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.
One of the great things about traveling for my job is that I get more time to catch up on reading while traveling than I often have sitting at home. On a recent trip from Seattle to New York City, I was reading through a Harvard Business Review article on our current recession, and the impact on the technology sector. The article presented an interesting idea which correlates, I believe, to patterns in many SharePoint deployments: increasing productivity without increasing demand leads to resource disparities, to which many companies compensate by decreasing headcount – instead of retooling and reusing those people. That is my theory, anyway.
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.
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:
SharePoint Server 2010 is entering its third year of product life, after having been introduced to the public in beta form in October of 2009. The product’s adoption has been nothing short of astounding and many lessons have been learned by enterprises large and small, across geographies and industry verticals.
Among the most important trends in SharePoint adoption that I see as an analyst and consultant are the following.
