Whitepapers, Articles, Research, Webcasts, Interviews and Podcasts

I have been lucky enough to share my experiences, lessons learned, and advice through various contributions to the community. This page represents a collected listing of many of those contributions to make discovery and referring back to them easier.

Looking for something specific? Due to the length of this page, to make navigating it a bit easier, use these quick links:

  1. Books
  2. Articles & Whitepapers
  3. Podcasts & Interviews
  4. Recorded Webinars
  5. Open Research
  6. On This Blog

Books

What follows are books I have contributed to:

IMPROVE IT! Adoption & Analytics Guidance

Microsoft SharePoint For Business Executives: Q&A Handbook

Forget lengthy technical SharePoint guides more suited for hands-on technical staff; get equipped with the knowledge of SharePoint’s business potential before deployment.

Get to grips with SharePoint governance, the Cloud, staffing, development and much more from a business perspective in this book and e-book.

An essential SharePoint Pocket Guide with useful Q&As for every business executive deliberating over SharePoint implementation.

Articles & Whitepapers

Often when asked by a client, colleague or peer in my industry for my thoughts repeatedly on a subject I try to distill them in the form of articles or whitepapers. What follows are a few of the articles and contributions I have made.

  • Whitepaper: Driving Office 365 Adoption & Usage: What You Need To Know
    Explore the best approach and techniques for driving and improving Office 365 adoption and usage. Including how to create powerful and successful adoption campaigns!
  • Whitepaper: Measuring The Business Impact & ROI Of Office 365
    Find out how to identify and measure the business value Office 365 provides with examples and advice on Office 365 reporting and metrics.
  • Whitepaper: Intranets With Office 365: What You Need To Know
    Explore the benefits of an Office 365 Intranet, why you should consider migrating your existing Intranet to Office 365 today and how and when to best use Office 365 capabilities with your Intranet.
  • Whitepaper: External Sharing With Office 365: What You Need To Know
    While it can be easy to turn external sharing on in Office 365, there are quite a few risks and things to consider. This whitepaper has everything you need to know about external sharing in Office 365.
  • Whitepaper: How To Decide When To Use What In Office 365: Enterprise User Guidance
    Read our white paper to understand best practices and strategies that will help you get more out of your Office 365 investment and answer the questions like when a user should use Yammer, SharePoint, Office 365 Groups, Outlook, Skype for Business or something else entirely.
  • Whitepaper: SharePoint Governance: A Definitive Guide
    Read our white paper to understand best practices and strategies necessary for planning and enforcing governance policies for Microsoft SharePoint.
  • Whitepaper: Tough Migration Decisions – Making The Right ChoicesSharePoint content migration can be a potentially risky, time consuming, and costly endeavor if you don’t understand the pitfalls and best practices. This whitepaper breaks down the key decisions you must face and provides practical tips to effectively plan for your migration. It includes 200+ questions you should ask your SharePoint migration vendor.
  • SharePoint Governance: Just Another Cog In The Machine?
    With IT departments tasked with managing people, processes, policies and technical requirements, your organization’s enterprise collaboration governance policy must be powerful enough to ensure simplified and respected management across all business areas.But how do you put together a successful SharePoint governance plan that also shows how fundamental IT is to your organization’s collaboration success?
  • 87 Terms Every Non-Technical SharePoint Professional Should Know
    Although SharePoint is often used by all areas of the business to solve business problems, it is still essentially a software tool. It can sometimes be difficult to decipher the technical language used when working with it, especially if you work with technical teams in your organisation. Richard Harbridge, Microsoft expert and Share Conference speaker, has put together a handy glossary of SharePoint terms explained so even the most non-techy of us can understand.
  • 6 Strategies To Boost SharePoint Social Usage
    Can you imagine a business launching a product with no promotion? No prizes for guessing how that turns out. The same goes for turning on SharePoint’s social tools and hoping people will stumble across them. It’s simply not going to work. SharePoint’s social tools needs someone to manage, nurture and facilitate usage in order for it to be successful. If you are the lucky person in your organisation that’s been appointed as custodian of SharePoint social, it can be a daunting task. Here to help is Richard Harbridge, Microsoft expert and Share Conference speaker. Read on for his top 6 tips to make your SharePoint social project a success.
  • The SharePoint Social Rule Book
