Obsess or Obese?

Bit of a left field blog today, but I guess that is why I have the rider at the top of blog roll. Coffee is loosely related to ECM, especially on the long night proposal churn.

So, at the local supermarket they have built out a counter in the foyer that will soon open as a cafe bar. Great, except the name is "Obsess Coffee" pretty innocuous, except that my eyes and brain is having mild dyslexia every time I go in the supermarket, all I can see as I flash past is "Obese Coffee".

Will this coffee make me fat? maybe I am too fat already. For some strange reason although I read obsess my brain turns up with obese. I think that it has something to do with the black letters on a dark wood background that might not be helping me here.

Sometimes our ECM implementations get a little like the coffee bar as when they have gone all obese, but we seem to be obsessed with them. We love them because we created them but if not connected to the business drivers and business outcomes they quickly become obese repositories for information flab, created from the content rush that comes with initial enthusiasm and not long term information lifestyle change.

Recently we have been dealing with customer that still want to go direct to technology and it hard going at times to hold the line and ensure that we are advocating the right approach. To make sure that we are treating this as a business project not just a technology project.

Well I better go work on that spelling and get my brain obsessed!

ECM - MOSS 2007 How do I get going?

How do we get going with MOSS 2007. Well, Setup.exe is NOT I repeat NOT the way to get started. Why? MOSS 2007 is a great platform for collaboration and information sharing but if not planned correctly it quickly becomes a virus within the organisation with information silo's that are out of control.

Now, I am not advocating the evil empire control, but like most projects if you don't have the end in mind then failure at least comes a total surprise I guess.

Planning, especially in the information management space is hard work becuase it takes some hard thinking and some hard talking up front to get everyone on the same page, with a single view of the end game that we are heading towards. This is especially true with MOSS as you have to take into account the nature of containment in the MOSS Hierarchy.

Microsoft have some reasonable guidance and checklists on their Governance resources centre on Technet. However, this does not cover fully the information management side of getting ready, which if you don't get a good handle on will cause you pain in the long run.

Another starting point would be to look into the "Best Practices" book by Ben Curry, Bill English, Mark Schneider and the Microsoft SharePoint Team; you can find it here at Amazon. This book is a good one for both technical and business people to get a handle on the things that you need to consider with MOSS 2007 and some best practices based on real world field experience.

This is a good resource to get a handle on how to start and what to consider before SETUP.EXE.