How To Collaborate And Deploy SharePoint

Editor's Notes

1. Hi, I’m Nick Inglis and I’m the SharePoint Program Manager at AIIM International. AIIM is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information… and I am the SharePoint guy at AIIM. You can learn more about us at A-I-I-M.org. Today we’re going to be talking about how to Collaborate and Adopt SharePoint successfully.
2. I always like telling people what they’re in for with any type of speaking engagement, that way if you think it’s going to be awful, you can leave. Please don’t leave though.First, we’re going to be talking about the collaborative roots of SharePoint in Platinum and Tahoe. We’re going to talk about our bright collaborative future and our problems. We’re going to discuss defining your business strategy and why this often neglected art is often the cause of SharePoint execution hiccups. Then we’ll talk all sorts of execution and I’ll tell you why SharePoint is AWESOME.
3. Back in 1998 Microsoft released a new version of Exchange with the name Platinum and in this thing there was a new repository called The Web Store where documents, web content and email were stored. Then this little product called Tahoe came along, not the smog emitting beast of an SUV that was also around in 1998, but Microsoft’s initial roots of SharePoint. When you brought Platinum and Tahoe together you’d get “Captain Planet”, no, you’d get WebDAV style Document Management added to your company’s function list. All of this was built around the Exchange server, which in itself is rooted in a form of collaboration. So, the bedrock of SharePoint began with collaboration and it’s important to understand that SharePoint had at its inception, sharing, messaging, collaboration and document management.
4. When you are not thinking about work, chances are you’re hitting up Facebook, or if you’re an uber geek like me, you’re hitting up Google Plus. If you remember back a decade or so one of the initial public collaboration platforms was ICQ. Then there was AOL IM, then Friendster, then LiveJournal, Myspace, Facebook, so on and so on. What we’ve seen is amaturation of public social tools which allow personal collaboration, this in turn this has been driving enterprise collaboration. Users are seeing the possibilities in their personal computing for the enterprise. When the PC first came out it was the enterprise which was showing users the possibilities of their personal computing. Now, we’re taking our queues from these external collaboration sites.With the cloud, there are now enterprise applications that are exist, and many that are freely available outside of our firewalls. These tools are easy to use and deploy, small businesses love them, you should hate them. They are like crack. They’re cheap, quick and often dirty. You should hate them because they can destroy your information security policies, you don’t know where the data resides, you don’t know how secure they are and your employees are going to want to use them. They too will go through a maturation process and many have. The problem is, your employees are going to go rogue on you if your corporate solutions suck. In many cases, because of some of the reasons I’m going to talk about, your SharePoint solution sucks.
5. SharePoint is one of the most amazing software packages that has ever been available. It is your corporate everything. Need Enterprise Content Management? SharePoint has got your back. Need Project Management? SharePoint has got your back. Need Knowledge Management? SharePoint has got your back. Need Enterprise Collaboration? SharePoint has got your back. SharePoint has always got your back.The Promise of SharePoint is that it can do anything given the right configuration. So, what we do is we say to our executives, “We need to use SharePoint because it can do everything we’ve ever dreamed of and more.” Then we get a license, we get a few servers, we spend a ton of time learning and configuring and then we tell our users, “Hey guys, stop using the shared drives and use this awesome thing called SharePoint that is going to do everything for us!” Then we launch it.Then users start playing around with it, they have issues, they don’t understand what it is besides an uber shared drive and they use it only as much as they NEED to use it. They start sharing more files via email because they can’t figure out how to used the file library, when the files are too big they use a fremiumSaas product without your knowledge or consent. They start failing SharePoint and whenever the word SharePoint is used around the office it is greeting with groans instead of cheers. Shame. On. Us.
6. We’ve failed our users. SharePoint isn’t about replacing a shared drive or replacing Docuwhatever or replacing Projectwhatever. It’s about reaching key business drivers. It’s about reducing paper usage, it’s about reducing IT costs, it’s about increasing collaboration, it’s about decreasing email volume. SharePoint is not a replacement, SharePoint is an enhancement!When you’re positioning SharePoint, don’t position it as a replacement. It isn’t one. It’s something new, elaborate and beautifully complex.
7. So, let’s define our business strategy here. Why do you want SharePoint? Is there a competitive benefit that your company will achieve with SharePoint? Is there a business issue that is solved by SharePoint? What you’ll want to do is a gap analysis. With a gap analysis you take an assessment of all of your current systems across key IT, human and business criteria. Rate each bit of criteria as it exists now in your current systems and then rate each bit of criteria as it would exist with SharePoint. Once you’ve gathered the data, you can see why you need SharePoint. That is your rationale for going to your executives. Don’t go making promises of heaven and glory, go in saying, “With SharePoint we will see a 20% reduction in email usage”. That’s why you want SharePoint. Make sure not to overpromise and under deliver just because SharePoint can do everything.
