Active Navigation Blog

Yesterday we held the first User Focus Group of 2010, using the excellent facilities at the Institute of Directors in Leeds. Thank you to those who attended; and particular thanks to Olivier Legendre of BP who took the time to prepare a very informative discussion about his experiences.

This event used a slightly different agenda and format from those in the past, spending a great deal more time discussing specific business applications of our current software as well as detailed features of the new product designs. Highlights included:

• Some excellent quality discussion around our new Methodology documentation and the pros and cons of cleansing copies of reference (or golden) document sets in real world situations.
• A detailed exchange of some of the opportunities and techniques for extracting valuable metadata from analysed files both for the population of SharePoint and to expose different types of good and bad information practices.
• Olivier's presentation describing how BP has combined a range of different Active Navigation analyses to compile custom reports that drive user buy-in for cleansing projects.
• Detailed walkthroughs of Release 4 interface and workflow mockups which garnered energetic exchanges around roles, security management and our powerful new reporting capabilities.
• Demos of the new SharePoint migrator and the Release 4 software.

• 10:00 Welcome and update, including Roadmap update
• 10:30 Methodology Guide Overview
• 10:45 Advanced Usage Scenarios - protection of golden document sets
• 11:00 Metadata workshop - discussion on extraction requirements and demonstration of potential solutions
• 12:00 Metadata extraction and classification for engineering content
• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:00 SharePoint Migrator Release Candidate demo
• 13:30 Usability review of mockups for release 4.0
• 14:15 Demo of release 4.0 web application
• 15:00 Close

Second blog for 2010 - but this one is an easy one so maybe it doesn't count?

We've set a date for our next User Focus Group for 3rd March and as we've discussed before, we're going to go 'up north', settling on Leeds as a sensible location with good air and rail connections. As usual,  we'll be using Institute of Directors facilities in the City (3 Albion Place, Leeds, LS1 6JL) - we've booked the 'City Room'.

Our plan for the day is to spend relatively little time in broadcast mode (phew!) and break quickly into more hands-on activities.

• First, we plan to demonstrate our new SharePoint Migrator.
• Second, we want to explore some special use cases for exploitation of our applications.
• Third, we have plenty of detailed discussion to get through around workflows within Release 4.0
• And finally, we (of course) expect to have our Guru at hand for detailed specific discussions.

New Year it is indeed and I've failed in one of my resolutions... blog more. Well what really is a travesty is that there's plenty to blog about - no shortage of material at all. Its definitely going to be an exciting year with some massive developments in our application and products, new focus on methodology and bringing business benefits and new people to join the team a grow our vision. Here's my first round of news...

First up, there's a lady who's not failed on her resolution - Debra Logan (of Gartner) has already blogged twice and continues her crusade in extolling the virtues of Information Governance and accountability for information in the organisation. She's written two new postings in her blog here. The need for this sort of business accountability is a belief we share - you simply can't practice decent information management without it.

Secondly, we plan to release our SharePoint Migrator at the end of February - it includes a range of improvements over the 'beta' version you may have encountered in the past, not least the ability to create document libraries during migration, driven by an improved mapping between source folder structures.

Third, we are settling on a date for our first Focus Group for 2010. More details on that soon. However, I expect it to be in the last week of February. Plan is to focus around review of Release 4.0 work to date, provide demos/hands on with the SharePoint Migrator, examine some specific use cases/examples of how to exploit or current toolset and take you all through our new Methodology Guide. All being well, I intend to make this a very practical session.

Well, that's that job done - first blog of the year. Now to place a reminder in my diary. More news in a couple of weeks.

Rich Hale (Operations and Product)

Okay, so its been a long time since I last updated this blog. My excuses are many fold but all boring so no need to waste space on them here. More interesting, however, is a nice piece of online video debate, hosted by the British Computer Society, entitled "The data storage dilemma". Sure, it comes at the issue from an IT and infrastructure perspective but it also covers off important issues like the real cost of managed storage, challenges with poorly implemented tiered storage solutions and why adding terabytes just doesn't work.

The clip is only a few minutes long and, pleasingly, its not a chore to watch because the industry 'experts' participating manage to take a workably objective view. They correctly highlight, up front, the need to ensure that redundant, obsolete and trivial information is removed and they strike a fair balance between storage cost drivers, e-discovery and compliance issues, information value and the need to build positive benefits cases around information management (to balance off e-discovery and similar negative drivers).

Why not have a listen here: Debate on Storage. I think its worth the effort and it might even help with selling the message in your organisation.

Rich Hale (Operations and Product) 

Just returned from the Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas... 7500 delegates crawling all over the Madalay Bay Convention Centre and all mad keen for news about SharePoint 2010 and the soon-to-be-released Beta. It was quite an atmosphere and thing to behold!

