The Bamboo Team Blog

New Faces of Bamboo: Introducing Sean Mason

2010-03-17T14:00:00Z

Editor's note: As readers of our 2009 Year in Review series will have likely gathered, Bamboo is currently undergoing rapid growth. Some of our new hires have been with us for a couple of months now, but with new faces appearing in the office seemingly daily in recent weeks, we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the new folks to Bamboo Nation. You should expect to see many of these new faces beginning to appear regularly here in the Team Blog over the course of the year.

What is your role at Bamboo, and what are your goals for the year?

I'm a Sales Engineer here at Bamboo Solutions assisting customers that are on a trial status while testing Bamboo products. One of my many goals for the year is to offer a broad spectrum of technical support to customers and my fellow sales team members.

What's your professional background?

My background stems from 8 years of combined software support between Technical Support and Pre-Sales Support, along with an additional 2 years split between Product Marketing and Product Management. The majority of my previous work experience has been with accounting- and inventory-based software products.

What prompted you to join the Bamboo team?

Bamboo has a strong following and, in recent years, has been growing exponentially year after year. The culture here is very different than what I was used to - I don't see any red tape that hinders processes/projects moving forward. I heard through some former coworkers that Bamboo Solutions is a great company to work for, and they were right. Right from the start, at the interview process I knew this was a completely different kind of company, and one that I wanted to work for.

What are some of your first impressions of working at Bamboo?

My strongest first impression of working at Bamboo is that it is a great environment to work in. The level of knowledge my coworkers have is extensive to say the least. Everyone is helpful and always available to lend a hand when needed. They are always trying to stay ahead of the latest developments in SharePoint integration so there is always something new to learn. Oh, and as you may have read in other "new faces of bamboo" blogs, they keep you well fed here.

With over 60 products to learn, do you feel overwhelmed? What's your strategy for getting up to speed?

Jumping right in is usually the best approach for me. Installing the products in different environments and configuring Web Parts is one strategy I plan to start with. Our Support and Pre-Sales teams have been great in getting me up to speed with the products. 60 plus products can seem daunting, but after some time I hope to be on par with my fellow coworkers.

Other than your deep and abiding love of Web Parts, what interests or hobbies do you enjoy outside of work?

I have a 2-year-old son who keeps me on my toes. I enjoy small-scale farming, goats, chickens and pigs are fun to raise, and provide my family with good quality meat you can't find in the store. I love powerlifting, and train on a regular basis, plus with the extra food I get at work, well, let's just say hopefully someday you might see me in a strongman competition.

Go Bamboo and stay strong!

Summary of the Parts that Make BambooRM™ Whole - part II

2010-03-17T05:05:00Z

Business Requirements in BambooRM

Okay we all know that business requirements are pretty important to a successful project. We also know that requirements' gathering (data and process) is also a vital part of successful project management and application development. In this week's blog I would like to showcase the ease with which BambooRM can be utilized to define the business data and system requirements at the start of a development project and how that will help ensure your project is delivered on time and on budget.

Let's look at how we can use BambooRM business requirements to correctly gather all the needed data for our requested development project. In a previous post, I discussed using the discussion board feature in BambooRM as a way to interact with team members as well as keep project related discussions available and centrally located for your project. In this blog I would like to take the discussion data and move them into a business requirement. In the before mentioned blog, this sample project team has used the discussion board to hash out a request from HQ for an internal corporate portal.

From Discussion Board to Business Requirement

Okay so now let's look at the actual business requirement feature itself. By clicking on the requirements management tab you are brought to the business requirements landing page.

From this page click on the link for...you guessed it, Business Requirements. You'll notice in the above screen shot I have already created three business requirements for our project deployment. Due to the fact that our team utilized the discussion board feature, I was able to quickly and accurately pull the three main business requirements for this project, directly from the discussion board.

For this project, using the project discussion board, we have determined that there are three business requirements needed for this project. They are, Deploy and configure the server infrastructure, Create and configure a shared service provider, and Create site collections and SharePoint sites.

Let's take a look at the data contained in the business requirement, "Deploy and configure the server infrastructure".

The fields for a requirement are as follows, title, description, difficulty, status, risk, owner, priority, estimated total hours, parent reference, and discussion item. There you go; you have a direct link to the determining factor for this requirement. This will help you later on down the road when your PM or customer says, "Why was that considered a requirement in the first place?" You're given the ability to say, "It's in the requirement itself...look at the associated discussion, we talked about this and determined it was a requirement that needed fulfillment". That is but one level of traceability in BambooRM. I don't need to tell you how essential traceability is to successful project management. Also it should be noted that I have only just scratched the surface with regards to traceability within BambooRM. In the upcoming weeks you should be seeing a blog on traceability alone. Another aspect of traceability that I wanted to point out is the versioning feature built into BambooRM. Notice on the screen shot that each requirement gets stamped with current version of this requirement, when it was created and by who, as well as when it was last modified.

In this screen shot you'll notice that I have modified the risk, and est. total hours. Those changes are logged and reflected on that requirement. You can access the requirement versioning by clicking on the versioning history tab on a particular requirement. All your changes are tracked and stored for easy reference

Alerts for changes made to requirements

No problem...Another built in feature is the alerting feature that is standard with WSS. By accessing the alert me feature you have the ability to assign alerts for yourself or your team. Clicking on the alert me feature brings you to the alert configuration page for a particular requirement.

