It’s 6:30 am, and my first task of the day is complete; I have just entered my step-count from yesterday into the tracking list for our company Wellness Program. Of course the tracking list is in SharePoint. I am not a big fan of the Wellness program, but I like the fact that we are tracking it in SharePoint. Projects like this help me accomplish a lot of my goals, by showing my coworkers that:
SharePoint is Versatile – We tell people that SharePoint is a platform on which a wide range of business solutions can be built. If I had substituted ‘array’ for ‘range’, I could have had three buzzwords in that sentence, but even at two, it’s meaningless to most people. When someone starts their day entering their step-count, and then proceeds to a document library to finish a report they started a week ago by clicking on ‘New’ in that library, the message is clear – we can do a lot of different things in SharePoint, but “New” is universal. I see the benefit from these kinds of projects in the way projects are requested; over time, we are gradually moving from “is this something we can do in SharePoint?” to “can you help us build this in SharePoint?”
SharePoint Can Be Secure – When people are involved in a business process, they want to know it is secure. They want to know that the right people have the right access and that the information we can extract from the process is accurate. On the other hand, when we are collecting information about a competitive experience, security is paramount. People really want to know that the results are accurate and that they can’t be manipulated. The first place we ever used activity logging in SharePoint was on an NFL pool site. Our step counts are tagged with a reminder not to edit the entries, and I’m sure my Systems Admin is aware of any attempts to break that rule.
SharePoint Can Analyze – We are divided into teams, and there will be a prize for the best team performance when our seven weeks of “Walking to Wellness” ends in July. Along the way, SharePoint is showing team totals, team average step counts along with the daily grind. Those aren’t remarkable statistics, but they are free and they are useful. The fact is clear; the cumulative daily step counts represent data that is necessary but overwhelming. Presenting information extracted from the data in this case is no different than counting reports in a library, and breaking them out into categories. Knowing how many reports are ‘in progress’, ‘under review’ and ‘complete’ will ultimately be more beneficial than seeing a pile of reports in a document library.
If someone in your organization has a fun task for SharePoint, don’t let the opportunity pass by. Show them just what SharePoint can do.
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