A New SharePoint Resource

By Michael Sampson
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I’ve wanted to write a book about collaboration for a long time, and last month that wish became reality with the publication of Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways. It’s a book about how business teams can make the most of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 for collaborative purposes. Be warned, however, that Seamless Teamwork is a very different book for an IT industry analyst to write, and even more than that, given some of the previous reports I have written about SharePoint, it’s a very different book for me to write.

I wrote Seamless Teamwork for a simple reason: there are many books and resources available for the people who do the technical work with SharePoint—designing, configuring and administering SharePoint in the enterprise—but little or nothing for the end-user. Seamless Teamwork seeks to redress the balance, offering an insight into how a project team uses the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint, while offering guidance on the main areas that most users grapple with. For example, there are sections that deal with how to work with SharePoint when offline or out of the office, how to decide whether to use Meeting Workspaces, and how to use the workflow capabilities of SharePoint for requesting input on documents. The book is composed of 10 chapters, spread over 300 pages. The orienting framework of the book is a project that someone—Roger Lengel from Fourth Coffee—is asked to lead, using SharePoint. SharePoint is a new factor for Roger, and the book follows him as he works out how to use SharePoint effectively within the context of his new project. The main idea is that the book starts from something that most of us can identify with—working on a business project—and then explores how and where SharePoint can help.

Key Elements

One of the keys to Seamless Teamwork is that it outlines a way of using SharePoint to support both the work tasks of the team and the social well-being of the team. An example of this is advice about how to use the wiki capabilities of SharePoint to support team brainstorming during the process of the project, as well as how to use the blog to support the people at a social level when the project is underway. Using the blog for this purpose provides a strategy for interpreting silence in virtual teams, which is a huge issue. Once you take away the ability for people to directly see the others they are working with, those people become invisible and inaudible. Thus when you use technology to bridge the gap between people, you need to provide cues as to why some people may be silent at a particular point in time. Keeping a project blog about upcoming movements is one way of overcoming this silence.

Another key to Seamless Teamwork is the way the sites are set up. In any business project, there are three broad groups involved in what happens: the people working on the project team, the sponsors and stakeholders of the project, and everyone else in the organization. The set up of a project site needs to recognize these three groups, and their differing requirements. The way Seamless Teamwork handles this is akin to the design of a building: anyone can walk into the foyer or lobby of a building and read the mission statement on the wall, look at the pictures of the CEOs, and view the brochures and magazines placed for review. However to get further into the building, you need special access privileges. This idea can be brought to life in SharePoint by creating an overall site for the project that anyone in the organization can access, and which gives details about the project and the people involved. If the visitor is a member of the project team, or a sponsor of the initiative, they can get to one of the sub-sites that forms that group’s working place. If you’re on the project team, you can get to the Inner Team site. If you’re a sponsor or stakeholder, you can get to the Sponsors and Stakeholders site. Both of these sub-sites are set up with specific lists and libraries to support project execution and communication.

Seamless Teamwork is a very pragmatic book. You will wonder if the same person who wrote the SharePoint 7 Pillars critique earlier in 2008 could also write Seamless Teamwork. Yes, I wrote both. If you are not familiar with SharePoint 7 Pillars, it is a research report that concludes that SharePoint fails in its ability to support team collaboration, according to the requirements of the 7 Pillars framework for enterprise collaboration. Yet, here’s Seamless Teamwork, a book that talks about how to use SharePoint for collaboration. How does one square the advice of both? The simple answer is the audience for SharePoint 7 Pillars and Seamless Teamwork is different, and each care about different things. The audience for SharePoint 7 Pillars is the IT Department, charged with building an IT environment to support collaboration. The SharePoint 7 Pillars research sounds a warning about how far you can go with SharePoint, as well as some of the areas where you will require technical and human practice mitigations. Seamless Teamwork is directed to people in business teams who use SharePoint. While Seamless Teamwork is not a complex IT book, IT people will benefit from a better understanding of how people use SharePoint. My hope is that the book will be of great help to all who read it.

Published December 1, 2008