It's on this page that you can configure the alerts title (or accept the default title which would be the requirement title) you can determine who will receive the alert, yourself, another team member, or the team as a whole. Also you have the ability to specify whether to filter alerts based on specific criteria; if anything changes, if someone else changes an item, if someone else changes an item created by me, and if someone else changes an item last modified by me ... it's not as iffy as it sounds...zinger!!! Excuse my digression; the last configuration aspect of the alerts page is when the alerts should be sent; immediately, a daily summary or a weekly summary.

Work flow for requirements

Another thing I want to highlight is the workflow capability behind BambooRM requirements. With BambooRM you have the ability to set up a review workflow for a requirement that you determine a team member needs to review. By clicking on the workflow button, on the particular requirement you want workflow to be on, you are brought to the workflow configuration page.

On this page you simply click on the review workflow link, which then brings you to the review workflow page, it's here where you set up who is going to receive the review workflow and include a message for that team member.

Once you do that an email is generated that informs the user that he or she has been assigned a task related to a particular requirement. In this case it's to confirm that there are no planned upgrades for WSS in the near future and if there are make sure to spec out the hardware to accommodate our eventual migration to the newest version.

We can go back to the project site and see that automatically the task is created for the team member. The team member is required to check on the latest version vs. any upcoming new versions.

Here is a sample of the email generated by the workflow….

The user needs to click on the Edit the task to mark the task as complete….

The respondent has indicated that this task is now completed...Well then, what's the difference with workflow in BambooRM and just sending an email to your team member. I know...I know one of my major points with regards to potential problems for projects is lost or useless communication via email. In my own defense...even though BambooRM workflow is actually using email to notify the team member that a task has been created in connection with their project site, the difference between "just email" and a BambooRM requirements workflow is the fact that its recorder and stored within BambooRM and your particular project site. It's also available for all team members to review anytime from anywhere. No longer is it stored in an individual team members email account, personal folder, or desktop, file share.

On the onset the requirements in BambooRM seems a little simple. And in my mind that's how they how it should be. Good requirements should be free of implementation specifics (state what, not how), they should be accurately stated in few words, and they should support the stated business, system and project adjective. With BambooRM you get that and a whole lot more!

Stay tuned for my next blog when I go over functional requirements in BambooRM and how they can be associated with parent requirements and functional groups.

New Faces of Bamboo: Introducing Katie Packard

2010-03-16T16:30:00Z

What is your role at Bamboo, and what are your goals for the year?

I'm the technical writer for the Product Management team's tools and technologies group. My goals for the year—other than the obvious ones of learning SharePoint and the ins and outs of Bamboo's products—include regularly contributing to the Team Blog and writing helpful, informative KBs (knowledge-based articles). Oh, and impressing my manager so much that he installs a Dunkin' Donuts coffee bar in the kitchen just for me.

What's your professional background?

I just spent two years working at a military/IT magazine, where I did a little bit of everything: writing, editing, training, blogging, content management, social media strategy, you name it. I have experience with e-newsletters and writing about a range of technical subjects, and I also try to bring my writing and editing skills into the volunteering that I do. I wrote my graduate thesis on plain language and usability and readability theories, so I try to incorporate those principles into whatever I'm working on. Lastly, I'm a dedicated member of the Grammar Police. I am strongly against the serial comma.

What prompted you to join the Bamboo team?

I have long wanted to learn SharePoint and to work in the software industry, and with the benefit of unlimited Dr Pepper, Bamboo seemed like the perfect next step for me professionally.

What are some of your first impressions of working at Bamboo?

Everyone is genuinely excited about and proud of Bamboo's products. That enthusiasm is contagious.

With over 60 products to learn, do you feel overwhelmed? What's your strategy for getting up to speed?

In a different corporate culture, I might feel overwhelmed, but everyone here is so friendly and helpful—and I drink a lot of coffee to keep me focused. I'm taking an online Mindsharp training course in SharePoint right now, and I've been spending a lot of time reviewing the documentation that is already available to absorb as much as I can. And I'm attending meetings, lots of meetings. This past week may have set a record for the number of meetings I've attended, but they're all informative, so I'm not complaining.

Other than your deep and abiding love of Web Parts, what interests or hobbies do you enjoy outside of work?

I volunteer for the local SPCA. I love to read. I drink a lot of coffee and Dr Pepper. I'm addicted to Netflix, which I use to get my fix of 90s-era Steven Seagal movies—the lamer they are, the more entertaining they are. I'm also addicted to school; I often come across some class that sounds interesting that I wind up taking.

This Week in Bamboo (March 7th, 2010 - March 13th, 2010)

2010-03-16T02:43:00Z

For This Week in Bamboo there were two patches released: Workflow Conductor and Alert Plus Web Part. For Workflow Conductor we fixed the issue where the “Assigned To” field is ready to use on current item of lookup common. Users can now use active directory group added to SharePoint group for Alert Plus Web Part. Also the new feature of Alert Plus Web Part is supported our new product Bamboo Custom Identifier Column. More information on all of the changes can be found below.

SA08 Workflow Conductor (R1.0.21)

Bug Fixed:

Assigned To field is ready to use on current item of lookup common.
Repeat While: Don't work with Compare these data sources.
Compare widget - Show the error message when input the correct number.

