Comments on: SharePoint’s Inconvenient Truth

By: ERS SharePoint

ERS SharePoint — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 15:08:36 +0000

This is a highly interesting blog and the subject of user adoption is something we have monitored for a long time now at ERS, having implemented SharePoint in many organisations.

Derek you stated in one of your comments that “I am looking for a file that I should have in Outlook or on my PC somewhere. I am searching around for it, but can’t find it. At the same time, I am thinking to myself, “this file might be out on one of our SharePoint sites, but I can never find anything there”. My personal behavior was to avoid going into SharePoint, until it became my last resort.”

With the right tool, you can easily search and find this data from within Outlook. Now obviously it shouldn’t be like this, (i.e. a 3rd party tool shouldn’t be needed) but SharePoint just isn’t easy to use and the search results returned are almost impossible to interpret, especially to inexperienced users. This is one of the major reasons that facilitating high user adoption is so difficult.

Because of this we developed an application for SharePoint that allows you to tag incoming emails and documents/attachments with managed metadata. These can then be searched for from within Outlook, using refiners. It makes the information incredbily easy to find compared to SharePoint’s traditional search function.

We have convinced a large number of people to like using SharePoint without them actually having to use the SharePoint interface and this is where it’s value lies.

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:38:33 +0000

One of the risks that organizations have connected to SharePoint was that they deployed the tool first and are seeking a strategy second. Not that this is a bad approach…but if the gap between deployment and strategy is too wide, the risks for dissatisfaction and/or poor rates of user adoption can lead to potentially uncomfortable questions being ask about the value of SharePoint for the business.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:01:32 +0000

Good points, Andy. This goes along with my analogy that SharePoint is like a Swiss Army Knife or a similar multi-tool. The multi-tool has lots of useful tools and does most things fairly well. However, if you are looking for the best set of tweezers, for example, they don’t necessarily come with the multi-tool; rather, there are dedicated companies that put out top-of-the-line tweezers. That’s not to say the tweezers will fit as nicely on your toolbelt as the multi-tool. Overall usefulness with SharePoint is quite high, depending on the willingness of organizations to take the time to plan before they build.

By: Andy Burns

Andy Burns — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:37:54 +0000

I disagree with the line “There are risks to SharePoint strategies that don’t venture much beyond the out-of-the-box experience” – somewhere in that line should be the phrase “F%$*ing disasterous”.

Until that line I was starting to get twitchy – because while Facebook or Tweetdeck do a handful of things well, SharePoint does a lot of things – a little awkwardly. But to say that it’s no good ‘cos it’s ‘inconvenient’ is like writing off ASP.NET because it doesn’t just do things straight away.

Too many organisations set out to ‘use’ SharePoint without establishing a) what for, and b) a realistic budget to achieve that. It’s sold as a solution by Microsoft marketing, while their techies talk about it as a platform. And I see the same happening with “the cloud”.

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:50:14 +0000

Excellent article, although a bitter pill to swallow since I’m a full time SharePoint designer. Your comment “When the imbalance of cost and experience/value is too great for any technology, it is ripe for replacement” makes me realize my need to remain agile, ready to adopt to new technologies or delve under the SharePoint hood a little more to keep my customers happy.

By: Adam Mohrfeld

Adam Mohrfeld — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 17:37:00 +0000

Yes, indeed, i focus on driving user adoption here, and comments like that are bothersome. The rest of the story goes, they wanted their site locked down, so when new people needed access, they couldn’t not find the documents. So, a snowball affect of complaining started occuring. They now understand the concept of sharing. :) But it’s never easy to get that point across.

Great point about searching through Outlook, and then PC, and then SharePoint. I find, too, that we have too many “places” to search for information. We have setup our crawler to index our file servers. Helpful yes, but we still find a plethora of results when common keywords are search upon.

By: EndUserSharePoint

EndUserSharePoint — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:59:01 +0000

Derek,

I had an interesting discussion with Jose Morales and Dan McPherson over dinner two nights ago. Jose is adamant that there is absolutely no reason a real interface can not be put on top of SharePoint, completely ignoring the out of the box theme. He wants to build application interfaces against the data stored in SharePoint, and has done a simple proof of concept with his Simple SharePoint CMS template, which you might have seen distributed through the EUSP newsletter.

In short, what you are asking for with an iGoogle interface is absolutely doable. Jose is formalizing his ideas and will be publishing an article on NothingButSharePoint.com soon.

By: Derek

Derek — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:51:42 +0000

“GAH!!!” — When I read this comment, I laughed and then cried. You expressed so well something that we SharePoint enthusiasts do not want to hear. I went back to the old way of doing something because the new way you provided, doesn’t work that well for me. In the example you mention, SharePoint just became UNDESIRABLE.

This morning, it struck me that I was in a similar position. I am looking for a file that I should have in Outlook or on my PC somewhere. I am searching around for it, but can’t find it. At the same time, I am thinking to myself, “this file might be out on one of our SharePoint sites, but I can never find anything there”. My personal behavior was to avoid going into SharePoint, until it became my last resort. GAH!!! again.

By: Adam Mohrfeld

Adam Mohrfeld — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:25:42 +0000

Derek, Thank you, great article! We contantly struggle with user adoption, and I’m sad to say this, but I once heard a manager say to me, “We can’t find anything, and went back to emailing project documents back and forth.” GAH!!!! It felt like a really bad break up story.

The reference to iGoogle is very interesting. I never considered comparing the usability of the two. But you are right, instead of “Google It’ – people should be saying, “SharePoint It” :)

By: Bill Morris

Bill Morris — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 09:54:25 +0000

Great post Derek , You have explained in a very explicit way. No doubt SharePoint is a convenient but people has created many difficulties. It has become limited to IT people only. Very few ordinary people knew about this and the usage. I was reading somewhere that it will contribute to make more sites in the year 2011 than the number of sites are existing now. So keeping in view the explosive growth developers should make it real convince.