8. So, now you’ve got your executive buy in. They’re with you on this. So, we go and we get our license, we get some awesome servers, we plan our topologies, we plan our security, we plan out our entire configuration, we’re in SharePoint heaven. We can’t get enough SharePoint! We walk around with smiles on our faces because we’re finally getting to play with one of the coolest software packages under the sun! Look, WE GET THIS part. We understand. We can DO this. Technical execution is what we’re great at.
9. It’s the humans that we don’t understand. We’re in our basements or server rooms or awful, dark closets next to the bathroom. Generally that’s where IT sits, the worst place in the building and we forget that this software that we’re spending all of this time and money on establishing is for THEM. This is where WE fail SharePoint. Firstly, plan out your messaging prior to your launch, no, you’re not in marketing, but you better be talking to your corporate internal marketing. Your marketing department understands SharePoint as much as a mouse understands Quantum Physics. They have no idea how to position SharePoint and what they end up relying on statements of “Our new SharePoint site will replace our shared drive”. We’ve already talked about how WRONG that is. You need to be assured that your marketing team is conveying the benefits of SharePoint to your users well in advance of your SharePoint launch.Also, you need to plan out your training. No, you’re not in your corporate training team, but you better be talking to your corporate training team. Your training team is going to pick up the first book on SharePoint that they can find, read one page and then start freaking out about how they’re going to teach employees about this new software that does everything. Then, they’re going to say, “alright, well what do they need to know?” What they’re going to rely on while determining what they think users need to know is focus on current business functions and process. What they’re going to rely on is what users are already doing, which is a fancy way of saying, they’re going to rely on teaching what SharePoint replaces. Instead, direct your training departments on the business drivers and align the training to the business drivers. When you focus on what SharePoint will do rather than what you’ve always done, users will start to see the benefits of the new system. For some companies, this requires two training sessions, one on what SharePoint does and how it will drive business, then how to use SharePoint to do those very same things.Then, plan your rollout and user adoption strategy, for each business this is going to be different but I’ll give you a few tips to make this as successful as possible. First, look at the business drivers. Which line of business has the most to benefit from with SharePoint? Second, look at your gap analysis. Which line of business has the most need for SharePoint? Where are the gaps huge? If you find that those are a single department, look for the second on either list as well. Take those two answers, those will be the first groups that you’ll roll out to. Start with a small rollout with a few users that you can handhold all the way through like little children and ensure that absolutely nothing goes wrong. Then, from that pool of early users take some early success stories and give those to your marketing team. Have your marketing team pump those messages out through the entire organization prior to your full launch, preferably right before or after your training. Then ease in lines of business as it most makes sense within your organization.User adoption is a tricky one and you’ll have to keep paying attention to your users activity. Where you see potential, again, potential defined in terms of your business drivers, not technical potential. Focus your attention on understanding why your users aren’t adopting a particular area or functionality. This can be an indicator of several things. One, they could just simply not understand why a function is important, the good ol’ “What’s In It For Me”. Two, they could simply not understand how to use the system, the good ol’ ID 10 T error. Or three, they could be putting the entire company at risk by going rogue with some system outside of the firewall that hasn’t been vetted. All of these issues are resolvable, if it’s not understanding why the function is important, explain. If it’s not understanding how to use the system, teach. If it’s rogue usage of unvetted technology, get them fired… or direct them to the appropriate function within SharePoint.
10. Finally, in closing, SharePoint is awesome. It has all of the potential in the world, but it takes work. Please, please, please, do not screw this up. When you screw up your SharePoint installation and rollout you give SharePoint and the rest of us a bad name. That does not please me, so don’t do it. Secondly, and I’ll add this at the end of the presentation, if you don’t have enough money to spend on managing SharePoint, don’t install it in the first place. If you can’t get executive buy in on spending the cash required to successfully deploy and manage SharePoint, you have to hold your ground. SharePoint cannot be successful on a shoestring budget, it will get messy and your SharePoint will be awful, so don’t try it. Finally, Plan everything. Yes, you have shiny new servers and a license to the coolest software and you’re going to want to run to your servers and install SharePoint, don’t do it. Put your plan in place for EVERYTHING. Then, you can have a successful project.