Forms, SharePoint & InfoPath: Perspectives for the Fiscally Responsible (Part 2)

When we last left this subject, we decided that the ability to embed forms in SharePoint Web Parts and to connect forms with line-of-business information and REST Web Services were two of InfoPath’s hidden gems. Here now is the logic chain behind this sentiment – and indeed, the very reason for pursuing an e-forms strategy in the first place.

1.    Whether they are on paper or on screen, forms are critical information capture mechanisms – not for capture’s own sake, but as part of a broader business process.

2.    Functionally, therefore, forms (paper or electronic) are front ends to databases and triggers of organizational workflow. Key cogs in virtually all business processes, they smoothly feed data to and from back-end repositories, enabling field pre-population and indexing, retrieval, and routing.

3.    Within SharePoint and beyond, therefore, e-forms enable staggering new heights in efficiency and effectiveness by allowing otherwise too-often disparate back-end systems to talk to each other – a capability that is especially valuable in forms-fed operations areas like A/P, ERP, and HR.

Intrigued? Good. Excited? Excellent. But don’t be fooled by even the preceding paragraphs: connecting forms to databases usually requires a whole lot more than meets the eye.

Whether you use InfoPath or some other tools, the list of challenges starts with the requirement to possess a deep knowledge of all the external fields you want to populate, and the system securities needed to gain access to those fields in the first place. Neither of these endeavors is for the faint of heart, so be sure you enlist the experts you need for help if you aren’t already conversant in the details.

More specific to InfoPath are issues related to providing the same experience to users working via browsers vs. the InfoPath client, and to mimic the look and layout of existing paper forms in the InfoPath environment. It also can be challenging to ensure that the soft and hard copies of an InfoPath form look the same as each other – and since InfoPath uses a table-based construction that positions objects relative to one another, forms design and maintenance can be complicated because when one object moves, they all move!

So what’s new: InfoPath isn’t perfect. But neither is any product out there, and at least InfoPath has close ties to SharePoint, which itself has flaws and gaps and other characteristics to work around.

The point, however is that regardless of your means, the time is long past to embark upon the e-forms trail. The need to physically handle paper slows processes, increases costs, and introduces opportunity for error – BFMA, for one, estimates that the clerical cost of processing a form is thirty to fifty times the cost of printing it, so even if you don’t buy the arguments touting improved processes and greater efficiencies, you may like knowing that there are real dollars to be saved.

Especially if your organization is already deep into the SharePoint pool.

Where are you on the e-forms trail? Leave a comment or drop a line and let me know!

Attention Health Care Providers: The Push-Pull Intensifies for Electronic Health Records

The U.S. Health and Human Services Department yesterday issued a more flexible 5-year plan to impel doctors and hospitals toward implementing electronic health records.

That’s the push.

The pull is that converting from paper to electronic record-keeping is expected to improve the delivery of medical care, result in greater patient safety, and reduce provider costs.

Sounds good to me.

But how are health care organizations supposed to manage their transition? Converting from hard copy to soft is hard enough without the pressures of federal mandates and concerns over patient privacy and systems security dangling overhead. And for all the politico- and vendor-touted examples of organizations already moving down the EHR path, the fact is, says Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “Only 20% of doctors and 10% of hospitals use even basic electronic health records.”

This week’s announcement relaxed the definition of “meaningful use” as it applies to installing EHR solutions and thereby qualifying for federal funding. For instance, the government’s original proposal required that 75% of prescriptions written be electronic, whereas the new iteration calls for only 40%.

But because so few providers are EHR-enabled right now, the rule changes in some ways are all but irrelevant, as the issue for them isn’t 40% or 70%, but any percent at all.

There’s little doubt that EHR technology will do much to transform the way health care is delivered in this country, and the unleashing next year of federal monies to help ease the switchover certainly will help the process along. But fundamental practical questions still remain to be asked, never mind answered, and one only hopes that providers become significantly engaged sooner rather than later, for the work required to meet the 2015 compliance deadline is rather more than meets the eye.

Need help sorting through the issues? Let me know at sweissman@hollygroup.com.

Forms, SharePoint & InfoPath: Perspectives for the Fiscally Responsible (Part 1)

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the latest and greatest ways to manage information, then you’ve certainly heard of Microsoft SharePoint. The latest in a long line of Next Big Things from The Most Interesting Company in the World (“stay computing, my friends”), it continues to receive an unprecedented amount of press and general attention, and to this observer’s eye, it is too-often lauded as The Answer to All Your Questions simply because it exists.

