Three Ways to Optimize your SharePoint Implementation

Microsoft SharePoint is a popular and valuable business tool that offers a broad range of useful document-centric collaboration capabilities. With SharePoint, users can work together efficiently to create and manage documents that capture institutional knowledge and convey that knowledge to others.

SharePoint’s close connection to Microsoft Office is one reason for its extensive adoption. In fact, SharePoint is one of the fastest growing products in Microsoft history, reaching an estimated 130 million users this year, according to the company. Like Office, it is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for document- and content-centric collaboration.

SharePoint Challenges
The growing use of SharePoint creates both opportunities and challenges. SharePoint’s core features and end-user acceptance offer the opportunity to introduce collaboration, workflow and content management in an organization. At the same time, a variety of issues can make it challenging to get the full potential business value out of SharePoint:

• Fragmented departmental SharePoint implementations;
• Isolation of SharePoint content from the larger enterprise information environment; and
• The need for richer functionality on top of core SharePoint capabilities.

I’ll explore these issues in more detail, and follow with a strategy that will help you overcome these challenges, multiply the business value of your SharePoint investment, and also increase the value of your other content-centric IT investments.

1. Fragmented departmental SharePoint implementations. While SharePoint is a great aid to collaboration, it is usually implemented initially on a team-by-team basis. As a result, corporate SharePoint deployments tend to be highly fragmented.

Most companies wind up with many small “islands” of SharePoint content, workflows, administration and customizations. So it is difficult—if not impossible—for people in different areas of the company to find and otherwise leverage content that is not in their particular SharePoint “territory.”

2. Isolation of SharePoint content from the larger enterprise information environment. While SharePoint-based content is growing rapidly across most organizations, it still typically represents only a small fraction of the unstructured content that knowledge workers use on a daily basis.

SharePoint can therefore potentially become its own “island” of information that winds up isolated from the larger enterprise information environment. Thus, in some cases, people using SharePoint will miss out on a wealth of information that may be relevant to their immediate needs. In other cases, people using some other system will miss out on the information that is contained within SharePoint. Either way, the isolation of SharePoint content detracts from the business value that people get out of their SharePoint resources.

In the real world, people often neglect to create their content in SharePoint. So it isn’t wise to depend entirely upon busy people to ensure the ability of the business as a whole to leverage the content they individually create.

3. The need for richer functionality on top of core SharePoint capabilities. While SharePoint provides a wide range of useful content collaboration and distribution functions, it does not do everything every company needs to fulfill its information-sharing requirements.

Adding this functionality can be a challenge. Not every company has the IT skills to work with SharePoint’s underlying architecture. This can pose obstacles to companies that are not Microsoft-only shops and/or that need to integrate SharePoint with other non-Microsoft applications. Given that IT resources at most companies are already stretched pretty thin, it is important to develop strategies that make it easier to enhance SharePoint with the various additional capabilities the business is likely to require.

In other words, while SharePoint is certainly a powerful business solution, it is not by itself the be-all and end-all of content management, collaboration and workflow. Technology decision-makers therefore have to develop a strategy to get maximum value out of SharePoint—so they can meet the information-sharing needs of the business as effectively and cost-efficiently as possible.

Optimizing SharePoint
Across the board, the three challenges that I have described are symptoms of a single larger issue: failure to fully optimize an organization’s information resources. As you’ll see, these challenges are not unique to SharePoint. Many applications, from transactional business systems to rich media, suffer the same issues. Solve these challenges for SharePoint and you’ll be well on your way to optimizing the use of information throughout your organization.

Before diving more deeply into the three major challenges and their solutions, I’d like to introduce the concept of information optimization. Information optimization is the discipline of ensuring that all of an organization’s information is readily accessible to the employees, partners and customers who need it, in a form that is contextually relevant and easy to use. Information optimization is an ongoing process that seeks to improve information use by understanding and addressing all of the impediments to its effective use. There is also a technology component to the information optimization story, because ultimately you’ll need a technology platform that can support the principles and objectives of information optimization. 

With this common understanding of information optimization, one can productively explore how to address the challenges to gaining full value from your SharePoint investments:

Unifying SharePoint assets across the enterprise. The ideal antidote to fragmented departmental SharePoint implementations is an information optimization strategy and platform that can unify all of your organization’s distributed departmental SharePoint systems and make them look like one. The goal of this effort is to enable SharePoint users throughout the organization to find and make use of SharePoint assets anywhere, regardless of location—but with one big caveat: users must only be able to see information that they are authorized to view. This means that the system used to unify all of the SharePoint content must have built-in security capability that understands and enforces the access permissions and policies of each SharePoint server.

Using an enterprisewide information optimization approach to unify the enterprise SharePoint environment offers substantial advantages over attempting to do so within SharePoint itself. For one thing, existing departmental SharePoint implementations tend to be entrenched and resistant to change. Modifying those implementations to align with an enterprise standard can be disruptive, politically challenging and counter-productive. Attempts to standardize future SharePoint implementations can also slow deployment and limit the ability of individual departments to customize them to meet their business needs.

Each department can be given autonomy to deploy SharePoint in accordance with its own requirements—and to continue enhancing those deployments as necessary. Following an information optimization approach, you can ensure the ability of the business as a whole to leverage information in departmental SharePoint deployments.

Integrating SharePoint with the larger enterprise information environment. This is perhaps the biggest impact you can have. For organizations making a  commitment to SharePoint as a core content authoring and collaboration environment, preventing SharePoint from becoming its own information silo is particularly important.