Some organizations are wildly successful in using most of SharePoint’s features. Others struggle to even get SharePoint’s most basic elements off the shelf and into common practice. Why will your SharePoint Adoption Plan fail and how to be a collaboration Hero!
Why Your SharePoint Adoption Plan Won’t Succeed
Surprise – there’s also a lot you can do to doom your SharePoint intranet project! We can’t fairly call these “worst” practices, but here are some bad things to avoid.
• A poorly planned architecture, with bad interface design and too many irrelevant documents, obscures all the valuable content users need from the platform.
• Bad governance – either too much or too little – can either drive users away or make usage patterns so chaotic that usage becomes difficult.
• The speed-to-market of SharePoint solutions is also a noted user roadblock because it can lead to a boil-the-ocean climate where SharePoint gets positioned as the answer to all business needs, and the pace of change outstrips users’ ability to learn and adapt.
• Disconnects between IT and the business can lead to the “Field of Dreams” problem. “If you build it, they will come” works only if you stop to ask what “they” need. Uneducated guesses about user requirements turn SharePoint rollouts into social experiments instead of nimble business tools.
How to Become a SharePoint Collaboration Hero
Adoption can’t be solved overnight. Creating an effective, flexible governance plan that espouses business needs does not happen at the wave of a wand. However, there are tools to help begin to change user behavior and increase SharePoint contributors.
Have you met Stan Malooney? Well, you are about to. Just watch this video:
(embed video into blog: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1DMJ0l-HCg&feature=relmfu)
Stan is a collaboration hero because he has a SharePoint adoption tool that makes it easy for him to get his documents into SharePoint without changing his work patterns. The right tools can help speed user adoption by making SharePoint easy and convenient to use. For example, Microsoft Outlook is likely the preferred method for content collaboration by users in your organization. Users probably complain about its drawbacks – frustrating attachment searches, disparate updates to the same document, and those pesky out-of-space email alerts – but they are unlikely to change their behavior and use SharePoint instead simply because you ask them to.
Instead, make it effortless for them. AttachThis is a free, simple Microsoft Outlook add-in that integrates with the work patterns of your users: when they send an email attachment, it asks them if they want to store that document in SharePoint and send a document hyperlink to the email recipients instead.
• Collaboration is simpler because SharePoint automatically consolidates edits from various team members into a single document.
• Collecting feedback is easier because users can take advantage of SharePoint’s intrinsic feedback-gathering process instead of storing comments in email.
• Users spend less time searching for the right email attachments.
• Work is no longer interrupted by out-of-space email alerts.
Download the free AttachThis SharePoint-Outlook connector here: http://www.quest.com/sharepoint-outlook-integration/.
Quest Software, now part of Dell are already signed up as Platinum Sponsors for the European SharePoint Conference 2013. Why not join them? Contact sponsor@sharepointeurope.comor call + 353 91 514 501 for more information.
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