Sharepoint Server 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper

Sharepoint Server 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper (Click Here To DownLoad) the Ebook

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provides a vast number of capabilities that empower business users. For example, SharePoint Server 2010 enables users to collaborate on documents with each other, tag and rate content, self-publish, track group projects, and even develop their own productivity solutions. However, even with this amount of power in hand, users (and the organizations they work for) can benefit greatly from having a clear SharePoint Adoption Plan. Why? Because SharePoint is often something that users can benefit from, but don‟t necessarily have to use to get their job done.
A SharePoint Adoption Plan describes how the benefits of your SharePoint deployment will be communicated to users and what kind of training you‟ll provide. An adoption plan helps you establish the following:

1.  Power Users and Influencers who can “peer coach” fellow users
2.  A plan for Communications and Buzz
3.  A Comprehensive Training Plan

In this white paper, you will learn how to plan, organize, and create your adoption plan. We'll also provide some examples of how to integrate your governance plan into the training and communications plans for your solution.
First, let‟s discuss why SharePoint adoption can be challenging.

The Challenge of Adoption
Even with a great governance plan, a complete collection of credible, usable, and relevant content, and a fully tested solution, you can‟t just “turn on” the new portal, collaboration, or social computing environment and expect users to come running to embrace the new solution with open arms. Your adoption plan needs to capture both the hearts and minds of the user community to ensure that the solution will be successful.
 

What is SharePoint, Exactly?
SharePoint 2010 provides an information-sharing platform, document management platform, workflow platform, business process management framework, and development foundation on which information worker solutions can be created. Comprehensive business solutions can be easily assembled to support a company‟s information management and business needs. However, one of the great difficulties with regard to adopting SharePoint is the fact that, the above description notwithstanding, SharePoint can be very difficult to describe to users because it encompasses so many applications, uses, and functions. Users often have many alternative ways to achieve the same outcomes as they do with SharePoint. For example, there are several options users can choose for sharing a new document – posting it to a SharePoint site is one possibility, but so are e-mailing as an attachment and saving to a file share. You‟ll want to make sure that users have a clear path regarding the use of SharePoint even for the simplest of tasks.
Figure : The SharePoint in Plain English video describes a few of the benefits of using SharePoint.
SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices | White Paper Page | 5
Build It and They Might Come
One of the most important lessons we learned from deploying SharePoint 2007 was the importance of including end users in the design of the solution. Understanding their information sharing challenges and key business “pain points” are critical to solution success. However, even if you include users in all aspects of solution creation, the solution you create will almost always involve changes to the way that people do their jobs. And basically, almost all change is perceived as bad – even if it‟s good! This means that your adoption plan needs to recognize how difficult organizational change can be and leverage a variety of approaches to facilitate user adoption. Essentially your adoption plan is really a plan for effecting change and, as you will recognize when you read this paper, your adoption plan is really a plan for change management.
Figure : Change in an organization is comprised of 3 elements: people, process and tools. It’s an iterative process of communicating change, training people on new skills/tools/processes, and gathering feedback for future improvements.