When I attend conferences I hear all the time from other attendees that they have SharePoint at their company but it 1) doesn’t work well, 2) nobody uses it or 3) everyone hates it and hates IT for pushing it on them !

I seem to be in the minority of those companies who have SharePoint and its working very well.  So over a drink with a few attendees we discussed why and why not SharePoint succeeds and the findings can be applied to any enterprise software offerings.

1) SharePoint is an infrastructure project, leave it to IT.

Wrong.  SharePoint is a end user product, it affects the way you collaborate, share information, find information, find people, socialise, present data, etc.

Yep there is software installation and server build out, if on premise and integration if going Office365 but just putting it out there and sending users a URL is going to fail.

At my company we did several things

• Built a governance group of business folk, not IT Business partners (although they were represented as they are also a user), but real business folk.   Empowers the business lines and ensures the roadmap is aligned to the business need not hindering it.
• Business Sponsor and IT Sponsor.   A business sponsor was key to show this was not just another IT solution.  Of course it also involved changing the way IT worked and so an IT sponsor was also required.  Plus there is large ongoing IT investment therefore a senior IT lead was essential.
• Created a forum where anyone interested in Collaboration could attend.  Held monthly, a virtual meeting which has 1000’s of attendees.  Creates an ownership culture
• Power Users and Champions – yep no surprise there.  These folk started to appear within around 3months of our initial pilot back in 2007.  Over the years some have remained and new ones have joined that list.  These folk are used to present with us the collaboration offerings to their business line.  They present at our forums and they blog and update our wiki on the collaboration services.

 2) SharePoint is not Intuitive

Again I hear all the time that SharePoint is difficult to use and it should be as easy as an iPad.  Okay, lets stop a minute.  An iPad is a very different kettle of fish.

I do however agree that SharePoint UI is not as easy as it should be and takes a little longer to get used to.   However this is because it is trying to get enterprise users to move from the long established content mgmt and lets face it fileshares to a new way of working.   We have seen the UI change from SP2007 through SP2010 and SP2013 and it is getting better but there will always be some need for education,

So what did we do. Well…

• Ready, Set, Go program – with each new release and for anyone new to SharePoint we created an online program where people could get acclimated with SharePoint.  It is a mix of wiki material, one-pagers (in 15 languages), PowerPoints and Video snippets on our internal Youtube solution (built on SharePoint !).
• Collaboration Forum – we also used our monthly collaboration forum to get one of our power users to show a feature of sharepoint.
• Use Social – we post a tip of the week on our social feeds (internal twitter and our blog) highlighting a feature.  Sometimes this comes from ‘How To’ questions submitted to our support group and sometimes its suggested by a user or a team member
• Site Visits – Throughout the year members of the collaboration team are at various sites visiting and discussing collaboration with governance members, power users and customers.  We use this opportunity to provide training drop in sessions.  Where anyone can pop along, ask a question, show us how they use SharePoint or tell us whats wrong with it !
• Traditional training – and lastly we do offer traditional classroom training.  Some groups still want this and often newly formed teams find it a great way to accelerate their collaboration.

One thing we didn’t do was change the UI heavily.  The only thing we did was reduce the number of templates, ban SharePoint Designer from our main collaboration offering and add a custom footer.  More on the custom footer in a separate post but briefly it provides Site Information, support information and analytic data to us for planning and forecasting.

Set dumb expectations

Keep the buzz going

Lastly…

Its critical to see SharePoint as part of a bigger end to end Knowledge, Collaboration and Information Strategy for your company.  If you end up with SharePoint being used in just some parts of the org and competitors in another its going to devalue your investment and lead to customer confusion and dissatisfaction.

You need to think about how people will find the content they put in, think tagging, taxonomy, folksonomy and the search experience.

You need to think about how to identify the critical content and how to remove/deprioritise the stale/inactive content.

SharePoint is a journey and having been able to keep Collaboration on SharePoint now for over 8yrs at my company has been critical.   That strong user network has grown with it and learnt it together.  We havent done the traditional thing which is change product every 2-4yrs just because something new is out there !