A high level committee charter includes the purpose of the committee, the time frame that you are asking them to serve and the anticipated amount of time that they should expect the committee to consume during their business week.  The charter will also outline the general focus of the group and the type of decisions that will be made.  If the group will be called upon to make decisions of a technical nature, make certain that the business people on your committee understand that they will be asked to understand the technology and make a determination of it’s validity within their frame of experience.

Your mission statement for the committee should state that the governance committee will be the champions of the use of SharePoint within the organization.  It should also state that the committee will be the highest level of authority regarding SharePoint decisions and that what they decide will inform the policies written around SharePoint and will guide the way that SharePoint is positioned and used within the organization.

Rather than simply discuss SharePoint, the committee will be expected to learn the platform and act as its champion within the organization.  If some on your committee feel as though the governance committee meetings are ‘just another meeting’, then you will need to replace them.  Also, business people who speak entirely about ‘strategy’ and ‘theory’ and don’t bring actionable ideas to the meeting are not doing you any good.

I.S. Departments also usually avoid adding people to the committee that they see as not being ‘technologically aware’.  Why do we avoid adding these people?  Because it takes more time to explain technology and SharePoint to them.  But when you think about it, aren’t those EXACTLY the type of people that you want represented on your committee?  If you are like most companies, you will be spending the majority of your time explaining to the user community exactly what SharePoint does.  So, why not have your ‘technology luddite’ help prep you with content that will explain to the end-user what SharePoint can do for them?

• Governance meeting dates and times and the agenda for the next Governance meeting.
• Minutes from each previously held meeting so that those unable to attend will be able to catch up on what decisions were made and what topics were discussed.
• Decisions made in each meeting.
• Any interesting use of SharePoint that’s been encountered within the user community that can be used as a success story.
• Effects of decisions made by the Governance Committee.
• An area for feedback from the SharePoint user community that the Governance committee can interact with directly.
• Upcoming meeting agendas and any work that should be done prior to a meeting.

It is also recommended that you have at least 2 backup members that you can ask to participate in the event that some find involvement in the committee to be too time consuming.

Earlier this evening I received an e-mail from a co-worker with some items that are ready for my review.  Being the good SharePoint Soldier that I am, I connected to our SharePoint environment to check them out of our SharePoint site to work on them locally.  Checking them out of the library proved a little more painful that I anticipated, however.  My system began to download the documents and I waited, and waited and waited some more for the files to process.  After about 45 minutes of waiting around and watching some really bad television program, I went into the document library and looked at the size of these files.  Well, they turned out to be 90 meg in size…each.  On a hotel wi-fi signal that’s lower than Sarah Palin’s approval rating, I don’t anticipate being able to work on these files until sometime tomorrow morning.

So here’s my SharePoint recommendation for you:

A lot of organizations selling the use of SharePoint to their organizations tout the ability for remote workers to be able to more easily access corporate documents, regardless of whether they are working from home or from the road.  It’s true, SharePoint is an excellent, easy-to-use document management system.  However, wouldn’t it be better if we helped out our remote friends by ensuring that we place the the ‘File Size’ column in the document library view so they can anticipate the wait they are in for when they begin to download documents locally?  Something so easy, so simple that makes such a big difference when it comes to user satisfaction.

From the management personnel, a higher level, strategic view of the business will be represented, which will serve to inform where the business is going, some of the elements that it is hoped that SharePoint will address and the path that is planned to move the organization to the next level.

From the individual contributors will come a focus on the practical application of the technology and how the user community will actually integrate SharePoint into their daily work.  When I work with organizations I often try to spend most of my time with the individual contributors, the people that focus on where the rubber meets the road.  These are the people that are planning and executing the vision set forward by management.  SharePoint is very much a ‘hands on’ technology that flourishes when stretched and molded.  It often takes the worker community a little longer to get SharePoint configured exactly the way that they want it, but once it is, beautiful things happen.

Choosing governance committee members that are all PRO SharePoint will feel right for 5 months or so but will hurt you in the long run.  If the committee doesn’t have any members that approach SharePoint, and collaboration’s usefulness within your company, with skepticism, you will miss widespread adoption and will diminish your reputation within the organization.

Automatic Linking [Live Writer]

See the word ‘SharePoint’ in the paragraph above, the one with the hyperlink to the Microsoft SharePoint page?  As I was typing the word into Live Writer, Live Write linked it to the Microsoft SharePoint site with a URL I provided in the Automatic Linking configuration area.  Every time, from this point forward, I write the word “SharePoint” in a blog posting, it will be hyperlinked to the URL I setup.  This makes it extremely easy to have a wealth of links stored and available and simply refer my readers to them by typing in the words I’ve associated with the URL.  Now, having the word ‘SharePoint’ linked EVERY time I write it in a blog post would make the post appear a little strange (to me, at least), so I’ve checked the box at the bottom of the Automatic Linking setup screen to “Link to each term only once per post”.  That’s VERY cool!  Now the links won’t be overwhelming within my posts.

