The biggest barriers to implementing SharePoint are not implementing the product, but getting users behind it
In his article The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of SharePoint 2007 Development over at SharePoint Buzz.com, the author talks about the ‘ugly’ of SharePoint 2007 as being
1. Selling - I have had the hardest time selling Sharepoint to my company. The functionality it provides out of the box alone would save the company in support calls, millions of dollars in mismanaged folders and bring in some organization into the company…
2. Training … Sharepoint is something I strongly believe the company can benefit from. However … the company is not willing to fork out the thousands of dollars for the product let alone the hundreds of dollars and time that I would need to train myself properly for the Sharepoint environment …
The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of SharePoint 2007 Development, by SharePoint Buzz.com, posted 5 January 2007.
(The original article was based on a post called The good and bad of MOSS 2007 development, New Year, New Job, New Projects!, by Sezai Komur.)
SharePoint Buzz sounds as though his company has not implemented SharePoint yet, and he cannot convince them to do it, but let me tell you, for some companies it’s almost as bad even once SharePoint is implemented.
Let’s use my company as an example. Two years ago the then head of IT decided to buy SharePoint. There was no consultation with the end users, it was just a done deal. Some money was made available for portal design, and one of the IT support staff was sent on a two-day course—but only because we insisted—to learn how to set it up, integrate active directory, and so on.
So the in-house designer and myself, as content manager, taught ourselves as we implemented it. There was no budget for training.
There is still no budget for training. Even now I still answer most of the enquiries about access and security because there is no budget to send the support team on training courses, and “They can’t afford the time out for internal training”.
As for end users—whenever I try to organise internal training for end users I get, “They don’t need to know”, or “The program isn’t important enough in their day-to-day work for us to take them away from their jobs”, and so on.
Most people go out of their way to resist change. It’s human nature. I don’t blame them for finding excuses not to use SharePoint. They need to be sold on the product.
Selling SharePoint is the hard part.
I can sit down with individual users in the company, show them what a great product SharePoint is, and what you can do with it. They are often enthusiastic, but if we can’t implement something immediately that enthusiasm wanes. Of course it does. Out of sight, out of mind.
Until I can sell it to the people who matter—the heads of department—the people who can issue a directive and say, “You will do it this way from now on”, SharePoint is never going to provide the benefits it should.
It’s a hard sell. These department managers were mostly here two years ago. They had SharePoint presented to them as a fait accompli. They didn’t want it. They didn’t see any need for it.
We, the people who implemented it, didn’t know enough about it in those first vital months to sell it to the people who mattered.
We’re slowly getting people onto SharePoint, but it’s a hard slog. Much harder than it should be.
Obviously, with the experience we have now, we would do a better job of selling the product in those important few months, and we would have concentrated on the people who really needed to be sold to. But without that training, without that experience, we did it the hard way, and we have a lot of ground to catch up.
So SharePoint Buzz, I say you have captured the two ‘ugly’ points about SharePoint really well. It’s a great product, and I mean SharePoint 2003 as well as 2007.
It is a hard sell, and it’s even harder to sell (not to mention implement), without training.
Comments (6 comments)
Great writeup and thanks for the reference. Keep checking out my blog for more SharePoint related news.
p.s. I have added your blog RSS to my feed list.
Kanwal / January 30th, 2007, 1:36 am / #
Your post on SharePoint 2007 caught my attention because we’re just about to implement it at my work and I’m the writer assigned to create the user documentation for everyone.
Did you implement MySites, with all the blog and wiki functionality? If so, how did it go? Did users start blogging?
I’m also curious about the RSS feeds — did users start using RSS feeds in any efficient way (e.g., substituting RSS feeds for project email lists)?
Any pitfalls or other traps I should be aware of? Thanks.
Tom Johnson / January 30th, 2007, 2:19 am / #
Thanks Kanwal, I’m enjoying reading your SharePoint blogs.
Tom, I probably haven’t been clear here. Although the original SharePoint Buzz article was about SharePoint 2007, I’m not actually using it. I was speaking about my experience with SharePoint 2003. Having said that, though, I think that some of the my experiences with the 2003 version will translate to 2007, and I think I could predict with some certainty how our users would react to 2007.
My Site — I am the only person at my work who really uses My Site. Users who (I can get to) attend a training session play with it for a couple of weeks, and then forget about it. I don’t see that changing in the near future.
RSS feeds — Our users are wedded to email. It’s been an uphill battle getting them to use document libraries rather than folders on a shared drive. Encouraging them use RSS feeds — that one’s a sell job, and it depends how well it’s sold.
We did try to introduce traditional RSS feeds via the Smiling Goat web part (http://www.smilinggoat.net/stuff.aspx) for 2003, and that experiment met with resounding indifference. The general response, particularly among developers, who I thought would be keen to use it, was “Why bother?”. (I might add that many of these developers do subscribe to RSS feeds, but they do it through their browser via feeds like Bloglines. I might also add that most of our developers love FireFox, which has its own problems with SharePoint.)