The reasons for this, though misguided, are simple enough:

• For one thing, SharePoint comes from Microsoft, which is the infrastructure vendor of choice for many organizations and is so well established that there’s no doubt about the company’s – or the product’s – longevity.
• For another, SharePoint not only works, but works fairly well. First introduced in 2001, it took three major releases before most of the major bugs were ironed out. But this isn’t unusual for big Microsoft projects – Microsoft CRM and even Windows itself ran this same course – and now in its fourth generation, the product today more than ready for prime time.
• Finally, SharePoint does many things and can do them for many kinds of people. Described by Microsoft itself as “the ultimate Swiss Army knife,”[1] it supports business intelligence, collaboration, portals, search, content management, and business forms. The trick, though, is first to figure out what you need it to do, and then explore how SharePoint might do it.

Detractors have rightly pointed out that the product’s versatility may in fact lead it to be too many things to too many people – especially for those who aren’t yet clear about what they want it to do. SharePoint supports so many capabilities that it is too easy to leave this question open-ended. So the better informed you are about your organization’s needs, the better results you will get – a statement, by the way, that is true for any technology solution, not just SharePoint.

Take My Forms -- Please
Let’s take forms and forms-based applications as cases in point. Considered by users to be necessary nuisances at best, forms exist virtually everywhere and are perhaps the least sexy implementations in the panoply. As such, they tend not to ignite the imagination of the IT professionals and financial executives who bear ultimate responsibility for their deployment.

The problem is that forms are simply too important and too expensive to shirk, ignore, or eliminate. Many enterprise solutions and most consumer-facing applications use them as front ends to databases, data presentation mechanisms, or both – and lifecycle costs (design à archiving) can be as high as $75,000 per form. So it’s not enough to declare them “annoying” and push them to the side. Rather, they represent surprisingly significant amounts of expense – and thus surprisingly significant opportunity for savings as well.

InfoPath to the Rescue – But There’s a Catch

Easing forms-related pain is where InfoPath comes into play. Microsoft’s entry in the electronic forms sweepstakes, InfoPath serves as SharePoint’s “official” e-forms capability. Steeped in XML, it supports several especially useful tasks that the company is proud to specify:

• Quickly and efficiently create forms and minimize training time
• Easily create sophisticated forms without writing code
• Give participants the ability to fill out forms online or offline

These benefits lead Microsoft’s list of InfoPath attractions, and in fact, there are no issues to be had here. However, another batch of items on the list come with a ‘catch’:

• Build modular, extensible, and portable SharePoint applications: this is true enough, but it is overstated as written since doing so requires using other Microsoft tools as well.
• Make browser forms conform to standards: this bold statement suggests more than may actually be the case since the ‘standards’ referenced may be more internal (i.e., consistent across Microsoft stacks) than international (i.e., a true technical benchmark).
• Enjoy more powerful Web browser forms: this likely means that improved parity has been achieved between InfoPath client forms and their SharePoint Server equivalents, a positive step to be sure in that it fixes a very old problem, but not one that necessarily equates to more power per se.
• Enhance forms with code: this is certainly true in the same way it is true with most other software applications, any one of which can be made more robust through programming. But it also is tacit acknowledgment that InfoPath’s strength lies in creating simpler forms rather than more complex varieties, and this is a key distinction to remember when identifying your most pressing needs.
• More easily manage forms on the server: this is one core benefit of moving to electronic forms from paper, but practically speaking, it is possibly more appealing to IT staff than to forms creation professionals. Some translation thus may be required.

The Hidden Gems
Microsoft rounds out its Top Ten list with two items that may well be the crown jewels of forms functionality:

• Embed forms in Web Parts: this capability positions forms as integral components of SharePoint applications, which broadly speaking often can be built by mixing and matching Web Parts of all kinds. The danger here is that it’s as easy to create a process monster as a practical innovation. But the ability to include forms functionality as easily as any other is a real plus for the forms-minded.
• Connect forms with line-of-business information and REST Web Services: presented as No. 9 on Redmond’s list, it probably should be positioned as No. 1 in terms of organizational value since it is the key to maintaining and leveraging the gobs of data contained in your various back-end systems. Forms-like interfaces have been used literally for decades to facilitate data input and data display, and making the capability more accessible to more people is promising indeed from a process/productivity standpoint.

(stay tuned for more …)

[1]Jeff Teper, Corporate VP for SharePoint, Microsoft Corp. at the 2009 Microsoft SharePoint Conference

Time to Fall in Love with Forms Again

People find them annoying at best and indecipherable at worst. Organizations use them for everything but hate to invest in them. And no one is exactly sure where the development art ends and the implementation science begins.

We’re talking, of course, about forms – paper forms, electronic forms, even the kind of wizardy-type things many Web sites use to engage you as a prospect of customer.

It’s been literally 20 years since this observer got his first look at an electronic form, and the experience lit the fires of imagination because the technology so clearly was all about entering information into a database so it can be used and tracked, thereby enabling staggering new heights in operational efficiency and records management.

