SharePoint|The Reality Series 4: Benchmarks for success

Empowering those allies is not a simple task. “These people all have day jobs,” says O’Connor. One internal marketing vehicle is to create internal SharePoint training sites. EPC encourages clients to download Camtasia Studio and generate short training videos like: How do I set up a new list, or how do I add folks to my workspace?

An analogy O’Connor uses is the notion of the SharePoint economy: “The system administrators are the mall managers, while the store owner is the power user. It’s those shopkeepers who manage inventory and make sure content is relevant—they police the store.” Ultimately they also create new internal markets for delivering information.

Deployment is easy. Doing it well is another story. That is both an enticement and challenge for a firm whose record-keeping is scattered, siloed and resistant to any kind of integration or interoperability. In KMWorld’s SharePoint series we have showcased a half-dozen implementations, and the reality is this: Once governance is determined, permissions are structured, metadata is populating, search is tuned and the site hierarchy reflects organizational reality, then the foundation is in place. So are the before- and after-effects. It’s the difference between facing a brick wall of file server folders and a unified, user-focused system that strengthens the IP base, interconnectedness and the operational efficiencies of an integrated enterprise.

The ultimate power of SharePoint stems organizationally from what Marc Anderson terms that “one version of the truth thing.”