Create a Collaboration Café for your SharePoint User Community

Let me tell you a secret about your user community:  they may be intimidated by you.  “Not true”, you say.  “Yes…it’s true!” Why might they be intimidated by you?  Because of your extreme knowledge of SharePoint and because of an affliction you (and I) both suffer from….something called ‘expertitis’ (x-pert-i-tis).  ‘Expertitis’ is ‘the inability of a knowledgeable IT professional to think like an end user’.  This MAY be getting in the way of your users adopting SharePoint in your environment. 

When people don’t feel comfortable asking you questions, they will either find some other, less knowledgeable, person to ask or they might not ask their question at all.  If they choose not to ask their question they will be contributing to SharePoint’s demise…something you definitely want to avoid.

One of the best ways to support your users is to build and nurture a community of learning where users teach one another.  In short, you should consider creating a Collaboration Café that allows people to share their success stories with one another as well as learn SharePoint from the SharePoint expert (yes….that’s you).

The Collaboration Café Vibe

What does a good Café feel like to you?  To me, a good Café is an easy-going and relaxed environment, a place for friends, well appointed with comfortable chairs, plenty of electrical outlets, easy access to high-end caffeinated beverages and music that offers just the right mixture of Smooth Jazz (Brian Culbertson).

That’s the feeling that you want to convey in your Collaboration Café.  The site should say: “Welcome, browse around a bit.  I hope that you find something you like.  You know what you’re looking for better than I do, but if I can help you find something please let me know.”  The best Cafés cater to their clientele, making certain they come back often to become part of a community.

What’s in it for You?

The Collaboration Café not only helps your user community education and communicate with one another…it offers you, the SharePoint Professional, several benefits:

1. As users add items to the site you can easily comb the information to determine what focused training would be most beneficial to them.  Targeted training ALWAYS drives greater user adoption.  Within the walls of the Café, you will find a treasure trove of information to act upon.

2. The Café will allow you to more easily see the impact of the training materials you offer.  With a simple stroll through the Café, you will be able to see whether the level of knowledge sharing increases or remains the same after training has been provided.  Training not only helps people solve their challenges, it raises the level of discourse within the Café.

3. You can easily determine who is providing their knowledge on the site so that you can identify users that might benefit the collaboration team.  Identify these people and put them on a mission to share their knowledge and insight or, better yet, bring them onto the collaboration team.

What Components Make a Great Collaboration Café?

As far as what you should place in your Collaboration Café, I recommend videos (LOTS of videos), how-to articles, tips, tricks, interviews, podcasts (SharePoint Podcasting Kit), well-formed thoughts about how departments are using SharePoint and support information to help them when they get stuck.  Let’s conceptualize your Collaboration Café:

1. Have an announcements area.  Make the announcements short and sweet and include PICTURES in the announcement.  Web sites are visual mediums so don’t just present text!  Shrink some pictures and place them in each of the announcement postings.  Carefully guard what’s presented in the announcements area so that only pertinent information is shown.  Limit the maximum number of announcements to display at any one time to 3.

2. Discuss unique content with your training department, your marketing department and the people responsible for supporting your end users.  What’s that, you say?  You ARE the training, marketing and support departments?  Well, sounds like you have a lot of work to do to keep your user community whistling a happy SharePoint tune.  Seriously, one person simply CANNOT produce all of the information that your user community will desire to consume.  Get some help from a trusted colleague that can contribute their own unique view of collaboration or that can review the information you are producing.  Identify topics, assign them to people to write about and get the site going with some actionable information people can use.

3. Focus on the ‘findability’ of your information.  Create some SharePoint tips and tricks and categorize them by function, by level of effort and by topic.  Categorizing information that’s housed on your site makes it easier for people to click on areas that might be new to them, helping them to learn something new (ahh…the power of hyperlinks!)

4. Talk with your CEO and ask them to write an article or sit for a recorded interview you can podcast and post to the site (General Podcasting format).  Make the CEO’s interview available ONLY on the Collaboration Café so people must visit the site to listen to it.  What will the CEO talk about?  Have them talk about the business value behind collaboration, their hopes for the coming year and how they hope that people will use SharePoint.  Presenting this information on the Café gives the Café Cache (I worked hard on that one), communicating that the CEO supports the collaboration platform and is keeping a watchful eye on those that enhance their area of the business using SharePoint.

