“Ellen, could you have this site up and running in about 2 weeks?” my clients often asked. “Yes, I could, but can you?” I always answered, “my experience is that the business, and that is YOU, is usually the bottleneck.”

The client always looked a bit annoyed when I said that. And that was a good starting point for a conversation about roles and responsibilities. Understandable, because the business does not always know what is expected of them, and when they know it, they do not always know how to do it. Read on to learn how we tried to manage mutual expectations.

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 2 days, 15 hours, 12 minutes ago

In the series of “Do More With SharePoint-Examples” this time I will explain a process where a Survey saved our IT-department lots of time and effort. Technically/functionally it is one of the most simple examples, but from a change management perspective, and because the idea is easy to transfer to other organizations, I thought I’d share. What was the problem? Many employees had rather expensive Software X on their PC, and local IT wanted to reduce licensing costs by providing a cheaper alternative, but were afraid of the administrative burden of emailing back and forth with 100 users. SharePoint came to the rescue...read on!

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 41 days, 16 hours, 17 minutes ago

If your intranet looks fantastic, then you’ve succeeded right? But succeeded in what? The thing is, making a fantastic looking intranet was probably not what you were asked to do, was it?

You were probably asked to deliver a fantastic functioning intranet. An intranet which is the place that staff go to collaborate, or to find out about the latest news in the organisation. And whilst it might look great, if it’s not achieving these aims, then it’s not a success.

Source: www.soozihl.com Posted by SooziHL 63 days, 7 hours, 22 minutes ago

Call your new intranet ‘SharePoint’ and your project is doomed from the start.

I’ve seen all sorts of reasons and a million blog posts on this topic, but I’m going to focus on just two:

1. People will probably have heard of SharePoint before. They might have used it in their previous jobs. You have no control over their experiences, but in launching ‘SharePoint’ you’re going to be stuck with their expectations.

And the reality is that a lot of SharePoint implementations that have been done over the past 10 years were done badly. In many organisations, the mention of ‘SharePoint’ will be met with a roll of the eyes and a rant about lost documents.

Don’t make life hard for yourself by bringing years of other people’s mistakes into your project.

1. Internal systems need to be marketed to the organisation in the same way as external products need to be marketed to customers. The people in your organisation are your customers.

So give it a name and a brand – something that fits in with your organisation; something that people will identify with. Hold a competition to suggest a name if you like.

However you go about it, make an effort to call it something. But FFS, just don’t call it SharePoint!

Source: www.soozihl.com Posted by SooziHL 84 days, 12 hours, 9 minutes ago

Are employees rejecting SharePoint?

Each month, we ask two communication experts to argue respective sides of a burning issue. Here, Sam Marshall and Camilla Herrmann debate whether employees are rejecting Microsoft SharePoint or not.

YES, says Sam Marshall, director of ClearBox Consulting Ltd. SharePoint is unquestionably a success from a licensing perspective, but dig behind the firewall and the picture looks more chequered. For example in a uSamp survey last year, 80 percent of organizations usi...

NO, says Camilla Herrmann, internal and digital communications consultant There are two key points to define here:

What is collaboration?
What exactly is SharePoint?

Collaboration is not about using the latest sexy tool demonstrated to the CIO, whether that’s Yammer, Salesforce or external social tools like Twitter. It’s about employees working together by any means they can, whether it’s shouting across the desk or using BlackBerry Messenger.

Source: www.internalcommshub.com Posted by support 101 days, 4 hours, 53 minutes ago

As you will know, I have helped many colleagues with setting up SharePoint Team Sites. These could be simple project sites, mainly used for sharing documents, but also sites where important processes were facilitated. My clients were very diverse. Each initial interview was therefore exciting. What kind of person would be in front of me? The Hesitator, the System-Lover or the Ideal Partner? Or the person who inspired the 80-120 rule? Read on!

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 120 days, 13 hours, 42 minutes ago

“If we gave you a team site, would it be useful to you?”

We’ve said before that the breadth of SharePoint is both its strength and weakness. Intranet and project teams now have a powerful new tool to help the organisation work better, but what features to deploy?

The classic technology-centric approach is to talk to stakeholders in each business area, asking questions such as:

• What additional capabilities do you want on the intranet?

• Which of the following features would be useful to you?

• If you had (feature), how could you make use of it?

• What can we do with the new version of SharePoint?

Source: www.steptwo.com.au Posted by admin 133 days, 5 hours, 39 minutes ago

Over the years, we have used Team Sites extensively for managing and working in projects. Depending on the type of project, we have used them in different ways: - Simple Projects: stand-alone Team Sites - Recurring projects: Team Site with templated subsites - Multiple projects: 1. PMO Team Site - Multiple projects: 2. Program Site Collection.

Read on to learn more.

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 140 days, 7 hours, 17 minutes ago

I may be irritating KPI-addicts, mathematicians, or other people who like counting, measuring and comparing, but  what gets measured does not always get done!

Of course that requires some explanation.

When we moved from a custom-built intranet to SharePoint, we had to think about usage statistics. SharePoint could not get us the statstics in the way we wanted, so we asked a third party to develop it. We got a little carried away withe the functional requirements, with dramatic results....

Source: mydigitalworkplace.wordpress.com Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 154 days, 13 hours, 49 minutes ago

If you have ever been involved in a product recall or another crisis, you will know that this is a stressful time! Everything that can relieve that stress is more than welcome. Read about a Team Site setup that has helped a team with their recalls and crisis situations, so they could save time, reduce stress and improve collaboration.

Source: wp.me Posted by http://ellenvanaken.wordpress.com/ 182 days, 17 hours, 9 minutes ago