I tried the procedure described here on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. I suppose it also works on Windows XP. However, in Windows XP you can just boot up in Safe Mode (press F8 before Windows starts booting) and log on with the built-in administrator account even it is disabled. Because an administrator password has to be configured when Windows XP is installed, the Safe Mode procedure will only help if you have at least this password.

Once you enable the administrator account, you can use this account to log on to this Windows installation. This works because, by default, the built-in administrator account is configured with an empty password in Vista and Windows 7. Of course, if you configured an administrator password (which I recommended in my article about the built-in administrator account), this procedure is useless if you have also forgotten this password or if a user has set the password and didn’t tell you about it.

Before you proceed, please note that editing the Registry is always risky if you don’t know what you are doing.

To offline enable the built-in administrator account, follow these steps:

1. Load the SAM Registry hive with regedit as described in my post about the offline Registry editor.
2. Navigate to HKLM\%your_key_name%\SAM\Domains\Accounts\Users\Names\.
3. Click “Administrator” and note the value in the type column.
4. Navigate to HKLM\%your_key_name%\SAM\Domains\Accounts\Users\.
5. Use the type value you noted before to locate the Registry key of the administrator account (see screenshot).
    
6. Edit the F entry of the administrator key and navigate to the 0038 position.
7. If the built-in administrator account is disabled, the value of this position is “11″; replace it with “10″. NOTE: Make sure to edit the correct position because editing binary values in the Registry is a bit tricky: Move the cursor to the beginning of position 0038, press “DEL,” and then type “10″.
   
8. Click %your_key_name% and then unload the hive through the corresponding menu point in the File menu.

After you reboot, you can log on using the built-in administrator and reset the password of other accounts.

Note that you can also use this procedure to offline enable other accounts with administrator privileges. In this case, the value at position 0038 will be “15″ if the account is disabled; replace it with”14″ to enable the account.

SharePoint has unquestionably garnered a lot of attention from business users and IT. Toby Bell, Gartner Inc.’s research vice-president, calls SharePoint 2007 “nothing short of a phenomenon.” He says the growing number of searches for SharePoint on Gartner.com indicates high interest in the product and some confusion about its value.

“For Microsoft and its partner ecosystem, it’s easy to see SharePoint becoming the billion dollar baby in ECM [enterprise content management],” says Bell via e-mail. “[However,] estimating the potential ROI of SharePoint and related products for enterprise buyers is harder.”

Indeed, the true costs of deploying and supporting SharePoint are not well understood. Fundamental misconceptions about SharePoint prevent organizations from deploying it effectively and realizing its value. Many IT executives view SharePoint as a shrink-wrapped product that can be installed and configured in hours or days. In fact, it cannot. SharePoint is truly an enterprise information platform and must be treated as such. That means SharePoint configuration work needs to be well-planned and designed—not conducted in an ad-hoc fashion.

What’s more, because SharePoint has been popular among users, SharePoint sites have popped up all over enterprises, resulting in what is known as “SharePoint sprawl.” The ability for users to easily create and manage a SharePoint site is one of the product’s benefits, but the subsequent sprawl takes up lots of storage space, increases costs and makes it harder for users to find documents due to inconsistent metadata and tagging.

This article explores the true costs of SharePoint—both expected and unexpected. By gaining a firm handle on these costs, IT leaders will be able to identify whether the product is right for their organizations and will be better prepared to take advantage of SharePoint’s many benefits.

Expected Costs

When determining the true cost of deploying SharePoint, CIOs need to consider the expenses typically associated with rolling out any new software product, such as the cost of licenses, server software, virus protection, hardware and infrastructure, and IT staff. Here’s a breakdown of the costs IT leaders can expect to incur when deploying SharePoint.

1. SharePoint Product Licenses: Microsoft offers different licensing options for SharePoint. Pricing for each of these options can vary considerably based on an organization’s licensing agreement with Microsoft. In this regard, it is important for IT leaders to determine if they are going to be employing the free version of SharePoint, known as WSS (Windows SharePoint Services), or if they’ll use MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Standard, Enterprise or SharePoint for Internet Sites.

WSS is the base level of SharePoint that is freely available with Windows Server 2003 and above. No client license is needed for it. MOSS Standard offers additional functionality including records management capabilities and enhanced searching. MOSS Enterprise offers even more: Web-based electronic forms (InfoPath on the Web), the business data catalog (BDC) for connectivity to databases, and Excel services for rendering Excel spreadsheets via the Web in SharePoint. Both versions of MOSS require the purchase of a client access license.

The version of SharePoint a CIO selects will depend upon the functionality his or her organization needs, and the cost of those licenses will in turn depend on the number of instances of server software that is running at any given time and the number of users.

