot of traffic. There’s also a Windows Phone app if you’re not in front of your PC. (You can see some more info on OfficeTalk in this article.)

A lot of the SharePoint sites we’ve built have a little OfficeTalk web part off to the side; that has a semi-synchronous conversation happening, in the context of the page you’re looking at. For example, if I’m looking at a SharePoint site about Windows 8, there will be an internal conversation running off to the right of the page, of people dialoguing about Windows 8. We think that’s pretty clever, and I’d expect similar capability to make its way into future Microsoft products. As you might expect, we prefer that some conversations happen within the Microsoft Firewall so it’s important that we provide employees with a proper – meaning secure – means of collaborating.

I know there is a lot of interest (for example within the Masie Consortium) in this area. What guidance would you give other companies looking to get value for SharePoint for learning?

My guidance to my peers in the industry is to take the training to where the people are. Often what people have to do is to drop what they are doing as a knowledge worker and “take a sabbatical” to go to the learning management system. And it doesn’t dawn on most employees to go and do that. Most employees don’t fully differentiate mentally between what’s training and what’s not. Content and community get blurred in the mind of learner.

Our job is to unify it all, and unlock learning content in your LMS via APIs and expose it, for example, in SharePoint.

How do you deliver assessments with SharePoint?

We have three modes of assessments we can call from our LMS. The assessments are available from SharePoint, but are running within the LMS where the SCORM APIs ensure data is being tracked.

- Standalone assessments

- Assessment wrapped around online training

- Assessment wrapped round virtual/instructor led training

We have built our own tool that we use to develop online training and assessments. We did that partly as we had our own unique requirements and partly because we wanted to deliver in Silverlight. The unique requirements primarily enable a degree of adaptively sophistication that I don’t believe exists in standard eLearning development tools. We’re currently in the process of re-releasing the system to deliver HTML5 content. From an assessment standpoint, the tool is not as sophisticated as systems like Questionmark.

Do you see SharePoint in the long term as competing with learning management systems or more as a hybrid?

For the foreseeable future we’re going to have both a LMS and SharePoint. One of the strengths of an LMS is that it can help us administer the business rules around training, especially around instructor-led training. There’s an immense amount of business rules to administer. For example, we set up a class which has minimum and maximum capacity, we reserve certain seats for certain audiences, we have a cancellation policy, we have a charge-back policy, we like our approval workflows, we set up pre-requisites, etc. etc. etc. There are so many business rules that we leverage every day from our LMS that rebuilding it would require a significant R&D investment.

The way I think about it is that because our LMS provides a rich set of capabilities we need to run the business, it frees up my team to focus on delivering innovative experiences and creating new modalities.

Will there be learning improvements in future versions of SharePoint?

Anything my team learns from using SharePoint to train Microsoft employees, the SharePoint product team benefits from. I can’t say what’s in or out of particular versions, but I advocate for learning needs to the SharePoint product team and they are very aware of learning scenarios.

One more thing I’m passionate about is what we’re doing on Windows 8. I’ve attached a screen shot of a solution we call Role Guide. This is a touch-optimized Windows 8 Metro style app that presents tailored roadmaps to Microsoft employees based on their role, region, manager status, and many other attributes. It also provides a fantastic search experience (integrated with our LMS) and includes an ‘in-experience’ SCORM content player that looks great when playing our HTML 5 content. To my knowledge, we’re delivering a bunch of industry firsts in this solution.

Posted in Interview | Tagged Academy, Corporate training, Federico, LMS, Masie, Microsoft, OfficeTalk, Search, SharePoint 15, SumTotal Systems | 4 Comments

Cheating on tests less likely if you use SharePoint?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by johnkleeman

Do you deliver online tests to employees (for compliance, certification or training purposes) or to students in college or university courses? If so, might your test-takers be less likely to cheat if you deliver tests or exams embedded in SharePoint than in a standalone application? The answer is possibly yes. Read on to find out more!

A key concept to explain this is the fraud triangle, originally invented by Donald Cressey, a famed criminologist. He suggested that for people to conduct fraud, which includes cheating at a test, they need Motivation, Opportunity and Rationalization.