Limitations:

Workflow deployment is not working in Window 2003 multiple web front end servers’ farm.
Parallel widget - showing the error status when combining some of widgets.

HW05 Alert Plus Web Part (R2.8.23)

New:

Support Bamboo Custom Identifier Column.

Bugs Fixed:

Creating a copy of the alert from the web part is creating duplicate items in the change list.
Weekly custom scheduler does not behave properly. It was changed to the next day.
Allow users to use active directory group added to SP group.

Save the Date! Bamboo Will Sponsor Microsoft Launch Event for SharePoint 2010 in Washington DC on 5/18

2010-03-15T19:27:00Z

As most of you already know, Microsoft will officially launch SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 on May 12th, 2010.

Actually, this launch is a lot bigger than just SharePoint & Office, we'll also see new versions of Microsoft Project, SQL Server, Visio & Visual Studio. As part of this wave of key product updates, Microsoft will be conducting a series of launch events in Dallas (5/18), Atlanta (5/20), Houston (5/20), San Francisco (5/20), Detroit (5/25), Minneapolis (5/27), Philadelphia (5/27), Seattle (5/27) and Bamboo's hometown Washington, DC on May 18th.

We don't have much in the way of details yet regarding the events themselves. We don't know the venues and we haven't seen an agenda or a program. The one thing we do know as of today, is that Bamboo will be a Gold Sponsor of the event in DC. We just got the official word this afternoon, and we couldn't be more excited.

If you've never been to a Microsoft event, please take our word for it that they know how to throw a party.

We'll post details about the event as soon as we get them. In the meantime, please put a big red circle around Thursday, May 18th on your calendar, and plan to join us in the nation's capital to celebrate the launch of SharePoint 2010!

In the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about the new features and capabilities of the next version of SharePoint, check out our SharePoint 2010 blog, where we are sharing everything we've learned about SharePoint 2010 working with Microsoft over the past year and a half.

If you're already planning your rollout of SharePoint 2010, and want to make sure that Bamboo Web Parts & solutions are part of your deployment, please take a minute to read Wes Bryan's recent post: Bamboo Product Support for SharePoint 2010.

ShareFEST, the SharePoint Conference for Life Sciences is Coming to Philadelphia April 8-9

2010-03-12T19:45:00Z

I noticed in a LinkedIn update earlier this week that our friend and resident expert on SharePoint for Project Management, Dux Raymond Sy would be a speaker at the upcoming ShareFEST Conference in Philadelphia, April 8-9. Somehow this SharePoint conference had previously escaped my notice, but within seconds of visiting the ShareFEST Conference site, I knew that I'd be booking a trip to Philly in early April.

You see, ShareFEST represents a fascinating approach to a SharePoint conference, in that it's geared towards a specific industry: life sciences. As such, scheduled ShareFEST sessions are packed with life sciences industry leaders presenting SharePoint in Use case studies, in addition to a selection of SharePoint luminaries such as Dux, and Friday's keynote speaker Mike Gannotti, who will be presenting on "What SharePoint 2010 brings to Life Sciences." Thursday keynotes will be delivered by Steve Aylward, General Manager, Healthcare & Life Sciences Group at Microsoft, and Matt Walz, Chief Technology Officer at NextDocs.

Such was my immediate enthusiasm for ShareFEST and what it represents that I'm thrilled to announce that in partnership with NextDocs, Bamboo Nation is now an official media sponsor of the ShareFEST Conference. Over the coming weeks, we look forward to bringing you guest blogs from conference speakers and, of course, you can expect extensive coverage of the Conference itself right here on the Bamboo Team Blog. Most importantly, however, if you're a life sciences professional using SharePoint, and you can be anywhere in the world on April 8-9, make it Philadelphia and the ShareFEST Conference.

New Faces of Bamboo: Introducing Anita Colvard

2010-03-10T17:15:00Z

What is your role at Bamboo, and what are your goals for the year?

I am a support engineer, and I'm looking forward to becoming an advocate for Bamboo customers, and to help grow the synergy between Bamboo and her customers.

What's your professional background?

I spent 15 years at AOL - starting in member support, then moving to an internal/customer help desk role for publishing technology. Then I moved to online publishing and finally host systems software engineering. I particularly enjoyed the challenges and ever-changing world of automated newsfeeds, the rewards of front-end publishing and the intricacies of search relevancy and indexing. The primary goal for all of our teams was to make the online experience the best it could be for our customers, whether they were internal teams or the public.

One of my primary goals has always been to make the customer experience the best it can be, whether I'm writing the code or addressing support issues, so I feel I have a lot to offer Bamboo and its customers in that arena.

What prompted you to join the Bamboo team?

Steve Gaitten, formerly a colleague at AOL, and currently Bamboo's Director of Online Operations, kept telling me what a great place Bamboo was. I paid attention.

I loved working at AOL, but I was attracted to Bamboo by the innovative and nimble dynamic, and the friendly and social atmosphere. I also found that, in addition to Steve, some other old friends were now working here, and I was happy to be able to join them again in the workplace.

The more I learned about the company, and the more employees I met, the more I wanted to work at Bamboo.

What are some of your first impressions of working at Bamboo?

"Oh my! Look at all that food! An espresso machine!!!"

Even more importantly, what a friendly and hard-working group of people.

With over 60 products to learn, do you feel overwhelmed? What's your strategy for getting up to speed?

