It has been 10 long years for SharePoint in the industry and the software is being credited huge success with respect to installations and sales. The fact that the platform of SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved in perspective of the massive technological advancement as against the predecessors, is certainly undeniable.
However, it is unfortunate that most of the organizations across the world are making use of only a fraction of the capabilities of the software. This particular work approach is often leading to frustrations and disappointments within the organizations. The issues that tend to crop up are quite complex; however, the common themes or approaches can be categorized and identified as the five deadly sins in an organization.
Here is a brief explanation of the issues and the ways of avoiding them to maximize the success quotient of SharePoint implementation within an organization:
1. Treating Governance as an One-Time Event: The term ‘governance’ is being much talked about in the present age. Owing to its much-hyped popularity, a number of organizations have attempted implying SharePoint governance. However, most of the time it ends up as nothing more than a weak effort of writing a plan and storing it in the document library. Governance should never be considered just a one-time shot since it is generally an active process. With SharePoint extending deeper into diverse areas of an enterprise, the significance of existing governance is turning out to be greater. The odds of ownership and the position of SharePoint within an organization are quite common. It is to be remembered that governance can greatly affect adoption, in case the controls are too rigid.
2. Leadership Abandoning Responsibility for Roadmapping and Information Architecture: The lack of ability in finding information quickly and easily is one of the increasing disappointments and frustrations faced by most of the business users. While a number of organizations are using SharePoint for quite some time, yet the usability is restricted within just file share. It has also been noticed in a number of cases that the software implementation has made the experience of users worse as they tried finding information spread across expansive websites, pages, discussion threads, document libraries, and wikis.
What made this happen? Unfortunately, the rise of this particular issue within an organization can easily be credited to management’s failure. Taking up a proactive approach to define the terms of processes, architecture, procedure, and training that allows efficient information management would have helped combat the issue. An organization that lacks a solid roadmap and information architecture for ensuring business growth with the passage of time will go on struggling with the most basic management items restricting their evolution into a more productive and collaborative footing.
3. Treating Training and User Adoption as an Afterthought: A particular issue that often tends to crop up within an organization is considered the worst sin that can happen to anyone. This is because it affects the support and confidence of your specific user base largely. It is likely for most people to welcome change and adapt to the same in a bid to try something different in terms of adding value and worth to the organization and their jobs. However, presenting a tool to someone that is hard to use can certainly lead to a loss of support.
This poses as great danger concerning SharePoint as it can virtually reach out to everyone in an organization. Once you tend to lose that support or confidence, gaining that back for another attempt is not only a difficult process and time consuming, but also expensive. It is common to witness IT taking technical approach and rolling out SharePoint with few considerations for effective impact upon users. This approach certainly calls for greater disaster and turns out to be worse.
After all, IT is supposed to prove itself as the most competent and skilled in terms of application of technology to business issues. With SharePoint, end-users and departments enjoy the convenience of creating and finding their own solutions for specific constituents and domains. If IT goes on to establish a bad example on the ways of gaining adoption and training its users properly, the stream of failure will spread and continue towards different levels of an organization.
4. Taking Human Resource Implications Lightly: SharePoint is a complex and extensive technology that holds a broad reach. Most of the organizations often tend to overlook this particular aspect of the software and depend on existing employees, having little expertise with the diverse range of necessary and essential disciplines of the software, to deliver complete business and platform solutions. What turns out to be worse is that a number of organizations tend to misuse a particular employee for the kind of role that is a total misfit.
This particular business problem with SharePoint indeed gives rise to multiple issues in IT and the enterprise as a whole. Some of the examples or instances shared by clients include:
I - Custom development of application as against SharePoint Out of the Box functionality that could have been easily leveraged. This leads to largely increased ownership cost in terms of the application.
II - Not improving the best practices of SharePoint development and design leading to expensive maintenance and enhanced efforts.
5. Lack of Education and Engagement among Executives: Most of the big organizations feature the objective of enhancing more collaboration and productivity within the enterprise. During the same time, a common theme that plays around the IT departments is that SharePoint lacks maximum support and attention from the executives. The executives surely want to reap the benefits, but fails making any investment as and when necessary.
The technology might not be perfect, but the issues that tend to crop with SharePoint are specifically 'man-made'. The course of SharePoint can certainly be changed; however, the road to deliverance begins with expertise and knowledge.
We provide SharePoint application development services. If you would like to know more about our expert SharePoint programmers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
Microsoft states that SharePoint is their most thriving server products, ever with 36.5 million in user license sales reported, for the years 2006-2011 and an approximate 2 billion in total sales reported as of 2013. Thousands of Microsoft partners around the world, work with SharePoint technologies, creating biggest partner's communities. It widely deploys apps, by SMBs and enterprises, across the globe. It is available in more than 70 languages.
