We have looked at the challenges and few basic rules to enhance user adoption for SharePoint sites in the previous blog Driving SharePoint User Adoption [Part 1] Now, let us look at methods to promote user adoption and how to get a few easy wins for adoption.
Promoting User Adoption
Below are a few tips on the methods to promote user adoption:
Launch a Great Campaign
- Start the launch campaign and create a healthy curiosity within the user community. There is a reason why movie trailers are created months or years in advance. They create the much needed hype and excitement!
- Conduct some pre-launch sessions/open forums where the users get answers to questions they may have on the new launching site
- Plan the application launch day and make it creative with posting the screenshots of the application across the floor with some interesting facts about the application
Promote Your Site Actively
- In the first week after launch, identify the team/department which uses the application the most and reward the team members
- Send frequent remailers to end-users about the good statics of the application usage
- Have the email id/phone number of the people/system administrators on each page for a few days, so that users know whom to contact in case of errors/issues
Eat Your Own Dog Food
- Use SharePoint for your own document sharing and collaboration
- Lead by example – employees model the behavior of the leader
- Top management should be active in internal blogs
- Leaders should refuse to accept emails with too many attachments, large attachments or messages copied to several people
Make Your Home Page Interesting
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| Announcements | Weather |
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| Employee Directory | Employee of the month |
- Make sure your Home Page is extremely attractive/user friendly and useful
- Few sample widgets that you can have on the homepage are – announcements, current weather, tip of the day etc. The application should create interest in the users to make them want to check it at least once a day
- Love-at-first-sight will have a long lasting impact
Provide Training
- Train SharePoint owners on their responsibilities and how to be webmasters of their respective sites
- Get users involved early and explain how it will make their job easier
- Train users!
Encourage and Incorporate User Feedback
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- Collect formal and informal user feedback. It is always good to work towards improvement and have a regular release plan. Always show some progress to the users and win their confidence.
- Post positive feedback’s regularly via bulletin boards/emails
- You can use the SharePoint out of the box survey tool itself to capture user feedback.
Easy wins for SharePoint adoption
Below are few out-of-the-box features of SharePoint which can be exploited to win good user adoption.
Search Experience
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- Exploit search capabilities of SharePoint
- Configure search with the right refiners
- Optimize search speed
- Maintain consistent search experience
Automation/Workflow
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Today’s world is leaning towards automation. We all know time is money and if we can gain time by automating a few processes, that will not only add to our business value, but will also result in better user adoption. SharePoint offers out-of-the-box workflows which are simple enough to be configured.
Below are few points to be considered around automation:
- Automate simple processes
- Leverage out-of-the-box workflows
- Have notifications at various steps
- Enable reporting around the process
- Make approval process easy with mobile enablement
Mobile Enablement
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- Have the application mobile enabled
- Release Intranet apps
- Notifications on mobile(Email/SMS)
- One click approval
Conclusion
- Adoption is not that difficult, provided it is part of the strategy right from the beginning of the project.
- The right features of SharePoint should be leveraged based on business needs
- An appealing application will always have a good user adoption.