Motivation. To cheat at a test, you need motivation, a reason to do it. Typically this will be because the test is high stakes – if you fail, there will be penalties.
Opportunity. To cheat at a test, you also need opportunity. There are three main kinds of opportunity:
1. Impersonation or identity fraud : where another person logs in and takes a test for the test-taker. For instance, a manager gets a secretary to take the test for him/her, or a student gets a cleverer class-mate to take the test.
2. Content theft : where the questions (and/or answers) are stolen and given/sold to potential cheaters.
3. Unauthorized aids : where the test-takers get unapproved help to answer the questions, for instance another person to help, or access to the Internet or materials they are not supposed to have.
Rationalization. Someone who cheats also needs to be able to rationalize to themselves that what they are doing is fair – for instance that they think the process is unfair or because everyone else is doing it or some other mental model. They need a rationale to convince themselves that what they are doing is okay to do.

So given this, why might taking a test from SharePoint make it less likely that people cheat?

The main reason is that in many organizations, you would not willingly give your SharePoint password to another person. This might give them access to private or financial information (e.g. bonus or salary). It might be a serious breach of your organization’s information security policy. Or it might allow them to take actions as you that could be embarrassing (send emails, fill in forms etc). So in many organizations, if you use SharePoint to authenticate test-takers, it might encourage someone to take the test themselves and so prevent impersonation, which is one of the main Opportunities for cheating.

Use of SharePoint could also help a little with Rationalization, as it could be part of a fair testing programme, which will make people feel less keen to defraud it. SharePoint probably won’t help much with Motivation, nor with other Opportunities such as content theft or unauthorized aids. If you are interested in learning how to deal with these, as well as more on the fraud triangle, see Questionmark CEO Eric Shepherd’s excellent blog article Assessment Security and How To Reduce Fraud.

If your organization culture allows SharePoint password exchange, then using SharePoint probably won’t help exam security. But if your organization culture is such that people will not easily give their SharePoint password to someone else, then using SharePoint as an entry point to online tests and exams could reduce impersonation and so reduce cheating.

Posted in Commentary, Compliance | Tagged Assessment security, cheating, fraud triangle, Impersonation, Motivation, Opportunity, Rationalization, Security, SharePoint, Universities | 3 Comments

SharePoint. Useful or useless for corporate learning?

Posted on January 24, 2012 by johnkleeman

Thought leader interview with Danny De Witte, an IT and Learning expert in Belgium

Danny, what is your background?

I started at Elsevier Training (part of the Reed Elsevier group), where we did some early work on PC learning. Then I was one of the co-founders of U&I Learning, which was one of the first Belgian e-learning companies, and I worked there for 12 years. About 2 years ago I joined Xylos, I wanted to broaden my work and one of the systems I wanted to work with was SharePoint.

Is your main interest learning or IT or both?

It’s a bit of both. I started as a system engineer a long time ago, but I became interested in learning. Now I specialize in using technology to enhance the learning for end-users of my customers.

How did you first get involved with SharePoint?

My first contact with SharePoint (2003 version)was at U&I Learning. We needed to implement an internal knowledge platform and SharePoint was the tool we used. Now at Xylos, we are a Microsoft partner, and I have the opportunity to work with SharePoint specialists. We use and implement SharePoint a lot and I have been able to get much more involved with it.

How widely used is SharePoint in Belgium?

Not as widely used as in some countries. Most companies are still running SharePoint 2007 but a lot of companies are installing or migrating to SharePoint 2010. Usually the driver is as a document management application or to replace a file server. That’s the first step that customers use it for.

We would like to see our customers also use SharePoint for learning purposes. This is happening slowly. We do have some implementations that use the SharePoint Learning Kit for instance.

Do you find the SharePoint Learning Kit to be effective?

I often refer to it as “My first steps in learning” for a customer. The only thing they want to do at the beginning is to make a course available and have some tracking on it (who has done it and when). Tracking at the course level is not a basic functionality of SharePoint, so we have to have something that does the tracking for the customer. And the SharePoint Learning Kit can do this and give a very basic, quick report for a few courses.

