This is a blog post about one of those feel-good moments that lets you know that dreams do come true (with respect to SharePoint). We have been working with SharePoint since 2005-6 and we have had our share of early-adopters and Johnny-come-lately’s to deal with. We have always maintained the belief that sooner or later, people will come to understand the powerful nature of this dynamic platform. We have had lots of success, enough to fill two weekly blogs, but we have only just realized the amazing kind of success that only comes with perseverance and adoption. We have recently added two employees who were given no instructions on the use of a departmental share drive! Not only are these employees living out of SharePoint, OK and their inbox, but they are largely working with documents that are born digital and they are working to keep them digital.
Not giving someone a share drive when they join the company might not seem like much of a milestone, in fact, some might call it a best practice. In our case though it is important to highlight because it means that for one department, there is no share drive and for a second department, there is no ongoing use of the share drive. Those are huge milestones, and it was important to realize that the opportunity existed to not provision those drive letters to these people and to act on that opportunity.
Even better, one of the new employees has already asked if he could make changes to the library structure on the SharePoint site his department uses. He has discussed the way these libraries work with his supervisor and they agreed that the libraries could be better. When I received his request, I noticed that the proposed additions to the library structure included a few folders within libraries. We had a quick conversation about possibly using metadata columns to differentiate content instead of relegating documents to folders, and he was excited about the prospect. We are meeting later this week so I can demonstrate these and other features, and then implement the changes he wants.
The key to making the initial success even better, was having a stable of existing solutions to showcase. When we set up our meeting, I told him that I could show him how we are using the various features in other departments. You can’t imagine how much better a real live in-use-by-a-user solution is than a make believe example from the IT guy. It is so easy for people to relate to the things their coworkers are doing and so hard to relate to the things we do in Information Services. That’s because almost every employee understands the business content used in their and other departments. On the other hand, only the geeky few understand the stuff we do in IS.
The best part of this story was when one of the new employees asked “is this something we can do ourselves?” See, I told you, dreams do come true.
#Adoption #sharepoint
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