SharePoint Santa: 5 Branding Improvements I'dLike To See Under My Tree
Dear SharePoint Santa,
Many people agree that the appearance and user interface of SharePoint need to be augmented and customized in order to meet their marketing and operational requirements. While this is especially true for Public Facing sites, it’s equally important for many corporate Intranets. Unfortunately, the common method for Branding SharePoint, (lots of custom CSS) is expensive to implement and typically lost upon migration to the next version.
What Your Training Department Doesn'tWant You To Know
Still using “Instructor Led” Training? Don’t let your Board find out! Sure, instructor led training was the standard way to train in corporate environments for the last 100 years. Before PowerPoint, it was dry erase markers on whiteboards and before that, chalk on slate.
The issue isn’t that this model is so expensive (lost time, travel, etc, etc.) or that it’s so ineffective (90% forgotten in 30 days) but that for the best run organizations it’s been replaced by a much better system.
Over the last 5 years there has been a huge shift to a dramatically more effective and efficient model; delivering training to each desktop via video streaming through your corporate intranet.
Can Great Branding Eliminate theNeed for Training?
We live in a fast-paced world today. In fact, that’s a tremendous understatement. Anyone involved with the SharePoint platform, or for that matter, the world of IT in general, realizes that we work in an industry that breaks a second into 1000 parts.
At this moment in time, SharePoint training typically takes the form of a 2 day off-site “boot camp” style cram session. The effectiveness of these boot camps is disputed. Recent surveys attempting to identify the root cause for SharePoint’s abysmal adoption rate (22%), often target poor training as being the main culprit.
Want Real Adoption? ImplementSharePoint Upside Down
The Routine
Most organizations implement SharePoint in the same step-by-step manner:
IT department buys the product and the licenses
Install the platform
Deploy a site for each department manager
Migrate the content of shared drives into these new sites
Move into “maintenance” mode.
Training
Also, each department manager most likely got a SharePoint ‘team site’. They may have also received a memo about their new site, providing them with their username, password and a link to the site that they now ‘own’. Unfortunately, Managers tend have no idea what to do with their new site and it’s not their fault.
It seems like there’s a never-ending stream of blogs, books and videos on how to Brand SharePoint. Even so, the amount of misinformation and misunderstandings surrounding this topic is truly amazing.
Many people agree that the appearance and user interface of SharePoint need to be augmented and customized in order to meet their marketing and operational requirements. While this is especially true for Public Facing sites, it’s equally important for many corporate Intranets. Unfortunately, the common method for Branding SharePoint, (lots of custom CSS) is expensive to implement and typically lost upon migration to the next version.
