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%. 

One of the cool things about not being a total moron in SharePoint anymore is that I actually have the ability to help people. I’m always happy to lend a hand when I can, and it’s actually a great way for me to learn even more. However, sometimes it can be hard for me to give the proper advice/help because I don’t exactly know what a person is asking. There are so many different parameters that can affect any advice you get in SharePoint and it’s really hard for someone to be in your head. Sometimes it can take several back and forth emails just to fully understand the question being asked. So, I thought I’d type up a quick blog which will help you ask your questions more succinctly and make sure you get the best advice/help possible (not necessarily from me).

A successful team is perhaps won of the most critical aspects to a successful SharePoint project, because without the right people you can’t make it happen. The first thing to say is that building a successful team is not about hiring as many developers as possible and hope they get it all to work. In fact the place to start is not with the people who will implement the project but those who will envisage and plan the project.

I just got done with a Live Learning Web cast for AppDev on User Profiles and My Sites and it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly have been worse. I had serious machine issues for the first 30 minutes and couldn’t get my profile import configuration to save. I kept getting an error message about connecting to the database on the profile configuration screen. This was very strange as everything else seemed to be working – I’d expect the Shared Services Administration site to fail completely if the database server was borked.

SharePoint is really a collection of capabilities. At its heart, it is a Portal that exposes information customized for a particular user. It has extended functionality to quickly build features inside this portal to enable Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search. It has ventured into Social Computing and Collaboration by creating shared work spaces, supporting blogs and wikis and allowing people search. With the inclusion of PerformancePoint in its licensing, it also becomes a strong Business Intelligence offering, though it will require expanded knowledge of that capability to implement. It starts to break down when pushed to work as a Business Process Management Suite or Application framework.

I worked on creating a mailing list for a public facing SharePoint site. I really had some constraints because I was only allowed to use SharePoint Designer and the browser. I’m not used to these situations because I am mainly a software engineer. However, it was a very nice experience. I applied lots of knowledge and I worked around the constraints. I decided to put the experience and workarounds together into an educational series of articles to help SharePoint end users and administrators create their own mailing list without writing a single line of .NET code.

Each article will cover specific areas of HTML and CSS – such as layout, formatting, links, tables, HTML forms, starting with a basic introduction. I will show in each of these examples using SharePoint as our development platform for HTML and CSS, and will provide as many external resources as possible for assistance along the way.

User Adoption: Educate the User Community on the Differences between Blogs, Wikis, RSS Feeds, Discussions and SharePoint Lists
Introduction
The most powerful feature of SharePoint is its ability to socialize information, to offer the people in your company an easy to use collaboration environment that will provide them the ability to publish information for others to consume. [...]

For the past month I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Content Types, trying to get the final installment done for the SharePoint 101 Tricks and Traps ebook. I was working on something this morning that might turn out to be useful for a basic End User just starting to get their hands [...]