Premise

E-mail is an effective transient communication medium, an asynchronous extension to the instant messaging model. E-mail is not an effective knowledge management solution. SharePoint is Microsoft’s knowledge management product offering for the enterprise. We should use it as such.

This post is written for a Microsoft internal audience, but should apply to any organization using Outlook 2007 and SharePoint on their corporate network. The principles here extend beyond specific tools, however. E-mail clients are about bringing information to one person. Enterprises will embrace tools to extend knowledge management beyond the e-mail silo into more permanent and generally accessible platforms like SharePoint which will enable a new wave of collaboration across enterprises.

Problem

Microsoft employees (and the rest of the corporate world) frequently use e-mail to fill knowledge management gaps.

Recommendation

Microsoft employees, teams and organizations should leverage Sharepoint shared document libraries, Wiki libraries and blogging capabilities to move knowledge management functions out of e-mail and into SharePoint.

Sub-problem

Undoing fifteen years of business habits and culture built around the utility of e-mail is difficult. The inertia is pretty overwhelming.

Solution

Integrate SharePoint knowledge consumption and proliferation with existing e-mail usage patterns and habits.  SharePoint’s RSS feeds combined with Vista’s RSS subsystem and Outlook’s RSS and Search Folder capabilities make that task trivial. Good. Here’s how.

Configure your Outlook client to display RSS items inline with e-mail items. This action is non-destructive and can be backed out. This is important to note as people get nervous when you monkey with their Outlook configuration, which is a big obstacle to the overall goal of moving knowledge management out of e-mail to SharePoint. 

1.       On the File menu, click New, Search Folder

2.       Select Create a custom Search Folder

3.       Click Choose to specify custom criteria

4.       Give the folder a name (I recommend “Inbox with RSS” but any name will do)

5.       Click the Browse button to specify the source folders to include in this search folder

6.       Uncheck Mailbox at the top level of the list

7.       Check Inbox and RSS Feeds

8.       Click OK to accept the search folder customization options

9.       Click OK to create the new search folder

Configure Outlook to open your Inbox with RSS folder as your default mail view. When you start Outlook,  by default, your Inbox is displayed. Use this procedure to instead display your Inbox with RSS folder instead.

1.       On the Tools menu, select Options

2.       On the Other tab, click Advanced Options…

3.       Under General Settings, next to Startup in this folder text box, click Browse

4.       Locate and select the Inbox with RSS folder

5.       Click OK to accept the options

Subscribe to some SharePoint RSS feeds. When you see the Feeds button turn orange in the IE toolbar, you can subscribe to a feed of content at the current URL. There are five types of feeds to seek out:

·         Blogs. Usually the voice of an individual or a team.

·         Wikis. Great for intra- and inter-team collaboration and drafting documents.

·         Document libraries.

·         Calendars.

·         Announcement lists.

That’s great, but which feeds are interesting? An OPML file is a list of RSS subscriptions that can be exported and imported. This is a great mechanism for sharing lists of feeds. Here’s what to do.

1.       Get someone with a good subscription list to export an OPML file for you

2.       Open Internet Explorer (both IE and Outlook share a common feeds list)

3.       On the File menu, select Import and Export to open the Import and Export wizard

4.       Click Next

5.       Click Import Feeds and click Next

6.       Select the OPML file saved locally and click Next

Profit

RSS feeds are like distribution lists. One-to-many communication. Use them to keep in touch with your team and other teams in your workgroup and organization. Keep in touch with other groups that you have no working relationship with.

Problems

There are some limitations and constraints, both technical and cultural, that we must overcome to truly embrace SharePoint as a knowledge management solution.

1.       The Outlook 2007 form used to display RSS feed items does not identify the feed the item is associated with.

2.       The Reply button is disabled when viewing RSS items, but you can forward.

3.       Outlook 2007’s presence integration with Communicator does not work on the RSS item form.

4.       Outlook 2007 does not provide a facility to export or otherwise share Search Folders. Instead of following the steps listed in the Solution section of this document, wouldn’t it be nice to send around a file with a message like, “To get RSS inline with e-mail, double click the attachment to add a new Search Folder to your Outlook folder list.”

5.       There’s a chicken/egg, critical mass component to this culture change. Slow and steady wins the race. This change will take years to take hold. My goal is to get my workgroup to adopt some of these recommendations. That is why this blog entry exists.