What kinds of customers are using SharePoint for learning in Belgium?

They are companies in various industries. For instance, we have one in the Chemical sector, they already have SharePoint 2007 and they want to make one or two courses available to everyone. Another company, a worldwide company, is also using SharePoint 2007. And they say, we want to train our sales people, we have new products which are being launched very quickly, we want to put the learning for a new product online.

Did you use any kind of assessments?

For one customer, we built a course using Captivate and Presenter, and there was a small assessment at the end of the course.

What do you think of the future potential of SharePoint for use in learning?

I think it’s huge. We have the new version 2010, it has lots of possibilities, meaning that you have the social part in it now. You have additional metadata functionality. You can create a community, you can add an expert search, you can define expertise, and all these things. If you build it correctly, you can have a mixture of formal and informal learning. What we promote to our customers is “If you use already SharePoint, then all the knowledge within your company is already available via SharePoint. Let’s link these documents, these PowerPoint, whatever they are to a community site where you can have your employees discussing these specific topics.”

We often give the example of information about specific topic like Project Management. You have a site that holds documentation about your PM approach, you can add some learning parts, and you can really build your community based on existing content that is already available.

I also see a lot of value in connecting an LMS (learning management system) with SharePoint. We have an agreement with e2train where we use their LMS. We put our content in it, because the customer wants to know who visits the content and how much time they spend there, and then we build web parts that get the content from the LMS and display it in SharePoint. So the company gets the tracking from the LMS, but the employee has a single portal to access learning.

So the LMS runs on top of SharePoint?

No, it’s a separate system. We run them side by side. We’ve built some web parts which identify the user and gets some content from the LMS and displays it in SharePoint.

So users don’t need to login to the LMS, they go to a specific site in SharePoint and if there is a course in the LMS for the topic they are interested in, the course material is displayed in a web part on that site, so it’s all context driven.

I’ve heard of other companies using SharePoint as a portal into a Learning Management System. Do you think this works well?

Well it depends on the company – what do you really want to know about the learning of the end-user?

If I log in to a course ten times, or if I spend ten hours on a course, that doesn’t mean anything. It just says that I have logged into the course ten times and spent ten hours on it, it doesn’t measure my learning. So if you don’t need that information, you really don’t need a learning management system. You could say, here is the course; take the course, and afterwards do an assessment.

The main reason to have the LMS is for reporting, I call it for “funding purposes”. Here in Belgium, you are able to get some funding from the government if you have a certain number of educational days within the company. Sometimes I talk to a customer and say that if someone visits a course for two hours, it doesn’t say anything about their learning. Did they learn something? We don’t know – the only way to tell is by testing the person – using an assessment.

What do you typically recommend to customers?

Most importantly you have to listen to the customer’s needs!

Do you already have something in place? What do you want to achieve? Do you want to build communities? Do you want to facilitate “informal learning”? Do you want to have formalized learning?

For instance, I was at a customer a few months ago who said they wanted communities of practice for learning. They thought they might need an LMS, but I told them they didn’t need an LMS, SharePoint can do it

So sometimes people think they need an LMS but don’t?

Yes. People often think that if they want to start learning within the company, they need a learning management system. And that’s not always the case. A LMS as the words say will manage your learning, and in a large company where you have lots of courseware going from e-learning to classroom training to documents and other stuff, well then, to cover the management, workflow and the reporting needs, a LMS is very handy. If you don’t need all this, then you could choose something else like SharePoint.

What would be your advice to someone looking at doing informal learning using SharePoint?

First of all, they have to use the latest version, SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2007 is fine, but there are lots of improvements in the latest version. I would suggest they start with a knowledge site on a specific topic, where they can bundle all the information that’s available and activate the services they require.

You don’t need custom software to get started. Under normal circumstances, we use out of the box SharePoint. We strongly recommend to start using the MySite functionalities. Encourage people to fill in their profile completely with their expertise, things they are interested about, how to contact them etc. The implementation of SharePoint, the MySites functionality and Lync could be, when correctly implemented, a very powerful learning tool.