Overwhelmed? Not exactly the term I'd use. I see this as a challenge, and welcome the opportunity to strengthen and grow my knowledge and abilities.

I've already helped setup my first SharePoint server, and am installing and utilizing Bamboo Web Parts. I've been loaned good reading material on SharePoint and Bamboo products, and am writing a daily internal wiki with notes, observations, links and impressions.

I find that writing as I learn helps me retain the information, and documenting that learning in a wiki makes the data retrievable for future needs.

Other than your deep and abiding love of Web Parts, what interests or hobbies do you enjoy outside of work?

I'm a devoted gardener and, I'm told, a pretty good naturalist. I'm particularly interested in native & medicinal plants, herbs, and heirloom vegetables and fruits. I also plant with an eye to attracting birds and butterflies.

My cats and I enjoy bird watching. Steve Gaitten and I discuss the finer points of plant cultivation and propagation, and have managed to swap plant starts now and again.

I've already talked about the benefits of raised beds and solarizing the soil to a co-worker who wants to start her own garden.

I attend nature and birding walks with a local conservation group, and enjoy digital SLR photography.

With an avocation for arts and crafts, I am setting up work space at home for wheel thrown pottery, ceramic tiles, fabric arts (silk painting and dyeing, tie dyed clothing), and just recently started weaving. I occasionally dabble in watercolor painting. When time permits, I print, mat and frame my own photographs.

I'm also a certified SCUBA diver, and was thrilled to switch from film to digital underwater photography.

This Week in Bamboo (February 28th, 2010 - March 6th, 2010)

2010-03-09T20:52:00Z

Do you want to know what's new in Bamboo this week? Check out our storefront for new product, Bamboo Custom Identifier, with 30 day free trial download. The new Bamboo Custom Identifier provides users with a method to customize the format of auto-generated values and allows users to manually enter unique values. And much more, see Product Release Announcement Blog for more details. We also released some fixes for Calendar Plus Web Part and List Rotator Web Part this week. List of bugs fixed can be found below.

HW41H Bamboo Custom Identifier (R1.0)

Initial Release

Limitations:

Other Bamboo products have not provided 100% support for Customer Identifier columns yet. They will be in subsequent patch updates of each product.

Known Issues: None

HW20 Calendar Plus (R3.4.23)

Bugs Fixed:

The word "More..." in month view isn't translated to German.
The text of the legend on the UI is different than the text of the legend on the print window when using custom CSS.
Missing items in holiday list.
Cannot change the font or the font size when using None Skin.

HW21 List Rotator (R2.5.24)

Bug Fixed:

The web part shows default style after configuring Custom CSS for Select Style option.

SharePoint 2010 Bamboo Product FAQ

2010-03-08T16:43:00Z

Welcome to our Bamboo Product FAQ for SharePoint 2010. For an overview of Bamboo's plan for providing SharePoint 2010 support, please read the post, Bamboo Product Support for SharePoint 2010. This post attemps to dive into a little more detail by providing answers to some common questions. If you have specific questions that are not answered here, then please submit a comment below or contact our Sales team to get the answers you need.

1. Will all your products work with SharePoint 2010?

Yes, save for a few exceptions, we will provide SharePoint 2010 compatible versions of all of our active products as soon as possible after the release of SharePoint 2010.

2. What will it cost to upgrade?

Customers that hold licenses for current versions of products (or have purchased them since November 2009) will be permitted to move their existing licenses to the new platform without charge. Customers with existing premium support contracts are included in this group.

3. What products will you not be supporting on SharePoint 2010?

We will not be moving four of our products to the new platform. This includes HW01 List Integrity, HW02 SharePoint Desktop Explorer, HW15 Form AutoSave and the PB02 Job Requisition and Interview Management template extension. The latter three are not being carried over due to a general lack of interest in these products which makes continued investment in them unsustainable. Customers that own those products will still be able to continue to use them on the existing platform, but we will not be porting them to the new version of SharePoint. The products contained as part of PB02 (HW05, HW11A, HW18, HW21, and HW31) will be converted, but the site template will not. HW01 List Integrity is not being brought to the new platform due to improvements in SharePoint that include the same functionality offered by this product. We will provide upgrade instructions to help customers migrate their existing solutions to use the new SP2010 capabilities. Existing support contracts for all these products will continue to be honored.

4. How long will you support the existing versions of SharePoint?

We will continue to support our products (through both the Bamboo Support team and by product updates/fixes) on the WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 platform well into the foreseeable future. We expect that many of our customers will remain on the existing SharePoint platform for quite some time, and we plan to support them as long as possible. Microsoft has terminated mainstream support for the older WSS 2.0/SPS 2003 platform. In September of 2010, we will no longer be providing any updates or support for our products running on that platform.

5. I own the Ultimate Suite. It contains three of the products you will not be supporting on SharePoint 2010. Since I’ve already paid for it, how are you going to make it up to me?

Ultimate Suite customers with current support contracts will continue to see product additions to the Suite throughout the year. We plan to hold the renewal price for the Ultimate Suite at its current level and have 6 new products specifically targeted for inclusion into the Ultimate Suite to balance the change.

6. When will product “x” be ready?

Our current engineering schedule is to make all PM Suite products available on SharePoint 2010 within 60 days of the May 12th SharePoint release date. The remaining products will be made available within the 90-day window. Most products will be made available sooner than these dates, but we have decided to quote our worst-case timeframe so that customers can set their SharePoint 2010 deployment schedules with confidence. A complete listing of the SharePoint 2010 release schedule will be made available on our website, so as dates firm up they will be communicated there.

