According to a recent webinar I took part in, 70% of organisations in the Western world have adopted SharePoint. Is the organisation you work in one of those, or are you one of the 30% who are still considering whether SharePoint is a tool that you could use? If you fall into the latter camp you might be interested in listening to Prescient Digital Media's webinar on SharePoint 2010 Dos and Don'ts.
SharePoint use will vary dependent on who you talk to, but for the most part organisations are using it as a Web Content Management (WCM) or an Enterprise Content Management System (ECM). A recent survey found that, since its release more then 10 years ago, SharePoint has moved from “being an intranet and basic collaboration application to something that is now used for portals, collaboration, forms processing, business intelligence, business process management and content management”. If you're at the point where you're implementing SharePoint, great, but what are some of the key lessons you need to bear in mind when implementing SharePoint?
Dos and don'ts SharePoint 2010 is an extremely rich and robust web application but when you start using it it's important to focus on one thing only and take one step at a time. That might be Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Document Management. Use a carefully planned, phased approach to any SharePoint implementation and this will ensure you get the basics rights. Once these are in place you can think about implementing the other more interesting features in subsequent phases. Don't, whatever you do, bite off more than you can chew!
On any intranet, navigation is one of the most important elements so it's important to have a well thought out and developed navigation. Unfortunately, out of the box the SharePoint 2010 information architecture and navigation is underwhelming, so an essential requirement of any SharePoint implementation is to implement your own information architecture and avoid using the SharePoint navigation at all costs.
My Sites is a very powerful part of SP2010 which allows individuals within an organisation to connect in a similar way to how they would connect on Facebook. My Sites also allows individuals to find other users by expertise, by tags and by searching for their profile, plus it enables individuals to blog to their own My Sites. So any implementation of SharePoint 2012 should implement My Sites,but it should be done as phase two of any SharePoint project as it will take a lot of time to get it right and organisations will need to think carefully about they manage its implementation.
Another must when implementing SharePoint is to institute rules and governance for Team Sites. SharePoint administrators should plan for the creation of a huge number of sites. Without these rules and governance in place SharePoint sites will sprawl out of control very quickly. The final point made in the webinar is always to customise the look and feel of your SharePoint installation. An organisation’s business needs and requirements will determine what this look and feel is, but you should never use the out of the box SharePoint look and feel.
Listening to the webinar, one of the key lessons I learnt was that SharePoint has a lot under the hood. It's an extremely robust tool and can be augmented in many different ways. But it's important to appreciate that SharePoint will require a lot of time and investment to make it work the way you want it to work and you should never underestimate this. Organisations should also be prepared to spend money beyond what you might pay for licensing and implementation costs.
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James Mullan has worked in the legal sector since 2001. He is an advocate of social media tools and has been talking about how these tools can be used by information professionals and organisations since 2005. James is currently BIALL President Elect and in 2009 won the Wildy-BIALL Law Librarian of the year award for his use of social media tools. Outside of work James is a keen runner and maintains his own blog called "The Running Librarian" Follow James on Twitter @jamesmullan6, friend him on Facebook, or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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