5 Ways to Increase SharePoint Adoption and Utilization

Having participated in a number of SharePoint deployments I have, over the years, gained an appreciation of what makes a “sticky” deployment. “Sticky” or “stickiness” is a marketing term that basically means it’s attractive enough to pull in your audience and makes them stick long enough to use the service effectively.

To make you deployment “sticky” consider the following:

1. Enhanced Look & Feel

The User Interface and Experience (UI/UX) that’s developed into your deployment is of utmost importance. The goal here is to ensure your SharePoint web portal is user friendly, intuitive and easy on the eyes or visually appealing (i.e. consider the general layout and placement of links and various functionalities).

2. Training

Training your End-Users and Champions (these are the users you’ve identified as your ambassadors in each and every department in your organization. Usually they’re more technologically savvier than most of your users) will ensure they’ll have the requisite skills to enable them utilize all the features and services available on SharePoint for their day to day work. The Champions will offer peer learning and training to the other users and promote the use and adoption of SharePoint across the organization on your behalf.

3. Leverage SharePoint’s Workflow Engine

SharePoint is a very robust platform and beyond being used, predominantly, for Document and Content Management it also comes with a Workflow engine that can be used for developing simple business applications. Many organizations are still fairly manual (paper-based) in how they process various business functions. Using the SharePoint Workflow engine, you can automate various business processes by developing online-based forms and workflows with the requisite conditions and business logic. You can develop simple apps such as Petty Cash Requests, Travel Request, Taxi/Cab Requests, Leave Requests among others. By developing and hosting these apps on SharePoint will ensure users are always coming to the portal to make requests for various services in your organization.

4. Use SharePoint as your Communication Hub.

The other way to increase adoption and use of SharePoint is to ensure all your communications are either done using SharePoint or direct users to your SharePoint web portal. For example, all your company memos, notices and discussion forums can be done using SharePoint Lists, News Feed, Announcements and other features such as Yammer and Discussion Forums.  Other communication artifacts such your company newsletter should be structure in such a way that all articles have a link directing the users to the company SharePoint portal.

5. Project Sponsorship

And finally having a senior respected manager or executive as your Project Sponsor will provide you with the requisite political will and resourcing to push the adoption and use of SharePoint across your organization. Project Sponsorship is a very important prerequisite whenever one is introducing any change in an organization and this most certainly applies to your SharePoint Deployment Projects.