There is nothing more frustrating than rolling out a shiny new SharePoint farm to notice that 6 months later not a lot is going on. This isn’t some sort of conspiracy theory but it’s the simple fact that we have many ingrained business processes around sharing documents and it is very very hard to change those, even with a clearly more superior system being availalbe.

Can you guess which one of these ingrained processes is the most pervasive? If you said sharing documents via email you would be correct but you wouldn’t get many points, it is easily the most common method to share a document. It has been simplified to such an extent that if I want to fire off an email with an attachment it’s basically a few short steps and off it goes. The problem is that basically at this point the attachment is disconnected from any future collaborations and lots and lots of versions floating around that need to be reconciled into your master document.

There is definitely lots of ways to put content into SharePoint and then share it but it’s still just a little bit harder than the email process. And that extra work to make the switch from email to SharePoint is the biggest catalyst to SharePoint adoption. After all, email has been the predominant method of corporate communication since the late 1980s. It has a massive amount of pre-existing behavior built in.

That is the whole concept between AttachThis, make a minor change to an existing process and make great things happen. There is no debating that content in SharePoint comes alive, with such features as version control, check in check out, records management, search, metadata, the list goes on. But until it gets there none of those features are available.

So why don’t we just nudge you, the user, just a bit, and make it simple to adopt sharepoint but keep doing all that you are doing, and make the connection between email and sharepoint seamless!

AttachThis is an outlook add in that is quick to install and has a very small footprint. In fact until it is needed you don’t see it. The next time however you send an email attachment AttachThis will wake up and present you with some simple options.

You do have to set up at least one location and we have worked to make that easy as well with Smart Tags for SharePoint URLs (those pesky http etc and so ons you have to type in your browser) and once these are set up it’s a one click process.

There are some more advanced features in the Pro version, including greater administrative control and security permission management, but we will cover that off next week.

AttachThis 2.0 is now out and available at http://communities.quest.com/community/sharepointforall/management/attachthis

Quest Software were already signed up as Platium Sponsors for the European SharePoint Conference 2013.