2. Microsoft SQL Server Licenses: The purchase of SharePoint doesn’t include the cost of Microsoft SQL Server, which is used to store the actual SharePoint content and corresponding metadata. In most cases, companies pursuing SharePoint are already running a SQL Server. If so, the SQL Server database servers could be used, or an additional SQL database may need to be installed and configured as part of the SharePoint server farm. The optimal database configuration will be predicated upon requirements for scale, redundancy and performance. Pricing will vary significantly depending on the configuration and the type of software license agreement a company has with Microsoft.

3. Windows Server Software: All SharePoint Servers will be required to run on Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 regardless of whether they’re physical machines or virtual machines. The SharePoint farm can be fully contained, run on one Windows Server, or the farm can be distributed across multiple Windows servers depending on requirements for scale, redundancy and performance. Pricing will vary for Windows server depending on the configuration and type of license agreement.

4. Virus Protection and Backup: SharePoint platforms need to be secure. To that end, Microsoft offers a number of virus protection and back-up products specifically geared toward SharePoint. Additionally, a number of third-party suppliers provide virus protection and backup products for SharePoint. The prices for these products vary. They can be user- or server-based or both.

5. Hardware and Infrastructure: The hardware required to run a SharePoint environment includes the actual computers functioning as servers (for MS SQL database, SharePoint Web front-end servers, SharePoint application servers), the disk storage (local or a storage area network), and the necessary networking hardware and workstations. Most companies already have the networking and workstations in place to support SharePoint; what they need are additional server-based components. If SharePoint is being employed over a WAN, for instance, CIOs may want to explore infrastructure optimization appliances, which can be deployed as software running on industry-standard servers or as pre-packaged hardware solutions. Software-based appliances start at $5,000 and hardware-based appliances start at $18,000.

6. IT Staff: The IT staff needed to support a SharePoint implementation will depend on a number of variables. For example, if users are building their own sites and content with basic SharePoint features, the IT support costs will be lower.

However, if an IT department is using SharePoint as a development platform for business applications, costs will increase because developers and quality assurance testers will be needed. Business analysts, project managers, IT configuration staff and IT help desk staff may also be needed. The amount of time these staff members devote to implementing and supporting SharePoint depends on the pace at which SharePoint is being deployed and on how much advanced configuration and development work is needed.

7. Third-Party Products: Like all software, SharePoint is not perfect in that it does not solve every problem perfectly. Tom Rizzo, Microsoft’s senior director for SharePoint, says that the product was designed to provide a rich set of functionality, and where gaps exist, third-party vendors have introduced specific products to fill such voids. Examples of third-party products include tools for image capture, metadata replication and workflow supplements. SharePoint, more so than any other enterprise content management (ECM) platform, has set the stage for a global market of third-party products. The cost of these third-party products varies.

8. Configuration Management: SharePoint 2007′s phenomenal growth has occurred despite the fact that it doesn’t have overly mature capabilities for configuration, replication, and the promotion of changes to code. As a result, additional time should be allocated toward configuration management. The cost of configuration management will be predicated upon an organization’s process for promoting code from one environment to another. For example, for an organization with finely tuned and documented processes, it may take a week or more to prepare this type of configuration management effort for SharePoint.

9. Consulting costs: IT organizations may need to hire consultants to help configure SharePoint’s many administrative options and to help integrate third-party products with it.

10. Quality Assurance: QA testing should extend beyond out-of-the-box functionality to include testing of custom development, the integration of third-party products, and any formal configuration exercises. As a general rule, CIOs should allocate five to 10 percent of their overall SharePoint project effort to quality assurance.

Unexpected Costs

It’s the unexpected costs—the costs that IT leaders don’t think to include into their business cases for SharePoint—that eat into their ROI. To get the biggest bang for your SharePoint buck, factor these expenses into your SharePoint strategy.

1. Governance: SharePoint’s greatest advantage — its simplicity and ease of use — is often its biggest curse. Because it’s so easy to use, adoption is high. The drawback of high user adoption is that the product is used inconsistently. As a result, design and governance standards need to be created.

Time and effort needs to be put toward developing and maintaining a SharePoint governance plan that outlines the type of content that should be loaded into the system, records policies, standard processes and metadata constructs, and guidelines for approaching and supporting SharePoint projects. IT leaders don’t need to design an entire governance strategy up front. Instead, they should do some initial planning and let their governance standards evolve to reflect changing user patterns.

2. Change Management: After deploying SharePoint, users will need to change their approaches to creating and managing information. Given people’s reluctance to change, a proactive change management program is recommended. This may be as simple as a formal communication from the executive sponsor stating the importance of SharePoint. It could also be an internal newsletter, e-mail campaign to promote the proper use of SharePoint, and “lunch and learn” demonstrations to give people a sense as to how SharePoint can make their lives easier. The costs of the change management effort will vary depending upon its intensity.

3. SharePoint Application Training: Even if your users are familiar with SharePoint, using it to solve a specific business problem (such as automating a contract management or accounts payable process) typically requires some training. Training can be performed by your staff or outside consultants. Since SharePoint’s user interface is intuitive, the training effort for end-users is usually measured in hours rather than days or weeks while SharePoint administrators may need a few days of training.

