SharePoint Collaboration Tips

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With the economy tightening, collaboration is absolutely vital to business growth. The need to grow and innovate in today’s business landscape requires a new approach to connect, communicate and collaborate to increase revenues and reduce costs.

Microsoft SharePoint provides information workers with unified communications that break down the silos of communications impacting the gold standards of performance—profit and sales growth.  Collaborative portals such as SharePoint shift the way that people work, but the culture change that occurs can be exhausting. In order to alleviate some of these challenges, here are some tips to bear in mind:

• Create compelling reasons for employees to go to the portal. How is the employee’s day made easier or more productive? What action does the portal cut from multiple steps down to one? Portals that can answer these questions drive visitors and gain momentum. The ability to automate a single report /notification or recover a lost document can be big wins in the eyes of end users. Managers need to find out what works for their teams. A lot of people pride themselves on technology and technology for the sake of technology can be destructive. Find out what works and use those methods and tools. Adapt to what works best—if a team likes discussion boards, managers should encourage their use.
• Make the portal the “front door” to the business. Put everything an employee needs on the portal (HR docs, phone numbers, certifications, documents, benefits, project management information). If someone is not using the portal, they are not really part of the business. Use security trimming that keeps in mind the different audiences within your business (executives, managers, admins, etc.) to cut down the visual noise and insure that the experience is relevant for the employee at every click.
• Lead by example:  Executive adoption. Having management adoption and frequent use are keys to corporate culture change.  Simple managerial acknowledgement goes a long way to rewarding the collaborative effort. Management needs to care and want to participate in the portal.
• Create an initial taxonomy. From the outset, anyone who is organizing a shared portal should have a clear understanding of the files the company uses and how best to organize them using folder structures and metadata. Once that structure is in place, the organizer should promote sending links as opposed to attachments. Employees should navigate to the work as opposed to pushing the work around while leveraging key SharePoint features such as check in/check out and version history. As a consequence, a whole series of great things happen. Corporate memory happens. If one person leaves, they don’t take the info with them. If a new person comes on board, there is a method to the chaos.
• It’s Ok to have fun. Items such as weather updates, lunch menus, webinars/classes, upcoming events, photos, etc. alongside the business data are all great draws to the portal. It’s crucial to create the attention that will pull employees towards the portal.

Paul West is a principal and co-founder of Sharepoint360 and has extensive experience with both SharePoint architecture and implementations. He believes in the power of SharePoint to deliver real world measureable results that help organizations maximize on their IT investments. He has been working with SharePoint technologies since the Microsoft SharePoint release in 2001.