SharePoint 2010 Adoption Planning #EuropeanSP by Christian Buckley

At the European SharePoint Conference currently being held at
the Estrel Convention Center in Berlin, Germany, I attended Matt
Berg’s presentation entitled “Drive Adoption and Get Users Excited
about SharePoint 2010.” For those who are not familiar with Matt,
he is a Senior Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft
SharePoint team in Redmond, WA, and was one of the primary forces
behind the SharePoint Conference held in Anaheim, CA earlier this
month. In his role, he has a well-placed view into customers
deploying SharePoint and partners augmenting their solutions, and I
wanted to hear his perspective on one of the most important aspects
of a successful SharePoint deployment: end-user adoption.

Adoption Planning

Matt Berg

3 Execution Strategies
Matt’s (@bergasonic) message was fairly simple; however, the
difficulty is often in the execution. His strategy consisted of
three main points:

1. Set goals and have a plan.
SharePoint is more than just a technical deployment activity, and
organizations need to build a plan for getting end users to embrace
it. You can do this by setting specific goals around onboarding,
usage and activity, and around training. Make end-user adoption a
central facet of your deployment strategy.

2. Get executive support.
We know how critical this can be to the overall deployment of
SharePoint, but it can be equally important to have this support in
place for your end-user adoption plan, which will remain in action
long after your hardware is up and running, and the environment has
been fully deployed.

3. Customer Examples.
Matt also walked the audience through three customer examples where
overall success could be linked back to each company’s end-user
adoption strategies:

•SKECHERS created pages around each of their departments to help
build a sense of community around each organization. They also
created an “I want to….” section to help employees find the most
common requests and content best bets. Additionally, they created a
specific help section to help people walk through the basics of
using SharePoint, and where to go for further assistance.
•Accenture wanted to make their portal not about collaboration but
about people, so they built a portal around the profiles and
pictures of real employees.
•Electronic Arts built a portal around the idea of helping people
better work together. Much of their end-user strategy was built
around extending My Sites, and utilizing rich profiles and social
conversations to drive contextual search.
Additional Resources
At the end of his presentation, Matt referred attendees to a new
Microsoft site focused on end-user adoption at www.iUseSharePoint.com
that includes a SharePoint adoption kit, as well as customer
examples, video tutorials and links to partners and online
resources to help you build out your plan. The site will help you
organize and build your own adoption kit.

For those who attended the European SharePoint Conference, you
can download a copy of Matt’s presentation here (attendee login
required).

Editor’s Note: You may also be interested in reading:


10 Planning and Governance Keys to SharePoint Success

Report: A Third of Organizations Use SharePoint as an Enterprise
CMS

SharePoint 2010 Planning and Adoption Framework

About the Author
Christian Buckley is an Evangelist with Axceler, a SharePoint ISV
and Microsoft Gold Partner. An active speaker, writer and blogger,
Christian runs the IT Pro channel on NothingButSharePoint.com, is a
SharePoint expert for AIIM.org, and maintains a personal blog at
buckleyPLANET.com. Pick up Christian’s free e-book Inside the
SharePoint community: 4 Strategies for Building Your Personal Brand
(no registration required).

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