5. SharePoint Community Participation: The SharePoint community is unlike any other ECM community. It is collegial, always on and continually expanding. On SharePoint Saturdays, for example, SharePoint experts volunteer their time to speak at Microsoft offices. There is no charge to attend one of these presentations, at which hundreds of people gather (a testament to the growing role of the SharePoint community.) SharePoint Saturdays are a great source of information, but should you elect to attend these events or the many SharePoint conferences taking place around the world, factor travel expenses into your SharePoint cost equation.

6. SharePoint Code Management: When development takes place in SharePoint, it should be managed in a controlled and traceable manner. To that end, CIOs should invest in code management and plug-ins for Visual Studio or other integrated development environments that allow for the creation and management of SharePoint source code. The costs for such tools can range in the hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars.

SharePoint: Worth the Costs?

After digesting all of this information, you may wonder if SharePoint is worth all of the expense.

The fact is, managing enterprise information and processes is not a trivial exercise. More than 80 percent of enterprise information is stored as unstructured content. SharePoint gives structure to that content and makes it easy for users to find and access.

If CIOs treat SharePoint as off-the-shelf software, the costs will indeed be onerous. However, if CIOs treat it as an enterprise information platform and content management system, SharePoint will yield tremendous value—and potentially at a fraction of the cost of comparable ECM solutions.

Please note that resetting the password from an account other than the corresponding user account always means that the user loses the credentials stored in the Windows Vault, stored Internet Explorer passwords, and files that you encrypted with the Encrypting File System (EFS). Of course, if you have a backup of these credentials, you can restore them; likewise, if you have exported the private EFS key, you can import it again after you have reset the password.

Like with all other solutions that allow you to reset the Windows password without having an account on the corresponding computer, you have to boot from a second operating system and access the Windows installation while it is offline.

You can do this with a bootable Windows PE USB stick or by using Windows RE. You can start Windows RE by booting the Windows Vista or Windows 7 setup DVD and then selecting “Repair” instead of “Install Windows.”

By the way, you can’t use the Windows XP boot CD for this purpose because its Recovery Console will ask for a password for the offline installation. However, you can use a Vista or Windows 7 DVD to reset a forgotten Windows administrator password on Windows XP.

This works because Windows RE, which is based on Vista or Windows 7, will let you launch a command prompt with access to an offline installation without requiring a password.

To reset a forgotten administrator password, follow these steps:

1. Boot from Windows PE or Windows RE and access the command prompt.
2. Find the drive letter of the partition where Windows is installed. In Vista and Windows XP, it is usually C:, in Windows 7, it is D: in most cases because the first partition contains Startup Repair. To find the drive letter, type C: (or D:, respectively) and search for the Windows folder. Note that Windows PE (RE) usually resides on X:.
3. Type the following command (replace “c:” with the correct drive letter if Windows is not located on C:):
   copy c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe c:\
   This creates a copy of sethc.exe to restore later.
4. Type this command to replace sethc.exe with cmd.exe:
   copy /y c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe
5. Reboot your computer and start the Windows installation where you forgot the administrator password.
6. After you see the logon screen, press the SHIFT key five times.
7. You should see a command prompt where you can enter the following command to reset the Windows password (see screenshot above):
   net user you_user_name new_password
   If you don’t know your user name, just type net user to list the available user names.
8. You can now log on with the new password.

I recommend that you replace sethc.exe with the copy you stored in the root folder of your system drive in step 3. For this, you have to boot up again with Windows PE or RE because you can’t replace system files while the Windows installation is online. Then you have to enter this command:

copy /y c:\sethc.exe c:\windows\system32\sethc.exe

For instance, while importing data, we mostly encounter the following error:

NOTICE: [8] Memcache::connect() [memcache.connect]: Server localhost (tcp 11211) failed with: Connection refused (111) on line 62 in file sugarCRM/include/utils/external_cache/SugarCache_Memcache.php

WARNING: [2] Memcache::connect() [memcache.connect]: Can’t connect to localhost:11211, Connection refused (111) on line 62 in file sugarCRM/include/utils/external_cache/SugarCache_Memcache.php.

A simple change in the config.php can solve the problem.  You should see $sugar_config = array(…) in the config.php directory.

Now add the following value to the config.php file:

‘external_cache_disabled’ => true,

Don’t forget the comma (,) at the end of the line else you will be facing parsing issues….

This will solve the error/problem and you will be able to import data peacefully.

I often find myself staring at Microsoft SharePoint and wondering how I can do more with it to enable a 21st century law firm; one in which attorneys, clients and staff can easily share ideas, expertise and information across time and distance. How can it be used to reduce costs while expanding the ways in which we collaborate?

In this article I’ll suggest 10 ways you can use SharePoint today in your firm to improve attorney effectiveness, deliver better client service and reduce costs. This is not a "how to" but a "what now" article, written to answer that perennial question: "now what?"

