It’s the simple things that get buy-in with End Users
As I’m delivering the Beginning SharePoint 2oo7 – The Basics workshops to Singapore and Shanghai, I’m keeping track of the little things that get people excited:
- Creating a ‘drop box’ on the entrance page where team members can drop documents
- The calendar overlay feature in Outlook 2007 that let’s you view stacked calendars
- Turning off blog comment approval
- Attach multiple categories to a post
- Save Excel workbook as a web page
- Changing regional settings
- Project task list with a Gantt chart embedded
These are the simple, everyday things that people don’t see demo’d often, but can really make or break the buy-in for End Users. When people see these things work and how simple they are to implement, there are big smiles all around. It’s not the killer, .NET development environment they’re after… they just want to have something easy to use that’s more efficient than what they currently have.
By keeping this list, it’s going to give me some focus for the next round of screencasts. I’ll be finishing the training session on Thursday and will be able to step back and evaluate the most important things I can do to help with End User buy-in.
Afterall, that’s what I’m after, right? How is the everyday End User going to use SharePoint to their advantage to do a better job. It’s just a bonus to have it be fun along the way.
In some environments, this is the first time that users have been able to see immediate results of their efforts. One of the biggest “light up” moments for users in my environment is to simply post an announcement on the team site.
Another great buy-in is linking to a discussion with Outlook 2007. This way, they can interact with the discussion as they would interact with email. This is a big plus for some users since some have never used a collaborative application like SharePoint outside of work. They immediately feel comfortable because they are familiar with Outlook. Perhaps this is a potential screencast for your collection.
Would love to see a screencast on the document “drop box” on entry screen concept.
This seems like functionality that would really help my users.