Do You See SharePoint As Half Full Or Half Empty?

As a SharePoint Consultant who has consulted at many different companies small and large, I have often experienced negative initial reactions when mentioning SharePoint.

The reasons have ranged from things like “SharePoint is slow” to other things like the “SharePoint navigation is confusing”. And I have to admit, there have been times I have used SharePoint sites that were both slow and confusing. The good news is that both of these can be improved so that they do not need to become a roadblock to using an otherwise useful product. But beyond merely removing these barriers, the good news is that there are many features that SharePoint provides that many users have never come to understand and appreciate and my goal is to help raise awareness of these features.

What I have learned over time is that most users’ concept of SharePoint is that it is simply a document repository…

They see it as a ”a place my boss forces me to put my files that takes more time and effort than storing them locally or putting them on a file share”. SharePoint is generally a product that has been introduced to the organization by the IT department for work teams to collaborate and usually with little or no training on SharePoint provided. And while storing documents is certainly a valid use of SharePoint, there is so much more capability than most users realize or have been given the rights to leverage in their work group or department.

On occasion, I have the opportunity to sit down with motivated employees who like to learn and I describe to them some of the features within SharePoint that I think will interest them.

Most users are surprised to hear about these capabilities and are eager to figure out how they can begin to use them.

My goal in this blog series is to share a few of what I consider to be the most underutilized features of SharePoint that can be leveraged for both personal productivity and business process improvements.

These underutilized features include:

• Custom Lists
• Notifications and Workflow
• Security

After discussing these features individually, I’ll conclude with a discussion of how these features can be combined together to create Business Applications that can help support and automate some of your current business processes.

And before you assume that you need a developer or technical person to take advantage of these features, know that all of these are available to end-users of SharePoint and are configurable through the SharePoint UI or through SharePoint Designer.

Stay tuned. I look forward to sharing more about these underutilized features with you and hearing from you about any questions or comments on these topics.

By the way…

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We thought you would enjoy this take on how different people see the half full/empty glass (source)…

The optimist says the glass is half full.

The pessimist says the glass is half empty.

The project manager says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

The professional trainer does not care if the glass is half full or half empty, he just knows that starting the discussion will give him ten minutes to figure out why his powerpoint presentation is not working (@jbutweets – thought you would enjoy this one!)

The consultant says let’s examine the question, prepare a strategy for an answer, and all for a daily rate of…

The engineer says the glass is over-designed for the quantity of water.

The computer programmer says the glass is full-empty.