1: REPLACE YOUR DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Just like a "real" DMS, SharePoint can store millions of documents along with associated versions and metadata. It can be configured to enforce retention policies and approval workflows, to allow each practice group to define their own document properties, to enforce those policies and properties centrally, or some combination thereof.

The most controversial issue relating to the use of SharePoint as a DMS has nothing to do with features or functionality, but rather with the fact that it stores documents in an SQL database as opposed to individual files on disk like leading legal DMS vendors such as OpenText and Interwoven. Storing documents in the database leads to two concerns:

1. Many believe that documents stored in SQL Server are more likely to become corrupt than the same document stored as a file on a disk drive. This concern stems from problems with Binary Large Object (BLOB) storage in early SQL databases during the 1980s and 90s. Old fears die hard;

2. The other concern relates to the price and performance of storing unstructured BLOB content on (relatively) expensive disk subsystems used by database servers, as well as the additional performance overhead of retrieving BLOB content through a database server.

Because of these concerns, Microsoft enabled externalized document storage, using what they refer to as an "External BLOB Store" provider. This specification was published in 2007 with limited fanfare and the caveat that EBS may be superseded when SharePoint 2010 ships, with its support for the SQL 2008 "FileStream" column attribute. To date, I’m aware of only one vendor, BlueThread Technologies, which is shipping a commercial EBS provider (named Storage Point). To make things even more interesting, SQL 2008 supports what’s called "Remote BLOB Storage)." And there is quite a bit of confusion as to whether EBS or RBS should be used to externalize SharePoint document content.

The basic story is that the EBS is supported by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and runs on a SharePoint Web front-end server, while RBS is only a SQL 2008 feature and runs on the SQL Server. And it’s unclear whether either will be supported in SharePoint 2010.

Although the question of BLOB storage is an important one, there is no reason that native SharePoint cannot be used to store millions of documents given adequate server and backup planning, thus making SharePoint a viable DMS candidate for small to midsize law firms.

2. AUTOMATE NEW BUSINESS INTAKE

Many firms still use paper forms or Microsoft Word documents to manage conflict checks and new client-matter requests. These are routed to various parties (risk management, requesting attorney, new business committee, etc.) throughout the firm via interoffice mail or e-mail.

Eventually, after all approvals are received, the information on these forms is re-entered into the accounting system so that work can be tracked and the client can be billed. There’s a better alternative.

SharePoint comes with a simple forms approval routing workflow, which allows the creation of a basic automated new business intake workflow without programming. More complex workflows may be built using either SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Visual Studio.

Given that not all attorneys will embrace a paperless new business intake system, you can still implement one by having secretaries enter new business requests into SharePoint and then print copies for those attorneys who prefer paper. While the up-front savings in terms of human labor in such instances may be negligible, the benefit to the firm of having a single central repository of all new business data and approvals will be significant.

3. SEARCH ACROSS ALL YOUR SYSTEMS

Microsoft recognizes that the need for enterprise search is universal, as well as a huge market, and has built a search engine to address it. That search engine is the basis for search in Windows SharePoint Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and the Search Server 2008. The underlying search technology is the same in all, but not all products expose the same level of functionality. For example, WSS (Microsoft’s free portal offering) only allows searching within SharePoint site collections, whereas MOSS and Search Server can search across entire SharePoint farms as well as non-SharePoint Web sites. MOSS also allows you to search Exchange public folders, file shares and databases using the Business Data Catalog.

Add to this the capabilities made available by add-on vendors such as BA-Insight or XMLaw and you have a platform that can bring together content from your intranet, extranet, DMS, e-mail, accounting and other line-of-business systems, allowing your users a one-stop search experience.

And with just a bit of elbow grease you can customize the search experience through the use of XML data and XML style sheets or through programming via the SharePoint object model to do any of the following:

• display documents for a given client/matter;

• use search results as a way to access records in a database; and

• customize the search results to show different information, or provide different links, depending on the source of the result.

The bottom line is that SharePoint’s search capability can be used as-is or customized extensively. Out-of-the-box it provides a basic search experience which works well for searching your intranet, extranet and Exchange public folders. With customization, and possibly some add-on products, it can provide a true "enterprise" search environment at a fraction of the cost of products such as Recommind or Autonomy.

4. ENCOURAGE ‘COMMUNITIES OF INTEREST’ USING ‘MY SITES’

Law firm intranets are typically organized around categories such as firm, practice group, department and client matters, which represent the various communities implicit within the structure of the firm.

There are many other communities, however, that exist outside of the traditional firm structure. Some may be permanent, others temporary. Examples might include: summer associates, green technology, volunteers or paralegals. Your firm can benefit from supporting these communities by allowing members to more easily find and interact with each other, even though such communities may not be codified in the accounting or personnel systems, or found on the firm’s organization chart.

Using SharePoint you can represent these communities, and make their members easy to find, by adding a multivalued "communities of interest" field to the profile database in MOSS. You may limit entries in this field to a controlled list, or allow individuals to enter any value(s) they wish. When your users visit a profile page each community will be displayed as a hyperlink that, when clicked, will execute a search returning all firm employees belonging to that community.