7. Can I get beta copies of the SharePoint 2010 versions of my components?

We will make beta releases of PM Central, and subsequently all the components that are part of PM Central, available in Bamboo Labs in early April. These are the only SharePoint 2010 Bamboo products we will offer for beta release. This should allow customers to validate a majority of their Bamboo products on SharePoint 2010 prior to the actual SP2010 release date.

8. When Bamboo releases a new product or upgrades an existing one, how long will I have to wait until the SharePoint 2010 version is ready?

Once MS releases SharePoint 2010, all ensuing releases of our products will include two builds. One for WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 and one for WSS 4.0 /MSS 2010. License keys will not be interchangeable between the two platforms so customers will need to purchase the correct version of the product at Storefront checkout. Bamboo will provide customers with a simple method to exchange their existing keys for new ones and will allow a 60-day grace period where customers can run both versions simultaneously.

9. What form will your updates for SharePoint 2010 take?

See #11 below.

10. Do you have any specific product plans for SP 2010?

See #11 below.

11. What new products are you planning to develop for 2010?

Our initial efforts will focus on porting our existing products to the new platform as quickly as possible. The second round of updates will look to include features that will add additional value to the new platform. These changes may exploit new SP 2010 capabilities or just fill functional gaps that still exist in SharePoint. Finally, we will look for opportunities to introduce new products that improve the SharePoint platform. We currently have a few product ideas on the drawing board, but they are in the early planning stages and we are not able to share them at this time.

12. Will Bamboo have products to assist customers to migrate to SP 2010?

Yes. List Bulk Import is scheduled for release concurrently with the SharePoint 2010 release, and a new product (Bamboo Data Migration) will be available in June.

13. Doesn’t the new version of SharePoint provide the same capabilities as Cross-List? Why are you still selling it?

Yes, it does. We have decided to continue investing in the Cross-List Web Part as an active product for a number of reasons. Cross-List has been deployed by thousands of customers, and in most cases it will be easier for them to upgrade to a SharePoint 2010-compatible version of our Web Part rather than migrate their solution to use native SharePoint functions. In addition, we plan on improving Cross-List with additional capabilities that will provide value above and beyond that which is available in SharePoint 2010.

Bamboo Product Support for SharePoint 2010

2010-03-08T16:28:00Z

Microsoft has officially announced a release date of May 12th for SharePoint 2010. Many who haven’t yet spent time with the beta release are suddenly planning to take a hard look at the new version of SharePoint. They are, or will soon be, discovering what is to be a strong investment from Microsoft in the SharePoint franchise. Many of our customers have shared with us their adoption plans for 2010 and, as one might expect, they are extremely varied. Some will adopt right away, while others are planning for near term deployments to their staging and test environments. Many are waiting until the latter half of this year, while others have no plans at all. Whatever your plans for 2010, the purpose of this blog is to let you know when your Bamboo products will be ready for SharePoint 2010.

Before we discuss the product release timeline, let’s cover the answers to a few commonly asked questions. The one we receive most often is, “If I make a purchase now, will I be able to upgrade to SharePoint 2010?” The answer is, “Yes, and for free!” All customers who hold current versions of any of our products will receive free upgrades to the 2010 platform. Furthermore, we are extending this offer to any customer that has purchased Bamboo software since November of 2009. The second most popular question we are fielding is, “Will all of your products support SharePoint 2010?” Outside of a few isolated exceptions, the answer is yes, and this support will come in the form of free software updates. The few products that we have decided not to port to the new platform are detailed in our SharePoint 2010 Bamboo Product FAQ. This includes two older products that were designed for WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003, and one with functionality that will be covered by the SharePoint 2010 platform out-of-the-box. In the latter case, we will be providing our customers with solution migration assistance. Why no ported version? The simple answer is that it just wasn’t in the best interests of our customers to keep them tied to what would amount to a bolt-on third-party solution when they are much better served by adopting the new SharePoint 2010 features. Now when was the last time you got honesty like that from a vendor?

One of the big issues we wrestled with as a product team was how to provide 2010-compatible solutions for our customers as near as possible to the Microsoft release date without compromising our typical product improvement cycle by placing releases into a virtual holding pattern. As you might imagine, this is not easily accomplished with a portfolio of close to 60 products. The plan we decided on calls for a staged rollout of product support for 2010. The first phase will involve a release of PM Central and 16 of our best selling Web Parts to Bamboo Labs. This will occur in early April and is intended to allow customers that are planning a quick adoption of SharePoint 2010 to begin testing their Bamboo products. These products will be the only ones we release in beta prior to the general SharePoint 2010 release date.

Once SharePoint 2010 is released in May, all new releases of Bamboo software will come in two versions; one supporting SharePoint 2010 and the other SharePoint 2007 (WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007). This will be the case whether the releases are new products or are just point releases. Web Parts will be re-released for SharePoint 2010 as they are made ready for the new platform. This second phase of support for SharePoint 2010 will conclude no later than 60 days after the release of 2010, and will include Workflow Conductor, PM Central, and all products in the Product Management Suite. The final stage of our deployment will consist of all remaining Bamboo products. This will include any remaining components of the SharePoint Administration Suite and Ultimate Suite. Although the vast majority of products will be offered for SharePoint 2010 much sooner, you can be sure that the complete set of Bamboo products will be available within 90 days of the release of SharePoint 2010.

