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I've been reading The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More and started thinking about how this concept. The concept of everyone being a producer really applied to collaboration. More than blogs and wikis which are common templates in WSS 3.0, the team sites, document & meeting workspaces.
One complaint I hear about SharePoint and other collaboration products is site proliferation. Some would say, "A corporation should only have a few dozen sites that cover the departments in the company." As well they would suggest that hundreds to thousands would be a mess and tens to hundreds of thousands as complete chaos. At the SharePoint Conference in early 2006 Gates talked about the power of self service and how it empowers the information worker. In reference to everyone a producer and the web 2.0 concept more and more those that think there should be few sites in a corporation need to rethink the long tail. If the average information worker has no voice or has only a voice as a reader and not a contributor, then they are being silenced. I would like to suggest that at Microsoft, the 100,000 Site Collections (half of which are my sites) are in line with the long tail. The voices are allowed to exist. In a managed environment with life cycle management, 70,000 employees + contractors can all start projects, collaborate, and have a presence without being curtailed by IT. Of course HR has their say, and FrontBridge can even enforce HR's policies.
At your neighborhood retail store, the person scanning the items and taking your money you may think has little to do with taking advantage of the long tail in relation to a powerful collaboration product like SharePoint. I'd suggest that companies do need to exercize their control around self service and plan appropriately. It isn't for everyone, but that Teller may have a lot to say about optimizing their work environment. A survey may not do justice for that teller. If the CEO or CIO decide that the tellers have no voice or are read only and have no ability to create sites... so be it. They are chopping the tail off and saying we are going to listen and include search results for those that are most relevant to their business, but that obscure idea of the janitor may be the next big thing! When search is combined with wikis, blogs, and team collaboration with security, life cycle management and all the other things you'd expect, a thousand voices can be heard.
As I write this blog, I'm a lone voice talking about how managed environments with sites on them don't need to be considered "out of control." I know that people across the world can read this and make their own take on it. I've often been in a meeting where someone mentions they were searching for some topic they were researching and came across my posts on this blog. It's pretty cool that of the billions of pages on the internet that the person down the hall could easily find my post and make sense of my comments. Oh, how much more important is it that companies encourage their employees to share their thoughts, IP, and what they've learned on their intranets. There's a lot of brain power out there. We need to tap it.
I encourage all SharePoint people to share their knowledge on the internet. What we create is and can be so much better than what a team of people can put together because we as the thousands of consultants, technical sales, instructors, analysts, etc... united have some really unique perspectives and can help each other at the same time we are documenting our best practices making each other more successful. Don't be afraid that, that IP of yours should stay yours, share it, blog it and gain some credibility. Join us!
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From JoiningDots... (Thanks for the comment) Long Tail Reaches IT (SharePoint)
In response to JoiningDots great post... You don't need to worry about posting something that won't be read. With the long tail... it will be read if the content is indexed (your first reason to use SharePoint Server), then through filtering and relevancy the content will be found! Based on my recent look at stats, the average word doc is viewed 11 times. Don't think you could say the same for content on a file share. So the good content must be accessed quite a few times to make up that average.
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I just came back from a conference that talked about Web 2.0 and various strategies for associations to implement social networks and communities of practice. What I got back echoed a lot of what you say. One of the key speakers was Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales of Wikipedia who talked about the idea of empowering the users and letting go of predefined structures.
Joel, thank you for putting it so eloquently. This is something I have been participating in, having recently changed roles, and have benefited from personally. Not just the potential gain in credibility but the sense of being part of something; the networking and the common goal of making things better.... I'm in!
The complaint about proliferation of sites complaint is probably as much about managability as anything else - internal collaboration is a different animal than public, whilst there are parallels, the drivers for business are different. Other portal products also allow end user expression and customisation to a certain extent. In Sharepoint land there is little out of the box aggregation of sites - meaning a site becomes a silo, the opposite of what we're trying to acheive. - In this situation 10's of thousands of sites represents 10's of thousands of opportunities for duplication and wasted effort.
I realise I'm simplifying things, but rather than hear complaints about proliferation of sites as a complaint about end user freedoms - see it as more a complaint about the way sites and site collections create barriers.
By all means, don't abandon structure or the top down method of creating site directories and manage.
On the other hand, consider "my sites" as a place (with a pre defined quota) for self expressions without letting users go hog wild.
You definitely NEED to having a place for top down which is controlled and managed for enterprise search and enterprise browse. The consideration of this post is the other web app, the one for collaboration, this is where you need to keep control of things like quotas and life cycle management to keep things relevant, but can be less restructive to help the end users/clients to share information in a meaningful way.
Hi Joel
You are not a lone voice. I've blogged about this too...
http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2007/03/long-tail-reaches-it.html
I was at the Garnter Portals and Collaboration Conference in Orlando recently and Don Tapscott gave a keynote on his book Wikinomics. It talked in detail about how collaboration tools are changing IT and business in general. Check it out if you get the chance, http://www.wikinomics.com and my blog post on the topic: http://www.thediekes.com/2007/03/wikinomics.html
Steve
And no, this is not Don promoting his own book. :)