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.
Take time before your SharePoint project starts and discuss what collaboration means within your organization.
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.
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.
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.
In similar fashion, the context of SharePoint must be communicated to your users in order for them to adopt it.
Training your users on ‘SharePoint 101’ topics is only the first in a multi-step process to get people into the collaboration mindset. After the initial training has occurred, make certain that you have a game plan to train your users to move beyond what they already know about SharePoint. It’s your responsibility to educate them on the power of the tool and show how it can be applied to streamline business processes. After your users have gone through their initial SharePoint training they will generally retain about 35% of what was presented. They will take that 35% and reduce it to the 28% that is more applicable to their needs and may have difficulty moving beyond that 28%.
SharePoint’s flexibility is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The capabilities of SharePoint far exceed those that user communities are accustomed to receiving in a software solution. Given this, when they are first exposed to these capabilities your users may feel intimidated by SharePoint’s complexity and frustrated by its menus and cryptic options. Here are some ideas about how best to use SharePoint’s flexibility to gain greater adoption of the platform within your environment
Our old friend Lee Reed sent us this Friday funny. Does the photo feel familiar…sigh…
"Those first few months…the ones just after the rollout. Those were the days when everything was new, like a spring rain. Late nights spent at the office learning the CQWP, mastering new curse-word combinations after using Designer on your site’s pages. [...]
Organic growth is great and is something that you should allow within your SharePoint environment. However, providing some guardrails around what site administrators can or should do with regards to navigation will help to ensure that everyone has an enjoyable SharePoint navigation experience.
