How SharePoint is being used to manage content at United Airlines:

Collaboration, Documents and SocialDenise Wilson Enterprise Architect, CollaborationUnited Airlines

United AirlinesWorld’s leading airline

Most passenger seat miles and destinations

5,557 flights per day

378 global airports

Over 85,000 employees

Boeing 787 cockpit

Global operation to coordinate

United AirlinesFly to airports on six continents from our hubs in:

• Chicago• Cleveland• Denver• Guam• Houston• Los Angeles• New York/Newark• San Francisco• Tokyo• Washington, D.C.

Operate nearly 700 mainline aircraft

Have 270 new aircraft on order through 2022.

Operate more than two million flights per year carrying 142 million passengers

Have ordered 50 of the new Boeing 787 aircraft

Rated the world’s most admired airline on FORTUNE magazine’s 2012 airline-industry list

United Airlines Boeing

787

United AirlinesLeading edge technologies

Aviation and environmental

Computing

* 2013 RDP: Rapid Deployment Program 2012 TAP: Technical Adoption Program

• First in US to fly 787 (20% more fuel efficient)

• Testing biofuel-powered aircraft• SharePoint for global environmental

compliance• SharePoint 2010 internal & external ECM

farms

• 20% of United.com content from SharePoint

• Early adopters: SharePoint 2013, Windows 8,

Server 2012 and System Center 2012

Evolution of SharePoint at United2001: SharePoint 2001 (Portal Server) for project docs

2007: SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) for targeted application

Architectural Review Committee2008: MOSS as enterprise platform

eDiscovery and ECM

2012: SharePoint 2013 development for production

Service Catalog application and Social

2010: New SP 2010 farm and upgraded 2007 sites

What Does United Airlines Use SharePoint For?

• Collaboration• Content Management• Social

Collaboration

Collaboration and Governance

• Collaboration is individuals working together for a common purpose to achieve a business goal *

• Collaboration relies on openness and knowledge sharing *

• Collaboration: “There’s a hurricane coming and we need a SharePoint site to share information with the affected airports”

*AIIM - http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Collaboration

Collaboration and Governance

• Governance addresses the creation and closing of team workspaces to capturing the results of that collaboration in a repository *

• Governance: “All airports need to be provided with SharePoint sites to communicate on a regular basis”

*AIIM - http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Collaboration

Keys to Collaboration and GovernanceDon’t customize and lock down too much

Users need to be able to search the web to look at blogs and solutions to learn

Guide user behavior with structured defaults and templatesDefaults are pre-populated based on the site or list choices, but user can change.

Must allow user discovery process (and mistakes) on a site level Site owner is content, not Central Administration. And, yes, we have backups.

Information ArchitectureSites are provisioned according to service levels (SLAs), type of content and security• Portal.united.com (Org chart navigation)

• Team.united.com (Working sites for content)

• Project.united.com (Project management sites)

• Services.united.com (Application sites used by enterprise)

• Records.united.com (Record Centers)

• Mysite.united.com (MySites)

• One stop shopping

• Navigate and search

• Custom branding

• Site provisioning to build out hierarchy and auto-create dropdowns and site navigation

Portal Home

• Org chart navigation and VP Blogs

• VP’s “magazine to the United community”

• Publishing Site• (few authors,

everyone read)

Portal Sites

Team Sites• Bulk of content

• Documents, workflows, forms

• Managing Director level site collections and AD security groups

• All team members can contribute

MySites

Collaboration and Connections

• Personal site collection

• Newsfeed

• Find expertise

Enterprise Content Management

Things that define aviation (and your business) are the same between versions of SharePoint

Once established, content types are mostly consistent between versions

2007 content types and columns were migrated to 2010 during upgrade

Enterprise Content ManagementTaxonomy – The language of the business

ECM is business-centric

SharePoint is a cost-effective mechanism to manage that process (flexible)

TaxonomyTaxonomy is a list of lists

Aircraft Type• 737• 757• 787

Event Type• Weather• Maintenance• Air Traffic

Control

• Build up your lists as you go• Prototype live with test lists

and libraries• Get basic structure• Then add new columns and

list items

• Lock down the basic structure before you go to production

• Easier to add than subtract or change

Taxonomy (Business Vocabulary)Managed Lists and Term Sets (Technical Structure)

Site Columns and Content TypesA Content Type is a group of columns and

properties that describe something.

Can apply policies to a content type.

Content Type examples:• “Aircraft record”• “Contract”• “Project document”

“Project document” may have Site Columns such as:

• Project number• Project manager• Site code

Centralized and Departmental MetadataCentralized ECM: • UA Document• Default for most site collections

Departmental ECM: • In-house efforts with huge ROIs• Site collection (not enterprise) scope• Examples at United created in 2 – 8 weeks (no code)

• Each one of these is a departmental taxonomy

Targeted ApplicationsSome examples at United

• System Operations Dashboard and Alert System

• DOT Long Tarmac Delay Rule compliance• Architectural Review Committee• Technology Intake Process• Technology Service Catalog

We’ll look at three examples of department ECM

Targeted Application (2007 and 2010):Architectural Review Committee

Dropdowns promote standardization Set of columns

and Word template per content type

User entry populates Word doc cover page

Build standardized file name by concatenating metadata

Site Collection Level content types

Content Types and Site ColumnEnterprise and department level metadata in one list

