Is Your SharePoint a Headache? Here’s How to Fix It!

SharePoint…love it or hate it?

Through the years, people have had a love/hate relationship with Microsoft’s Knowledge Management/Intranet offering.  Alright, it may be more “hate” than “love” if you tally the votes.

Management wants it to solve all their organization issues, IT just wants it to work and everyone to stop asking them how to use it.  And other business units seem to be left in the middle … struggling with how best to use, interact, and engage with this powerful platform.

Pointers to avoid SharePoint headaches:

Planning

Whether it’s a migration or a new implementation, please take the time to plan! It’s really important as an organization to have governance and buy in for the way SharePoint will be initially setup, organized, and accessed. This will help drive your resources to engage, communicate and collaborate in a way that you would like as an organization. Many organizations just do the initial setup and that is really not using all that SharePoint has to offer and you will end up with frustrated resources.
At the least be sure to establish basic guidance for your organization, such as expectations for document storage and the way you would like to collaborate. This will save a lot of time and help shape the way your company culture is represented in day-to-day interaction.

Training

Make sure you have sessions to ensure your resources are comfortable with your systems and know how to navigate to find what they need and ensure they are adhering to your organization’s best practices. SharePoint is NOT overly complex, however having some “lunch and learns” or videos will help you and your resources get the most out of what SharePoint has to offer.

Automation

Don’t just use Microsoft SharePoint for content storage and collaboration! It’s way more than a glorified file share, so be sure to explore other features and functionalities SharePoint can provide as a hub to other systems and applications. Repetitive, error-prone, or paper-based tasks can be automated and integrated with SharePoint and other tools to increase productivity within an organization.

At Artic, we really enjoy digging in and learning more about our client’s businesses, and how our expertise can help their organization. Some interesting takeaways from our recent SharePoint engagements:

• Automation. A nation-wide building supply company struggled with paper-based processes and communication and collaboration with their over 180 locations. After interviewing various business units, Artic worked to implement SharePoint online across the organization, automating several processes, removing collective hours of time off individual approvals and reducing errors for a variety of approval processes.
• Detailed, accurate and accessible volunteer data is crucial for the success of a Youth Tutor program servicing thousands of students across Western Washington. Artic worked with the team to understand the important data and created a SharePoint list to hold detailed information and included an automated and connected form to process new tutors. Data is all in one place, organized and easy to update and utilize, eliminating multiple excel spreadsheets, and a laborious manual entry process to track and manage volunteers.
• A Washington-state environmental sustainability organization struggled with management of active stakeholders both in and outside of the organization needing content access. Artic utilized SharePoint’s external sharing and guest user features to provide targeted access for specific documents to the right audiences, while maintaining the overall security of the organization’s information.

This list is by no means exhaustive of all that goes into configuring and maintaining a SharePoint environment, but some of the key things to consider.
Reduce headaches and gain confidence in your organization’s SharePoint implementation.

Contact Artic to find out how.