5. CREATE A FIRMWIDE CALENDAR

Here’s an easy way to give everyone in your firm a single place to go to find all events of interest. SharePoint’s calendar list (also called an "events" list) provides all the basics you’d find in Outlook or similar calendars. You also have the ability to create filtered and sorted views of calendar items, and to hide entries based on user permissions. And because SharePoint calendars are Web-based, users don’t need any special software to read or update them.

Another nice feature of SharePoint calendars, as with any type of SharePoint list, is the ability to subscribe to e-mail alerts when new items are added, or existing items changed. This allows users to receive an e-mail when, for example, your litigation practice group schedules a new lunchtime seminar.

SharePoint calendars can also be linked to Microsoft Outlook 2007 so that you can view and edit them in Outlook rather than a browser. This provides some intriguing possibilities when combined with Outlook’s ability to display multiple calendars in a single consolidated view.

6. CREATE A PRACTICE GROUP WIKI

The word "wiki" is a shortened version of the Hawaiian word "wikiwiki" meaning quick. In many respects a wiki represents a return to the original goal of the World Wide Web, which was to give authors (originally scientists) a quick and easy way to share and cross -reference research.

Law firms have a clear need to document and share "best practices" related to various areas of law, use of standard forms, information about jurisdictions and courts, client-specific procedures and the like. Wikis offer an excellent tool for doing just that.

Of course, wikis aren’t the only method for creating such resources, but they offer several advantages, including:

• busy attorneys can master the use of a wiki in a few minutes;

• wikis have a built-in history of changes, so that users can see who made what changes to a page; and

• as with all SharePoint lists, users can receive an e-mail alert when wiki pages are updated or edited.

One of the most common concerns attorneys have about wikis is the apparent lack of editorial controls. The question is: If anyone can make a change to a page, how does one determine that the information it contains is correct? This is a valid concern which can be addressed in a variety of ways. As mentioned earlier, users can direct SharePoint to send an e-mail any time a wiki page is created or edited. Thus reviewers can examine the new or edited content to determine correctness. If more control is required, the wiki can be set to require approval of new or edited content prior to it being made generally available. Finally, individual pages or the entire wiki can be locked for editing by a select group of authors. With all these options for governance, it should be possible to find the right balance between community authorship and editorial control at your firm.

7. COLLABORATE WITH CLIENTS USING EXTRANETS

An extranet is simply a collection of SharePoint sites that is available to both your firm’s personnel and authorized clients. In law firms, extranets are typically segmented by client and matter, and permissions are assigned such that clients and other non-firm personnel can only access pages to which they’ve been granted access.

SharePoint extranets provide many advantages, including:

• simple document-sharing between firm, clients and other authorized parties;

• robust security at the site, list or document level;

• the ability to log access to documents (a capability that’s included in MOSS, but which requires some programming in WSS);

• full-text search; and

• support for template-based site provisioning.

Empowering your attorneys, clients and other parties to collaborate via secure extranets can result in significant increases in productivity and reduce the flood of e-mails and the associated risk of confusion over inconsistent copies of documents.

8. MANAGE PROJECTS

Professional project managers will tell you that the most prevalent project management software today is Microsoft Excel!

Applications such as Microsoft Project or Oracle Primavera P6 can manage global projects spanning years and continents, while the majority of projects last a few months and involve fewer than 10 people — most of whom are not professional project managers. For these individuals and their projects, what’s needed is a way to keep track of task assignments and status, and to sort, search and share those tasks with others throughout the firm.

While Excel has the advantage of being a familiar tool, it also has several shortcomings:

• only one person may edit the task list at a time;

• users must have Microsoft Excel installed on their computer; and

• when e-mail is used to share spreadsheets it becomes difficult to know who has the "master" copy.

Using SharePoint to track project tasks addresses the above-noted shortcomings by allowing:

• multiple people to view and edit the task list at the same time;

• Web browser access to task lists; and

• the provision of a single "master" list that all project stakeholders share.

SharePoint ships with two list types that are good candidates for managing projects: "issue tracking" and "task". Both these list types can be customized to add fields such as client-matter number or practice group to allow you to meet your projects’ specific needs.

9. DISPLAY ‘KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS’

Key performance indicators are simply graphical representations of important business measures. The idea is to give decision makers an at-a-glance understanding of how the firm is doing at a point in time.

In MOSS (KPIs aren’t available in WSS) you can base indicators on data stored in a SharePoint list, SQL database, Excel 2007 spreadsheet or parameters that have been entered directly into the KPI list. Regardless of the data source, each KPI requires three pieces of data: the indicator’s current value (e.g., current YTD billings), the target value (e.g., forecasted YTD billings) and a threshold value below or above which you want the KPI to display a warning.