    Are you a rule breaker, a risk taker, a fly by the seat of your pants kinda person? Or do you believe rules are important, preventing anarchy and all out chaos from ensuing? Whether you like rules or not, chances are you work for a company that does.When it comes to SharePoint’s social tools, providing guidance around how they should be used is essential. Just because SharePoint’s social tools are designed to look and act like consumer social tools such as Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean they should be used in the same way.
  • 26 More Ideas to Breathe Life Into SharePoint
    If you’ve run out of steam with your SharePoint efforts, here are 26 ideas from Share Conference speaker and Microsoft expert Richard Harbridge to breathe life back into your intranet and get users back on track. And if these 26 tips are not enough, here are 27 more. You’re welcome!
  • 27 Ways To Rejuvenate A Tired Intranet
    A lot of SharePoint project start off with the best of intentions. You’re absolutely committed to setting up that competition and that launch party will happen. Well, eventually.It doesn’t matter how good your intentions are, sometimes your other work (you know, that important stuff you do outside of SharePoint) gets in the way and your SharePoint project inevitably slips by the wayside. Well, it’s time to breathe new life into your user adoption plan and get those users back on track and logging into SharePoint. Struggling to know where to start (again)? Here are 27 user adoption ideas, courtesy of SharePoint pro Richard Harbridge, that should get your creative juices flowing.
  • Why Executives Are Resisting SharePoint’s Social Tools
    SharePoint’s social tools have been getting a bad wrap from Executives recently.Aside from the fact that SharePoint’s social tools are perceived as a massive distraction and a productivity suck-hole (it’s just Facebook for the enterprise, right?) your Executive may also believe they pose a real threat of corporate embarrassment, cyber-attacks and loss of intellectual property. In their eyes, these tools are a potential disaster waiting to happen and best steered clear of all together.While most of these are very legitimate concerns, they shouldn’t be a reason to turn off SharePoint’s social tools all together.
  • Q&A with Richard Harbridge: SharePoint Servers To The Cloud
    There are many options now for running SharePoint in the cloud, but the question is: Should you make the move? And if the answer is yes, then which alternative cloud offering should you choose? Office 365, Windows Azure or one of many third-party cloud providers?
  • SCM: Ensure The Long-Term Health Of SharePoint Content Management Systems
    Prescribing a SharePoint implementation without a proper diagnosis is akin to IT malpractice.That’s the assertion of Richard Harbridge, a SharePoint architect and consultant for Portal Solutions of Rockville, Md. Harbridge presented a SharePoint content management tutorial called “Is Your SharePoint Really Healthy? What’s the Right Prescription?” at KMWorld 2012 in Washington, D.C. There, he suggested that the collaboration platform required a governed model of care to ensure ongoing health.
  • KMWorld: SharePoint 2013 – a new way to work together?
    According to the Microsoft SharePoint product website, “SharePoint 2013 is the new way to work together.” So what is so new about SharePoint 2013? Will it really change how we work together? The short answer is no, probably not for the readers of an article like this. However, the longer answer (for many people) is that it may make their jobs a little easier, and those who haven’t really invested heavily in SharePoint might want to take another look.
  • FPWeb Whitepaper: On Premise vs. Cloud – SharePoint Hosting ROI Comparison
    Internationally recognized SharePoint experts Richard Harbridge and Sadie Van Buren team up to deliver an in depth analysis of the three major methods of implementing SharePoint. Compare the true cost of ownership and learn how to achieve the strongest return on investment for your SharePoint deployment by downloading this free white paper now.
  • ESJ: Q&A – Integrating SharePoint With Social Content
    When planning your enterprise social strategy, you must consider how your organization will integrate internal social activities with existing technology investments and processes. When social technology is implemented without an effective strategy and without effective integration, social information often can become isolated from the business processes and activities that would benefit most. This means that your investment isn’t resulting in as strong of a return, especially over longer periods of time.What should be integrated with that ubiquitous enterprise application, SharePoint? What are the benefits of such integration, and what does it take? We asked Richard Harbridge, a senior SharePoint architect/evangelist with Portal Solutions for his perspective.
  • SCM: The Future of Email – Collaboration Experts On New Social Media Tools
    Email is one technology that spurs a great deal of discussion in the world of content management. The ubiquitous communication technology has inspired many discussions about how it will hold up against evolving enterprise collaboration initiatives and new social media tools. Still, most organizations use email and among workers it enjoys a comfortable familiarity that’s hard to foster with newer collaborative applications...
