Can Great Branding Eliminate the Need for Training?

Can Great Branding Eliminate the Need 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.

But even with the incredible time pressure that we operate under, I still have time to laugh at some of the approaches people are coming up with in order to shorten the learning curve for effectively utilizing SharePoint.

Branding SharePoint Like Facebook?

People that should know better are suggesting that if you simply start branding the SharePoint UI to look more like social media sites, that your adoption problems will be solved.  Another approach that you’ll hear about is adding Yammer just to get people to enter their SharePoint intranet.

People are saying things like “give them an interface they already know how to use” or “making SharePoint more social will get people into the environment”.

If this weren’t so tragic a misunderstanding, it would be funny.

SharePoint is Powerful

SharePoint, at its heart, is a powerful application for creating and managing documents and other intellectual property.  The idea was that it is already a dramatically simplified interface that allows normal workers (not IT personnel) to perform amazing business miracles, like the creation of a workflow or a key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard without writing any code.

While I am a firm believer in Branding SharePoint in order to reinforce an organizations identity and facilitate the use of the environment, I don’t think there’s any way to escape the need for actual SharePoint Training if you expect your organization to benefit from SharePoint.

To put this in perspective, consider this: would adding Yammer or a Facebook like interface to your company’s accounting system negate the need for training your AP and AR clerks? Probably not.