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What is SharePoint?

By Keith Smith posted 09-16-2010 22:00

  

 

I promise this post won’t turn into another detailed review of the famous SharePoint Wheel.  No discussion of Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and Composites.  I’m more interested in discussing people’s perceptions of SharePoint and motivations for using it.  I’d like to talk about the one sentence answer users will give if you ask them what SharePoint is.  I’ve found that most users will lock in on a particular feature or implementation.  Power users well versed in the SharePoint feature sets will give standard answers along the lines of:

  • SharePoint lets me collaborate
  • SharePoint speeds up my processes
  • SharePoint allows me to share documents

The next set of users will show an understanding of the features but are more specific about how their daily lives are affected:

  • SharePoint replaced my old file shares
  • SharePoint lets me access and process my (insert task here)
  • SharePoint is our internal Facebook

For me the most interesting ones are those common sense descriptions that you never expected.  These come out of left field but can offer real insight into the little things that drive user adoption:

  • SharePoint lets me see the lunch menu every day
  • SharePoint helps keep my Inbox from filling up
  • SharePoint lets me make my own version of the intranet

I’m curious to hear about the descriptions that are prevalent in your organizations.  Let’s get a conversation started in the comments.



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