SharePoint & Lotus

In the current economic climate, cool technology, innovation and brilliant ideas are simply not enough! The IT executives are being required by their colleagues in finance to show a clear financial justification for every IT initiative. So how do you measure better collaboration and better team productivity? This has been the topic of a number of sessions we recently had with IT executives at customer sites. Here are two approaches to define success metrics for your SharePoint or your collaboration software initiative:

1. Demonstrate that enterprise email traffic goes down significantly with the adoption of SharePoint.

   E-mail is expensive, about $150 per mailbox per year for either Domino or Exchange. A big piece is the management of email storage. So if you can reduce your dependency on email traffic, moving to more advanced collaborations such as instant messaging, document sharing, and real-time communications, then you will increase efficiency and decrease email storage costs.

    

   We have seen that you can reduce email traffic by 50% with the right combination of SharePoint taxonomy and the SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. This can be achieved through the usage of sending links to shared documents residing on SharePoint, rather than using attachements. That's why we have added a "replace-attachements-with-links" feature to our SharePoint Integrator, which automatically posts all attachements on a pre-defined SharePoint location and then replaces the outgoing message with links rather than large attachments being sent to a thousand folks. Domino 8.5 also helps in this field as it will keep just one document copy per Domino server.
   
    

2. Increase SharePoint usage, boost collaboration.
   We have also seen that our SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes accelerates SharePoint adoption accross business users. This can be measured by the total number of documents being posted on a SharePoint site per week. We have seen 100% increase over a period of three months. Users can easily publish SharePoint documents received as attachements or emails with attachements just by dragging & dropping the email or the document. This increases the number of shared documents and promote sharing and collaboration accross the enterprise.

So decreased email traffic and an increased number of shared documents seems to be an effective way to measure your collaboration initiative. Feel free to share how you measure the success of your collaboration initiative.