Site metadata(Document type)

Enterprise metadata

(Airport code)

• Built with SharePoint List Items

• “Add New”

• Creating row in a database table

Slice and Dice Normalized Data

Slice and Dice Normalized Data• ECM-derived

data can be expressed in different ways

• Can drill down

• “Show me everything about Beijing”

Targeted Application (2007 and 2010): Operations Dashboard and Alert System

Operations Coordination Center• Operational

alerts• Brainstormed

for a year• Two-week effort

out of the box• In use by the

enterprise for five years

• Adopted as business critical system in merger

Operations Logs• Operations Managers

create logs using list items

• Click “Add New Item”• Based on

departmental-level (Ops) needs

• Leverages enterprise level list of airports

• Alerts 2,000 people across all divisions

Operations Dashboard• Operations

taxonomy

• “Show me everything out of Frankfurt”

• Federal compliance

• Automatically expire records after 13 months by policy

• Paid back the cost of the 2007 enterprise platform with this one app

Operations E-mail Alerts• User can sign up for all

alerts or customize alerts based on their own view

• Environmental director can be alerted on fuel events but not weather

Targeted Application (2013): Technology Service Catalog

Service CatalogLevel 1 Terms / Categories

2

3

1

1) Taxonomy (categories)2) Search box 3) Popular Items auto-populated

Search and popular items based on taxonomy / metadata

Service CatalogLevel 2 Child Terms / Subcategories

Friendly URL (Term: Hardware)

Content ManagementTaxonomy and lists: Starting points

Classify things based on what you already have

Set up a SharePoint site to aggregate all your materials and start to test

Legal record retention policy is good guide for content types

Limit the number of choices so users don’t get overwhelmed

Start small, show value and build up

United Airlines Collaboration and Social Strategy

2013 SocialScoped Newsfeeds

Hash tagging

Social brings together metadata in the newsfeed

2013 CommunitiesBring the familiar social tools inside the corporate environment

Ease of use

2013 WikiEase of use

SharePoint 2010 training wiki hosted on 2013

Top Ten Key Learnings

Number 10: Implement in PhasesImplement in phases – Evolve as you go

Operations Dashboard:

• Phase I: Logged existing e-mails to SP document library No change for users, but can log and centralize existing content to see what we have

• Phase II: Created structured SharePoint listsClick “New”, select from dropdowns: create log and send targeted alertsContent type allows automated expiration of list items after 13 months

• Phase III: Integrated Mainframe Ops DataWeb service: SharePoint list item when gate to takeoff > 90 minutesAvionics systems on the aircraft -> Data Warehouse - > SharePoint

Number 9: Follow Microsoft Roadmap For Supportability

• Implement functionality supported by the SharePoint object model

• For configuration and code

• Otherwise, small functional gains will dramatically increase support costs

• In other words, don’t do something Microsoft recommends against or will not support

Number 8: Minimize Customizations • Users can find existing resources in

the public space

TechNet, Blogs, Books• Training materials and courses are

readily available that cover the out of the box functionality

• If something is highly customized, it has to be documented, trained and supported

Number 7: Be careful with 3rd party toolsFully review custom code and third party

tools• Didn’t work: One popular third party tool for

cascading dropdowns brought down the entire enterprise farm.

• Know how it is deployed• Know how to back it out• Know what their support obligations are• All solutions custom or third party should be

deployed as ‘wsp’

Number 6: Backup your content

• Industry-leading third party tools (Backup and Workflow engines) run on separate servers, which is a best practice

• If you can back up SharePoint 4 ways, do it

• Also, redundancy for high availability (two web front ends, service apps on more than one box, clustered SQL)

Number 5: Establish and Follow Governance• Provide guidelines for your users.

Automate this where possible. Provide dropdowns so they don’t have to guess.

• Require user agreements for MySites

• Provide Power User training

• Site provisioning is a key part of governance

Number 4: Manage the site provisioning process• Helps structure content for ease of discovery

and management (URL taxonomy)

• Put sites on a list so users know what is available

• Site provisioning supports the ECM process for tagging content. Can auto-populate metadata. Provide default content types.

• Enables navigation and search which promotes collaboration

Number 3: Use Content Types• Department content types are many (see Targeted

Application examples above)• Enterprise Content Types are few (but are defaults

on most site collections): UA Document, AFE, Project Document

• Allows you to manage that “document” type as an object

• Can apply templates and policy to Content Type object: UA Presentation has standard PPT template when you click “New”

Number 2: Empower the users • Users will amaze you. Support them and champion

their efforts. (Hence don’t customize or lock down too much)

• They know what their department needs. Don’t have to rely on Technology for the initiative

• Millions in ROI by replacing legacy and paper systems (Ops, HR, Training)

• Legal Dept cataloged 36,000 paper ‘bankers boxes’ using a SharePoint list – disposal reduced costs by 80%

• Airport Ops automated a paper hotel request form (for use by 6,000 employees) in one week

Number 1: Make It HappenCreate and demonstrate prototypes for your own team and for other teams

Champion and shepherd enterprise-wide efforts

Answer the phone

• Provide a live-person support system, power users and SharePoint team support

• Brainstorm with people and share your knowledge• Learn from your users what works and what

doesn’t work• Prototype solutions, test them and roll them out. • Repeat.

Thank you for attending the presentation today. We appreciate your interest.

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