  • Focus: Best Practices For Using Microsoft SharePoint In An Enterprise
    Microsoft SharePoint enables enterprises to set up Web sites, share information with one another, manage documents and publish reports. With an estimated presence in 50 to 60 percent of all large organizations, SharePoint is in widespread use. So, how can your enterprise get the most out of SharePoint and its collaboration features? In this guide, Focus Experts Paul Culmsee, Richard Harbridge, Veronique Palmer, Michal Pisarek, James Pritz and Michael Sampson share their top 8 best practices for using Microsoft SharePoint in an enterprise.
  • CMSWire: The Five Teams You Need For Effective SharePoint Governance
    In this article, I hope to give you some practical structure and tactics you can use to achieve effective SharePoint governance.
  • NBSP: Evaluating Cloud Providers
    Struggling with evaluating cloud providers? Interested in moving to the cloud but not certain what the risks are and what you need to consider? This article is focused around sharing some tools and techniques I have found to help when performing the often difficult task of comparing or evaluating cloud providers.
  • NBSP: SharePoint is not a Silver Bullet
    Every day we see projects and business challenges that SharePoint helps us overcome. It’s kind of hard not to begin reactively saying “SharePoint” as the answer to so many corporate challenges especially as our understanding of what the platform can do matures. This poses a very real danger as SharePoint is not the best tool or solution for every challenge.
  • NBSP: Powerful Columns You Probably Didn’t Know About
    Often I am surprised by how few businesses know about some of the powerful columns based on SharePoint’s publishing features. In this article not only will we highlight what these are, but we will also explore why they are powerful and useful columns that you really should consider leveraging.
  • NBSP: Why Leveraging SharePoint Blog Features For Intranet News Is A Great Idea
    Almost every intranet site has news articles of some sort. One very useful technique when building out your news articles in SharePoint is to use a blog site to host them.
  • NBSP: Manage Web Part Permissions and Information
    A quick post highlighting two important aspects about SharePoint WebParts, and the WebPart Gallery (for SharePoint 2007 AND 2010).
  • SCM: Don’t Let Performance Anxiety Derail Your SharePoint 2010 Installation
    SharePoint 2010 has been making steady gains as the enterprise collaboration platform of choice. However, many potential end users remain resistant. The problem: performance issues that result in excruciating waits for pages to load or service interruptions at critical times...
  • Redmond Mag: What To Expect In SharePoint 15
    It’s no surprise that Microsoft SharePoint is among the most widely deployed platforms for enterprise collaboration, with more than 125 million licenses sold to more than 65,000 enterprise customers. Right now, though, the mystery is all about what to expect from the next major release — and that’s rapidly starting to unravel. Microsoft recently released the first technology preview of the forthcoming upgrade, code-named “SharePoint 15,” to selected testers, and the company is gunning for a general beta release this summer. And while Microsoft isn’t saying, observers are betting on a commercial release by year’s end or in early 2013.
  • SCM: SharePoint 2010 Adoption; If You Deploy It, Will Your Users Come? (Requires Sign Up)
    SharePoint’s success in the market can be attributed largely to its ease of use, according to Richard Harbridge, senior SharePoint evangelist at Allin Corp., a Boston-based consulting and IT services firm…
  • SCM: Successful SharePoint 2010 Deployment Relies On Six Key Steps (Requires Sign Up)
    As more and more companies deploy Microsoft SharePoint 2010, it is becoming increasingly clear that successful use of the complex collaboration platform requires careful management…
  • SCM: SharePoint 2010 collaboration ISVs focus on workflow and analytics. (Requires Sign Up)
    With 125 million licenses sold, Microsoft’s SharePoint is the market leader for enterprise collaboration, but it doesn’t solve every business problem for every user. Instead, many SharePoint 2010 collaboration platform users rely on a host of independent software vendors (ISVs) to handle what SharePoint can’t...
  • Focus: Collaboration Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for using Microsoft Sharepoint in an Enterprise?
  • Focus: What are alternatives to MS SharePoint?
  • Focus: How does Box.net compare to SharePoint?
  • Focus: What is the Best Practice for configuring SharePoint to hold policy and process documentation?
  • Focus: What are the Consequences of Changing your SharePoint Governance Model?
  • Focus: What questions should be asked when planning a SharePoint intranet?
  • Focus: How do you prevent scope creep on a complicated IT project?
  • Focus: K-12 Enteprise – need to set up SharePoint (fast/cheap) – in house or Office 365?
  • Focus: Some elements of “dream jobs” are universal (e.g: pay). What are some of your unique elements?