Blogs — Not sure about this one. It may take off (in the office), but I’d be surprised if it happens in the next couple of years. Although … blogging is fashionable, so it may work. It really depends on the type of company and what they are using SharePoint for.
One of our high-level managers tried blogging with SharePoint 2003. He created text portal listings, one for each post, and it was very successful as a blog. However, he discontinued the whole thing after people started misquoting him. It wasn’t the blogging that was an issue at all, but how people used what he wrote.
I know I come across as really negative here, but I’m basing it on my own experience and it totally depends on your audience. You’re fine if you have a tech savvy audience, but the average office is not tech savvy.
We–the people reading this blog–are often bloggers. We’re mostly computer literate and generally au fait with things like blogs and RSS feeds and so on. We’re happy to try out and adopt new technology.
The average SharePoint user isn’t. Or, I should say, the average user who has had SharePoint thrust upon them (can I call them a typical office worker?), isn’t. They are comfortable with Windows Explorer and file manager, with Outlook and Office. Blogging at work is outside their comprehension. It’s not even something they would remotely consider. Likewise the traditional RSS feeds. You mention substituting RSS feeds for project email lists. I’d love to see that happen, but it’s really hard to wean the average user off Outlook.
They like document libraries, because they can see some use for them. (And SharePoint 2007 comes with a recycle bin. Hallelujah.) They like task lists and issue lists, because they use them every day, even if they are currently spreadsheets or part of Outlook. But if they don’t blog now, and don’t use RSS feeds, it’s going to be a really hard sell for a while.
A caveat here. Our SharePoint is totally internal. There is no access to outsiders. We run a company internet outside of this, and it is a straight AJAX/DHTML/Flash site. Hence our SharePoint is used totally for internal processes, intranet, project management, processes, etc.
From a tech writer perspective … my prediction on the killer app for SharePoint 2007. The wiki. (Or maybe I just want it to be.)
As a tech writer on a new SharePoint implementation I would be asking ‘Why are you implementing SharePoint?’ and ’What is SharePoint going to do for you?’ and concentrate on documenting those reasons, rather than all the bells and whistles. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2003 or 2007, I think most of it would be the same. For example:
As I say, it really depends on what is being implemented, and why.
31/1—This comment is turning out much longer than the blog itself (I should have blogged about it), but I just wanted to clarify one thing with RSS feeds, and here’s where my lack of knowledge about how they’re being used in SharePoint 2007 hinders. I’m not clear how the content query web part fits in with an RSS feed but I have heard them both used as a means to aggregate (roll-up) information from sub-sites. Roll-ups are good. Roll-ups are vital to any workplace that has working sites where the information needs to be aggregated at a higher level. CabSav.
CabSav / January 30th, 2007, 8:26 pm / #
CabSav,
Thanks for the lengthy reply. Sorry for not responding sooner — I forgot where your blog was. (The Subscribe to Comments plugin very helpful for readers sometimes.)
You have a ton of good information here. I agree with what you say and think that your experience will match ours here. We used SharePoint 2003 to create a blog within our own department, simply using the discussion tool. It was all right, but I was pretty much the main commenter. Strangely, most people saw the blog as a medium of fluff. For example, if you had a question about the best cell phone plan out there, you would post that on the blog. But if it was more serious, it was not usually posted on the blog. In the minds of many, blog = light journal.
However, I actually stopped posting to our internal dept. blog because it’s not very interesting blogging to my 11 colleagues. Part of the appeal of blogging is to connect to a global audience. If you spend time writing posts that only reach a small subset of people, many of whom aren’t bloggers and don’t care about blogs, where’s the motivation in that?
I agree that the wiki may be the most important part of SharePoint 2007. I was playing with it for a while yesterday and I like it except that it doesn’t allow you to upload pictures (and numbering is tough; meaning, if you split up your numbering with pictures and step results, you have to use soft returns everywhere). But even with these limitations, I’m planning to use the wiki to write the user documentation for SharePoint 2007.
Re RSS feeds, you mentioned the Smiling Goat web part reader. Did you find a way to make that work with authenticated feeds? In other words, lets say you have a newsletter behind the firewall. I created an RSS feed out of something like that and tried to get the Smiling Goat web part reader to read the feed, but it wouldn’t work. It only worked with feeds that were outside the firewall.
I think you’re right that people will be slow to shift away from email to feeds. I’m not sure what it is that will change their minds. Personally, I like offering people both. With Tech Writer Voices (www.techwritervoices.com), you can subscribe to both the feed or email delivery. 70% prefer e-mail.
Thanks for your awesome posts.
Tom Johnson / February 7th, 2007, 9:15 pm / #
Tom
I’ll have a look at the Subscribe to Comments. Smiling Goat RSS feeds. Yes, we did have problems with the firewall.
CabSav
CabSav / February 9th, 2007, 7:36 pm / #
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Idetrorce / December 16th, 2007, 4:57 pm / #
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