User Adoption: Educate the End User Community (EndUserSharePoint.com)…

Additionally, EndUserSharePoint.Com offers training that has been very well received. You might want to look at the events coming up to see if they might expand your knowledge in a particular area (click on ‘OnLine Workshops’ on this website’s menu bar).

Lastly, the fastest way to understand SharePoint’s use specific to your environment is to hire a knowledgeable SharePoint consultant that can help you both to apply the technology to your business as well as assist in building training materials.

One note of advice that I can give you is that it’s pretty easy to educate the user community on the steps they need to take to get things done in SharePoint. You should focus on that AND telling the users WHY they should do things in SharePoint. If you leave out the WHY, your SharePoint implementation will not flourish and will be unable to realize its full potential.

Hope this helps,

Lee

Thanks in advance…

I say use what works. If discussion threads have the largest uptake for your team then, by all means, continue using them.

As far as more information on the use of Wiki’s, I just finished Michael Sampson’s book,”seamless teamwork’ (http://www.seamlessteamwork.com/), and it has a lot of great ideas regarding how to utilize SharePoint wiki’s for collaboration. While the book doesn’t really focus on the core aspects of SharePoint (use of lists, publishing, etc) it explores Wiki’s extensively. You might pick up some good ideas from that resource. The book is well written and I finished it in about 2 days reading off and on (and yes, I skipped some pages).

I showed a client how to create a wiki page ‘header’ in MS Word that had links to the most commonly used pages in a wiki. After creating a text-based header in Word and applying hyperlinks to the text, I had them copy and paste the header into a Wiki page. Then I showed them how to use the Wiki markup language to link to and create new pages ([[New Page]]). They started using Wiki’s almost to the exclusion of SharePoint (They had never explored the use of Wiki’s previously. While it was not my intent for them to focus on the use Wiki’s, people gravitated toward it because it was very much like something they were familiar and comfortable with…MS Word.

You can also visit wikipedia.org and explore what can be done with extensive focus on Wiki’s. Great ideas can be found there.

But again, if discussion groups are what has the greatest uptake for your team, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Getting people utilizing SharePoint is the most imporatant thing. Once their hooked, start expanding their knowledge level to other areas of SharePoint and see what happens.

It’s all a journey!

In response to your question, my team has a mix of people, some are very technical. It is a small team but we are all very outspoken and not afraid to share our opinions or ideas. We are all trying to embrace SharePoint to make our jobs easier, basically because we were told to. :) Seriously though we have made a number of our processes more efficient through SharePoint, only one of which is our use of discussions.

We had tried wikis a little, but people are not very comfortable with them. We may use them for knowledge sharing but people seem to be having a tough time using wikis for anything that doesn’t look exactly like wikipedia. We have not tried blogs at all. Our company uses blogs, but my team is not comfortable with the “one to many” mode of communication, if we have to be the “one” (at least not yet anyway). The discussion threads work well for us. Someone may post something like “I have this issue, any ideas?” or “Here’s what I think we should do with this, what do you guys think?”. Of course if you have any ideas for using wikis, blogs, or anything else for this sort of thing, I am open to it.

You are exactly right, “aren’t as powerful” was what I intended to write. What a difference two letters makes.

Thanks for your feedback.

Looking forward to your post on a ‘Collaboration Café Meeting Place’!