Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Tips For Successful SharePoint Adoption and Security

SharePoint is the fastest growing product of Microsoft, widespread and used by many of the fortune 500 companies. SharePoint is a tremendous tool with a wide range of capabilities. It addresses high level business analysis to identify problems and opportunities helping businesses improve content collaboration and increase access to business intelligence. It also ensures that strong data security, compliance and auditing processes are all in place. Merely deploying and making it available cannot assure its successful adoption throughout the organization. While its implementation in the corporate world has increased, getting users to adopt SharePoint and sustaining it securely can be challenging. Here are few tips which will help you increase SharePoint adoption in your organization to garner its business benefits.


Analyze Your Requirements
Before deploying SharePoint, it is imperative to look at your company’s objectives, initiatives and goals because SharePoint has a lot of features to suit your specific business requirements. Also look into the current application usability, process and people involved; issues related to them and how SharePoint can fix them for you.

Designed Architecture
Knowing more about SharePoint architecture and how templates can be designed well which involves many content types and navigation, is more important to make your SharePoint environment rich and user-friendly. Many organizations build web pages without proper planning and don’t think of end user accessibility for updating their content. Designing your architecture with proper flow will build an easy access to end users who can take full advantage of all available features. Thus innovative planning and designing of architecture to hold all new features and support your requirements helps users provide quality output.

Plan Your Deployment as per Critical Needs
Rather than installing the complete set of features in SharePoint application to end users, it is better to install critical features as per your specific needs. In general some of the most common features that are needed include document sharing, managing sales, intranets, business intelligence and custom applications accessed through dashboards.

Being Proactive is a Key Strategy
In addition to planning and designing your architecture as per the current business requirements, you also need to proactively think and design template for future requirements and capabilities. Proactive design will help with end user needs for better and lasting system usability.

Your First Run—Start Slowly
It is always better not to do multiple things at once. Start slowly, and devise your deployment gradually over time. For example, you can initially target to a particular group of people or capabilities, focusing on specific issues that people face like managing sales, accounting, business planning or sharing of spreadsheets.

Customize End User Training
Most companies feel that SharePoint is easy to understand and use while in reality it is tricky for the users without proper training. Although there are a lot of training institutes, books, DVDs, online courses and many other ready-made materials available, they usually don’t guide you properly for custom-built features available in your SharePoint application. Companies need to focus on proper business-specific training to their employees on SharePoint before they start using it. Guiding users with how SharePoint can benefit them and how easily it can be accessed will motivate them to embrace the change. Creating few training documents, notes, PPTs of most commonly used tasks and features will all help end users understand the application better.

Security via Permissions Levels
SharePoint security comes via various default levels of permissions. These permission levels are the base of security that can be assigned to groups. Instead of sharing them with individuals, it is better to share them with groups first and later in each group you can add users to make sure about each of their permission levels before providing.

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