Technical Writer

It’s official. We’re upgrading SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to MOSS 2007.

Hooray!

This is not just an opportunity to upgrade to a better system, it’s also an opportunity to undo some of the mistakes we made first time round. It’s a chance to resell the good points of SharePoint.

Mistakes we made

Most of the mistakes we made were due to inexperience. It’s only now, after we have used the system for two years, that we actually understand these were even mistakes.

• We did not know what SharePoint really was, or what it could do
• We tried to make it too much like a traditional web site—which led to a heavy reliance on putting web parts on pages rather than sending users to content
• We used the portal server almost exclusively; there are only two ‘real’ WSS sites on our whole system
• We used SharePoint out of the box, with no customisation except for the CSS redesign
• We did not understand the concept of shared authoring well, and we tried to make it too safe
• We did not understand that SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services were two separate programs.

System limitations

We had other issues when we first implemented SharePoint, not related to our implementation. One of these was that at the time we were also in the middle of upgrading from Office 2000 to Office 2003. If you are an early user of SharePoint you will know just how little you could do with Office 2000 compared to Offce 2003. We went for the lowest common denominator in training, and if you couldn’t only do something in Office 2003, we didn’t show people how to do it initially. A bad mistake. By the time everyone had upgraded to 2003 habits had set in. The majority of our documents are still created on the LAN drive, for example, and uploaded to SharePoint, rather than saved directly to SharePoint.

Experience helps us sell

Three years on we also know what is important to our users.

First time around we were selling the idea of the product. “Wow. Look at this great new product called SharePoint. It has libraries and lists, and web parts.  Aren’t they great? And what about those meeting workspaces? Why don’t you set up meetings with meeting workspaces? Or sites for projects?” And the users said, “It’s too much work. And besides, I have a process that works anyway. Why should I change?”

Now we don’t bother. We lead them gently, and pretty much ignore the marketing blurb about all the impressive things you can do with the product.

Now it’s more, “You know all our policies and processes are on SharePoint, but did you know you don’t have to upload the document every time you want to change something. You can change it direct in SharePoint. Not only that, you can keep a record of every change. Look, here’s how.” Or maybe, “I see that you do most of your work from that page. Did you know you can add a link to the home page by adding a My Link?” Or, “You want to find something on a LAN drive? Use SharePoint search.” And the users go, “Wow. I didn’t know it could do that.”

Baby steps, but they have helped us far more than trying to sell all the advanced features of the product.

We’re not implementing a new product, we’re upgrading

We’re not the only ones who have learned about SharePoint in the last three years. Our users have too. This time we’re not implmenting a new product. They understand how it works, how to move around, how to add documents and even web parts.

Last time around people had to learn a new system, as well as new ways of doing things. Now they know the system so this gives us far greater scope to introduce some of the more impressive features that confused people before.

I’m looking forward to that.

Last Modified : January 7th, 2008
Filed under : SharePoint
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