Podcasts & Interviews

What follows are some of the podcasts and interviews I have done.

Panel Videos

  • Share Panel – Real World SharePoint Governance
    This SHARE 2012 panel explores the importance of SharePoint Governance within an organization and dive into real world scenarios that the panelists have seen on their journeys within SharePoint projects from both a consultancy and employee perspective. Moderated by Jeremy Thake, Enterprise Architect – Microsoft SharePoint MVP, AvePoint, Inc. and panelists include Sarah Haase, Best Buy, Susan Hanley, Susan Hanley LLC, Richard Harbridge, Allin Consulting, and Adam Quinn, Nielsen.

Audio Interviews

  • The SharePoint Pod Show: Building a SharePoint Team
    In Episode 69 of the SharePoint Pod Show, Rob, Nick, and Brett catch up with Richard Harbridge to discuss how to best build a SharePoint team in your organization.
  • The MOSS Show: Richard Harbridge Gets Us App’d
    In between sessions at the Share conference, Richard Harbridge speaks to us about 3rd party add-ons for SharePoint, the new App model and how to think about it differently and what is might mean living in an ‘App’ world in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.
  • The MOSS Show: Upgrading with Richard Harbridge
    In preparation for his upcoming Share Conference session, in this episode we dive into all kinds of upgrade-related topics with Richard Harbridge, ranging from some of the technical and business planning required to a number of super-user related tasks and responsibilities. We talk about Upgrade Evaluation sites, budgets, collaboration with IT, managing the user expectations and tons more.
  • The MOSS Show: Helping Assess ROI With SharePoint
    In this episode, SharePoint expert Richard Harbridge helps us to understand and think about assessing the return on investment (ROI) of or SharePoint platform. We talk about why ROI is important, different ways to measure, and how to improve this over time.
  • ECM Talk 12: Richard Harbridge on Information Architecture in SharePoint
    Richard Harbridge     and James Lappin discuss information architecture issues within SharePoint.
  • Roundtable: SharePoint In The Cloud: Evaluating Impact, Pros, and Cons
    Microsoft has unleashed their cloud strategy and Office 365 is now publically available (as of July). What does this mean for organizations using SharePoint today? How can organizations leverage the Microsoft cloud effectively with their SharePoint implementations and future SharePoint Strategies?
  • SharePoint Ninja “Meet The Community”: Interview With Richard Harbridge
    In an informal interview Michael and I discuss some of the challenges in the community, how to share and contribute more, and thoughts on SharePoint in general.

Video Interviews

Webinars

What follows are free (and available to the public) webinar recordings.

Open Research

As an independent (volunteer) researcher I implore you to write using this data, gather and share insights from this data, and apply the data here to help improve your own organizations decision making or the decision making of your clients. The purpose of this research is to share real data based on observations, interviews, studies, and work I have conducted.