After having the flight back to reflect, I remain of the view (as did almost all of the delegates) that for 2010, SharePoint is really coming of age. Of course, MOSS 2007 was a massive leap forward from the challenges of 2003 but it looks to me that SharePoint 2010 will take a similar leap forward again. So what are the highlights? Well, excluding the UK party held in a bar made entirely of ice, for those interested in information governance in SharePoint the exciting bits are:

• A proper taxonomy, folksonomy and keyword management and tagging environment.
• Lists (and that included document libraries) capable of handling up to a million items! 
• The ability to syndicate and push content types and taxonomies across the enterprise.
• Multi-layered rules for 'more than passable' document disposition management.
• Complex metadata filters and the ability to multi-select list items for bulk update.

On the 7th and 8th of October we held our second User Forum at the beautiful Lainston House Hotel near Winchester.  This year saw no fewer than 32 'real' delegates in attendance (that is, not including our staff), almost doubling the total from last year!

Right now we've yet to receive responses from our feedback survey but, having asked around, and despite the torrential rain that threatened to wash out day one activities, I'm convinced that the two days were a great success.   Sure, some things didn't go quite as well as planned, but the relaxed and business-like atmosphere in evidence throughout showed that we'd got everything pretty much in the right place. So what are our early thoughts? 

• First, we're going to stick with the networking activities in day one.  They provide a great platform for day two.
• We took a risk with our Keynote speaker and early reactions range from enthusiastic to unimpressed; that is to be expected. We liked the message but think it could have been 15 minutes shorter.
• You gave us great and generally supportive feedback on our roadmap. We need to ensure that you get a chance to give more input as it develops.
• Next time, we expect to reduce the overall duration of the presentations and allow more time for more detailed workshop tracks.

We attended Gartner's Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit last week and I'm really pleased to say what a great event we had!!  So, why was I particularly excited....?

The key lies with Gartner's messaging which, for the first time in my view, genuinely recognised the challenges and issues around legacy information stores and their management.  Specifically Gartner analysts appeared to be of one voice regarding the costs of storing piles of unmanaged legacy information and the risks associated with e-discovery and compliance when these problems are not addressed.  It was great to hear references to some of our discoveries 'from the field' (such as the massive amounts of redundant, obsolete and trivial informaiton that's out there) and the general use of terms like DIGITAL DEBRIS or FLOTSAM and JETSAM.  One analyst even referred to GARBAGE STORES of information!

This is all great news because it waymarks a turning market where people and organisations are recognising that technology is not the solution and that fundamentals like ensuring information stores are kept clean and tidy are critical to good information governance.  The acknowledgement that (quote) "putting in a search tool is a reactive approach" is great for providers such as Active Navigation who provide the tools required to keep information in check so that search (and other technologies) can be deployed more effectively.

Finally, a word on SharePoint.  Mark Gilbert (Gartner's 'main man' for SharePoint) told a nice story around the need to ensure that 'normal' business users actually have the freedom to make the most out of their team sites.  His view was that, at team level, SharePoint should be allowed to grow organically.  I like that model but it sets the business up with a serious governance challenge that can't be ignored - namely, how do you keep track of what is happening so as to stop bad practice, encourage good practice and deal with any mess that's left behind? Needless to say, we have some great plans for enabling that approach but we're always interested in the ways in which others are planning to govern their SharePoint implementations.

Would be great to hear some feedback at the upcoming User Forum.

Cheers

Rich Hale (Product Manager) 

All of our testing has been done and I'm please to say that, as of 11th September, Release 3.8 is finished.  We're all really pleased with what's been achieved in this version and early feedback from review of our release candidate has been immensely encouraging.  Analysis as significantly quicker and improvements to the structure and presentation of reports has made our tools easier to use. Perhaps most importantly, new features have proven effective in revealing new ways of finding those messy areas of troublesome shared drives.

The release is available for download by customers and partners in the  customer resource library.  It includes an update path (for both our server and any databases) from release 3.6 and later.  The whole upgrade process should be painless, however, you should give us a call if you want any advice.

I hope you like what we've done and look forward to your feedback. 

Rich Hale (Product Manager) 

On the 24th we completed coding and what turned out to be a release candidate for Release 3.8.  All of the functionality is complete and feedback is favourable on a number of fronts including significant performance improvements and the utility of our new reporting.  So, why a release candidate?

Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, we uncovered some issues during regression testing and after a bit of thought we decided that they really did need to be addressed.  That work is already well underway and we are aiming for completion (and subsequent release) on September the 11th. In the mean time, we are offering the release candidate for very specific purposes (such as to test performance or support validation) but not for general use.  As a release candidate, there will be no upgrade path to the full release build.

Thanks for your patience

Rich Hale (Product Manager)