The power of KPIs is that they quickly convey the status of quantitative measures of the firm’s success and alert viewers of the need to dig more deeply when one or more of those measures diverge from its expected range. Of course, you will typically limit visibility of KPIs to authorized individuals (e.g., managing partners or senior management).

10. CREATE A ‘MASHUP’

One of SharePoint’s most powerful features is the ability to pull together documents and information from multiple systems and sources. As the saying goes, "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts."

The key to this is the fact that SharePoint pages are made up of a collection of components called "Web parts," each of which can retrieve and display information from a distinct source. Some of the more useful Web parts for this purpose include:

• Page Viewer: displays a Web page within the Web page, allowing you to create pages that are loose collections of many separate Web applications;

• XML: formats XML (i.e., structured data returned by another Web page) using XSLT. Many computer systems (including the InterAction CRM system common to many law firms) will return data in XML format;

• RSS: displays an "RSS feed" on the Web page. Free RSS feeds are available from sources such as Google, Yahoo or The New York Times. Legal-specific feeds from sources such as LexisNexis are available for a fee. These can typically be filtered based on a topic, date range, client name or other criteria to display a targeted list of articles on your portal;

• BDC: displays data from any source for which you’ve defined (or purchased) a BDC schema. Such systems could include accounting, CRM, new business systems or any other relational database that you’d like to make available to your portal users. The BDC can also query Web services which conform to its specifications, allowing you to integrate nontraditional data sources as well;

• Excel: MOSS ships with a feature called "Excel Services" which allows you to display an interactive version of an Excel spreadsheet on a Web page. You can use this to make commonly used Excel calculations and models available to all your portal users.

These are just a few of the Web parts that you can use to integrate multiple systems through SharePoint. Many vendors, such as Interwoven, Aderant, OpenText and Elite, offer Web parts to integrate their products’ data as well. In addition, third-party vendors such as Handshake, SeeUnity and XMLaw provide general-purpose Web parts for integrating common legal applications’ data and documents.

CONCLUSION

So there you have it. Ten ways you can use SharePoint to improve collaboration, streamline processes, communicate more effectively with your clients and help your attorneys and colleagues find the information and documents they need more easily and quickly.

These are real techniques used at real firms such as yours. Now that you’re armed with these actionable ideas, it’s time to get to work.

Let the fun begin!

1 — Learn how to manage risks and compliance.

Managing business risk and achieving regulatory compliance are among the greatest challenges that enterprises face. There is increasing pressure to comply with evolving legislation, mandates, standards and regulations designed to protect against an array of risks that span different industries, disciplines, governments and geographies.

Yet in many organizations, compliance and risk management have been treated as silos of responsibility, supported by reactive point solutions that can introduce new cost burdens and complexity. Constant fire drills, regulatory pressure, organizational anxiety and even outright confusion are not uncommon. Despite large investments in this area executives believe their organizations have inadequately addressed the processes and systems dealing with risk, compliance and security.

Top challenges in risk management are

• Prioritizing risks
• Defining control objectives and control activities
• Measuring potential risks and control efficiency
• Constantly being in reactive mode when dealing with risk

2 — Become “risk adept” rather than “risk-averse.”

Take a results-oriented, execution-driven approach to become “risk-adept” rather than “risk-averse.”

A best-leading-industry approach has these elements:

• Use strategies and processes that drive value (access, execute, monitor, remediate and report)
• Establish effective processes integrated with automated workflows to make sure nothing important is skipped
• Maintain a library of tested risk indicators and control activities
• Remain current with new and emerging risk factors and compliance issues
• Leverage insights about leading practices from many industries

The approach should be designed to help your organization better identify, understand and manage the dynamic interrelationships between risk and compliance and incorporate those disciplines into daily business activities.

Build up a global, unified risk and compliance framework that can be vertically tailored to your specific needs, allowing your organization to assert more control over complex and ever-changing risk and compliance dynamics. With this approach, you can achieve greater levels of compliance and better manage risk at less cost with degrees of efficiency and precision not possible with a traditional siloed approach.

3 — EGRC comprises strategy, business process and technology.

An enterprise wide governance, risk and compliance implementation (EGRC) comprises strategy, business process and technology to give your organization an enterprise-scale platform configurable to address a host of regulatory requirements, industry standards and controls and internal policies. It should help managers and auditors assess the potential effect of threats and vulnerabilities on compliance—including the risk of noncompliance itself—by covering:

• Regulatory compliance: providing a comprehensive framework for managing Sarbanes-Oxley, Japanese Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, OMB Circular A-123 and other compliance initiatives.
• Internal policies and procedures: configuring the solution to your organization’s specific needs.
• Enterprise risk management:  assessing and managing business risks using key risk indicators that measure risk likelihood and effect, then translates those effects into control objectives and monitors effectiveness through compliance.

For companies based in the United States, the EGRC solution should align with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Auditing Standard No. 5, which encourages a risk-based approach to compliance under Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404. It gives public companies greater flexibility to focus compliance initiatives on areas that present the greatest degree of risk, such as financial-closing processes or fraud-management controls, rather than on myriad Sarbanes-Oxley-based controls without regard to the importance to their business.

