Less is more

Special offer, today only (Fri. 10/16): Outlook, Excel, SharePoint Webinars!

Today's special offer not only gives you access to these webinars at the reduced $35 fee, but if you purchase one seat, you get to attend all three at no extra charge.

Once you purchase one seat at the $35 fee (in any of the three Webninars that are taking place next week), you can forward your receipt to training@people-onthego.com and request to be registered for the other two.

Microsoft SharePoint Techniques

October 20, 12:00pm PT, 2 hrs ($35 if purchased today)

Microsoft Excel 2007 Techniques

October 22, 9:30am PT, 90 min ($35 if purchased today)

Managing & Organizing Your Inbox in Outlook 2003

October 22, 11:30am PT, 90 min (35 if purchased today)

Hope you will be able to join us!

Questions? E-mail training@people-onthego.com or call 415.503.1649

How do you engage your team members when you implement collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, Microsoft SharePoint and the like?

Here is a summary of the suggestions offered from users and experts in the field on the best way to implement collaboration tools and engage the target audiences:

·        Make it easy and convenient for team members to use the tools to do small but important tasks. For example, checking a blog for information, or publishing an update on a specific item to a blog (rather than using email). 

·        Start small by engaging those team members that have a natural tendency to collaborate and are good early adopters. Form a tiger team and do a pilot project. You can work the kinks out before a larger roll out. It is easier to get additional team members to adapt once there is initial success.

·        Create a short collaborative project to evaluate certain tools (or have one person do an evaluation) and share the pros and cons of each tool with the rest of the team. Then the team can determine which tool is going to be the most productive to the whole group.

·        Make it fun and exciting too! Someone suggested running contests over SharePoint (scavenger hunts) or posting helpful notes that will get people thinking more and more about the value of the tool and its use for different projects.

·        Have an official cut-off date for when an old system is no longer available for use. This should be a far off date that is easy to remember (like at the turn of the fiscal year the new system comes online). This lets people know that they have a deadline to learn the new system.

·        The primary factor that enables adoption of a collaboration tool: A new project with no "incumbent" technology or process to change. So pick a new project, and work with the project team to select a tool for the project.

·        Find an executive sponsor who sees the benefits of the collaboration tool, and its impact on productivity and the ability to meet the key business objectives, and get their support in making the tool an important part of conducting business.

·        Provide the team with mini-training sessions, both formal and informal. A lot resistance to adoption has to do with the unknown and fears of wasting time. If you help your team overcome these fears, you are likely to get a much higher level of engagement.

·        Overall, the collaboration platforms should be a productivity tool, not a burden. The tool should make some important aspect of one’s job easier. Whether that is something as simple as submitting a ticket to the IT department, or viewing HR announcements, it has to be sold to the user base as something that will improve daily work life.

·        Also, at the end of the day, a tool has to be useful for the intended purpose. We too often see people thinking of all these tools as interchangeable, but blogs are more of a one-to-many tool as compared to wikis that are better at capturing widely held knowledge, which is different from SharePoint, which is much better at organizing document-focused work, e.g., word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, with collaboration more often in a supporting role.

How do recurring meetings and meeting workspaces work in Microsoft SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint's calendar is ideal for managing team meetings and events. It is one way to take the load off of e-mail and save some time. When a meeting is created in the SharePoint calendar, you have the option to create a meeting workspace, which is basically a site, where you can track meeting related information, such as meeting objectives, agenda items, and all meeting documents. The meeting workspace look like this:

Just as you would expect, you can create recurring meetings in SharePoint. The question is, What happens if you create a meeting workspace for a recurring meeting? Is this workspace shared between all the instances of the recurring meeting? and would you then be able to attached a document and have it be shared and visible to all these instances?

The answer is NO. The meeting workspace that is created is not a shared one. Instead, each instance of the recurring meeting gets its own instance of the meeting worspace. This is probably what you would want, because it is likely that each meeting has its own agenda, its own issues, and its own supporting documents.

