SharePoint: Get It Right the First Time

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Apr 12, 2011

In my experience, you need to keep six things in mind to get SharePoint right the first time:

There’s no such thing as out of the box SharePoint
One size does not fit all
If you build it, they will not come
It’s never just about SharePoint
SharePoint is not an IT thing
SharePoint is not an Office product

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these in turn.

In my day-to-day work, I come across a lot of information about SharePoint, both first-hand at client sites and second-hand through research and reading. And honestly, a lot of it is not only less-than-useful, it’s downright redundant — we’ve all heard so much of it before, you wonder why folks keep writing it (and why we keep reading it!).

The answer, of course, is that SharePoint has a massive adoption footprint: every client I work with either has it or is about to have it. And on top of that, just about anyone who has SharePoint also has horror stories to tell about procuring, implementing, supporting or upgrading SharePoint (or some combination of all of these).

So it’s no wonder that we’re all so interested in hearing and talking about SharePoint…even if we’re just regurgitating and digesting the same information over and over.

Also from Joe, read: SharePoint: Is It Worth Using as a Collaboration Tool?

Six Things

With that having been said, I’m going to jump back into the fray and risk adding to the regurgitation by giving advice on how to get SharePoint right the first time at your organization, not only because I see so many organizations get it wrong the first time (and second, and third), but also because I think there’s very little information on this subject that goes beyond the technical perspective to discuss the strategic, planning dimensions of getting SharePoint right — which is what I want to do here.

Ok, enough hedging: here we go!

#1. There’s no such thing as out of the box SharePoint

Sure, SharePoint’s easy to get up and running. But anyone who tells you that it’s ready to go for most organizations, as is, out of the box, is either lying or has little practical experience with SharePoint.

SharePoint is a platform (and an enterprise one at that), which means that it’s designed to do “everything for everybody” by providing broad functionality across a wide range of capabilities.

But “everything for everybody” quickly turns to “nothing for anybody” in practice if a platform’s broad functionality isn’t configured effectively to provide specific solutions to end-users.

So when you’re planning your SharePoint program, get a big old mason jar and make anyone who says “out of the box SharePoint” put a fiver in there…and then make sure you take the time to figure out how you need to tailor SharePoint to meet the requirements of your end-users.

#2. One size does not fit all

One of the key benefits of an enterprise platform like SharePoint is that it allows an organization to leverage functionality across the enterprise and achieve economies of scale. But there’s a big difference between economies of scale and forcing a one-size-fits-all solution on everyone at your organization.

The latter is sometimes an unavoidable evil (especially for structured processes like AP or AR being enabled by an ERP system), but you should avoid it whenever you can, because in the wrong situation, it can lead to long-term failure for an enterprise platform.

I would argue that an enterprise SharePoint implementation is always the wrong situation for a one-size-fits-all approach. At those enterprises I’ve seen try it, either adoption is low to non-existent or rogue usage (i.e., users adapting the platform to their needs) is the norm. The former turns your enterprise licenses to shelfware; the latter creates a SharePoint environment that is uncontrolled, ungoverned and unsustainable.