4 — EGRC is aware of end users needs.

Based on our experience the primary end user wants to…

• Store, access, search, track and manage risk and compliance data, e.g. by a survey functionality that helps users in making a realistic assessment of their current state and also chart out the course of action for their risk or compliance program.
• Automate workflow processes and information routing.
• Prioritize, assess and manage remediation of control deficiencies e.g. by entering Risk, KRI and Compliance data into libraries or link attributes through a hierarchy.
• Collaborate atop a familiar standards-based platform.
• Monitor risk and compliance with metrics, alerts and analytics e.g. by reviewing status of risk and compliance metrics.

5 — SharePoint offers features and capabilities for EGRC.

Why? Here are some reasons:

• Rapidly acceptable. The familiar Microsoft “look and feel” increases the speed of adoption and reduces users’ resistance to change, while implementing standard libraries for COSO, CoBIT, ISO and ITL
• Configurable versus customizable. Taking advantage of the extensive and flexible software functionality of Microsoft’s applications enables business requirements to be met through configuration instead of the development of custom code. Best examples: are versioning, audit logging, multistage workflow, survey, search, reporting and dashboard functions.
• Practical and cost-efficient. Most organizations have already standardized on Microsoft and have most of the necessary applications to run the solution, thereby reducing acquisition costs and freeing up resources for more value-added activities

6 — Tips for implementing an EGRC platform.

In order to adequately address ongoing business risk and compliance, organizations need a transparent view of their enterprise. A leading-edge approach has these elements:

• Use strategies, processes and technologies to proactively manage risk and compliance enterprise wide.
• Use automated workflows to increase efficiency and reliability.
• Provide a comprehensive enterprise risk and compliance management framework.
• Build a library of identifiable risk indicators and control activities.
• Stay current with new and emerging risk factors and compliance issues.
• Leverage insights about leading practices from many industries.
• Create a “one size fits one” risk-based compliance solution that will drive business value and reduce costs and complexities.

7 — Realize the benefits of integrated risk and compliance management.

By introducing an EGRC solution you will realize the following benefits:

• Reduce costs
• Reduce audit fees, fines and penalties through integrated systems, controls, processes and audit trails
• Save internal costs and gain efficiency by redeploying resources from manual and duplicative controls
• Reduce Complexity
• Replace silos of risk and compliance activities with an overarching, integrated view
• Reduce risk and compliance complexity by integrating and de-conflicting risk requirements
• Increase Business Value
• Align a comprehensive risk strategy with specific execution controls through transparent processes and technology
• Make better, informed decisions with forward visibility into risk and compliance through data transparency and real-time reporting
• Improve risk and compliance management with a solid governance structure

8 — What you need is a Governance Model.

We believe there are 4 key competencies in a governance model: 1) Guiding/Strategizing, 2) Designing/Coordinating, 3) Executing and 4) Monitoring.

• A Steering Committee with executive sponsors will guide the company by defining a policy for EGRC and aligning it with the Information Management policy.
• Project teams will initially design and coordinate processes to enable each business to consistently fulfill their execution obligations for EGRC; and Working Groups will monitor these for continuous improvement.
• Each business will execute and enforce the policies and processes for EGRC.
• Internal Audit will audit and monitor adherence to the policies and processes as part of routine audits of EGRC.

You might also be interested in the following posts:

• 8 things you need to know about SharePoint governance
• 8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system
• 8 things to consider when implementing SharePoint with another ECM engine
• 8 ways to use SharePoint for social computing
• 8 more things you need to know about SharePoint
• 8 reasons you should consider automatic classification and metadata tagging in SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint has the flexibility to be an organization’s intranet, content management system, knowledge management system, and business process automation platform. No other system can wear so many hats and give its users so many available features and functionality.

Take for example, SharePoint’s position in the enterprise content management (ECM) market. It is extremely successful because its cost, usability and powerful out-of-the-box functionality are at the top of the list compared to the competition.

For example, an organization can implement a more traditional ECM application and it may cost $3 million to $4 million, or it can choose a powerful SharePoint solution for approximately $700,000 to $1 million. This price difference generates a powerful business case in today’s economic environment.

Another factor is many companies find other document management systems to be extremely difficult to customize when compared to SharePoint’s flexible Web-based interface. Also, SharePoint has a powerful workflow platform that allows organizations to automate their business processes all within a single SharePoint environment.

Given these market advantages, SharePoint implementations are growing quickly in enterprises – and this rapid growth presents challenges to IT organizations. At the top of the challenges they face are governance of the environment, and provisioning of sites and content.

It is extremely important to implement SharePoint right the first time because if you do not, you may spend twice as much to correct your mistakes after the fact.

Organizations should look to utilize proven governance models and automated site provisioning solutions to ensure they implement SharePoint right the first time.

