3 realities of learning SharePoint

I get lots of questions from my loyal blog followers on what are the best ways I can recommend to learn SharePoint. I am not talking about learning SharePoint from end user perspective, but rather more of Power User/Administrator folks. For example how do I learn to create a project or team site in SharePoint, setup security, information architecture, etc. Let me share few tips on SharePoint learning that I gathered over the years, as well as came to conclusion from my experience with the tool.

Reality # 1: You won’t learn SharePoint by taking online classes or attending formal SharePoint training alone

These are definitely a great start, will probably teach you some basic principles and best practices. But no more than that. Paraphrasing a famous shoe company, you have to “Just do it”. SharePoint is like driving – you can’t learn theory only and claim to be a good driver. Repetitive practice will make you better. Same exact logic goes with SharePoint. You have to roll up your sleeves and just immerse yourself into it. You will make mistakes, lots of mistakes. And that is fine, because that is the only way to learn SharePoint (like everything else in life).

Google is your best friend to learn SharePoint

The reality is – you will do majority of learning by “googling” the topic or issue and reading blogs like this one or from other SharePoint enthusiasts. There is lots of useful information out there and the best way to address it is by finding the answer on Internet. There is no single book or magic user guide that explains all the nuances of SharePoint. Trust me – this is how we all of us “SharePoint consultants” learned SharePoint.

 

Reality # 2: You won’t learn SharePoint unless you are 100% committed to it

Truth of the matter is you can’t do SharePoint (well) on a part-time basis. You know that feeling when you put on skis or skates once every 5 years? Same thing applies to SharePoint. If you are building an occasional site here and there – you might get away with it, but to do it right – you have to be committed 100% to it. Remember, it is not just about building a site and dropping off a bunch of documents in the document library. You have to consider overall information architecture, security, understand well user requirements, make time for training and user adoption, etc.

 

Reality # 3: You will never learn it all or know it all with SharePoint

Truth of the matter is, SharePoint is a very complicated system and you can’t be an expert in all of its aspects. Moreover, SharePoint is a constantly evolving system. Especially with it being in the cloud now as part of Office 365 offering, you might find new functionality every time you login. And there are always 10 ways to do 1 thing. And, let’s keep in mind, that it is not an easy system and was never designed to be easy. The only way to excel in SharePoint is by working with it, day in and day out, and grow your internal knowledge and skills.

by Gregory Zelfond via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

How to implement SharePoint in your organization – Best Practices

The first question I get from the potential clients ready to get going with SharePoint is: “Where do we start?” On one side you have to manage your day jobs, manage employees, you have your data, information, documents, content all over the place and on another side you have a very capable , configurable and customizable, but very overwhelming little monster called SharePoint. How do you get this thing moving? How do you approach this “implement SharePoint” thing? What is the first thing we should do?

With this article I hope to demystify and respond to these questions. I also want to highlight the fact there are many ways to implement SharePoint and this post shares approach based on my experience with SharePoint implementations/roll-outs in various organizations, ranging from small business and nonprofits to large enterprises.

SharePoint Implementation Tip # 1: Implement SharePoint in phases.
 
Moving your whole business to SharePoint in 1 big project is a sure guarantee of failure. You have to break it down into manageable mini-projects. For example, you have this vision of SharePoint with multiple project sites and team sites, department sites and various portals and repositories. That’s good. But don’t roll out all of it at once. From User Adoption and Change Management perspective, this will be a lot for your users to digest. Break it down into manageable phases, use “thing big, start small” approach, create a plan and implement phase by phase (site by site).

SharePoint Implementation Tip # 2: Pick an easy target / quick win for Phase I.
 
Now that you agreed to implement in phases, what do you choose for Phase I? Hint: you want to make it real easy on yourself and your users. I always recommend that clients roll-out just 1-2 SharePoint sites initially. A great candidate in many organizations is a site storing company’s policies and procedures. It is a great candidate, because the content usually needs to be accessed by the whole organization (so it will force your users to access SharePoint). Moreover, there are only a few content owners for such sites (content owners = users who can edit and modify content). Majority of your users will be content consumers (content consumers = users who will have Read-Only access). So from security standpoint – it is a relatively easy setup. Besides, with Policies and Procedures, for example, there is no external sharing involved. So you don’t have to worry about that little monster. So here we go, your Phase I is defined: Policies & Procedures site + homepage (you have to have a friendly homepage for your employees!)

SharePoint Implementation Tip # 3: Move away from folder structure and into metadata
 
If you are making such a huge leap anyway (by moving your business to SharePoint), you have to consider new, modern ways to organize your content. I advise that you leverage the power of SharePoint by moving away from folder structure and into Metadata. Example above (Policies and Procedures site) is a great candidate for it. While Metadata concept can be intimidating for your users who are used to storing documents in folders, the example above is a great way to “ease” them into the concept. Why? Because typically, policies and procedures is an easily structured data set. It is far easier to wrap your heads around this than any other data you have.

Do I need to move everything to metadata? Being a SharePoint metadata advocate and author of very popular “12 reasons folders in SharePoint are a bad idea” blog post, it would seem that metadata is the only way to go in SharePoint. Not necessarily. The rule of thumb is to move from folders to metadata only if data can be structured and is shareable with lots of people in an organization. Example: If you have Marketing department site with 2 people working in that department, responsible for company’s logos and marketing brochures, and folders work just fine for them, don’t convert them to metadata – let them continue their work in folder environment (unless you want to your users to hate SharePoint). On another hand, if you want to share those same marketing materials with the rest of organization and present in a logical manner with beautiful user interface – surfacing them up on a separate Marketing Portal in a metadata format might be a good idea.

SharePoint Implementation Tip # 4: Let your users/employees determine your next phase of the SharePoint implementation.
 
Once you rolled out Phase I, start soliciting feedback from users right away. As they become more comfortable with SharePoint, ask them which site or functionality they would like to see next. You will score lots of points in the User Adoption department and will automatically get their buy-in for the next phase. May be it will be a Department site. Or may be a team or project site. Or may be a site to share files with external vendors. Whatever it is, you will have a pipeline of phases / work cut out for yourself with buy-in from employees (which is most important!)

Link to original article can be found here

by Gregory Zelfond via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community