This book seeks to bridge the gap between SharePoint's functionality and end users' desire to use SharePoint to assist with their business processes. While other books will tell you what SharePoint can do from a technical standpoint and may leave you wondering if the product is appropriate for your day-to-day needs, this book will provide you with the information and hands-on direction so you can immediately apply solutions to your work environment.
Like its predecessor SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 is the Swiss Army Knife of web platforms. Its extreme versatility means that SharePoint does not fit neatly into one single software category in terms of its definition, functionality, or user-approach. It also means that a company's investment in SharePoint can deliver more than just a document management system to the organization, but rather can replace website technology, intranets, and bespoke applications, as well as file servers.
Because of the flexibility in SharePoint functionality, end users are often challenged to understand where to begin applying SharePoint's capabilities to their daily activities or job functions, and to understand which functionality is appropriate to their needs. The objective of this book is to demystify the SharePoint product for end users by providing non-coding business solutions and applying out of the box functionality of the SharePoint product.
With the information overload through intranets, e-mails, calendars, tasks, SMS, and instant messages, like it or not we have become Information Workers. Though they have no physical impact, the amount of information can provide knockout punches if vital pieces of information are missing, forgotten, or even misread. However, it is not just the actual information that can bring the end user down, but also the endless calls for attention about the request, its status, who has acted on it or where it is in the process, who is taking action on it, and so on.
As the new decade is upon us, things will only continue to get worse for the following reasons:
- Companies have been doing more with fewer people.
- The world has gotten smaller with the globalization of economies.
- Companies have a real need for transparency, measurable results via metrics, and instant gratification. Organizations want greater visibility into what their workers are doing; not just seeing the end result of a document or project, but where they are in the process.
- Limitation of existing technology: E-mail was and still is a great tool, but it was designed as an electronic memo system for one-on-one communication and not as a project management tracking system, or for company-wide global communication, or a purchase order tracking tool. The limits of e-mail usage and functionality have not only pushed the envelope to the limit, but busted it.
The preceding list may seem like a depressing read, but like it or not it is the reality in many organizations.
The aforementioned problems can be solved by introducing SharePoint to an organization as a strategic platform with a phased rollout, with user buy-in. The key to its success is its presentation. If end users see this tool as an aid to their productivity for managing information and not an initiative dictated by the IT department, they will be more likely to embrace it. Those who invest time to change their work habits with the use of this technology will have the ability to gain control of their work days, increase their productivity and efficiency, and maybe even garner a promotion along the way.
Most end users do not realize that they need to learn new skills beyond e-mail functionality and Microsoft Office. These skills may have been adequate in the early Internet days when AOL and AltaVista were the tools of choice, but these desktop applications on their own do not work well if people continuously need to access the information that resides on a user's desktop as there are security and accessibility issues. Learning new techniques with the SharePoint technology is not a major undertaking, but will require some time investment that will pay off multiple times over.
Most end users have been taught only to save information in these applications and e-mail it when necessary, which of course means there is more clutter in your Inbox. Considering the time constraints of the average worker, there has to be a better way.
The days when work ends at the sound of the whistle on the factory floor at five o'clock are long gone. Today, our work and personal lives have become intertwined. Often at times, we work at home and shop at work. The result of this work style is that information and updates about it need to be available at all times for people to be productive, but this is unlikely if information is stored on one individual's desktop.
There exists an always on mentality, in which an employee seems to have his Blackberry glued to their hand. Endlessly checking e-mails and responding to requests have become the norm. No one ever assumes they were employed to read and write e-mails as part of their job description, but this activity can be a considerable amount of time in the work day. To improve enterprise productivity and collaboration exponentially, end users must be extremely organized in how they utilize and store information. This is a challenge as end users often use the information that is unstructured, out of sync with lines of business applications, and stored in a format that is not accessible to other team members. At best, the information may be e-mailed to other team members where it may be unread or misfiled.