What about Office 365?

We’re looking at this. We think it would be very powerful for customers to start with Office 365, using SharePoint for learning in the cloud, say with 20-30 users. Then if they like it, they can move the whole company to the cloud or install SharePoint On Premise. However we need to be sure that everything what we put in the cloud can easily be transferred to On Premise if needed. For the moment, this is a concern.

How do you see the future?

I think lots of companies will start to use SharePoint or other community-content system for learning.

For SharePoint to be really useful, it would be nice if we could have some additional tracking within SharePoint where we can see who clicked on what, what was the contribution of users on topics/forums so you can rate or award people based on the contributions they do.

I think we are not there yet, we still have a long way to go. But things are moving in the right direction.

Thank you Danny. How can people contact you?

I’m on Twitter at @paravolve. And I work at Xylos – www.xylos.com. We have expertise in SharePoint and learning. If someone wants a SharePoint and learning solution, we can help them make it happen.

Posted in Interview | Tagged 70+20+10, Belgium, Corporate learning, Corporate training, Corporations, Informal learning, LMS, Xylos | 1 Comment

Seven ways to stay up-to-date on SharePoint and Assessments

Posted on January 7, 2012 by johnkleeman

How do you find the key nuggets of information gold you need amongst all the verbiage on the Internet?

Here are some of the ways I stay up to date on SharePoint and Assessments, you can adapt many of these to your specific interests.

If you’re interested in e-learning, the site elearninglearning.com aggregates over 100 e-learning blogs (including this one) and has just introduced a personalizaton service which allows you to get a daily or weekly email alerting you to key-words used in the blog entries. For example you could personalize your email to include the topic “SharePoint” and then you’d get a daily or weekly email on SharePoint related e-learning blog entries.
Google Alerts is another great service – you just go to www.google.com/alerts and put in your search query, for example “SharePoint Assessments” and your email address, you’ll get an email with links any day that Google indexes something that covers your query.
For specifically SharePoint information, I find Bamboo’s SharePoint Daily a very useful daily email. Its editor Chris Dooley tracks the news and blogosphere keenly and you won’t miss much in the SharePoint world if you follow this.
Assessment news is more diverse, but a couple of good places to look at are the e-assessment association and Questionmark’s blog.
There are several LinkedIn groups that focus on SharePoint and also some that focus on assessment, higher education or certification. And you can get daily or weekly updates on these. Some promotion and discussion as well as news, but worthwhile.
A strong way to stay in touch is Twitter, though it requires some time investment. I follow a few hundred people on Twitter and check it a few times a day. This keeps me in touch with developments and people round the world. You can follow me on Twitter at @johnkleeman.
Last but hopefully not least, keep an eye on this blog. You can follow this blog by using the RSS button at the top right of the screen.

I hope this helps you stay up-to-date!

Posted in Commentary, Community | Tagged Bamboo, Community, elearninglearning, Google, LinkedIn, RSS, Twitter | 2 Comments

How SharePoint and Assessments helped the Tooth Fairies one Christmas – a holiday tale

Posted on December 17, 2011 by johnkleeman

Did you know the Fairies use SharePoint? Here’s a story about how SharePoint and Assessments came in handy one Christmas.

Only the very best Fairies who leave Fairy University are appointed as Tooth Fairies. Tooth Fairies visit all the little children in the world and collect their discarded baby teeth and leave behind some money. Back when the world was small, it was easy for the Chief Tooth Fairy to keep track of all the children on paper cards, but now there are so many people in the world, she’s deployed SharePoint.

There had been a difficult meeting of the North Pole Council to approve SharePoint, when the Chief Reindeer found an article which claimed that SharePoint is Crack and Microsoft is the Pusher – did this mean that SharePoint was from the dark side? The Reindeer was keen for the Fairies to join Santa in using SAP (check out Forbes magazine who leaked Santa’s use to us mortals). But the Chief Tooth Fairy’s favourite god-daughter had been to a SharePoint Saturday and came back so enthusiastic that she’d set up a trial site in the Clouds around the North Pole, and they’d tried it and liked it. We can always do a Duet with you, she said to Santa if we need to connect.