However, you might ask, how about information that is common between these instances of the recurring meeting? Maybe you have a list of issues that you review every time, or some documents that are important to have access to in every meeting. The good news is that it is still easy to handle such common information by creating a document libraty, or folder within a library, where this information is posted.

Visit our online live SharePoint workshops to learn more about SharePoint.

Happy collaboration with SharePoint!

Deleting an item from the links list in Microsoft SharePoint

You added links to your Microsoft SharePoint Team Site page, which is likely to be very helpful for your site visitors and members, but then you decide to delete one of these links.  You would think that you can do that by simply modifying the web part, and just delete the link, the same place you added it.

Not exactly! There is more to it, but luckily not much more. These are the steps involved in deleting such a link. Let us consider the following links section in a SharePoint site, in this case our SharePoint site at People-OnTheGo, which has a link to the lunch & learn webinars, and let us say we would like to delete this link:

1. Click on the "Links" heading which is right above the list of links. This is actually a hyperlink which will take you to the links page where you can manage the links. Once you click on it, you will get to the following page:

2. Now if you move your mouse pointer to the "Lunch & Learn webinars" link, and namely to the right side, until you see the Edit menu popup, one of the choices you will see is the familiar "Delete Item" choice.

3. Click on the "Delete Item" choice, and confirm, and the link will be gone.

For more tips on techniques in Microsoft SharePoint, feel free to visit our Microsoft SharePoint Techniques classes. Here is the full schedule of the online live workshops including SharePoint.

Happy SharePoint'ing!

Sign up for the special "collaboration" bundle--Effective meetings, blogs, wikis, SharePoint ($35.00 special)

The collaboration bundle in March 2008 includes the three workshops listed below, and can be purchased online at:

-------------> Register online now ($35 special expires on 3/10)

• Workshop 1: Microsoft SharePoint Techniques (Tuesday March 11, 2008 from 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM PST)
• Workshop 2: Effective Meetings--Offline & Online (Tuesday March 18, 2008 from 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM PST)
• Workshop 3: Emerging Collaboration Technologies--blog, wikis, and Microsoft SharePoint (Wednesday March 26, 2008 from 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST)

They are made available for a nominal registration fee of $35.00 (this includes all three workshops). This is a special one time offer and seats are limited. You can order up to 10 seats.

Once you place your order, and receive the confirmation e-mail, please forward the confirmation e-mail you receive to training@people-onthego.com indicating which of the three workshops you would like to attend, and also the names and e-mails of the additional participants, and which workshops each participant would like to attend--if you order more than one seat. As a result, you and the other participants will each receive their individual login information for the desired workshops (for the web and phone conference).

-------------> Register online now ($35.00 special expires on 3/10)

PS: Please note that these workshops are also availale as corporate workshops. Feel free to e-mail us at training@people-onthego.com if you have questions, or if you would like to discuss bringing the workshops to your team.

We look forward to your participation!

Lunch & Learn Webinar on "Microsoft SharePoint in Action"

This week's complimentary lunch & learn webinar was titled: "Microsoft SharePoint in Action" and was presented by People-OnTheGo (www.people-onthego.com), with guest speaker Claire Castell, Manager at the Consumer and Small Business Deposit Risk at Wells Fargo. Below is the description of the session, and here are the presentation slides Download lunch_and_learn_sharepoint.pdf. For those interested in further workshops regarding SharePoint, as well as other collaboration tools such as blogs and wikis, please refer to the Microsoft SharePoint Techniques workshop, the Emerging Technologies workshop, and the Effective Meetings workshop (view schedule). Hope you will be able to join us in future lunch & learn webinars.

Session description: Windows SharePoint, a Microsoft add-on to Windows Server 2003, offers web and intranet functionality. It is a powerful collaboration tool as well as an application development platform. It enables the creation and sharing of web pages, documents, team and project sub-sites, version-controlled document storage, and basic search functionality. In this session, we will explain and demonstrate the benefits of Windows SharePoint, and how it can be used to enhance collaboration and information management within a team or an organization.