SharePoint faults and limitations
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A must read on intranet:
http://www.internalcommshub.com/open/channels/casestudies/spdebate.shtml
Are employees rejecting SharePoint?
Each month, we ask two communication experts to argue respective sides of a burning issue. Here, Sam Marshall and Camilla Herrmann debate whether employees are rejecting Microsoft SharePoint or not.
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YES, says Sam Marshall, director of ClearBox Consulting Ltd.
SharePoint is unquestionably a success from a licensing perspective, but dig behind the firewall and the picture looks more chequered. For example in a uSamp survey last year, 80 percent of organizations using SharePoint said employees continue to share documents as email attachments.
Recently, the UK Met Office abandoned a twoyear SharePoint implementation project in favor of the cloud-based Huddle service. Even where SharePoint is used, people aren’t truly collaborating with it. Team sites are often really document graveyards where content is stored once collaboration has stopped.
Other social features such as blogs and My Sites have very low adoption rates or just pockets of activity. Even celebrated case studies are not about widespread adoption but localized success stories.
What’s causing this rejection? That we can even ask this question says something about SharePoint. If you had a more publishing-based intranet, you wouldn’t say: “Are employees rejecting Dreamweaver or Interwoven?”, for example. The difference is that we expect employees to be active content participants on SharePoint, not just passive readers.
To a large extent this rejection is passive, i.e. it’s a failure to adopt born of inertia rather than tasting the SharePoint sprouts and then spitting them out. This comes from years of ingrained habits about what
workplace collaboration is: email, attachments and network drives. That in itself is not SharePoint’s fault – Google Wave hit similar challenges, for example.
However SharePoint doesn’t help either. It’s highly complex, and some of the collaboration patterns are quite sophisticated, such as metadata, versioning and workflow. It makes it hard to selectively switch these elements off so that people can learn progressively. Moreover, the user interface is particularly unpleasant. It’s fiddly and lacks the visual appeal of modern websites.
None of these issues are insurmountable and some organizations are implementing SharePoint well. Where it fails, it’s usually down to how it is deployed. Firstly, training dwells too much on the “how” of collaboration and not enough on the “why”.
Secondly, behavior change issues are rarely directly addressed at launch time. The role of leadership in cultivating new working practices, for example coaching team leaders and embedding business governance, are all essential.
Thirdly, deployments tend to be too bare bones. Employees given a bag of building blocks, rather than an answer to their problem, rarely have the motivation to work out how to make it work.
SharePoint should be seen as a platform on top of which business needs can be met and even if the answer is code-free, it doesn’t mean that analysts and IT support staff aren’t needed.
Ultimately, SharePoint collaboration is a multi-year journey and many organizations are still at the early stages. Just because the technology is there, it doesn’t mean organizations are necessarily primed to adopt them.
The risk is that if employees form an early negative opinion about SharePoint, then it will be all the harder to bring them back for another try.
NO, says Camilla Herrmann, internal and digital communications consultant
There are two key points to define here:
- What is collaboration?
- What exactly is SharePoint?
Collaboration is not about using the latest sexy tool demonstrated to the CIO, whether that’s Yammer, Salesforce or external social tools like Twitter. It’s about employees working together by any means they can, whether it’s shouting across the desk or using BlackBerry Messenger.
Email has been the top collaborative tool in most enterprises for many years and it’s a hard habit to break. But there’s an appetite – especially among the Facebook generation – for something more.
It’s true that some of SharePoint’s collaborative tools are a long way from being best of breed. The wiki is very basic and full of annoying little characteristics, so it’s not really surprising if it gets little use.
The discussion forum is nearly as poor, yet I’ve seen a forum with a little visual tweaking becoming the most popular section on a SharePoint-based intranet for 50,000 employees and a real driver for change.
In that case the forum was placed on the homepage from day one and sent a strong message that collaboration was endorsed by the organization.
Perhaps the most collaborative tool in the Swiss Army penknife that makes up SharePoint is the people search. Properly configured, updated and linked to My Site profiles, it’s the way to find the person that you need in a large organization. Once you have tracked them down, however you collaborate after that, SharePoint has done its job.
Just letting employees comment on news items, or rate documents for usefulness, is all part of collaboration and a great introduction for the many organizations that are still only dipping a toe in the water of the social workplace. Oh, and don’t forget the core list and library stuff. I’ve recently been showing new users how to structure long document lists through views – which can save them many hours of work – and they just love it.
Despite this, SharePoint properly planned, well supported and actively launched is often a ground-breaking application for an enterprise. In a multinational organization it may be the first tool to cross geographical barriers. It’s an incredibly powerful way of organizing information, which those who have been using it for a while tend to take for granted.
If you define collaboration as any way you can work together – and SharePoint as a well thought-through implementation with a way to find the people and content that you need – I’d say there is no way it can fail your employees.
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