It’s no secret that SharePoint provides a broad set of capabilities. There are a tremendous number of native features and functions that "arrive" with "presets". That’s just for starters. Taking time to configure unused settings or reconfigure the presets will surface even more capabilities. All you have to do is set values for the many properties directly available through a web browser. What’s unfortunate, in my opinion, is that many of these features are overlooked, not configured or set once and forgotten. I say unfortunate because that ultimately means that SharePoint is not used as fully as it can be, that organizations are not receiving as much value from their SharePoint investment as they could be.
I call these overlooked, not configured or forgotten features the inside corners of SharePoint. They are like the corners of a room or a bookcase. They are dimly lit; they don’t receive much direct, bright light. Where there’s little light there’s little use. Unlike the corners of a room however, you can turn these corners inside-out. You can make them outside corners. You can transform them from dark places of little activity to bright, vibrant, active places like the corners of crossroads.
Make your SharePoint inside corners crossroads corners: focus on a renewed effort to improve your SharePoint implementation. Take a look in these corners:
Revisit your list (and library) views. Often views are created that are appropriate for the initial SharePoint implementation. Just as often additional views are never created. Are your lists getting long? Is the native default view (All Items) really the most useful one? Do your users really need to see all the items or, in general, are those from this fiscal year, this quarter or this month what they are most interested in seeing? Are you aware that filtered views often provide improved performance? Use a calculated column to display a temporally filtered view.
Are you using the Document Center? Why not? It’s a great centralized place for public documents. Are your SharePoint users taking advantage of the Document Workspace feature? Are you?
When’s the last time you or your SharePoint Search expert tuned Search by adding or deleting keywords, modifying the noise-word file(s) or added items to the thesaurus file(s)? (I just avoided the plural of thesaurus.)
How’s the corporate slide library these days? You do have one for all your PowerPoint slides correct? If not, you can probably save your marketing and sales folks untold hours of time wading through complete PowerPoint decks looking for that one slide they want − if you establish one. More importantly you can make sure all the slides in use are current. You’ll need some procedure and policy directives to assist but the slide library will make those P&Ps very simple.
Displaying SharePoint libraries as folders in Outlook allows you to see SharePoint documents from the place you probably spend a good deal of time: Outlook. Imagine combining this and the previous item. A PowerPoint slide library in an Outlook folder?! Try it!
Do you and your SharePoint users make use of the datasheet and Windows Explorer views for document or other libraries (like the slide library). I seem to be stuck on slide libraries. I wonder why.
Have you set information management policies on your content types?
This ought to give you a good start and some ideas about how you can change it up a bit. I guarantee that if you go looking for your SharePoint inside corners, you’ll find some and that you can reinvigorate your SharePoint users by turning those corners inside-out.
