I can’t stress enough how important it is to spend the time up front getting the design of the SharePoint solution right. Your provider should have the experience to guide you through the preparation, planning and scoping of your deployment, determining the functionality for implementation carefully.

An experienced consulting provider can evaluate and work within the platform, deliberately playing to the application’s many strengths and avoiding its weaknesses. Furthermore your provider should have enough experience to understand when a product is the right fit, and if it’s not, providing alternatives even if it means losing the business.

Experience in your industry and understanding of typical disablers is advantageous.  Obviously industry specific solution accelerators enable you to rapidly bring concepts to fruition.

Ultimately, your provider should have the experience to ensure you don’t transfer existing problems to SharePoint and expect miracles. By taking a mature approach and asking the right questions with the right people, it positions the vendor to actually give you an indication of outlay and reward.

Once you have selected a provider and you are in your planning phase, it is time to consider User Adoption.The greatest adoption step you can take as a project team is to collectively author an adoption strategy. Let’s put it this way, you can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated collaboration features, glamorous look and feel, detailed analytics or mind blowing integration - but if people don’t use it, it isn’t going to add value. So the most critical factor for software success is effective user adoption. The phrase “if you build it, they will come” just doesn’t apply, you need staff to understand the change SharePoint will bring and what is in it for them.

If the SharePoint project you had implemented is not meeting your expectations there are ways to rectify the situation. Professional Advantage is running an upcoming online event where we will cover:

• Common reasons SharePoint projects fail
• Strategies to increase staff adoption rates
• Ways to quantifiably measure SharePoint usage
• Examples of projects we have rescued

Register at: www.pa.com.au/rescue

Tuesday 24 April, 2012

A SharePoint 2010 intranet is best served as a degustation menu. Each dish (feature) serving a specific purpose, resembling perfection in its own right and complimenting the rest of the course. One of the most common pitfalls of SharePoint implementations is the desire to achieve all goals at once. If you break them down into different independently measurable components you will not only achieve success but achieve it over and over again. Replace one failure with many small successes and suddenly SharePoint becomes a buzzword in your organisation instead of a swearword.

Information Architecture (IA) is an integral part of any web based content management system, you need to keep a close eye on the overall IA while designing the smaller and more manageable solutions. When breaking the IA down into manageable components remember two things: IA is not merely the sitemap and navigation, it also consists of metadata and classifications. Secondly, the IA will change over time. Build in a governance plan from the start on how to tackle IA changes and how to implement them.

As much as you would not put the strawberry ice cream on the steak and cover it in gravy, nor should you mix information, knowledge and processes up on your Intranet. Always keep your target audience in mind. Who is the benefactor of the solution you are attempting? Often you will have several goals in mind for your Intranet. Some of them might be

• An Increase in productivity
• To automate business processes
• Increasing knowledge sharing
• Making documents easier to find
• Helping new and existing staff to find critical information

Don’t put the “New Employee Form” into the HR team site together with some HR policies and internal HR documents. Instead, design an informational area of the intranet which can be centrally managed by a webmaster. This way, staff can find policies, information and reference material. Create an area for process automation where staff can navigate to, to get specific things done such as: equipment request, travel request, expense approval or new staff forms. Then build up workspaces for the different departments/teams where they can collaborate in a secure and managed environment. Cross promote links to the most relevant forms/processes to each team for faster user access. Use custom publishing workflows to allow content to move from the collaborative environment to the informational part of the intranet.

That way your IA can grow in a managed way instead of sprawling out of control and each audience will be served the course they requested. Tip: When designing the workspaces, treat each workspace as its own mini homepage project. Each department will have different needs, processes and types of information and the workspace homepage should reflect that individuality (while maintaining the brand guidelines of course). This way you can ensure maximum user uptake as the intranet becomes more and more relevant to how staff actually work.

Finally, give your staff the right tools to do their job. Ever tried eating a steak with no knife and fork? That’s how staff without any training will feel about the new Intranet. Frustrated. Worse still, they might actually use the tools badly and start making a mess of things. Training them on SharePoint and more importantly on your processes and how they are supposed to work will help keep staff in line with your vision and ensure a healthier IA for years to come.

To sum it up:

• Break down the intranet into the core tasks at hand (Find Information, Activate Processes, Collaborate) and build according to those core tasks.
• Build the intranet in stages. Start with one of the pillars while keeping the others in mind.
• Build mini homepages for increased user adoption.
• Give them the skills to do their job.

