The first few minutes of my presentation, I will be doing at the Best Practice Conference. Trust me, it gets even better, but you have to attend to get the rest!
Back in the day, a literary Labyrinth was called a Choose your Own Adventure Book. I actually have somewhere in my parents house the very same book that is pictured above. Reading these was an adventure. Did you choose the right path? Putting your finger(s) in multiple pages, just in case you did not choose the right path. Planning your SharePoint environment is very much the same way, there can be multiple out comes, with lots of twists and turns along the way, and depending on the choices you made earlier, could force the outcome later.
Page 1 & 2
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Your company hears about this SharePoint “thing.” It sounds like a good idea. You and a bunch of co-workers are standing around the water cooler talking about it. “Hey Sarcastic Sally, how is the paper your working on?” “As good as an ulcer,” Sally retorted. |
“Did you hear about that program called SharePoint?” ”Stop smiling, the light shinning off your teeth is going to blind me. Yeah, it sounds cool.” ”Maybe we should look at the business problems it could solve before we move forward with it?” you ask yourself out loud. Sarcastic Sally Scoffs. “It’s a cool application, let’s just move forward. You are such a worry wart.” Go to page 21 if you agree with Sally Go to page 37 if you want to follow your own idea |
Sally scares me, I think we better listen to her. However, I am not sure if this is the right way, so lets put our finger in here JUST IN CASE.
Page 21 & 22
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Your SharePoint environment is installed and takes a life of its own, causing chaos and mayhem everywhere in your company. You are blamed for the IT nightmare and sent to a small town in Idaho to flip burgers. THE END |
Oh no! I like burgers, but not that much. What happened!
In reality, this is a very common mistake. More companies than not introduce a application into their environment without understanding the problems they are targeting to solve. This can be fatal to the success of releasing the application, especially if it is SharePoint. You have to understand the new workforce you are dealing with is Generation X, Generation Y, and the Lost Generations who have had Internet for the better part of their lives. They are the My Space, Facebook, iGoogle, My Yahoo, My MSN, instant messaging, tweeting generations. They know how to use we based applications very well. SharePoint being a web based application will be instantly second nature to them to use. That being said, if you do not know what business problems SharePoint is going to solve for your company, they will make those choices for you. There is a LOT of power with just out of the box features and web parts that they can take advantage of. At first glance this may sound like a good thing, however, there is one caveat. If you have legacy applications or applications that are not as intuitive to use, user friendly or “cool” to look at this new workforce can and will use SharePoint to replace those applications. This will then spread your information over multiple systems causing search ability issues and segmented data. This is not the desired effects SharePoint should have. SharePoint is extremely powerful, and I will dare say more powerful then Microsoft even realizes. This is a good thing, but has to be managed properly. In time those legacy applications may very well be absorbed by SharePoint based applications, but you want to keep it under control. Spotting the business problems SharePoint is designated to solve is the first step in a healthy deployment.
Good thing we put our finger in the page. Lets go back and try the other path… That’s, page… 37. Lets go!
Page 37 & 38
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You shoot back, “No, I think it will be a good idea to figure out the business problems we want to solve for the company.” “Like what?” asks Jeff from accounting. Sally and you watch him drain half the water cooler bottle of its contents into his water bottle. “Well, Sally already gave us one. She is having trouble collaborating with her team. The paper they are working on isn’t as easy as it should be. So collaboration is a big one I would think.” “Oh, sorry to hear that Sally, but we have our own problems,” Jeff informed us. |
“How so?” Sally inquired. “Well, we have all of these reports we are forced to do, but they are so time consuming, I don’t have time to do what I am supposed to do.” Jeff wrinkled his nose. “The enterprise version of SharePoint has Excel Services and BI capabilities,” I offered. “That could be another business problem we could solve initially.” “Do you have an executive sponsor?” Jeff wondered. “We are IT, why would we need that?” Sarcastic Sally snapped. “To get funding and support.” Jeff said defending himself. Go to Page 13 if you want to get an executive sponsor. |
I say we go with Sally, she still scares me. Lets go to page 25, but I am going to put my finger here again, JUST IN CASE!
Page 25 & 26
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Oh no, SharePoint has been considered a rogue project. Lack of funding has landed us in trouble. We are forced to use an old Commodore 64 and two TRS 80’s to try and build the environment. The project and idea has died before it could even go forward. A walk to the water cooler for you and Sally is now known as the Walk of Shame. THE END |
Sally did it to us again! What happened?!
Find out at the SharePoint Best Practices conference. If you want more information about the Best Practices Conference click on the banner below. Hope to see you there, as the line up of speakers is UNBELIEVABLE! Two of which are the authors of the book that inspired this entire event. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Best Practices published by Microsoft Press.
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