You probably already know this, but you won’t search long
for content management tools before running into SharePoint. For well over a decade Microsoft has been
evolving this collaborative powerhouse.
Today SharePoint offers more collaborative capabilities than any other
platform, period. Fact check this bold
statement with Gartner, Forester or any other reputable analysis firm.
Over 135 million licenses of SharePoint sold worldwide and thousands of books have been written about SharePoint
ranging in focus from the platforms tremendously powerful content management capabilities,
document management capabilities, collaborative capabilities… (learn more here).
But what about the social capabilities of the SharePoint
platform?
A few years ago, Microsoft acquired Yammer, a private social
network for your organization and integrated SharePoint with it. There’s over 200,000 organizations using
Yammer today. You may have already heard
of it.
Predictably, new marketing terms have been flying around
such as “enterprise social” or my favorite, “social collaboration”. To me, it’s still just collaboration. It’s just better now, perhaps a lot better.
Maybe a future post will discuss socializing your members,
but it’s late so I’m going to scope this posts’ focus on the pro’s and con’s on
using this SharePoint/Yammer combo to achieve social collaboration.
The Pros
You simply won’t find another solution that even comes close
to the amount of features. Starting with
a true search engine algorithm that gets smarter the more it’s used, security trims
results and has undergone over $3 billion of R&D, to the native Office
integration (Word, Outlook, Excel…). You
will start taking for granted things like file check-in/check-out, simultaneous
document editing, auto versioning, email and Txt Msg notifications. You will wonder how you lived without the
mobile capabilities. The business
process automation you achieve with the workflow features will solidify your
hero-like reputation.
All that before we even add Yammer to the equation.
Yammer, in my opinion, can be described as a discussion
forum on steroids. You can follow
people, threads, participate online or via email, and form conversations around
topics of interest within invitation only groups. The cool factor to me is that it’s designed
for collaboration, not spam.
The Cons
When I hear scary stories about SharePoint (or any large
enterprise platform for that matter) I take it with a grain of salt. Honestly,
when I hear such stories – I’m nearly always hearing about a project that was
either poorly planned, underfunded, mismanaged, poorly executed or in many
cases a mixture.
That said, SharePoint is imperfect. If your expectations are firmly set on
SharePoint being a “magic bullet” – don’t use SharePoint.
The Con’s of using SharePoint in my opinion are mainly
around expectation leveling. Whether you
realize it or not, SharePoint is very likely one of the most powerful platforms
you will encounter – this is not always a good thing. In fact, by my estimation it’s precisely this
vast river of functionality that has derailed more than one unsuspecting
project. You just can’t coast through a
SharePoint initiative - mainly because there’s too many ways to accomplish the
same objective, but usually only one “best right answer”.
SharePoint is big. It
can do a lot. You will learn of
something it can do and want it now (like using Yammer for example). You cannot manage your SharePoint based
solution without careful planning, access to good resources and the discipline
to practice sound project management. If
you try, you will fail – it’s too big, it offers too much temptation to turn on
a feature without planning first.
In Sum
Read up on Yammer but I recommend giving it a try within
your organization first, and then decide if your members would benefit from
social collaboration.