Bamboo looks forward to standing behind you as you move to SharePoint 2010. As part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program for Office/SharePoint 2010, we have been working with the new version of SharePoint for close to a year. Our team is ready to help offer you guidance, support, and, of course, product whenever you choose to move to SharePoint 2010. We look forward to working with you in what looks to be a great step forward for SharePoint. For more detailed information regarding Bamboo’s plans for SharePoint 2010, please read the SharePoint 2010 Bamboo Product FAQ.

Bamboo Solutions to Offer Workshops on Leveraging Microsoft SharePoint for Project Management & Workflow

2010-03-08T13:00:00Z

Learn how to harness SharePoint to manage projects, tasks and business processes

As the leading provider of components, technologies and applications for SharePoint, Bamboo® Solutions is excited to offer half-day, hands-on workshops to help users successfully manage projects and business processes within Microsoft® SharePoint®. Workshops are currently offered in Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington DC, Chicago and Atlanta.

Each half-day session includes an instructor led, hands-on curriculum. Each attendee receives access to their own product sandbox for a full 30 days. Workshop materials as well as breakfast or lunch are included. Registration fee for each half-day session is only $99. For more information, or to register online, visit www.bamboosolutions.com. Space is limited.

Two workshop courses are offered, based on Bamboo's flagship products:

Manage Projects in SharePoint (Project Management Central™) - Maximize productivity with an easy to use product designed to work that way you do. PM Central provides a centralized location to track and monitor projects so you can ensure all your mission critical business objectives are being met. Learn how to:

Jump start projects with pre-built application templates.
Control schedules and prevent schedule variances to ensure successful schedule delivery
Proactively plan task allocation - estimate, analyze and track all project costs
Create real time dashboards with visual project status indicators.
Manage project portfolios with hierarchical and top level aggregated views.

Manage Business Processes in SharePoint (Workflow Conductor™) - Workflow Conductor for SharePoint empowers users to automate their business processes, quickly and without the need for coding. Learn how to:

Automate business processes by creating workflows using an easy to use drag and drop workflow designer.
Make automating business process even faster by utilizing workflow templates.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Decision makers, project managers, IT administrators, consultants and anyone who is responsible for the implementation of SharePoint. While no previous SharePoint experience is required, a general familiarity with the SharePoint platform is recommended.

WHERE/WHEN:

Two sessions are offered per day at each location:

Boston, MA - Microtek, 25 Burlington Mall Rd., 2nd Floor, Burlington, MA 01803

Monday and Tuesday, April 12 and 13, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

New York City, NY - Learning Tree International, One New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004

Thursday and Friday, April 15 and 16, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

San Francisco, CA - Microtek, 333 Bush Street, Suite 1200, San Francisco, CA 94104-2857

Monday and Tuesday, May 3 and 4, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Dallas, TX - Microtek, 5430 Lyndon B Johnson Freeway, Suite 300, Three Lincoln Centre, Dallas, TX 75240-2601

Thursday and Friday, May 6 and 7, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Washington DC - Microtek, 1101 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 300 (At "L" Street), Washington, DC 20005-3535

Thursday and Friday, June 3 and 4, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Chicago, IL - Learning Tree International, 1501 Woodfield Road, Suite 105, North Schaumburg, IL 60173

Monday and Tuesday, June 21 and 22, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Atlanta, GA - Learning Tree International, 1050 Crown Pointe Parkway, Atlanta, GA 30338

Wednesday and Thursday, June 23 and 24, 2010
8:30 am - 11:30 am
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Take SharePoint Item Identification to the Next Level with the Custom Identifier Column

2010-03-05T15:48:00Z

Are you bored with the ID column provided by SharePoint? Do you want a more flexible identification tool for your SharePoint items? Do you want to include information other than a simple incrementing number? Well, Bamboo Solutions has the solution for you!

Introducing the Bamboo Custom Identifier custom column! Use this column to provide a unique identifier for your tickets in a help desk system, product identifiers, or identifying your customers. Moving a hardcopy file system to SharePoint and don't want to lose your company's numbering system? The Bamboo Custom Identifier is here to help! With the Bamboo Custom Identifier, you can build the format of an auto-generated ID (That's right! No user entry is required), including variables such as:

Text - A static value that will not change, for example, if you want to identify help desk tickets, you might want to include HD in the front of the identifier.
Date/Time - Maybe you want to identify your helpdesk tickets with the date and time the ticket was opened?
Existing Column Value - You can also include a secondary column value from the same items in the ID.
Site and List Name - Include where the item resides in the portal by using the Site Name and List Name options in your ID.
Auto Incremented Number - Go beyond the single digit ID of 1, 10, 100 and set it to show the same number of digits, say 4, all the time: 0001, 0010, 0100.

Do you have a filing system that you want to span across sites? Do you want to maintain the same set of unique values across similar lists? Bamboo Custom Identifier can do that too!

So what are you waiting for? Come give the Bamboo Custom Identifier custom column a try. Like all Bamboo Solution products, give it a test drive and download a 30-day trial today!

Why the Need for Business Requirements Anyway?