5. Brand the site in a unique way with regards to its user interface (UI) and focus on making the site a case study on the effective use of SharePoint web parts and branding.  UI has A LOT to do with system acceptance, and while master page modification and creation is best left to a designer with master page skills, you can make small changes here and there on the page that will allow your users to see that your collaboration site is unique and different from a run-of-the-mill SharePoint site.  Don’t be afraid to channel your inner designer….or visit Pixelmill to get some great ideas for your site’s look and feel (http://www.pixelmill.com).

6. Use Camtasia to create videos that you can share with your users.  I produce videos using the Flash format, which creates an HTML page that encapsulates the flash video (if this sounds overly technical to you, don’t despair.  I simply click on the FLASH menu option in Camtasia and the software does the rest).  I then store both the flash video file and the HTML page in a SharePoint document library, categorize the HTML pages as ‘HTML’ using a ‘Category’ list column and build a view of the Doc Library that shows only the list entries categorized as ‘HTML’ (making it the default view).  This allows my users to click on the HTML pages in the document library and have the flash video begin to play.  If you don’t have Camtasia or the money to purchase it, don’t despair.  Pick up the free screen capture software at the awesome Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips site OR download Camtasia 3.0 for free, get an unlock code from them and then pay to upgrade to the latest version of the Camtasia software.  Doing this gets you the most recent version of Camtasia for around $150!  It’s perfectly legal and an incredible cost savings over buying the software directly.

7. In your network’s internal DNS server, have your network administrator setup a unique URL for your SharePoint support site.  Make certain it’s short, easy to remember and consider having the URL wording reflect your Collaboration Cafés brand.  Branding helps you to inject some personality into the site, making it less business focused and more personal and accessible.  Something as simple as sharepoint.mycompany.com will significantly increase the site’s uptake with your user community.  Remember the KISS principle.

8. Make the navigation of your Collaboration Café very shallow; allowing the majority of the information the site contains to be easily accessible from the main page of the site.  Highlight the information on the front page of your collaboration site using graphics (MS Clip Art) in a content editor web part (with hyperlink) that points people to all the great content you are creating.

9. Provide FAQ’s in a SharePoint Wiki for SharePoint’s capabilities and its supporting technologies, such as SharePoint Designer and InfoPath.  The FAQ should cover some of the ‘how’ of using SharePoint, but make certain to also include some of the ‘why’.  Explain how SharePoint can make a difference in a department or, better yet, include case studies of SharePoint successes from other areas of your business.  Success stories go a long way to explaining SharePoint’s capabilities to the uninitiated.  People want to understand just how far they can push SharePoint in their business area and it’s your job to help them understand how far it can stretch.

10. Are you providing in-house classes or videos for the user community focused on their needs?  If not, you should consider doing so.  The Collaboration Café is a great place to offer the class schedule, a description of what the training will cover and the intended audience.  Tell the users what they will be able to DO after they complete the training class.  People are attracted to the outcome of training classes, not the process that gets them to a specific level of knowledge.

11. Build a Wiki that allows individuals to showcase their successes and thoughts around the collaboration capability within their business unit.  Select one showcase a month and highlight the players that made it possible.  Interview and make an audio recording of the people involved and find out WHY they created the solution as they did.  HOW they did it can be provided in a screen shot or short video but WHY they did it in a particular way is what people are really interested in (ok, they are interested in the HOW as well, but make the full solution the focus of your showcase).

12. Add an RSS web part to your site and place the following link within it.  This link aggregates SharePoint Blog postings into a single feed and will ensure that there will always be new content about SharePoint to read in your Collaboration Café. (http://www.sharepointfeeds.com/?media=rss)

13. And last but not least, place a link to EndUserSharePoint.Com on the site so users can read all of the great content this site contains.  That’s your favorite URL after all, isn’t it?

The Collaboration Café is meant to be more than just an area for posting training classes and an FAQ.  The goal for your Café should be to create and foster the growth of a community of knowledge sharing that will benefit your user community and, ultimately, yourself.

Let the users drive the content, let them help one another and watch your user adoption blossom.  With the right mixture of support, information, training and case studies your SharePoint environment will continue to provide value to your business.

Turn up the Smooth Jazz and save me a seat near the window!

Author: Lee Reed
ThoughtBridge, Atlanta, GA

Lee Reed is an expert in collaboration and user adoption on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform. His consulting with companies large and small throughout the East Coast has resulted in many successful collaboration environments and increased user adoption.

Lee is currently the Director of Business Process and SharePoint Education for Thoughtbridge, a Microsoft Gold Partner focused exclusively on the Microsoft SharePoint 2007 platform.