people will only use them to collaborate so far as they can perceive additional value and can integrate them into their daily rhythm.
When creating a SharePoint intranet, there are several strategies that help improve collaboration. At its core, SharePoint is a collaboration platform, and most of its features are designed to drive collaboration in some way. When you understand how to use SharePoint effectively, it becomes an important element of your collaboration strategy.
Here are three tips for driving collaboration with SharePoint:
- Create the right kind of collaboration site: When you’re creating a collaborative site, the features and emphasis depend on whether the site is project-driven or community-driven. Community-driven sites emphasize communication and knowledge sharing. They provide a platform to ask questions and establish best practices. Project-driven collaboration sites, on the other hand, are more task-centric. People come to a project site to find out what they need to do and access the tools needed to complete their tasks. Document libraries exist either as resource repositories or a receptacle for the output of their collaboration.
- Tailor site features to the collaboration type: Overall, it’s important to not over-generalize the collaborative environment. While project and community sites are likely to share many features, they should be tailored to support the desired outcome of the collaboration. With a community-driven collaboration site, for example, integrating Yammer’s social enterprise functionality is one way to facilitate conversation. With a project site, you’d definitely take advantage of a SharePoint task list, as well as the project summary Web Part, which provides a view of upcoming task deadlines.
- Empower users to create collaborative environments: The best way to facilitate the creation of useful collaborative environments is to understand how people in your organization are working already – creating site templates that suit how they work and think, and empower them to create these environments as needed.
If nothing in your SharePoint intranet encourages intuitive collaboration, people are likely to fall back on tools that may not be well-suited to the task (such as email for document collaboration). Allowing the right employees to create collaborative environments as needed keeps them from reverting back to inefficient methods.
This approach does take some planning in terms of governance. You don’t want people to create an ever-growing number of sites with redundant and conflicting content. Before a person creates a new collaborative environment, they need to be sure that that there isn’t already a site in place. To that end, your SharePoint sites need to have the right metadata associated with them to ensure findability.
When collaboration tools offer substantive value for the organization and the user, it’s a win-win situation. With a SharePoint document library, for example, you reduce the number of copies of the document that are in circulation thereby streamlining collaboration. In addition, version history helps to save time in producing deliverables, reducing the danger of accidental content deletion, and improving the user experience thus producing economic benefits for the organization.
Learn more about creating the right enterprise collaboration strategy for your organization by contacting Portal Solutions.
Contributor: Adam Krueger, Creative Director at Portal Solutions