2010-03-04T23:21:00Z

It's simple, business requirements gathering is an essential part of successful project management and application development. Organizations as a whole have started to recognize this, and have recently started to push the importance of requirements gathering. But here at Bamboo, we feel that there really hasn't been enough done to explain the actual need for a requirements gathering process. It's also our belief that when project / development teams don't follow a successful business requirements gathering process they oftentimes end up playing the "blame game". Come on, as a developer or project manager, you know this game. It's the game where technical and development teams actually put the blame on their customers or clients, rather than on themselves, for not being able to reach deliverable deadlines or, even worse, delivering an application that falls short of expectations.

Why are requirements so important for application development and project management?

Let's take a look at an example of what I'm talking about. A customer asks for an application that streams the current temperature and time for 5 specific cities. Your project / development team delivers an application that lists 10 cities with historical events that happened on today's date. Is everyone ready for the blame game? "Well, we think it's an awesome app and honestly, you never really gave us any 'absolutely clear' business requirements. Based on what we thought you wanted we built you this!"

As you see in the simple example, by not defining the correct business data and system requirements at the start of the development project, the team delivered a totally different application than what was requested. By managing projects this way you run the risk of significant overrun costs for your SDLC phases. This is because the actual analysis process gets shifted into other phases of the SDLC, resulting in doubling your work effort. It boils down to this: items that should have been addressed during initial analysis are actually discovered during design, coding, scheduled maintenance, or even as late as an enhancement phase. With the necessity of added changes, you are inevitably faced with a ripple effect that highlights the need for increased effort; it therefore becomes harder to meet proposed deliverables which ultimately results in an increased overall cost of your project. All of this is attributed to a need to make changes or add additional requirements.

Are you starting to see the point here? If you're missing or have incomplete requirements documentation, you're setting yourself up for project overruns, and nobody wants that. Let's face it; it's not uncommon for project overruns to deplete significant amounts of a department's total budget, sometimes as high as 70%, and in some cases, even more.

As much as I hate to say this, I'm guilty of playing this blame game too. Not anymore though, with BambooRM's built in requirements tools, your project team is given the ability to guide your users through a process to draw out the exact core business requirements needed to deliver an accurate application development. You also have the added bonus of your project's data residing in one central location that is accessible by all designated team members all the time.

Then what defines a good business requirement?

I'm sure by now you're saying..."Okay, what do you suggest for determining good business requirements?" I'm well past suggestions at this point, I'm all about facts! The fact of the matter is, for successful project management, business requirement specifications need to be accurate, complete and clear. I found a good example of a checklist that I feel represents the points I'm trying to get across; the checklist which follows was adapted from that article by Anne Marie Smith, published in The Data Administration Newsletter 10 years ago. Which goes to show, if something is done accurately and stated correctly, it will stand the test of time. I really feel that if you use this checklist in conjunction with BambooRM, you will ensure your business requirements are of a high quality and specific to your project's end goal.

Precise:

Are your requirements stated consistently and without contradicting themselves or related systems?
Do the requirements support the stated business, system and project objectives?
Determine if any of your requirements are in conflict with given stated assumptions or limitations (cost, schedule, business environment, tech environment, or resources)
Are all activities and operations necessary?
Are any requirements you identified not required or out of scope?
Are there any data requirements that are not necessary or out of scope?

Defined:

Are all requirements free of implementation specifics (requirements state what, not how)?
Are they accurately stated in a few words (shall, will, should)?
Is your writing style and terminology consistent with your technical team and business client (is there a need for a project glossary)?
Have all operations been stated in terms of their triggering events or conditions, information requirements, processing and outcomes?
Is there any doubt in any of the operations, rules, definitions, or statements?
Confirm all your assumptions have been clearly stated

Complete:

Are the goals and objectives of the system clearly and fully defined?
Are all requirements traceable to higher level requirements or project mission statement (goals, objectives, constraints or concept of operation)?
Have all events and conditions been handled?
Have all operations been specified and are they sufficient to meet the stated system objectives?
Have all objects and data in the Activity Specification been defined in the model?
Have all required definitions and rules for objects and data been defined?
Does the specification satisfy the level of detail required by the design team?
Have all undefined, unresolved, incomplete specifications been identified for resolution?

Object specifications: Determining factors-

If your objects have been identified
If objects in the Activity Specification have been specified
That data items have been accurately attributed to the correct objects (Normalization)
That you identified data elements or at least created and understand them
That data in the Activity Specification has been specified
If data elements have been recognized
That all necessary relationships have been defined
That data items and relationships have been correctly and precisely defined
If redundant or derived data items and relationships can be identified and subsequently eliminated

Activity specifications: Determining Factors-

If all required activities have been specified
If all operations have been correctly and precisely defined
If all outcomes of each operation have been specified
If all standard/best practice/or identified life-cycle operations for each object have been specified
That all operations identify the event(s) or conditions which trigger them
That all operations identify the operator both system or user
That all operations use strong, clear-cut action verbs
That all specifications are clear cut and precise
That the data being used in the operation is clearly understood
If required operations use rules, formulas or conditions to qualify or define the processing of the operation
If all operations identify or clearly entail an outcome
If a data flow diagram has been created and updated
That your interfaces and activities have been updated in your data flow diagram

Organizational Compliancy:

Do your deliverables conform to organizational standards, as well as do they meet organizational process objectives, and follow industry standards?