The keys to include in an implementation approach are:

• Develop a SharePoint Governance Guide for your organization.
• Develop best practices, top-level navigation.
• Implement a Site Provisioning Process for all Sites and Subsites.
• Implement Custom Development Standards.
• Create a SharePoint training plan for your organization.
• Implement a SharePoint communication strategy.
• Create a SharePoint Roadmap for your organization.

Another critical ingredient to SharePoint success is having a strategy for managing paper-based information. Even with SharePoint-driven electronic processes, many times there is still paper involved in the workflow.

Users need to look for document imaging software that is easy to use and administer, otherwise training costs and time expended on IT management will outweigh any potential workflow efficiencies. For example, Nuance’s eCopy Connector for SharePoint utilizes the multifunction printers (MFPs) and document scanners that have already populated the enterprise and are connected into Microsoft environments.

From an IT management perspective, a document imaging application needs to have out-of-the-box capabilities to avoid customization issues and leverage an existing SharePoint investment. You should not have to modify Microsoft SharePoint to add document scanning. And the document imaging software should have zero footprint on the SharePoint Server.

Other IT requirements to consider include:

• Does the document imaging software authenticate against SharePoint to ensure document security and provide an electronic audit trail?
• Can the software support highly customized SharePoint environments?
• Are SharePoint Server modifications automatically reflected at each capture device in real time?

By following the steps outlined, organizations will be on the path to Microsoft SharePoint implementation success.

“Our SharePoint implementation was unsuccessful because management just doesn’t get it! Our CIO decided one day that I’m the SharePoint guru because I’m the Windows system administrator in our company. I was asked to install and deploy SharePoint to our 500 users within three months. This was a year ago and today, as you can imagine, SharePoint is not being fully utilized, users still can’t find what they need and management is questioning why SharePoint is not delivering its’ promise of improved collaboration.” lamented a system administrator after one of my recent talks. Sound familiar?

In a lot of organizations, it’s quite common to see IT getting the blame for poor SharePoint implementation and adoption. However, equally responsible are high-level decision makers who made the decision to roll out SharePoint yet don’t have a clear understanding of the value it brings to the organization.

Here are five reasons why executive SharePoint ignorance is not bliss:

1. SharePoint is more than just a glorified network share

Organizations today primarily utilize SharePoint as a file-sharing repository. In addition, it may have been haphazardly deployed by IT because management told them to. Strategic planning never happened and it’s just another tool that was thrown out there for the enterprise.

In my experience, there is a lack of awareness amongst executives that SharePoint is an enterprise platform. In fact, Microsoft defines SharePoint 2010 as ”the business collaboration platform for the Enterprise and the Web”.

SharePoint is much more than just a document management tool, it can be used for enterprise line of business needs such as: Intranet Portals, Reporting, Business Intelligence, Content Management, Workflow Automation, Records management, Public-facing websites, etc. For more details, read “Empowering Your Organization with SharePoint” whitepaper that showcases various examples on how SharePoint can be leveraged.

More importantly, SharePoint can empower everyone in an organization (mostly non-technical individuals) to deploy software-based solutions without IT intervention. Here’s a video showing how a project manager can benefit from SharePoint:

Deploy Software-Based Solutions Without IT Intervention

2. It’s All About the Benjamins

With tight budgets these days, how organizations spend their money is put under a microscope. That’s why it is critical for any decision maker to be fully aware of the benefits SharePoint can bring to an organization.

It is paramount that a strategic business case is developed to justify why investing in SharePoint can provide quantifiable organizational benefits. Better collaboration is a great benefit, but what does that mean in dollars and cents?

For example, a key area of inefficient collaboration in any organization is the practice of sending meeting invitations with document attachments. Even worse, once the meeting convenes and action items are generated, the typical method of collaboration for completing actions items is still email. Don’t you love it when you are copied on emails with a lot of attachments even if it has nothing to do with you?

If we assess this scenario, apart from IT overhead in storage, bandwidth, support and maintenance, what about business inefficiencies? How much time do people spend daily scouring through their email because they can’t find relevant information? What if you have to subscribe to legal compliance like SOX? Can relevant information be easily audited?

Knowing of this business pain, you can map to how SharePoint can provide a better solution. Out of the box it comes with meeting workspaces that can serve as the repository for meeting related artifacts. Not only would the relevant information be stored in a single location, it is limited to the key individuals involved in the meeting.

This means that when meeting invitations are sent, there’s no need to send document attachments anymore. Information about the meeting can be searched. So if somebody took off and is on vacation, the information we need is not sitting on their email inbox.

The point is, decision makers have to be involved with strategically prioritizing business needs that can be addressed by SharePoint. Apart from investing in the technology (licenses, hardware, etc.), investment in planning, governance and adoption is necessary to be successful.

The last thing you want to do is squander your investment by throwing tools at your users, expect them to find a problem to fix and be able to quantify the benefits for you.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 5 Reasons Why Executive SharePoint Ignorance is Not Bliss.

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