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. For users to adopt SharePoint, these capabilities must meet the user where they are; meaning that they must provide the power that’s needed to solve the user’s current challenge while also being easy enough for the user to understand and implement. When SharePoint is implemented outside of the flow of business, user adoption will suffer and your user community will feel like they’re ‘pushing a rope’. Read the rest of this entry »

When you don’t take the time to define what collaboration means in your environment then you won’t have a baseline to compare current-state against previous-state to determine if your project has been a success or not. Take time before your SharePoint project starts and discuss what collaboration means within your organization. Define it. Test the definition. Ask people throughout your company how they define collaboration in order to build holistic view of what collaboration means to people.

To some companies, collaboration means that information is freely available to everyone that needs or wants access to it. In others, it means that people are working together in a way that they are unable to currently. Still others define collaboration as being able to more easily socialize the content that they produce as part of their job, such as providing reports or other documents. Collaboration means different things to each and every company so be sure and find your definition at the beginning of your project. Read the rest of this entry »

SharePoint sites, and more specifically Intranets, are created to provide information that positively contributes to your users work life. Users have an unspoken expectation of your site. They expect the information being presented to be refreshed frequently, expand their existing knowledge or present them with information that they wouldn’t have otherwise known if they hadn’t found it on your site.

It’s unfortunate, then, that many new SharePoint Content Owners simply present RSS feeds in a web part to ‘flesh out’ their SharePoint site. The RSS feed web part on an Intranet or Internet site aren’t meant to be used in a “set it and forget it” way. The goal of your site should be to educate, to present information that the reader can’t get or can’t interpret themselves. The RSS web part, unfortunately, allows us to present information on our site in a passive manner. Instead, the way to view RSS, and other information presented on your site, is to focus on providing ‘quality, not quantity’. Read the rest of this entry »

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. It means supporting them in their efforts and helping them apply the technology to their unique business requirements. Don’t speak to them in generalizations. Speak to them with specifics about how it will support the work they do. Read the rest of this entry »

This file is the Microsoft Compiled Help file for SharePoint 2007. You can download this one file, place it on your machines hard drive and you will have all of the Microsoft Technet information about SharePoint always at your fingertips. That’s a pretty good deal for FREE.

Lee Reed (@SharePointLee) is a SharePoint Consultant based in Atlanta, GA and has held technology leadership positions in the healthcare, commercial real estate, multifamily, consulting and legal industries. He is laser focused on assisting companies to leverage their technology investments with a driving passion around demystifying technology to drive collaboration success.

I was doing some research recently and ran across this white paper from Microsoft that outlines “Five Ways SharePoint Can Save You Money“. I thought it sounded interesting, and very appropriate to the content I write, so I decided I would supply a link to the page for you, my readership.

Lee Reed (@SharePointLee) is a SharePoint Consultant based in Atlanta, GA and has held technology leadership positions in the healthcare, commercial real estate, multifamily, consulting and legal industries. He is laser focused on assisting companies to leverage their technology investments with a driving passion around demystifying technology to drive collaboration success.

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. Giving people a reason to visit, then, may be as simple as providing up-to-date information, access to common forms, automated information routing and providing access to information that simply cannot be found elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Departments will not mature at the same rate of speed, so it’s beneficial to build a model of maturity for your organization so that you can plan the steps to take to move each department or group to the next level of collaboration maturity. You may choose to modify my simple maturity model below or build one of your own. The goal will be to make certain that you include some ‘stretch goals’ within each level of your maturity model to help people move to greater use of the platform.

In this model, Level One maturity is the most basic level of SharePoint use while Level Five maturity represents a department or group that is especially well skilled in the use of SharePoint to solve their business challenges.

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