After a few interesting meetings I’ve come to realize that the concept of collaboration and Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) can be confusing.

I am looking for a sense of what’s going on with SharePoint today, across geographies, across industries, across SharePoint capability sets.

what do you do with SharePoint sites when their useful life is at an end, however you define that

The User Adoption Strategies report looks at the strategies that organizations are using to encourage adoption of SharePoint, and goes beyond mere “use” and explores the strategies that are “most effective”.

One of the things I rail against in my book SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration, is the belief that governance is just about optimizing technical settings in SharePoint. It’s not! It’s about so much more than that, and while the optimization of technical settings — the number of site collections, database sizes, page load times, and so on — is important within a particular context, successfully leveraging the technology of SharePoint to enhance business operations requires a more expansive view of governance.

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.

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.

Not at all. The problem here is the way you think about your projects. If you are consistently talking about “implementing SharePoint” you are going in the wrong direction. If you are talking about implementing any platform, you are setting up for failure. Many of the problems we run into with SharePoint and other platforms arise from focusing on the technologies.

In conclusion, there’s a life style here that I describe from the professional consultant’s point of view, but which applies almost equally to full time employees in a BA and/or power user role. Work patiently with the experts in your company and extract the core business requirements as best you can. With a deep understanding of SharePoint features and functions to draw upon, more often than not, you’ll be able to answer concerns and offer ways to improve everyone’s work day leveraging core SharePoint features.