SharePoint Adoption Tip 8 of 8: Implement SharePoint ‘In the Flow’ of Business

Implementing SharePoint in the flow of business means that SharePoint’s capabilities and your user’s needs meet at right time and the right place. For users to adopt SharePoint, these capabilities must meet the user where they are; meaning that they must provide the power that’s needed to solve the user’s current challenge while also being easy enough for the user to understand and implement. When SharePoint is implemented outside of the flow of business, user adoption will suffer and your user community will feel like they’re ‘pushing a rope’.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 7 of 8: Define What Collaboration Looks Like

When you don’t take the time to define what collaboration means in your environment then you won’t have a baseline to compare current-state against previous-state to determine if your project has been a success or not. Take time before your SharePoint project starts and discuss what collaboration means within your organization. Define it. Test the definition. Ask people throughout your company how they define collaboration in order to build holistic view of what collaboration means to people.

Reverse the Damaging Effects RSS feeds have on SharePoint User Adoption

SharePoint sites, and more specifically Intranets, are created to provide information that positively contributes to your users work life. Users have an unspoken expectation of your site. They expect the information being presented to be refreshed frequently, expand their existing knowledge or present them with information that they wouldn’t have otherwise known if they hadn’t found it on your site.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 6 of 8: Foster a Culture of Collaboration

Fostering a culture of collaboration means much more than just educating professionals on what SharePoint can do and how it can be utilized to make their job easier. It means supporting them in their efforts and helping them apply the technology to their unique business requirements. Don't speak to them in generalizations. Speak to them with specifics about how it will support the work they do.

Download the Latest Compiled Microsoft SharePoint Help File

This file is the Microsoft Compiled Help file for SharePoint 2007. You can download this one file, place it on your machines hard drive and you will have all of the Microsoft Technet information about SharePoint always at your fingertips. That's a pretty good deal for FREE.

Microsoft Paper: Five Ways SharePoint Can Save You Money

I was doing some research recently and ran across this white paper from Microsoft that outlines "Five Ways SharePoint Can Save You Money". I thought it sounded interesting, and very appropriate to the content I write, so I decided I would supply a link to the page for you, my readership.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 5 of 8: Give People a Reason to Visit

People will only visit SharePoint and use it as a primary information source when the pain of accessing the information any other way is greater than accessing it through SharePoint. Giving people a reason to visit, then, may be as simple as providing up-to-date information, access to common forms, automated information routing and providing access to information that simply cannot be found elsewhere.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 4 of 8: Rate Your Organizations SharePoint Collaboration Maturity

Frequently evaluating your company’s collaboration maturity is a great way to determine where knowledge gaps exist, what facets require additional education and how to assist people to expand their use of SharePoint. Departments will not mature at the same rate of speed, so it’s beneficial to build a model of maturity for your organization so that you can plan the steps to take to move each department or group to the next level of collaboration maturity. You may choose to modify my simple maturity model below or build one of your own. The goal will be to make certain that you include some ‘stretch goals’ within each level of your maturity model to help people move to greater use of the platform.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 3 of 8: Communicate the Context of SharePoint in the Environment

Communicate the Context of SharePoint in the Environment
While a moose crossing sign may make sense when you are traveling across the wide open spaces of Alaska, it certainly doesn’t make sense when you are driving in downtown Atlanta. The context of the sign simply doesn’t resonate in Atlanta as it does in Alaska. In similar fashion, the context of SharePoint must be communicated to your users in order for them to adopt it.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 2 of 8: Educate on the Tool

Training individuals on how to use the SharePoint solution is extremely important to the success of SharePoint in your company. More important, however, is educating your users on what SharePoint can do for them, when it should be considered to address a business units requirements and how to apply permissions to the information that they are placing on SharePoint. These are the basics and an increasing level of complexity, over time, will be required to move the adoption of SharePoint to where it needs to be.

SharePoint Adoption Tip 1 of 8: Focus on SharePoint’s Flexibility

SharePoint's flexibility is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The capabilities of SharePoint far exceed those users are accustomed to receiving in a software solution but require that they become expert 'configurators'. Given this, when they are first exposed to SharePoint your users may feel intimidated by its complexity and frustrated by cryptic menus and configurable options. The power comes in the user's ability to build lite applications with SharePoint that address their specific business needs.

3 Ways to Use a SharePoint Blog for Project Success

Projects are usually considered successful when they are completed by the project deadline, the tasks are finishing according to the project plan and if the project budget has not been exceeded. We’re taught that if you meet these criteria you have successfully completed the project. This, however, is simply not the case. What happened to user buy-in?

Don’t Make Users Think about your SharePoint Site Navigation

I’ve just returned from a business trip and saw something that I have never seen before. In the shower of the hotel there was a large sticker above the faucet that gave instructions on how to use the faucet. I thought it strange that there were instructions for something as simple as a faucet and it got me thinking about challenges with SharePoint navigation.