So one December, the Chief Tooth Fairy pulled her cloak round her (even for Fairies, it gets cold in December at the North Pole), sipped her cocoa and looked at the screen in front of her. What could this new SharePointy thing tell her about why tooth production was down?

Hmm. There were lots of complaints from children in the system, here was one from an American child: “Dear Fairy, I put my tooth under my pillow and when I woke up there was a funny coin with the letters EURO on it, what can I do with this?” She knew she had to do something, but what?

She called in her god-daughter and asked her to make SharePoint tell them what was going on. Five dashboards, four KPIs, three SharePoint Dailies, two workflows and a cartridge change and tree web part later, they worked out the problem. Lots of fairies didn’t know about different currencies, and leaving an English child a dollar or an Australian child a pound wasn’t making them very happy.

The Chief Tooth Fairy knew she needed to send some Fairies back to Fairy University for more training, but she couldn’t send them all as they were needed for duty – how to find out which ones? Christmas is a busy time for tooth fairies, with all the sticky food catching teeth.

Her god-daughter had a brainwave. I’ve seen this program Questionmark, which fits into SharePoint and allows you to give quizzes and tests. We put in some questions, ask the tooth fairies to fill it in, and the ones who don’t know what to do, we send back for training.

And this is what they did. When each Tooth Fairy came back from a mission, they took a test. And lots of Fairies went back for training, but only the ones who needed it.

So now the children of the world are back to normal service, thanks to SharePoint and Assessments.

I hope you enjoyed this story, check back here in 2012 for more real-world news about SharePoint and Assessments.

Posted in SharePoint in the Cloud, Uncategorized | Tagged Assessments, Christmas, Questionmark, SharePoint, Tooth Fairies, Xmas | 1 Comment

How SharePoint is helping change the way we blog

Posted on November 30, 2011 by johnkleeman

Julie Delazyn is a social media expert and journalist, she has turned the Questionmark blog (http://blog.questionmark.com) into one of the most widely read blogs in assessment. Here are her views on how SharePoint is helping change the way we blog:

Social media and social networks have become interlaced with the way we share information as companies, as marketers and even as people. While we come from a culture of sharing news through more formal networks such as the media, we have slowly gone into blogging as a way to share information anywhere and at any time sans the traditional gatekeeper or editor. It has given people a chance to become experts in their field by sharing information online and growing a readership that, if enthused, will retweet and Facebook your thoughts and articles.

This, when you stop to think about it, is revolutionary. Anyone anywhere can write their opinion on any subject under the straightforward notion of blogging. This isn’t a journalist hiding behind a byline to push an opinion. This is a person: a CEO, a fitness coach or even a fashion editor, all with their own expertise and their own opinions.

SharePoint is taking this revolution to the next level. By offering an interactive platform for easy blogging within SharePoint, one is now reverted back to a place where one’s blog no longer feels like a lonely island floating in the World Wide Web, but a fixture in a place shared by many with a common ground. Much like a sports magazine may publish the opinion of a famous football coach, a blog in SharePoint appropriately houses a contextual opinion that belongs there, making it easier to be seen, read and shared.

Like blogging with WordPress or Blogger, a blog within SharePoint is easy enough to set up. You can pick a theme and a look and customize your blog with lists and categories. If you are a coding junkie, you can do a lot more. But with already established collaboration functions, blogging within SharePoint means working in a web-based collaborative environment, and if your organization uses SharePoint, then this becomes the natural place to blog. Whereas WordPress, Blogger or any other blog site is set up so that you are swiftly blogging on the internet, SharePoint creates a natural environment for blogging within an organization. This is the key difference. Whether you begin blogging straight from Word, or stumble upon an article you’d like to embed in an entry, this collaborative environment makes it easy to integrate and jump from one application to another by using the already interactive tools at your disposal. This is how we are now interacting and learning from each other, as is explained in the 70+20+10 model, and the ease in which we can incorporate these functions is important to the way we learn from one another.