Today, that potential lives on as strong as ever. But in the score of years in between, the technology failed to generate the kind of excitement I believed it would – probably because pretty much nobody likes forms. At this point, not only do none of the original purveyors still exist, but the functionality itself also has been largely overshadowed and subsumed by other related stacks like BPM/workflow, imaging, and records/content management.

But here’s the thing:

Forms technology is everywhere,
whether we recognize it or not, call it that or not, realize it or not.

• When you order office supplies or request a vacation, you fill out a form. (That’s an easy one, even if done on-screen via a browser.)

• When you click the electronic calendar on the hotel’s Web site to check room availability, that’s a form, too.

• When you check the box and click “OK” to accept the licensing terms of your new desktop software, that’s yet another form.

• And when you set the parameters for and run a report in SalesForce.com, guess what? You're using a form!

The point is that almost anything you do on a networked computer these days – and that means nearly all of them – involves a form. In many cases, such as the hotel site and CRM examples just cited, they don’t really feel like forms. But they are just the same, and they are the key to unleashing everything, from a process perspective, that then ensues: receiving new pencils or getting time off, making a reservation and charging your credit card, sending an email campaign to selected contacts … all of which results in new records to be managed.

In many ways, Microsoft’s SharePoint embodies all that is happening with and around forms because it is the nexus for all kinds of applications: portals, business intelligence, document collaboration, knowledge management, etc. This being the case, it is no coincidence that it includes its own forms product in InfoPath.

But even if you don’t buy into Redmond’s view of the world, the fact is that the template exists in the collection of offerings from EMC, IBM, Oracle, and others as well, all of which have assembled entire kits of operational components that functionally are glued together by one type of form or another.

So, gentle reader, it’s time to fall in love with your forms again. The context in which they exist has changed dramatically over the years – as have the tools to design them and put them in the field, which now range far beyond simply putting ink on paper – but they are as critical to your business processes as they were 20 years ago.

Even if you can’t stand them day in and day out.

If you're in New England and would like to continue this conversation, join me at a special meeting of the Business Forms Management Association on June 21 at the MetLife facility on Boylston Street in Boston. For details, please click here.

So, THIS (SharePoint 2010) is what happened to knowledge management!

Microsoft officially unveiled SharePoint 2010 yesterday to great fanfare, much of which actually was deserved.  The litany of improvements and new features the company outlined was lengthy, and not just a few were greatly needed and long overdue.

Many of the new virtues had to do with content and records management, and over the course of time, we will be sure to deal with those here. (For now, it may be interesting to know that the highlights included the increased exposure of retention-related functions, and the ability to manage sets of documents as individual units.)

One of the most immediately intriguing area of focus, however, had to do with the concept of “My Sites,” which are the moral equivalent of Facebook and LinkedIn pages within the enterprise. Built around the compiling of "colleagues" – “friends,” in these other contexts – My Sites are fully searchable personal compendiums of people, expertise, and resources that serve as modern-day representations of what we long-time knowledge management proponents endeavored (often with little success) to get organizations to construct.

Fundamentally, what we’re talking is a dynamic database of information about individuals’ areas of expertise and interest – information that of course needs to be entered in order to be leveraged. The problem in years past was that employees wouldn’t spend the time and effort required to tell the database about themselves, and so the idea, while sound, lagged.

Today, however, the landscape has changed dramatically. Thanks to FaceBook, LinkedIn, Information Zen, and the myriad others, it no longer feels above and beyond the call of duty to provide this sort of data – in fact, the psychology has changed to the point where it almost becomes a badge of honor to have completed a profile and to have assembled a large network of contacts.

SharePoint had admirably tapped into this phenomenon by linking My Sites to a number of other technologies that remove some of the burden and add a great deal of value. Not the least of these include presence, so one can see whether a particular contact is online, and the ability to pull data in from other repositories like PeopleSoft and Active Directory.

The result is a nifty bit of functionality that with a minimal adoption curve can really add to life within a larger organization. That it is baked into SharePoint promises to breathe new life into the practice of managing knowledge, which has always been a good idea, but perhaps never has had a rising technology star to hitch itself to.

So for those of you who have been wondering, this – SharePoint 2010 – may well be what knowledge management has become. And you know what? That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Readers in my neck of the woods may wish to check out the Boston Area SharePoint Users Group at http://bostonsharepointug.org. The inaugural meeting last night was a smash hit, and I’ll be glad to see you there.

Ask not what SharePoint 2010 can do, ask what it can do for YOU

With the advent of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 well nigh upon us, much breath, ink, and screen space is being expended to assess what it does and doesn’t do. Often lost in the minutia, however, is the single most important question you can ask: what can SharePoint do for me?

