Summary: SharePoint supports six major business functions but many organizations implement it with only one or two initially in mind. Obtaining the greatest return on investment requires additional analysis, planning and projects.
Imagine for a moment that you have a new car. You bought it to replace your near-classic car which not only was showing its age – it didn’t have a disk player and you couldn’t use your Zune with it – but it also wasn’t performing very well.
You haven’t spent as much time as you’d like learning about all the features of your new car because — well, because you’re always driving your car. You drive it to the ball game and the golf course, to the fitness center and the airport, to call on clients and new prospects.
So instead of using the GPS-integrated, voice-activated navigation system, you’re still using your collection of road maps and PDA notes. GPS-Nav isn’t such an outstanding feature anyway you tell yourself. What you don’t know is that if you enter a list of destinations, for example prospects’ office locations, it returns a set of three suggested routes that minimize travel time based on time of day, known road-construction and location-specific traffic patterns.
You really are missing out on a great feature. Not only that, you paid for it! It’s there ready to use. All you need to do is start using it. Maybe that means asking a GPS-Nav expert for help, but then, after that time investment, you’d be getting more value from your car, and life would be a little easier.
Microsoft SharePoint is similar. It’s easy to use it for one or two specific business reasons and overlook its many other features and associated benefits.
The 2007 version of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies encompasses a large expanse on the features and capabilities map of web-based, integrated applications. Whether your organization uses Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), there are many, many available features and capabilities. How many of those capabilities are unused by your organization merely because they are unknown or misunderstood?
As a common example of a misunderstanding leading to under-utilization consider this. Many believe that workflow requires MOSS and that there are only four built-in workflows in MOSS. Both are incorrect however. WSS, for example, has a workflow known as the Three State workflow. It’s available as a SharePoint Feature. Activation, by default, is off for this feature in MOSS and on in WSS installations. Built-in MOSS workflows total 7.
There are many other examples of SharePoint features that are misunderstood or unknown and therefore remain unused. MOSS, for example, has six major business functions, often called "feature sets" or "workloads", for which it provides numerous built-in capabilities. You are probably familiar with the graphic shown here. It is often used to illustrate the six major pillars or functional areas that MOSS provides.
Many organizations elect to implement only one or two SharePoint workloads initially. This makes perfect sense. Projects need to have realistic scope and attainable goals. An initial SharePoint implementation encompassing all six business functions throughout an enterprise is very risky. Once initial implementation is finished however the other workloads are perfect candidates for new projects.
Although I’m sure there are organizations using all six feature sets today, I don’t personally know of any — and by the way, if the SharePoint consultancy you use isn’t actively using all six, you might consider asking them why they aren’t; it’s difficult to help your clients maximize the benefits of SharePoint’s features if, as a consultancy, you’re not using them all yourself —as I was saying, I don’t personally know of any organization using all six features sets today – except my company, PointBridge.
The other workloads, the ones not implemented by an organization, are often considered extras. As one Applications Director has said to me, "We bought a document management system and got records management, portal and web content systems for free." Since they are "extras", the other feature sets are often overlooked. The organization, like the owner of the car, returns to "operational" mode and never quite cycles back to implement or even investigate how they could benefit the organization.
So how can you avoid this situation in your organization? What can you do to maximize your organization’s use of SharePoint, to realize as much of the value proposition that SharePoint offers and benefits that you included in your ROI calculation?
You can start with a map like that shown in Table 1. This map illustrates where the main SharePoint feature sets are in use throughout an organization. The color coding provides an immediate indication of where there are opportunities to take advantage of under-used feature sets. The granularity of this map is coarse but at this point your analysis should be as well.
Your objective is to identify and then remove the "wasted whitespace". This does not mean removing all of the whitespace; not all groups in all organizations have a genuine business need for every one of the six MOSS feature sets. It’s likely, however, that the organization who’s "SharePoint Usage Map" or SUM is shown in Table 1 can benefit from increased MOSS feature set usage.
You can obtain the data necessary for constructing the map in a number of ways. SharePoint itself provides a good starting point with the Usage Analysis (UA) tools available. This has to be configured, but doing so is very straight-forward and the data provided is much more valuable than it was in the 2003 product. The results can be exported to Excel making your work pretty easy. If you don’t have UA configured, wait until about a month has passed once you do configure it before using the data to construct your map; a month’s worth of data should be considered a minimum. SharePoint UA reports aren’t the only sources of data however. Discussions or even formal interviews with site administrators, reading through the Site Administrator’s Site (if you don’t know what this is take a quick look) and specialized utilities are other sources of data for your map.
Once you have the data you can use Excel 2007’s Color Scale Formatting Rules to fill in the matrix and generate your organization’s SUM.
Table 1
If you have already begun to look for opportunities to leverage all six major feature sets of MOSS the SUM for your organization might look more like Table 2. This map indicates usage across many departments in the organization although the degree of usage tends toward the lower end of the spectrum. This type of map would be evidenced by one or two basic workflows being used within each of the departments making use of the Business Process (BP) workload for example. There would be limited use of custom workflows and more importantly little use of workflows whose activities and steps crossed departmental boundaries. While the SUM indicates that the MOSS workloads are being used in more than half of the possible combinations, there very likely is not much integrated usage; usage of the same workflow, for example, for processes that flow across departments.
Table 2
The efforts necessary to obtain the data that would yield a SUM that accurately represents more than minimal usage of the MOSS features sets like that shown in Table 2, for example, will require more than simply studying MOSS UA reports. Specialized utilities and other techniques will be required. Look for a future blog in which you can read about a few of the utilities that the Portals and Content Management team at PointBridge has developed for these and other purposes.
A more integrated use of the six workloads throughout an organization would yield a SUM that looks similar to Table 3. It is also possible for very advanced usage within departments – not integrated or inter-departmental usage – to yield a SUM like Table 3.
Table 3
Over the next weeks and months I will be publishing additional blog entries that further discuss obtaining data, performing analyses, and developing approaches to "Getting the White Out" in your organization.
