Increasing Microsoft SharePoint Adoption in Your Business

Choosing SharePoint as a platform for collaboration within your organisation can require substantial investment as it is tailored to meet your needs. Whether you need bespoke development or large-scale configuration changes, there will always be a requirement for some customisation. As with any major IT strategy investments, there is a need for the project to deliver some commercial outcome for the business – whether this is increased efficiency; better data management; or simply a streamlined process of communication.  Increasing SharePoint adoption within your organisation drives success.  With more people using the platform, you will get more of the benefits that it can bring.

Challenges in increasing SharePoint Adoption

A challenge for businesses when they move to SharePoint is encouraging adoption amongst staff within the business. There are many reasons why staff may not adopt SharePoint within a business. In some cases, this is related to a lack of understanding of what the platform offers – that can often be cured with training; in other cases, moving to SharePoint represents a major change in the working patterns that people have and they resist it. Finally, there are people who view SharePoint as a threat – they may feel that the increased access to productivity information may be used against them by management or that targets will increase.

increasing sharepoint adoption

Whether you are moving to SharePoint for the first time, or are increasing the use that it has within your business, it is important to consider an adoption plan as part of your roadmap to ensure that the value of your investment is maximised. At Valto, we have worked with businesses to help increase adoption of the platform and focus on several areas to soften the change and make it easier for staff to understand the benefits. We can do this through training and workshops where key stakeholders will be provided with the materials to drive change deeper into the business.

We focus on the key benefits of SharePoint when tailored to your organisation – this means that any information is real world and specific to your staff and how the development of the platform will benefit them.

Reducing Duplication of Effort

One of the biggest benefits of a fully collaborative working environment is that staff can simplify the process of working together to complete a task. Traditionally, if multiple staff were working on the same document you would run into issues with version control or duplication of work. With in-line collaboration through SharePoint and Office 365, staff can clearly see what others are working on and avoid duplication. This makes them more efficient and enables work to be completed faster.  With a SharePoint Intranet that supports collaboration, you will help staff work better together.

Improving Collaboration and File Management

Traditionally, businesses would use a shared drive to give staff access to content. The drawback of this would be that a shared drive doesn’t allow staff to work on the same document at the same time – which leads to problems with version control.

Using SharePoint’s built in tools for collaboration and approval saves time and effort for staff and simplifies the management of files to ensure that there’s only one correct version and that all changes are recorded and properly attributed.  When staff become aware of the benefits, increasing SharePoint adoption will help to drive wider usage among holdout staff.

Improving Process Management

Changes in process can be a problem with teams due to inertia. The introduction of SharePoint into a workplace often results in changes to process as approval systems and efficient workflows are brought in.

Planned processes do increase efficiency, but there can be resistance to them if the perception is that the old way was better.
Including staff in the workshops for planning how SharePoint will be used is the most effective way of ensuring that the new workflows will be accepted and the benefits of more structured processes within your organisation can be felt.
Improving Access to Information

Even with a structured, hierarchical file management system in place, it can be difficult for staff to find the content that they’re looking for in a timely way. Demonstrating the effectiveness of SharePoint’s search functionality to staff provides them with a demonstrable benefit instantly and can be a key factor in increasing SharePoint adoption.

Summary

To drive increasing SharePoint adoption in your business, the most important thing you need is buy in from staff. If you are seen to be imposing a new system without demonstrating the benefits that come from it, resistance and low adoption can be the outcome.
Providing training to staff and getting staff in each team to volunteer as champions to lead the process of rollout to staff helps enormously. Involving them in the development process is also necessary to get as many people on board with the project as possible.

The main driver for adoption through is ensuring that the applications built in Microsoft SharePoint are properly designed to meet the specific needs of your teams. If the project is not fully thought through, or executed badly, or if performance is a problem, it creates a negative impression of the platform and stifles usage.

Talk to a member of the Valto team about how we can help with the process of increasing SharePoint Adoption in your business and how our approach to development makes a difference to end user satisfaction. Call us today on 03335 779 009 .

