So your organization needs some IT Development done.
Let’s say an intranet, public facing portal or similar project. Let’s also say you’re the lucky middle manager or staffer that gets tasked with managing the outsourcing of the project.
The 3 Most Common Mistakes inOffice 365 and SharePoint Deployments
Today it’s all about the cloud, and why not? The benefits to supplying your organization with a high-quality implementation of Office 365 closely integrated with a SharePoint Intranet and Microsoft Exchange are irrefutable. Having these three powerful application environments skillfully implemented and professionally maintained by Microsoft eliminates an enormous amount of technical headaches while saving most organizations considerable cash.
There's Real SharePoint Adoption and then there's just adding "Social"
People are doing some pretty crazy things in order to try to drive much higher rates of adoption for SharePoint in the enterprise. Over the last year an enormous amount of attention has been given to weaving various types of social communication systems into the SharePoint environment. The theory seems to be that since these types of communication systems are popular as stand-alone systems, blending them into a SharePoint environment will provide a reason for more employees to enter the SharePoint environment.
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 or that it’s so ineffective (90% forgotten in 30 days) but that for the best run organizations it’s been replaced by a much better system.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.
Multilingual SharePoint Training? Ne, Nej and Nein!
Do a Google search for “multilingual SharePoint training” and you’ll find an endless series of links providing information about how easy it is to get the SharePoint platform to adapt itself to the needs of a multilingual world. And while that’s true, and Microsoft has done an incredible job in making SharePoint a great multilingual platform, it’s not what you were searching for. Multilingual SharePoint training is almost impossible to find.
Answer to SharePoint Adoption:Surprise! It's Not Yammer!
Want SharePoint Adoption?
Get Corporate Communications involved.
If you are familiar with SharePoint, then you are well aware that lack of adoption is an almost universal issue in the community. Several high-caliber studies indicate adoption rates as low as 22% (and that’s using the measurement of one visit per day!)
Branding has always been a fun topic for me, this is especially so when it comes to Branding SharePoint. I have a pretty varied background, but the time I spent in corporate operations gives me a tremendous appreciation for what SharePoint can do in the right hands. You can make miracles every day.
In this Four Part Blog Series, we will focus on, what we think are, the most important solutions to achieving a higher SharePoint Adoption rate inside an organization.
There’s a new strategy emerging for training employees in technical intranet procedures. I’m speaking, of course, about online training and support provided as a series of brief video snips. Bite-sized training modules that are easily searchable inside your existing intranet are proving more compelling and cost-effective than the traditional intranet training model.
A recent IDC poll indicated that only 22% of the employee base use SharePoint on a regular basis. As if the negative ROI of this situation weren’t bad enough, another study shows that the cost of supporting SharePoint can be over $40 per person per month. According to a Osterman research study, 46% of employees say that poor training is the reason for the poor adoption.
I think most people would also agree that there are two parts to Branding SharePoint: knowing what to do and knowing how to do it. Unfortunately in the world of Branding SharePoint, it seems like most of the discussion is focused on the “how to” portion and very little time is spent on the philosophy of what should and should not be done.
