SharePoint & Lotus

This year, many companies have taken SharePoint to an enterprise-wide level. These initiatives have not been driven at the departmental level using WSS, rather central IT is driving the adoption of MOSS to increase collaboration and document sharing across the enterprise.

IT executives in charge of SharePoint find that mainstream users are slow in taking advantage of SharePoint as they continue to share documents using email. One obstacle is that the web interface to SharePoint is rather rudimentary and can be slow, particularly when using a hosted SharePoint service. Also using the check-in/check-out document mechanism is not always intuitive and complying with the company taxonomy by filling in required fields for each uploaded document feels cumbersome. The result is that SharePoint remains the collaboration platform for technical users and the vast majority of enterprise users simply ignore it!

When you take a step back and think about it, adopting SharePoint for document collaboration, team calendaring, and project management requires users to change their behavior. We have all been using email for the past 15 years and this has been the main mechanism to share electronic information. Now, we need to learn new ways for sharing and collaborating. So how do you change user behavior?

I came across a great blog post from Peter Bregman entitled The Easiest Way to Change People's Behavior. Here is an excerpt:

“In your company, think about what you want people to do and whether the environment around them supports the behavior.

A client was complaining to me that his receptionist was not warm and friendly with people when they walked in. Guess where the receptionist sat? Think bank teller. That's right. The receptionist sat behind a glass window! Don't send her to communication training. Just remove the glass.

A friend of mine, the principal of a school in Boston, wanted to increase student engagement. They should talk to each other, he lamented, not just the teacher. He came up with a great solution.

He didn't send out memos. He didn't retrain all the teachers. He didn't print posters and hang them in the classrooms. Instead, he rearranged each classroom, placing the chairs in a semicircle, so the students were facing each other as well as the teacher. Voila.

If you want your employees to talk with each other, knock down the walls. If they sit in ten different countries, use Skype and a video camera permanently attached to their computer so there's no set-up time and it's always sitting there, impossible to ignore. It makes a world of a difference.

You want to make it easier to do something you want done and harder not to.”

This applies to SharePoint adoption as well. Make it easier - if you want your users to come to SharePoint, bring SharePoint to your users. Your users are on email so bring SharePoint to their email client. That’s really what we do with the SharePoint Integrator - we bring SharePoint straight to the email client. By doing so, mainstream users can easily publish information from their email to SharePoint and access SharePoint information from their email. No need to switch to a browser and lose context (“What was I looking for? And why am I on this news site?”); you can collaborate from your day-to-day work environment.

Feel free to take a look at the latest 2.0 product in this demo.