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Reducing Problems with SharePoint

When it’s properly configured, SharePoint can make an enormous difference to your business.  It helps improve collaboration and teams can make better decisions as a result.  Sometimes though, things can go wrong, so having the ability to fix any problems with SharePoint is essential..

In organisations where SharePoint is core to productivity, fixing problems quickly is a priority.  Having access to experienced technical staff can help minimise the cause of problems and resolve them more quickly.

Why things go wrong in SharePoint

Most problems with SharePoint boil down to one of three areas, either incorrect configuration, insufficient server resource, or incompatible code in a 3rd party application or extension.  Diagnosing the cause of an issue quickly usually means faster resolution.

Most deployments of SharePoint are unique.  A company will usually need some functionality adding, or have special needs to fulfil certain requirements.  In most cases, the configuration is handled by the SharePoint consultants who conduct the initial development work.

In a lot of cases, shortcuts that were taken during the deployment lead to bigger issues later.  These might be workarounds that had to be put in place to futz a piece of functionality, or maybe some additional code that tied two systems together.

Compromise leads to compromise.  Often, when performing a project to fix earlier issues, it becomes apparent that changes were made mid deployment that led to configuration settings being changed.

Diagnosing this type of issue can be straightforward for an experience SharePoint support professional, however the resolution can be more difficult.  There will always be a way of fixing incompatibility between software, but beware of a change now that simply stores up a problem for the future.  It is sometimes better to consider what your long-term IT Strategy is and work towards that.

Hosting Problems with SharePoint

Far and away the most common root of problems with SharePoint such as the platform slowing down or not providing the expected level of performance is insufficiently powerful infrastructure.  A SharePoint farm uses multiple physical or virtual machines to power it.  Database, front end, and application servers coupled with a search engine mean that there are multiple points of failure.

In some cases, issues with hosting arise because of changes in scale of the application over time.  As more data is added and more users join the network, it will begin to creak.  A regular assessment of your cloud is useful.  If you’re hosting SharePoint virtually, then an Azure Consultant will be able to provide advice and support about whether you have the correct infrastructure to meet your needs and then provide guidance about the right steps to take.

Extensions causing problems?

Customisation is fundamental to ensuring that SharePoint does what your organisation needs it to.  Whether you have used off the shelf apps or bespoke development, there is a risk that two different extensions may conflict with each other.  This is particularly common when code changes due to updates.

Many organisations use a test environment for SharePoint to ensure that any problems can be ironed out before users experience them, but there is always the potential for something unforeseen to get through the net.

Summary

If you’re having problems with SharePoint, the chances are that a member of our team will be able to help you resolve the issue quickly and avoid major disruption.  Call us today on 03335 779 009 and we’ll get started right away.

SharePoint Online and On Premises

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Migrating to SharePoint Online

The past year I have noticed a significant rise in companies seeking to optimise their business processes by moving their legacy on-premise SharePoint environments over to cloud based technologies.

The advancements in cloud based technologies and the guarantee of saving time and expenditure on server maintenance has made migration from SharePoint on-premise to a cloud based platform a more appealing option. It seems SharePoint Online within Office 365 is the most popular option when looking to migrate.

I have discovered first hand from multiple migration projects the issues you must consider before undertaking the migration to SharePoint Online. Perhaps you are considering a migration to SharePoint Online or maybe a Hybrid structure. If so there are a number of factors you should consider first.

What can be migrated?
Majority of your run of the mill content can be easily migrated, including;

  • documents
  • lists
  • libraries
  • site structures

Even workflows and Meta Data can be migrated with ease.

I have used multiple tools for migration projects. Different tools match different sets of project requirements and I tailor our migration method to fit the circumstance. There are many different tools available but it is worth shopping around to find the tool that will handle your migration expectations.

For example a recent project required that all historic meta-data for documents (Created dates, modified dates etc.) must remain the same, this can be achieved with certain migration tools on the market.

Custom Looks & Feel (Company Branding)

Often when organisations are migrating to their new SharePoint Online environment they take the opportunity to have a fresh look and feel for their sites. This is a key element of a migration which is often under estimated as changing the user interface and experience of a SharePoint Online site is totally different to On-Premise. This is due to how customisation can be delivered. You must be careful when considering your requirements for the look and feel of your new site as SharePoint Online is accessed through an internet connection so speed and performance should be your main concern.

