Christian Buckley from Axceler is talking about the connection between metadata, social tools, and personal productivity. Note that Christian is one of the co-authors of Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real-World Projects.

Key points:
– is a Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP. Before Exceler, was at Microsoft. Prior to that was a consultant, involved in start-ups, etc.
– question: how productive are your end users on SharePoint?
– … for one team at Axceler, the use of a particular SharePoint 2007 site is optimally aligned with how they work. Are not changing them over to SharePoint 2010.
– see “How fast and how far can you take your users?” by Kathy Sierra.
– people like it when they have visibility into the process. They can see what’s going on.
– … people who don’t have visibility, will blame SharePoint.
– idea: the business dynamics of how information workers capture, consume, and interact with data is changing.
– … eg., the online tools and the social platforms help teams work together more collaboratively.
– … also – the asynchronous tools are allowing introverts to contribute better.
– … eg., Social CRM – links the social profile into the CRM system. Can see what’s happening.
– … drivers for the change – the way that the new generation looks at data is different, they communicate in real-time collaborative ways, etc.
– … cloud adoption – a move away from hardware. Increasing focus on productivity and performance, not maintenance.
– idea: metadata is fundamental to making social, knowledge management, and SharePoint work
– … the metadata stack – metadata foundation, taxonomy, ad-hoc, with social media (adds context) and search, and end users at the top.
– … social and search are at the heart of the next version of SharePoint. If you have social turned off, you’ll need to start thinking about this for the SharePoint 15 wave.
– … there are both centralized and decentralized approaches to metadata. Pros and cons for each of these.
– … the teams that take the time to plan strategies for both will reap the rewards – search will actually work, people will locate their content.
– … common migraines – inconsistency taxonomy, people author locally, ad-hoc content migration leads to junk in the portal, etc.
– business ROI:
– … faster employee on-boarding and training
– … more productivity
– … more usage on the platform
– … faster realization of the financial investments
– case study – Christian talked about how he used SharePoint, workflow and social tools for building project teams.
– idea: social tools are just another layer of the search experience.
– idea: organizations don’t understand, much less track and measure, user productivity.
– … where do you begin?
– … what are the most active sites? What are their usage patterns? What business problems have been improved or solved by SharePoint? What’s the ROI on that?
– making end users more productive – through SharePoint:
– … taxonomy.
– … workflow (look at the Forrester report from last year).
– … forms.
– … social.