Unfortunately, the NFL won’t give my Green Bay Packers back the win that was stolen from them by the replacement refs earlier this week, but I’m going to do my small part to balance out the karma of that. I have something to give to you, loyal readers. Yes, it’s a present– my list of five things you can do to get ready for SharePoint 2013!
(Cue applause.)
Five Ways to Get Ready for SharePoint 2013!
5. Work with a partner who has been involved in multiple TAP scenarios. The best partners have been involved in Technology Adoption Programs—we’ve had a huge number of customers participate in this—and already understand the ins and potential outs of the upgrade, and where it can help add value. I’d hesitate to do a 2013 project with any partner that hasn’t had people under the hood of this product for the last nine months or so already.
4. Develop a Social Strategy! Social is a big investment area for SharePoint 2013, and you’ll want to take advantage of it. . You now have the ability to do social tagging—following people and communities that interest you and surfacing their activity in your newsfeed—and microblogging right out of the box. I don’t think you can ever truly be “bleeding edge” in enterprise software, but Microsoft and especially its partners are doing a great job of staying on top of this trend.
3. Take a good, hard look at the backbone of your current internet site– you might want to replace it. The web content management features of SharePoint 2013 have been greatly expanded, allowing for metadata-driven navigation, dynamically-assembled search-based content, and the ability to target specific content to particular mobile platforms, making the platform far more flexible to user audiences that carry different device form factors (iPad, iPhone, Android, Surface, Windows Phone, et cetera).
2. Move beyond basic workloads. Yeah, yeah, everyone knows that you can do collaboration and content management on SharePoint. That’s about as exciting as the typical presentation from your run-of-the-mill self-appointed “SharePoint Guru”, and even more common. If you’re not looking at social, mobile, WCM, search, business intelligence and other things, you’re behind the curve. If you’re doing SharePoint 2013 for only collaboration or content management, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
1. Plan ahead! Don’t wait until general availability! Yes, SharePoint 2013 has a big old flashing neon COMING SOON sign on it, but there’s no reason to wait until it gets released to start working out what you’ll use it for. Take a good long look at your pain points and business drivers and start matching them up to SharePoint solutions. You’ll be glad you did.