While I look forward to seeing which kind of innovation this may open up in terms of blogging within a “dyi” open source context, I am more intrigued about the changes that will occur in the way we share our opinions and invite people to belong to our individual and growing clouds. This is another way to share, another way to weave a web of opinion, followership and most importantly, innovation.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged 70+20+10, Blogs, Informal learning, Julie Delazyn, Microsoft, SharePoint | 6 Comments

How to use SharePoint to track annual competency tests: Part 2 – Elusive reminders

Posted on November 22, 2011 by johnkleeman

Like many others, I have to organize annual competence tests – everyone in my company has to pass a test once a year on data security. I use a SharePoint list to manage who has taken the test when, see the first part of this blog series for how the list is set up.

I find SharePoint much better than an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of who has taken a test – I get version tracking so I can check history, and I can easily make a SharePoint view of those who are due a test soon. But what I’d like to do is use SharePoint to send reminder emails. I would like SharePoint to remind employees when their test is due, and to remind me when tests are close to being overdue.

You’d think (or at least I thought) that this would be easy in SharePoint, but it isn’t. Here is the story so far of my quest for SharePoint reminders.

Things that don’t work

SharePoint alerts allow you to set yourself alerts when things change in SharePoint. My first thought was that you could just set up a view for list items where the date for the next test is near, and then set up an alert to run when items reach the view. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work; alerts can be sent when someone changes an item in the view, not when something is added to the view. Plus alerts don’t seem to be possible on views that filter on calculated columns.

2. SharePoint workflow lets you pause until a date, so you could in theory create a SharePoint Designer workflow which sits for a year and then sends an email, something like this:

However this won’t work for two reasons. Firstly a pause in a workflow is not I understand reliable for a period of a year, things get reset from time to time. And secondly if you adjust the date of the test for some reason, it won’t adjust the workflow, so it’s not fully reliable.

Things that might work

3. You may be able to set up two linked workflows, which between them can send a reminder. I’m not sure if it will reliably work over year timescales, but see this Microsoft article Create a secondary workflow to get you started. There could also be a similar workflow route set on sending emails when tasks expire.

4. This route seems more promising, and is based on a smart idea from @WonderLaura documented at SharePoint911. Essentially SharePoint has Information Management Policy Settings which among other things allow you to start a workflow based on some criteria. This is designed for retention policies, but can be used for other things. For instance, the screenshot below should start a workflow for each list item when a reminder date is reached:

However I’ve set this up on Office 365 SharePoint Online, and it’s currently not working reliably for me. If I can get it to work, I’ll blog further.

So what does work?

5. You could always program a solution. If you have the ability to write custom code, then you can do it this way pretty easily (e.g. with a custom timer job).

6. There are several add-on products from commercial companies that let you send reminders. I’ve not tried these myself as we use Office 365 where these web parts won’t work, but they could be helpful if you have your own SharePoint installation. There are other products but two potential ones are:

Bamboo Solutions offer an alert web part, see http://store.bamboosolutions.com/sharepoint-alert-plus-web-part.aspx
Pentalogic offer a reminder web part, see http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-products/reminder

Does anyone else know any other reliable way of doing this in SharePoint 2010 (especially in Office 365)? I’d love to know.

Posted in Compliance, How-To, SharePoint 2010 | Tagged Annual competency tests, Compliance, reminders, workflows | 1 Comment

What’s a SharePoint Saturday like?

Posted on November 12, 2011 by johnkleeman

It’s 6am in London on a Saturday morning, completely dark, no sign of dawn, the only sound I hear is an owl hooting. I’m off to SharePoint Saturday UK, set in the historic town of Nottingham (famous for persecuting Robin Hood, the outlaw noble who stole from the rich to give to the poor).

SharePoint Saturdays are community events, free to attend, paid for by low-key sponsors.

What is a SharePoint Saturday like?

Well there were 300 attendees, mostly SharePoint users and administrators, but with a few SharePoint grandees like Mark Miller and Todd Klindt. And someone who looks awfully like Robin Hood with Maid Marian and Friar Tuck in tow was there giving his approval to the event <g>.

