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the Free CMSWire NewsletterIn my last post, I hazarded my best guess at what 2011 will bring for SharePoint. In this post, I want to sketch out the SharePoint New Year’s resolutions I think every organization should adopt.
By addressing these six resolutions, you’ll be on your way to better understanding the context for SharePoint at your organization and setting the stage for SharePoint success in 2011.
- Take the time to understand your true needs around core SharePoint capabilities, especially document management and collaboration
- Evaluate your current application landscape before thinking about making SharePoint 2010 your core ECM system
- Avoid thinking of coexistence between SharePoint and other applications as either/or
- Get everyone involved in charting your organization’s approach to SharePoint and its role in the larger content management ecosystem
- Use a pilot to refine your approach to SharePoint
- Create a Center of Excellence to act as an ongoing governance body as SharePoint and your other content management applications continue to evolve
Let’s dive in and look at each one in more detail.
1. Take the time to understand your true needs around core SharePoint capabilities, especially document management and collaboration
Although there’s a lot SharePoint can do, document management and collaboration are the capabilities organizations leverage most often. But what most organizations don’t do is determine precisely what their true needs are around document management and collaboration before jumping into SharePoint.
What results is either a vanilla, out-of-the-box implementation that meets no one’s needs or a fully-featured, all-the-bells-and-whistles one that does more than anyone could ever want. In both cases, adoption is low because users’ true needs aren’t being met. And if there are already ECM applications or social business software in place, you run the risk of duplicating functionality across platforms and spending more than you need to.
Instead, organizations should develop a solid understanding of the business activities they are looking to enable with document management and collaboration capabilities to determine whether it’s best to pursue SharePoint 2010’s “good enough” approach or the more robust, specialized capabilities of best-of-breed ECM or social business software platforms.
The matrix below is an example of how you could begin to determine the division of labor between SharePoint, ECM and social business software for some broad categories of document management and collaboration capabilities.
NOTE: The scoring for ECM and social business software are for these platforms in general in order to illustrate the exercise, not for any specific vendor in these domains.
Figure 1: Functionality Matrix
2. Evaluate your current application landscape before thinking about making SharePoint 2010 your core ECM system or collaboration platform
SharePoint 2010’s value proposition as a core ECM system or collaboration platform depends in large part on what your application landscape looks like today. You need to know what applications are in place and what capabilities they provide so you can ensure that end-user needs are met with as little redundancy as possible. The difference in project costs, level of effort and return on investment for SharePoint 2010 will vary greatly depending on what’s already in place at an organization.
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