Having a heavily customised user interface and snazzy looking homepage may sound a great idea on paper. In reality without proper planning, creating this on SharePoint Online can incur performance problems. A site that takes a while to render and is slow to respond becomes unusable and will be abandoned by the end users, meaning all the time and effort gone into customising the site user experience has to be removed. I have managed multiple projects when organisations have developed incorrectly and needed to have their site rebranded correctly to improve performance.

SharePoint Online works best when used out of the box. There are some very simple out of the box options for changing the colour scheme of your site to match your organisations brand. The best way to do this is to customise the SharePoint Online colour palette. This can be achieved quickly with ease without risking performance issues. You can then change the logo to that of your companies and you have made the SharePoint site unique to your organisation.

 SharePoint Online – Custom Solution Migration

If an end user compared an out of the box SharePoint 2013 site side by side with a SharePoint online site you would not be able to tell the difference. The real differences impact the SharePoint developers and how they deliver their custom solutions on SharePoint Online. When developing for On-Prem, SharePoint developers had free run to develop solutions for a real custom user experience. Almost all custom developments cannot be easily migrated from on-premise to SharePoint Online, even with use of a migration tool.

SharePoint Farm Solutions

Most developers when providing solutions for on-prem SharePoint 2007/2010/2013 would deliver this through way of a deployment into the global assembly cache of the SharePoint farm. This provided the solution a full trust communication with SharePoint with few limitations. However SharePoint Online has not got the option for deploying your existing farm solutions and chances are you will need to re-develop the solution

Sorry Kids… Out of the Sandbox!

Microsoft do not recommend custom solutions to be developed as Sandbox solutions for SharePoint Online. In my experience SharePoint Online sites that are running multiple Sandbox solutions have been incredibly slow and sluggish. Often to the extent the hindrance of poor site performance out ways the benefit of customisation. In such cases often the original requirements are stripped back and Sandbox solutions are removed. If you are a non technical I would advise your site to be investigated for possible sandbox solutions before migration.

 SharePoint Online Add In Apps

The path Microsoft wish for developers to take is creating SharePoint add in apps. These can be developed and delivered in multiple ways depending of the requirement of the solution. A “SharePoint hosted Add In” is exactly what it says on the tin. You can create an Add in app and host it on your own SharePoint site. The limitation of this is you cannot use server side code such as C#. Instead your solution must be written in client side code such as Javascript.

This can have multiple drawbacks for developers so there is another option referred to as “Provider hosted Add in app”. These are applications that run in a server that is external to SharePoint’s.

That server would have its own infrastructure and the “Provider” would be responsible for keeping it running smoothly. A provider hosted Add in app allows developers to use server side code using the .NET CSOM. This is the method we usually find best for meeting the requirements of the App.

Migration To Currently Used SharePoint Site

You may have been using a hybrid structure up to now, but considering moving everything to SharePoint Online. This can be achieved but requires a slightly different approach to the migration planning.

The migration plan will include merging content from your on-prem to existing content on SharePoint online. This requires consideration of how the site structure will be set up to make navigation easy for your end users.

Before migrating be aware of existing content on the SharePoint online site such as workflows and how your migration may impact on it.

I had made a mistake when I was first trialing migration software last year. I was copying content from my on-prem dev environment to my SharePoint online dev site. The mistake happened when I migrated 300 list items to an existing list which an alert workflow had been set up. It then issued me 300 alert emails.

This is the type of scenario to consider to make sure your migration does not conflict with existing content.

Only a small piece of the puzzle

The issues raised above are only a small part of issues to be considered when making the move from On-Prem to SharePoint Online. Proper investigation and analysis of your existing environment should be carried out thoroughly before creating a plan of action for your migration.

I would recommend having a spring clean of your sites to make sure anything that does not need to be there is removed before the migration starts. The less data you need to move and the more out of the box solutions you can use the quicker the migration process will be.

Making sure you have all the requirements for your new SharePoint Online environment clearly documented and a migration delivery roadmap document will ensure a smooth migration.