Again, in using the above checklist in conjunction with BambooRM SaaS application, you gain the ability to work within your requirements management gathering methodology, providing you the ability to develop robust, sustainable, and useable systems and applications. This in turn gives your organization that much needed competitive edge. This is achieved by collecting, segregating, prioritizing, and documenting all relevant information and process needs in one central location... BambooRM. As always, sign up for a free trial and let us know what you think, or if you have any questions regarding all things BambooRM!

Guest Blog by Michael Womack - Adventures in Bamboo PM Central: "Charting and Tasking ..."

2010-03-04T14:45:00Z

Most of us have heard the phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words." That's how I would best describe the Summary Charts displayed under the All Projects tab on the top level page (a.k.a. the Project Portfolio Dashboard) in PM Central. My concern with Dashboard information like this is, and has always been: what information and/or message is being communicated to our users? If you have set up one or more projects in PM Central, you may have already seen the colorful charts that display on the PM Central Dashboard.

After setting up our initial test project sites, I have been working on these charts. Currently, I have three charts displayed (Tasks, Issues, and Milestones), which I wrote about last week, but now I need to remove and/or "customize" all of these charts (as well as replace the sample data currently feeding these charts from my existing two sample projects) with some new data so I can see how the chart category percentages are calculated in the charts displayed on the individual project site front page, as well as the charts displayed on the Dashboard. This aggregated chart data tells the story about how our project services area is doing collectively... so I want to have a clear understanding of how this data is calculated, which charts will reflect the most accurate status, and to whom this information is most useful.

Unfortunately, as I was manually entering new tasks and milestones in the individual projects, I stumbled on to another issue related to manually renumbering WBS tasks with a decimal place number (i.e., 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and so on) so the tasks will appear in the correct order and under the appropriate parent task or milestone. Apparently the Recalculate button function does not function like I thought it did... and it wiped out all my decimal numbers for al the tasks that I had renumbered. At any rate, I have submitted my question to my friends at Bamboo Support for their expert advice, and I suspect this may be my topic for next week, unless I make some major progress on my charts.

A side note about performance: I would highly recommend getting the fastest server available to perform this type of testing... or inject yourself with an extra dose of patience! Apparently, SharePoint and PM Central require mega 'horsepower' to run these powerful management tools. I am used to a much faster response time when navigating between screens and updating charts and tasks. I guess I've been spoiled, but in all fairness, we are still in the testing phase... the real 'power boost' will come when we Go Live!

Still in pursuit of your feedback...

What summary chart information do you find most useful to display on the Project Central Dashboard? ... and to whom is this info most useful to aside from the PMO Mgr? The default charts are "Task Summary"; "Issue Summary"; "Milestone Summary. Thanks in advance for your feedback...

Moving forward…

Follow Mike Womack's entire Adventures in Bamboo PM Central guest blog series:

Bamboo Giddy Ups into Dallas for SharePoint TechFest

2010-03-03T18:43:00Z

Yesterday marked our second trip to the InfoMart in Dallas, TX to participate in the annual SharePoint TechFest conference. As promised, TekFocus and RBA Consulting delivered on their promise that this year's event would be even bigger and better than last year's. The day kicked off with a keynote from Molly McCarthy, Office Business Value Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, and Justin Chandoo, Product Manager at Microsoft. Molly spends most of her time meeting with customers, striving to understand their business needs, and working with them to use Microsoft Information Worker solutions to drive their business. Justin's area of focus is in Information Worker (IW) Enterprise Solutions centered on SharePoint and Office. Molly and Justin led the discussion around getting ready for SharePoint 2010. The TechFest audience got a taste of what's to come with this exciting release with a product demonstration. Following the keynote, participants had the ability to choose sessions based on six available tracks: ECM, Collaboration, Composites, Search, BI, or Development. The one-day event started bright and early at 8am and ended at 6pm with a Conference Happy Hour.

I spent the day in the Exhibit Hall, and was joined by a few of the usual SharePoint ISV suspects: AvePoint, StoragePoint, RepliWeb - but found a new addition to the ranks in CLEAR. CLEAR provides super fast Internet for mobile, home and voice using their 4G WiMAX technology. At CLEAR, I also found an old friend that I haven't seen in a while who had recently joined their team: Anne Lacey Holmes. Send Anne an email to find out more about CLEAR.

There were also a handful of local Microsoft System Integrators in the Exhibit Hall, our favorite being Bamboo Partner RBA Consulting. They also led a session on Business Intelligence for Everybody and another on Complex Workflow Development with Microsoft Office and SharePoint 2010. Since Bamboo had just announced the product launch of Workflow Conductor, unfortunately we didn't have enough time to incorporate that technology into a session. If you're interested in Bamboo's approach to business process automation, be sure to check out this morning's press release.

Bamboo did present a session at TechFest, however, with our own Nando Carbonel presenting on Project Management in SharePoint, reviewing the out-of-the-box project management functionality, as well as the enhancements available through Bamboo Web Parts and PM Central. Unfortunately, the Internet connectivity wasn't up to snuff in the room, so Nando had to rely on screenshots in his presentation. For more detailed information and a live demonstration of PM Central, please sign up to attend one of our free PM Central webinars, offered several times each week.

As always, it's great to get out out in the field and visit with our existing customers and Partners. And it's exciting to meet our future customers; the ones that have downloaded one or more of our products, the ones that said they go to our website on a daily basis for information, and the ones that just needed a little more information from us to lead them to the next step in their SharePoint journey. Until next time....