Not another bloody SharePoint site

I’m writing this because that’s usually the first reaction to someone posting their latest procedure, visit report, audit or agenda to SharePoint. I used to think the same way for a couple of reasons.

1. SharePoint was implemented with no training or awareness sessions whatsoever. Result: people started using their new toy without really knowing why they were doing it.

Sender: “I’ve posted the document to SharePoint”

Me: “Which SharePoint site? You’ve got dozens of them! Which folder? Which document? A hyperlink might have come in handy there!

2. SharePoint 2003 is pretty ugly and quite often hindered things getting done.

The way it was implemented in the place I work, it looked very much like Windows Explorer but more confusing. Click on a file to open it, read it, edit and make comments on it (this is SharePoint after all). Save it, discover that “This document was opened as read only”, curse it, save it with a new name, forget to overwrite the original, end up with two documents neither of which you dare delete six months later because you can’t work out which one was the latest version.

Although SharePoint is meant for collaboration and sharing, in the majority of cases it is used for dumping something somewhere because the author feels guilty about storing it away on their own hard drive.

My company recently introduced SharePoint 2007 with a self service  set-up. I’ve been playing around with it and I think that we might actually get somewhere with it.

It’s hardly a piece of cake but with a bit of perseverance and some Googling it’s not too difficult to get to a situation where you can actually start to be more productive as a group than you were as a individuals.

I’ll post some case studies here. I hope you find them useful.