Great Document Management
Microsoft SharePoint may are already developed to help you manage mountains of data, although the real strength of the product lies in its flexibility and support for add-ons. There are actually hundreds of add-ons readily available for pretty much every version of SharePoint, which enhance its existing functions as well as offer new ones, to help you manage data better. Here are 6 types of tasks you may need to perform with SharePoint, and 12 add-ins that may help you do them better in onpremise and online versions of SharePoint.
Controlling which of your staff get to determine a particular document or list in SharePoint will be vital for proper knowledge management. User permissions and access rights have to be carefully managed, and although SharePoint does have some very good Finding Document Management security measures built in, a third party add-in is always good to have for sensitive data files. Here are a couple of add-ins to help you with this.
Companies that get the SharePoint implementation right, often start simply, with many of the features disabled. Break a SharePoint implementation up into stages and leave the 'bells-and-whistles' until last.
1. Start by just replacing the existing Intranet. 2. Add document management 3. Add forms management. 4. Add business process and workflow management 5. Start sharing business intelligence dashboards and enterprise reports 6. And so forth.
Always remember your short-term and long term objectives and work with IT while they download SharePoint. Clarify what will be required of SharePoint now, what possible extras might be useful and what may be required in the future.
Among the keys to the successful implementation a whole new technology is to drive user adoption and regularly gather feedback to evaluate progress.
Staff Polls, surveys and discussion forums provide effective ways to gather qualitative and quantitative feedback from staff. Communicating the successive stages of an iterative SharePoint implementation needs to stay interesting for staff, so adopting an engaging and innovative communications campaign is vital.
Promote your evolving SharePoint implementation through multiple channels and monitor readership to make sure you're hitting the mark
Short 'news' articles in Staff E-Mags can inform readers of new information and the availability of new tools, and additionally allowing readers to click directly through to specific SharePoint pages.
For project 'wins' that you want to profile with more impact, try using digital signage on screensavers. An image will be worth a thousand words. As an example, an image of a deck chair on the beach with relevant text and a click through link is a powerful and engaging way to notify staff that leave forms are now available via SharePoint.
For messages that need high cut through, consider using Desktop Alerts or Scrolling News feeds on call computer screens