Posting Categories and Tags [Live Writer]

Posting categories, tags and posting dates are at the top of the screen where you can more easily get to them rather than in the lower-right corner of the Writer screen where they are an after thought.  This whole idea of tagging content with metadata is a key tenet of SharePoint and should be a focus for everything that you produce as an information worker.  Making it easy to tag content in Live Writer as easy as adding metadata to the Document Information Panel in the Office applications, brings tagging to the forefront of your blog postings, making it easier for your readers to find content of interest quickly and easily.

Microsoft Services Integration [Live Writer]

Windows Live Writer integrates nicely with Microsoft’s SkyDrive so that you can easily store all of the content you need for your Blog in a publicly available location while also being able to modify permissions to the content.  This is especially important when you use a lot of different media in your blog postings.  I’m not a SkyDrive user but I am running across it more and more often with SharePoint professionals that I know.  Now that Live Writer sees it as simply another information storage location, I think it’s time I check into it.

Access to my Word Press Blog [Live Writer]

My blog, SharePointLee,  is hosted on a Word Press provider.  The fact that this is a Word Press blog doesn’t cause any issues with Live Writer, however.  Not only can I easily post content to my Word Press blog but I can also access several of the most important areas of Word Press directly from Live Writer, namely the Word Press Dashboard and the comments management function.  It took care of all of the linkages to these various areas for me given that I identified that I was using a Word Press blog.  It works in a similar fashion with a SharePoint Blog, making it easy for me to post and access areas of importance as the blog owner.  This version gives me the ability to post to several different blogs from the same computer, as the prior version did.  This is really convenient as it allows me to post to both the Word Press platform as well as to other SharePoint blogs that I may be using, both on my company’s servers as well as at client locations.

Of course, Windows Live Essentials 2011 has more to it than Windows Live Writer 2011.  There are several applications that make up the suite and they all have a new look and feel as well as new functionality:

• Microsoft Messenger
• Photo Gallery
• Movie Maker
• Mail
• Writer
• Bing Bar

Movie Maker

The application in this suite that I’m personally most interested in is Microsoft Movie Maker.  I’ve tried several versions of Microsoft Movie Maker and they always left me feeling as though this application was an after thought.  It consistently crashed on me when I was doing even the most basic of edits and it simply didn’t have the power that was required to edit the videos I was creating.  These were not large videos, but short, to-the-point videos that lasted less than 10 minutes or so.  Once I could get a video to resolve, the output didn’t look very professional or clear, often having a ‘hazy’ quality to the video itself.  Not that I needed to worry about that given that it’s frequent crashes made it all but impossible to use.  In short, I found the versions prior to this 2011 version to be big disappointments.  While my experience with the 2011 version is very short, it appears that Microsoft has placed renewed emphasis on this application and has made it light years better than its previous incarnations.

The general editing of video is very similar to the previous versions but the effects, transitions and integrations are mostly new.  These new capabilities offer creative options to the basic video creator.  While it won’t replace high-end video creation and editing software, the 2011 version is robust enough to allow the hobbyist to modify their videos in preparation for posting on-line.  It does such a good job that I find myself wishing it would have come out about 6 months earlier so I could have avoided purchasing a $99 video editing software suite.  While that suite is still more powerful than Movie Maker, it’s basic and mid-level features are matched by Movie Maker, and it’s a free download!  Now THAT’s value!

While I will likely never use Microsoft Messenger (but I like it’s integration with Facebook and LinkedIn), Microsoft Mail or the Bing Bar (as Bing is already the start page in my browser), I really like the enhancements the Microsoft team has made to Live Writer and Movie Maker, two applications that I will no doubt begin to find myself increasingly using.  Try them out for yourself and see what you think.  I sure hope that someone writes a Vimeo plug-in for Live Writer soon that works as easily as the one provided to YouTube!

The following are just a few of the applications that provides remote access to SharePoint from a device other than your computer.  The way that most people work requires them to be able to access corporate information at any time.  Having access to the SharePoint environment from their portable device will become increasingly easy and increasingly important for business users.

These applications offer a much richer SharePoint experience than accessing your SharePoint site through your devices browser, increasing user satisfaction and allowing fast access to the SharePoint environment’s content.

PocketPoint – iPhone/iPod
Moshare – iPhone/iPod
Attache’ - iPhone/iPod
SharePlus Office Mobile Client – iPhone/iPod, iPad
Filamente – iPad
iSP Browser for SharePoint – iPhone/iPod
Mobile Entree – iPhone/iPod, Android, Blackberry
Quick Browser for SharePoint – Android
Silverdust – Blackberry
WICKsoft – Blackberry