I arrived at the venue, a high quality University conference centre in Nottingham, just at the end of Todd Klindt’s keynote.

How does a SharePoint Saturday compare to a formal conference? In a way, it’s similar, lots of high quality speakers, but the atmosphere is different, less focused and less commercial. It was relaxed: no-one had to be there, the sponsors/exhibitors were informal, people were giving of their time and knowledge from goodwill. And it was a day off for everyone – so no conference calls to go to or emails to answer. A day to learn, but also to have fun. Hearty thanks to the team who organized it.

Here are some of the sessions I attended:

How we did it: Collaboration at a European Central Bank
A great story to start the day was how Symon Garfield (Twitter: @symon_garfield) of ICS helped a large Central Bank implement SharePoint for collaboration. They had 6 siloed divisions and installed SharePoint to allow teams across the divisions to collaborate. For instance one division had 75,000 spreadsheets previously only accessible from a file store. He gave useful advice on how to cross the adoption chasm, for instance make a sandpit area people can play in. For the first 6 months, adoption was a bit disappointing, but after people saw their peers being successful, adoption shot up after 9 months and it’s now hugely successful. The system also helps social learning.

SharePoint Application Showcase from the Salvation Army
From one of the richest organizations to one of the more needy, Chirag Patel (Twitter: @techchirag) talked about the SharePoint applications he’s helped the Salvation Army make. He tries to limits himself to 3 days work to get a site or application up and running, but has made some great-looking and valuable systems. One of those he showed was using SharePoint for course management within the Salvation Army – for sharing course documents, reducing emails and for managing submitted assignments using workflow. This application looks useful for others to know about, and I hope to describe it more in a follow-up piece.

To Host or Not to Host – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly Decisions
Mark Miller (Twitter: @eusp) is the man behind the website www.nothingbutsharepoint.com where a few of this site’s interviews have been syndicated. He now works as Senior Storyteller (!) at fpweb.net, the SharePoint hosting providers and having just flown in from Hong Kong this morning gave an entertaining talk on SharePoint hosting options – the good, the bad and the ugly.

He made the point that nothing is ideal in all respects, but that On Premise deployment of SharePoint is very expensive in infrastructure and time. Moving SharePoint to the Cloud saves a lot of money. And ran through the advantages and disadvantages he saw of the various Cloud methods

Office 365 – good for up to 150-200 people, then he suggests expensive (see here for my review of SharePoint Online in Office 365)
Using generic cloud providers – good value and reliable for the infrastructure, but not expert in supporting SharePoint.
Specialist providers like fpweb.net – manage SharePoint well and a good choice for many, he suggests.

Alan Richards on using SharePoint 2010 for efficiency in a school
A typical school uses 1.5 million sheets of paper a year, and Alan (Twitter: @arichards_Saruk) runs ICT for a consortium of schools in Essex and gave a great live demo of using SharePoint to make things more efficient using no-code solutions like forms and workflow.

The coolest thing he demonstrated was that all homework at his school is now managed via SharePoint. Students don’t have a homework diary, it’s all online. Students and parents can login and see what homework the student has got – all with standard SharePoint and workflow, no code. This is the most popular application he’s ever deployed, everyone likes it – students, parents and teachers. (I wish my kids schools had this!)

Alan has promised me an interview for this blog, so watch this space for more.

I also attended a good session by Matt Hughes (Twitter @mattmoo2) on branding SharePoint and met many people including actually meeting face to face Dave Coleman (Twitter: @davecoleman146) who I’ve interviewed for this blog but not met in person before – seems a real gentleman. And sorry to all I did not mention.

If you get a chance to go to a SharePoint Saturday, go! I learned a lot, met some great people and thoroughly enjoyed it.

And what would the real Robin Hood have thought? Perhaps in the knowledge age, we don’t need to steal from the rich; the rich can share information with the poor and we can all get richer?

Posted in Commentary, Community | Tagged Bank, Conference, hosting, Nottingham, Office 365, Robin Hood, Salvation Army, School, SharePoint, SharePoint Saturday | 2 Comments