SharePoint is most powerful collaborative platform, which delivers a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across intranet, extranet and internet sites. Users find news ways to share information with SharePoint, they search and discover the right information and people and how they build sites and experiences in a more self-service fashion. Technical people get benefited as they find better ways to organize documents, project details and timelines. They even can handle sites easily and grant permissions whenever they want to.
SharePoint applications are important for business and one can integrate with his or her website for a better performance. By getting developed under SharePoint technology it is sure to get a customized integrated solution. With out-of-Box features, one can get the compelling office integration as well as easy and flexible application deployment. It bestows upon users with so many diverse benefits and services. And adds value to company by serving them as a collaboration tool, portal, enterprise search engine, enterprise content management system, managing business processes, forms and offering effective business intelligence.
Vital Benefits of Using SharePoint
- Reduces the complexity of securing business information.
- Easily manages documents and ensures integrity of content.
- Improves team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools.
- Builds a collaboration environment quickly and easily.
- Gets users up to speed quickly.
- Deploys solutions tailored to any business processes.
- Provides sophisticated controls for securing company resources.
- Easily scales any collaboration solution to meet their specific business needs.
- Provides a cost-effective foundation for building web-based applications.
- Takes file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities.
Sharepoint empowers people to work together in such a manner so that they can get maximum benefits out of it. It makes people to collaborate and share their views, ideas and knowledge. This helps to find the ideas and expertise through various different communities. By combining an integrated, easy-to-manage platform with best-of-breed enterprise search feature can easily find content, information and people on the fly. SharPoint is highly secure, a comprehensive authentication and granular authorization system built in leads to secure development process. For easy customization, SharePoint also provides webparts which can be used as a plug and play object in your implementation. If you would like to get custom SharePoint webpart development done, that can help personalize your sharepoint application more precisely.
SharePoint websites based on their usability, design, creativity and ability to incorporate modern techniques. It is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft. Stands No.1 portal product holding an amazing record of Forrester Research. The new version of SharePoint, delivers great Intranet/Extranet platforms and acts as a great platform for building robust and reliable websites.
We provide Sharepoint application development services. If you would like to know more about our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
Incredulously, there are now well over 10,00,00,000 web users across the globe, around more than 500 companies using this multi-functional platform “SharePoint”. It’s one of Microsoft's large-scale enterprises and in past 5-6 years Microsoft sold over 36 million user licenses. It is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive enterprise search and content management, accelerating shared business processes and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Regardless of location and devices, we are able to log on to our collaborative, SharePoint-based environment to work with our colleagues on documents, projects or business processes.
SharePoint sites are quickly created and managed well by supporting specific content publishing, enterprise content management, records management and business intelligence needs. With Sharepoint one can conduct effective searches for people and documents, participate in forms-driven business processes. It even accesses and analyzes large business data. It offers a way for people to work together in a versatile way, working together in online and offline applications, in any location.
Capabilities of SharePoint Server
1. SharePoint sites deliver a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across internet, intranet and extranet. It also brings all users together to share information and knowledge base across organizations.
2. Collaboration, Portal, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process and Forms, Business Intelligence and licensed for Internet/Extranet.
3. SharePoint search gives users the ability to find the people, content and information they need by combining an integrated, with enterprise search technology.
4. SharePoint communities empowers organization to work with people in ways that are most effective for them. Allow employees to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and ideas, connect with colleagues and find information and experts without difficulty.
5. SharePoint Insights enable users to access and act together with information across unstructured and structured data sources. It empowers users to discover the right people and expertise to make better and more accurate business decisions.
6. SharePoint Content enables users to participate in a governed, compliant content management lifecycle. SharePoint content makes it possible to skillfully balance user experience with organization policy and business process.
7. SharePoint Foundation is made for small business organizations or departments looking for a low-cost entry-level or a pilot solution for secure, Web-based portal.
8. An organization can use the SharePoint Foundation to coordinate schedules, share, organize documents and participate in discussions through team workspaces, blogs, wikis and knowledge base on the platform that is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server.
9. It works perfectly with other technologies like MS Office, MS Unified Communications and MS Exchange Server. And it has centralized administration allows managers to access application management features, system settings, manage security settings, upgrade SharePoint, change general application settings etc.
10. It can customize application very easily and helps in organization branding. It also looks after the security issues, by managing permissions to sites, lists, folders, documents, web applications and more.
SharePoint Designer is a tool of choice, among developers, for rapid application development. With the help of SharePoint Designer, advanced users and developers can quickly create customized SharePoint solutions. Expert users can compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios, from many collaborative sites and web publishing to line-of-business data integration and business intelligence solutions.
These great solutions leverage the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy-to-use environment. Additionally, developers can use SharePoint to get a rapid start on SharePoint application development projects. With its advanced features and tools, organizations can quickly respond to growing business needs by building ultimate effective solutions.
We provide SharePoint development services. If you would like to know more about our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