  • What Is SharePoint?
    When asked repeatedly “what is SharePoint?” the responses we provide always seem to be different. Contained within this page is the (relatively) up to date set of responses I have been able to collect both physically and virtually. As new responses come in I will both update this with more analysis and will share the results.
  • SharePoint Research: On Premise, Hosted, and SaaS Implementation Costs
    After interviewing over 30 SharePoint professional service firms and 20 internal SharePoint administrators across North America a compiled research report and set of data was created to compare on premise SharePoint implementation costs (based on 6 scenarios) with hosted and cloud based SharePoint costs. The purpose of this partial research data is to provide a defensible baseline for determining whether the cloud, or on premise is the correct cost effective decision for the organization evaluating their options.

On This Blog

Sometimes it is difficult to navigate a blog. To give one more way of finding highlighted resources I have listed many resources found on this blog along with a short explanation of the primary purpose behind each resource.

  1. SharePoint Governance Policies, Plans, and Documents Listing:
    As part of another ongoing effort I share and highlight useful templates/Governance documents and samples that are available to the public. Many of these templates have been scrubbed from my clients or work.
  2. User Adoption Activity Listing:
    The user adoption activities listing is a collection of effective activities organizations employ to bolster adoption of their Intranets, Portals, or Applications. This is by no means a complete list, but hopefully will suggest some ideas around activities that other organizations have found to be successful in bolstering user adoption and engagement.
  3. Intranet Component Listing:
    This list contains components commonly found on Intranets (in particular on landing pages, homepages, and frequently used pages of Intranets). In my work I have been lucky enough to have worked with, implemented or been involved in over a hundred Intranets and this is one of the many tools I use to help plan for and tactically implement different pages.
  4. Intranet Design/Homepage Examples
    A collection of Intranet designs/examples taken from various internet sites (to my knowledge all of the designs here are SharePoint Intranets).
  5. SharePoint Workflows: What Should We Use It For? What Are Other People Using It For?
    We all know that we should always aim to automate and improve our business processes more. Many organizations reap enormous benefits from improving the way they work alone or with other people through enabling technologies like SharePoint. The big question is how do we start? Or perhaps which processes or workflows should we automate and improve first? This article dives into this issue and offers advice and recommendations based on successful experiences with many customers.
  6. SharePoint Glossary:
    This is a list of relevant SharePoint terms and what they mean. The goal of this list is to make understanding SharePoint terminology easier for end users and those just starting with SharePoint.
  7. SharePoint Standards:
    An ongoing project to maintain a listing of specific standards that the industry agrees to as a baseline for achieving effective SharePoint implementations. This contains the standards, templates, and examples for many areas of SharePoint and is often a frequently used Governance resource.
  8. SharePoint 2007 vs SharePoint 2010:
    An extremely popular resource on my blog that highlights and outlines the differences between SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 on a single (very long) page.
  9. How to: Lock Down Social Features in SharePoint 2010
    One of the more popular How to: articles based on interest in rolling out SharePoint 2010’s social features in a planned way and disabling or mitigating the risk/cost some pose.
  10. Eight Key Considerations When Implementing SharePoint 2010 Social Capabilities
    There is a minimum of eight things that every company should carefully consider when rolling out features like MySites, User Profiles, Tags, Notes, Activity Feeds, and Blogs. This article outlines why each consideration is important and in some cases provide an example of how you might begin dealing with that consideration effectively.

If you have a request for research or for a piece of writing please feel free to comment here or contact me via LinkedIn or email me at Richard@RHarbridge.com.

Hope there is a way I can help you,
Richard Harbridge

Are you a rule breaker, a risk taker, a fly by the seat of your pants kinda person? Or do you believe rules are important, preventing anarchy and all out chaos from ensuing? Whether you like rules or not, chances are you work for a company that does.

When it comes to SharePoint’s social tools, providing guidance around how they should be used is essential. Just because SharePoint’s social tools are designed to look and act like consumer social tools such as Facebook, doesn’t necessarily mean they should be used in the same way.

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