According to AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) at least 70% of organizations have deployed SharePoint in some shape or form in the last few years. The proliferation of Microsoft’s SharePoint software reflects how useful this file sharing and social collaboration tool can be to companies of all sizes.
SharePoint has the ability to improve your team’s productivity using its flexible collaboration features. It offers features such as version control for documents – potentially replacing the need for documents to be emailed back and forth. Team sites can be created to assign tasks and share calendars within a working group. Common workplace scenarios such as holiday requests, travel expenses and housekeeping tasks such as booking meeting rooms can all be executed efficiently within the SharePoint environment using process workflows.
But it can be difficult for users to adjust to the SharePoint way of working. Here are some tips to promote the adoption of SharePoint within your company:
Get buy-in from your team
It’s important that stakeholders are involved – right from the start of your SharePoint adoption. That includes everyone from the top to the bottom of your organization. It’s important that your senior staff demonstrate they are enthusiastic about SharePoint and that they use it in their own working practices.
Sell the benefits
Most users just want to know what’s in it for them. Be explicit about how SharePoint can improve their working lives and be clear about the benefits.
Address concerns
Don’t ignore user concerns. These may range from fears of role elimination to the difficulty of adapting to new working practices.
Have a long-term vision
Make it clear how SharePoint adoption is essential to your organization’s long-term goals.
Demonstrate success
Find examples of teams who are using SharePoint successfully and share best practice across your organization. Enable your users to share their tips and tricks and celebrate efficiency gains.
Be clear about what it is
Many people see SharePoint as a mere document repository. Make it very clear how much more it offers to their working lives.
Provide training and allow for adjustment
It may seem obvious but you need to train your users and make allowances for delays as they adjust to new systems. Users will resent the new software if it adds an additional burden to their workload, so compensate for this.
Allow for customization
If users can create their own personalized experience within SharePoint it will seem less imposed upon them.
Maintain site performance
The goal of SharePoint is for it to become the central, single location for your business’s information sharing needs. However, with the amount of data that users require access to, site performance can be affected. The inevitable result is poor end-user productivity.
Maintain your SharePoint site’s performance using SharePoint archiving
Our SharePoint archiving software is a solution to help you overcome these challenges and use SharePoint more efficiently. ShareArchiver’s SharePoint archiving software reduces storage costs and enhances system performance so that nothing gets in the way of end-user experience and user adoption of SharePoint.
How does it work?
SharePoint archiving replaces items or content in SharePoint with a stub. Tiny in size, the stub is an access point for users to restore the original document. The archived content is fully indexed and searchable by end users and can be restored very easily by the user. This means there are no barriers to file retrieval so the user experience is enhanced. A solid SharePoint archiving solution should be a key part of your company’s SharePoint adoption strategy to ensure there are no reasons for your users not to embrace the new way of working.
If you’re a business using SharePoint, why not take advantage of our free trial and see how ShareArchiver’s SharePoint archiving can help your business succeed with this platform.