A big part of the problem is that Microsoft’s own messaging is more muddled now than was with SharePoint 2007. Take a look at what we lovingly think of as the product’s “color wheel,” the graphical image used to depict SharePoint’s core capabilities:



As you can see, the 2007 descriptors were largely functional, readily filling in the blank answering the question “SharePoint supports ___________.” The 2010 edition, however, replaces them with terms that seem not to answer any one question, and thus seem not to appeal to any one audience.

For instance, “Insights” are what business analysts are paid to provide, so even if it isn’t completely clear what the feature is or does, it sounds like something a line of business person would resonate to. However, “Composites” sound – and, as it turns out, are – more technical, and have less meaning for business managers than their IT counterparts.

The inference, I suppose, is that SharePoint 2010 provides value to both of these audiences, and in fact, it does, once you get the hang of it. But because the how isn’t immediately obvious, it does little to help anyone determine whether SharePoint is for him or her.

The point here, gentle reader, is that if you’re not entirely sure how you’d put SharePoint to use, don’t use the official pronouncements – so often blindly repeated by Microsoft partners and so-called industry “experts” – as the starting point for figuring it out. Start instead by identifying your own primary points of pain, and drill from that vantage point into the reams of Microsoft material and gallons of online posts. You’ll know soon enough from the comments, questions, and complaints you’ll find just how well SharePoint speaks to your needs.

SharePoint Customers Playing ‘Match Game’ with Providers

Say the word “SharePoint” in IT circles these days and you’ll be met with free-association responses that are as contradictory as they are predictable:

Easy to use … difficult to manage … pretty solid … hard to understand … the latest Microsoft plot to take over the world

Ask, however, about the purposes to which SharePoint is to be put and a much clearer picture emerges:

Content management … collaboration … portals … business forms … search

We know this because we’ve spent the past several weeks asking these questions, formally and informally, and then diving deeply into the world of SharePoint partners to see how their statements of value match up against the responses we received. The result? A typical misalignment of marketing message and market need. Here’s what we found:

Among the Partners

• An awful lot of SharePoint partners – say, a third of them – seem hard-pressed to use the word “SharePoint” properly in a sentence. They’ve done a fair-to-middling job of repurposing Microsoft’s official verbiage, and that’s about it. Consequently, nothing stands out about what differentiates them from the 999 other firms they nominally compete with, nor what need SharePoint may have been designed to fill.
   
• Another 20% or so appear to have focused on one or two of SharePoint’s numerous capabilities, and have done so to decent effect. Most of these highlight content management, collaboration, and, to a lesser degree, process improvement as core strengths, a proper and solid mix for most customer organizations.
   
• The remainder come across as the consultants most of them are, talking about their stellar ability to listen to their customers and develop solutions that are optimized for each situation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (see Seinfeld, Jerry), but it can leave the reader wanting, and it certainly does presuppose the customer already knows what he or she wants.
  
  And therein lies the rub.

Among the Customers

• If the participants in a recent AIIM webinar are any guide, nearly a quarter of organizations either are still learning about SharePoint or are considering whether to deploy it. These people are hungry for as much fluff-free information as they can get, not only about the product but about how to think about what they most need. They likely know SharePoint can do a lot of things, but they may not know which of those functions will do them the most immediate good. Offers of meaningful help thus are gratefully accepted.
  
   
• Those that do have an idea – between half and two-thirds of our Webinar participants – say they’re looking to SharePoint primarily to handle content management and collaboration, followed by portals, search, and business forms in relatively equal measure. That content management scored so high may not be a surprise given that the question was asked of an AIIM-centered audience. However, business forms’ strong showing is interesting because they tend to be represent the great stealth need: never appearing in an inquiry or specification but needing to be dealt with right away because they’re central to most business processes.
  
  
  
  Sadly, very few SharePoint partners mention forms at all, even though the capability is baked-in via InfoPath.

• Besides being great for jump-starting workflows, electronic forms also work wonders for organizations seeking to reduce paper. However, it turns out that relatively few of the organizations we polled are thinking that way. Only one-third reported having a paper-reduction program in place, and 14% said they are too overwhelmed by the possibility to even think about it. So SharePoint partners leading with the environmental savings associated with moving from hard copy to soft might want to reconsider – not because the logic is wrong, but because people have other priorities right now.
  
  
  

Conclusion

At the end of the day, our foray into the market tells us that SharePoint partners overall can do a better job of matching their value propositions to the needs of their intended customers, and bringing out areas of associated value along the way. This issue isn’t endemic to SharePoint, of course. But it is worth bringing up because of the messaging onslaught we’re about to experience with the release of SharePoint 2010, which will only pile questions about the differences between the 2010 and 2007 editions on top of the questions so many organizations already have.

If only Gene Rayburn were available to moderate …