Thursday, December 13, 2007
Universal End User Issues of Any SharePoint Implementation
When I was delivering the SharePoint 2007 – The Basics Workshop yesterday in Neuchatel, I took the time to jot down a couple of things that come up in every End User workshop. Here’s the short list:
- User resistance to change
- Folders vs Views
- Legacy data, file servers and moving content
- Clunky interface in SharePoint (that’s a polite way of saying it)
- Access permissions
These are universal issues that will have to be addressed with every significant implementation of SharePoint. I’m going to take some time in the next couple of days to address each issue. If you’d like to jump in before hand and comment on any of these, I’d appreciate it. Also, if you see recurring issues with your End Users, comment on those and we’ll work on getting you some ammunition when addressing these problems.
Nice topics, im very interested in your tought about folder vs views. I think grouped views are very good, but i feel that nobody wants to maintain the meta data.
And if they´re allowd to use the webdav access they wont even think about the meta data. (Actually im testing workflows which send an email if no category was chosen)
Mark,
The biggest challenge I’ve faced in every implementation of SharePoint has been user adoption. The problem is two-fold. Most users tend to default to the way they have always done things and users who are interested in SharePoint loose steam when others don’t “convert” as quickly.
This is why it is important to do the following:
1) Train your users and “get their hands dirty” with some hands-on
2) Get users into SharePoint as soon as possible after training has been completed.
Even now, in my current position, adoption is going slowly. The irony is the IT groups are still falling back into old habits. We used to circulate hundreds of emails a week dealing with issues. We have collaborative spaces in SharePoint to centralize our communication, yet we still handle a lot of communication via email.
Another interesting trend I’ve noticed is adoption seems to be easier for those that are 30 and younger while it goes much slower with those over 30. So, user adoption may also be a generational issue as well.
I am very interested in hearing more about user resistance to change. I think that Chris brought up a good point.
More importantly though, one thing that I realize has a lot of importance but have no clues about is Folders vs Views. For now, I think that grouped views might be better because folder can because a mess when users create too much of them…but still, people are used to creating folders and I suppose they would be resistant to the change. In some cases, I’m thinking that we might want to restrict folder creation completely.
Oh, and about the clunky interface…I wish there was an answer to that, mine was simply to try to make it pretty, and use design to orientate the user…within the scope of what I can do.
Kevin,
I was discussing with Mark the other day the only valid use I have found for folders — permissions. If I have a group of documents that I want to block a group of users from editing or viewing, I either will need to set the permissions on each individual item or create a folder and set the permissions for the folder. Then, I can place those documents into the folder and not worry about permissions for each individual document (as that could become another nightmare).
Most of my users aren’t complaining about a clunky interface — it is more a matter of “How do I do this?” and “Why is SharePoint better at this?”
I would like to know your thoughts on using share point 2007 as universal access point(in simple share point as access point)