Some of the biggest positive changes I have found useful between SharePoint 2010 and 2007 – and there are many – fall into the areas of user interface, document management, platform, search and social media.  If you are intersted to read about it in more detail, I have put it together in a little article.  You can download it here, just fill out a small form about yourself.

I have recently worked on an Intranet Seminar hosted by Professional Advantage for over 200 Information Management Professionals.  Much of the examples discussed at the event were centred on Microsoft SharePoint.   At the end of the event we conducted a survey, where the attendees were asked to rate the most important aspects of an Intranet Strategy to their organisation. Overwhelmingly, Document Management was highlighted as being of the highest importance to those involved in developing an Intranet Strategy for their company.

66% of respondents nominated the ability to manage documents as being of greatest significance. This was followed by Content Management and then Search Capabilities.

For many organisations, document management is fragmented, inefficient, and costly – involving a mix of paper and electronic records, active and rarely accessed documents, onsite and offsite storage and multiple vendors. This doesn’t always have to be the case.

 We’d like to offer you a useful guide written by one of our professionals around developing a cohesive document management strategy. The “Creating Effective Document Management Strategies” whitepaper, authored by Roger Pegler, one of Australia’s leading Information Management Solutions Architects, discusses why you want to introduce a document management strategy, and what that strategy should entail to allow you to assess the costs involved.

 This is a useful guidelines document from Professional Advantage for any person tasked with identifying the organisational needs around document management.

 To download your copy please click here:

A document management strategy involves time and cost. It comes with a management overhead. Therefore, you have a right to expect that managed documents should be easier to store, access, and that the information should be more accurate.  When using document management you should be able to go directly to the final version of a document rather than calling up drafts.  Because if you can’t do this, then the cost of implementing the strategy probably isn’t worthwhile.

And that brings us to my previous blog about the document strategy – to have or not to have.  The reason you first need to know why you want to introduce a document management strategy, and secondly what that strategy would entail is so that you can assess the cost of doing so. Once you know the cost, you can make an informed decision as to whether it’s really in the business’ interest.

If the driver is compliance – perhaps you need to meet ISO or Department of Defence requirements or legal obligations – there’s no question.  You have to go down the path of creating and implementing a strategy or your business will suffer. The only real question is will document management will be enough, or do you require the stringency of a records management strategy?

If you’re considering document management for any other reason, try assessing the cost of not developing and implementing a strategy.  What if you just keep copying all your documents onto a drive somewhere?  What is the risk to the business if you can’t find that last copy of a proposal?  What is the cost if you never delete anything?

Some companies decide that living with the risk of no document management strategy is less and the cost of implementing one. Others find a parallel with disaster recovery -  if your documents are valuable enough to need protection against accidental loss,  they are also valuable enough to need managing  throughout their life cycle.

So where does that leave your organisation? 

Every organisation should have a document management strategy, even if that strategy is to say “We’re not going to manage documents”.  Whatever you choose to do, it should be the result of a conscious, considered decision. And before you create a document management strategy you need to decide why you want one and what you are hoping to achieve.

Usually corporate goals dictate the reason. For some companies it’s all about creating a framework for better decision-making. They want to be able to access and refer to the content of documents, regardless of whether that document is a Word file or a scanned image.  For others, it’s the desire to turn data into knowledge (i.e. knowledge management).  Then there are the organisations that require document (or perhaps records) management for compliance reasons.  They need to be able to keep and audit the paperwork.

But even for those driven by regulatory obligations, not every document in the organisation needs to be managed.  Invoices, purchase orders and other financial documents – yes.  Social club notices and emails arranging lunch dates – no.   If you’ve been exchanging emails with other staff members regarding a particular project, it’s the last email in that trail – not the first email and definitely not all the ones in between- that needs to be saved.  Because the last one contains all the previous responses, ideas and suggestions. All the emails leading up to this should be capable of being deleted.  Similarly, in some instances drafts of documents may be needed to track the decision-making process. In other circumstances, you may only require the final version.

The big trick is to recognise what you need to manage and to avoid the costs of managing fluff.  Will you be looking to manage unstructured as well as structured data?  When it comes to structured data you’ll probably want documents from Office applications managed via SharePoint, but what about emails, images, blogs, tweets, web pages and PDF files?

Document management must also address the whole data life cycle. If you’re designing the strategy, you have to work out what restrictions or stipulations you want to place on documents from creation and editing through to archiving and deletion.

Too many people focus solely on creation and saving of documents. Yes, you need to know from the  time a document or email is begun that it is tagged and stored correctly.  But you also need to know how you are going to find the document again and, at the bare minimum, when it should be deleted.