Why SharePoint and O365 Implementations Go Wrong

Our Director of Consulting, Carol Donnelly, talking about why SharePoint implementations go wrong and what you can do about it.

Transcript:

There’s a number of reasons why I see SharePoint implementations go awry. One of the biggest reasons is thinking that people who aren’t implementing SharePoint on the daily, on the weekly, are going to come in and implement a SharePoint solution for their organization and it’s going to take off and save a lot of time and money for the organization. 

Unfortunately, if you haven’t been doing this, you don’t know the pitfalls, you don’t know what to look out for, you don’t know the best practices.

And so a lot of times when I think about enterprise content management, document control, we go into an organization where they’ve implemented SharePoint and SharePoint’s gotten a bad name because they’ve implemented it like a fileshare. So now you have a really expensive fileshare, you’ve gone through a lot of dollars and time to get your documents out of the fileshare and into SharePoint and still people are complaining that they can’t find their documents.

There’s a better way and that’s where we come in. We do this for a living. This is something that we’re doing every week. We live and breathe SharePoint internally as our enterprise content management solution.

When I need to go find a document internally, I do it just like I do at home, I search for it, which is something that people forget when they’re at work and they’re so used to pecking and hunting and clicking to find the document. So there’s a better way. It’s setting up an information architecture within your SharePoint environment, tagging your files with metadata and using search to find the documents that you’ve uploaded.