Technical Writer

Over at EndUser SharePoint.com, Lee Reed talks about a new term shetiquette, or SharePoint Etiquette, and lists some things that are just not etiquette, like checking out documents and not checking them back in, entering garbage in meta-data fields, not providing training and so on.

He (or she) separated the list into two parts—one specific to users, the other to SharePoint administrators. They’re all good points, definitely worth a look, but the two that really resonated with me today were points numbers 10 and 16 in the adminstrators/site owners area. These were:

• Trying to “protect people from themselves” by blocking features in SharePoint rather than enforcing existing corporate policies for the proper use of corporate technology systems
• It’s also bad Shetiquette to give people the additional responsibilities of managing their Department’s SharePoint site without adding the responsibility to their job description so it will be considered during their performance evaluation.

Protecting people from themselves

Probably one of the biggest mistakes we made when we first set up our SharePoint portal was to set up as much as we could read-only.

While some areas definitely should have restricted access, we restricted way too much. The problem was, we then had to dole out individual access for users to even add documents to libraries where appropriate. (Another big mistake here was that we gave individuals access, not groups.) So after a while every different sub-site had different access. Then people would leave, and they’d be pulled off the Active Directory, but their names were still on SharePoint sub-areas (this was 2003 version) and we couldn’t get them off without a fiddle because they were no longer on active directory, and so on. It became a real mess.

Not only was it a mess, it prevented people from using SharePoint properly, because they really couldn’t do anything except read documents.

It took us a long time to realise that we already had corporate policies for who could do what and where. We didn’t have to do anything special for SharePoint. All we had to do was apply our standard policies across SharePoint as well. When we finally worked that out managing users on SharePoint became much easier.

It took a lot longer to really get people using SharePoint, however.

Adding SharePoint responsibility to the job description

This one particularly resonated with me because right now at work we are undergoing our annual performance reviews. We have just completed last year’s and are also kicking off the 2009 process. As the SharePoint administrator SharePoint is included in my performance evaluation, but I guarantee I am the only one in the company who has it.

We put all our business processes, policies and procedures and compliance documents on SharePoint. The people who are in charge of these documents are also responsibile for the SharePoint site where the documents are stored.

Making managing the SharePoint site part of these users’ job description would give this work a higher profile. People would be aware of it. Their managers would be aware of the work they do. It wouldn’t be considered dead time any more. People would pay more attention to what they do and thus it would be easier for them to attend training and other SharePoint-related sessions that could help them to do a better job.

We’d have a better site, and the site managers would be a lot more SharePoint savvy.