AIIM Resetting SharePoint Expectations (Part 2)

In May I had the wonderful opportunity to attend Resetting SharePoint Expectations, three AIIM seminars in Toronto, New York, and Washington D.C.

AIIM is the Association for Image and Information Management, they hold annual conferences, webinars, seminars, and training that is worth taking a look at.

Resetting SharePoint Expectations was a daylong event that was free for attendees. Overall I was impressed, the events were well organized, informative, and a lot of fun.

I staffed a Microsoft table where I helped answer questions about SharePoint and other Microsoft products such as the Surface. For the last hour of the event I did a Q&A where the audience summed up their experiences with SharePoint by identifying a movie and I shared my thoughts on how to tackle the SharePoint challenges represented by the movie choice. It was a lot of fun.

Here is an example:

How I Met Your Mother: It is taking forever for us to get SharePoint solutions deployed and out to our users.

Quentin: Keep it simple stupid. Don’t spend months analyzing everything, identifying a million requirements, and trying to customize to meet every requirement. Deploy OneDrive for Business for your users so they have basic document sharing. Get basic team sites out there. Then work on focused solutions such as training video portals and records management archives one by one. When you need customization, look at partner solutions you can quickly start using vs. building your own thing. Be tough on prioritizing your requirements. A lot of times, out of x, y, and z – you only need x. Cut through the bureaucracy and focus on getting value out there. Get the basics of a solution in place with the help of a few early adopters, then have a small group start using the new solution, as things work well expand out to include more and more people. Office 365 can help because you don’t need to throw in concerns about purchasing and setting up hardware into the mix. Have your users meet their mother (SharePoint?) in season 1, not season 8. 

See my post on the AIIM blog: Resetting SharePoint Expectations Event Summary (Part 2) and Resetting SharePoint Expectations Event Summary (Part 1) to learn more.

Please post in the comments here. What movie, TV show, or book sums up your experiences with SharePoint, Exchange, Lync and Office 365? In a future post I will respond to a few of your choices.

Thanks for reading,

Quentin Christensen, Program Manager