Can't live With It
Craig Asher, principal, Vital Financial, a small venture capital firm in Bethesda, Md.
Craig Asher didn't always look down his nose at SharePoint. When he and his business partner started using the software last year, they were looking forward to being able to easily collaborate and share documents with each other and with their business associates. The problem? There was nothing easy about it.
"We were using SharePoint for about five months, which I thought was long enough," Asher says. "My business partner is not extremelyWeb 2.0 savvy and he was just having trouble getting SharePoint to work."
Asher says SharePoint was not intuitive and was too clunky to use, so he went in search of an alternative. Now Vital Financial uses HyperOffice, an online collaboration platform that Asher says gave his company a 40-percent net savings and better functionality. And he was able to get his partner up and running with minimal training.
The firm uses the tool every day to share documents and pool knowledge about companies being considered for investment.
"We have to look at a lot of different companies and we go through a fairly thorough due-diligence process," Asher says. "We keep track of all the companies we're looking at in our HyperOffice wiki. I never want to go back to SharePoint."
Can't live Without it
Justin Singer, president, SMBology, an IT consulting firm in Houston
With a team of about 20 consultants, SMBology depends on SharePoint to keep every one of them in the loop no matter where they are.
"We're working in a pretty fast-paced environment, so there's a real need for everyone to have good access to information, be able to collaborate and be able to share thoughts and ideas of other people in the organization," says Justin Singer. "We have people in the office and people out of the office that we need to support, and SharePoint is a key aspect of how they work together."
SharePoint's search capability is a reason he believes SharePoint is indispensable. Before Singer deployed the software several years ago, it was difficult to keep track of information that was scattered all over, he says.
And SharePoint's version control makes it easy for employees to find the most up-to-date version of a common document.
Singer says he remains committed to SharePoint because of how well it ties in with the other Microsoft products his business depends on.
"It's incredibly feature rich, and it integrates nicely with what we're already doing," Singer says. "I don't know a single other product on the market that integrates as neatly as SharePoint does."
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Comments:
It's vital to have a strategy for deploying SharePoint. That includes deciding beforehand how your organization will use it and how employees will be trained. It's not enough to install the software and then just tell employees, "We now have SharePoint. Use it!" I wrote a blog piece about configuring a hosted SharePoint installation but many of my "questions you should ask yourself" can be used in deciding whether or not SharePoint is for your organization. Here it is if you are interested: http://www.aisn.net/blog/index.php/index.php/2011/03/15/sharepoint-2010-configuring-an-installation/
SharePoint does have to make some improvements on the simplicity front.
It's important to have a collaborating tool that's intuitive. Workers are using this tool to make their job easier after all - so when it makes their job harder they end up nothing but discouraged. Not only that, but having the ability to collaborate on more also helps them work better. One thing that really messes with workers is different applications. Many different companies have a list of different apps and add-ons to get the job done, but the reality is these don't integrate and workers just get fed up. A business management solution I do contract work with called WORKetc has found a way to skip this problem entirely. WORKetc combines CRM, project management, and billing into one application. This means an entire business can be run under just this powerful software. This helps streamline the work process (Establish a lead, do the project work and manage it, and then send out the invoice under one app), and helps keep employees motivated not only because of the intuitive all-in-one interface, but the ability to collaborate on ALL aspects of work. WORKetc does not come short by any means of features, and this table makes that very clear: http://www.worketc.com/compare
Sometimes it's a love- hate relationship. Companies that are heavily invested in Sharepoint and can and do benefit from it's strengths are looking for ways to make it work for everyone. Especially people like Craig Ashers business partner. There are lot's of free tools helping bridge the gap to Sharepoint adoption. Harmon.ie ( www.harmon.ie) brings Sharepoint into the familiar atmosphere of Outlook. You can collaborate easily right from your email client. Drag and drop and lot's of intuitive features. I hear the problem and suffer from similar problems as a new Sharepoint user but happy to be working with Harmon.ie in my Outlook sidebar since it's the application of choice for particular clients. FYI - Works with Google Docs too