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Thursday, October 16, 2008

Avoiding “File Share 2.0″ With SharePoint

The Setup

I’ve heard the story over and over again. Someone in IT runs into the Microsoft marketing engine, and they think it would be a great opportunity to get some exposure by solving all of the company’s collaboration problems.

The idea is pitched, sold without question, and then hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on licensing, hardware, and consulting hours. When it’s all ready to go that same person in IT creates a collaboration portal and turns it over to the company. What’s wrong with this?

Let’s fast forward even six months in the future. IT has been fighting adoption and end-user resistance over the idea of “replacing” the file share. With no oversight, governance, or plan the SharePoint installation turns into a giant mess reminiscent of the file share. Add on top of that search now “stinks,” because it doesn’t return any relevant search results. Everyone is upset, you’re baffled at what happened, and the desired exposure was given but not the kind one would want.

But How Do We Avoid This?

That’s a good question, and let me try to provide some answers to make your SharePoint investment worthwhile. I’ve often heard that SharePoint is the most deployed but under-utilized tool in the IT space. It’s not SharePoint’s fault (although many who have us believe that) it just comes down to a lack of planning and foresight. Let’s look at a couple of practical tips to avoid this in your enterprise.

Governance is the key

 Governance (in a rudimentary definition) is the outlining and enforcement of how something is to be utilized. One of the best steps you can do is to create a governance board with various stakeholders to ensure adoption of the plan. It will be imperative that someone at the executive level take a hold of your initiative to ensure its success. It’s amazing how things happen when your boss believes in it.

Further Reading:

Don’t pay lip service to content analysis and enterprise information architecture.

Have you ever tried to find something by burying through someone’s space on the file share or on their computer? Chances are it was a frustrating experience that led you no where.

If you don’t take the time investing in a thorough content analysis and truly architecting the solution around that analysis you will pay for it later. Most companies are so bent on implementation they skip past this step—often to their peril. If time and energy are spent here you will increase both the findability of information and avoid doing it all over again in a few months.

Further Reading:

Plan big but start small

IT has this knack of being pushed along by those who are most passionate about it (much like many topics). Part of the process of implementing a SharePoint solution, or any IT initiative for that matter, is to find the people who care the most about it. There are people who will love SharePoint and “get it” from the beginning. These are the people that talk about it with their co-workers at lunches or around the water cooler. Don’t underestimate this important aspect in adoption.

So, instead of thinking you have to convert the whole company over to SharePoint in a month do a phased roll out. Pick a department that will love SharePoint early on (HR is usually a great example), and they will serve as a boost for the continued implementation as well as those happy employees doing your job of evangelism.

Further Reading:

  1. Routes of Adoption: Process Standardization
  2. The Tactical Road To Enterprise 2.0

Empathize with end users

Let’s face it, no employee is elated to learn something all over again. It’s associated with frustration, uncertainty, and sometimes can make an employee feel threatened. We’ve all experienced this, and knowing how to empathize with your end users will go along way. This can be done in many forms such as having a forum to voice frustrations and concerns with the new implementation.

Training becomes crucial here also; take the time and effort to slowly and gently take them through the training process and how it will actually make things easier for them in the end. This is most important, because in the end if you don’t have consumers consuming information and contributors contributing information it doesn’t matter how planned out your implementation is.

Further Reading:

In Conclusion

This article is by no means intended to be exhaustive, but it should serve as a good reminder of how to maximize your organization’s investment in the SharePoint platform. I can guarantee that if these are the types of issues you’re concerned with in your SharePoint implementation, you’ll get that good visibility you were hoping for.

Chris PoteetChris Poteet
Siolon.com

 

 

Please Join the Discussion

6 Responses to “Avoiding “File Share 2.0″ With SharePoint”
  1. Great article; just last night I posted about the content proliferation / chaos issue, but without the specific tips for how to avoid it.

    http://amatterofdegree.typepad.com/a_matter_of_degree/

    I linked to your post in my post; very timely and helpful.

  2. Paul Galvin says:

    Great intro on governance!

    I think that one of the take-aways readers should get from this is that setting up sharepoint is deceptively easy. Decisions that orgs make early on have long-lasting implications. Unfortunately, it’s just about impossible to get those decisions right without going through a painful learning curve. So … I think companies should really consider finding a partner they trust who understands how SharePoint works. Invest in getting the foundation (governance, findability, information architecture, etc) designed correctly up front. These things are hard to change or correct after the fact.

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