For a successful SharePoint implementation, you can’t forget the most important ingredient — getting the platform used.

If you are reading this article, it is likely because you’ve heard whining in your office or you’re tired of repeating the same message over and over to improve user adoption of your SharePoint implementation.

You may be a frustrated project manager or business champion who spent countless hours on budgeting, planning, governance, information architecture, training and timelines, only to find that the last task in your SharePoint project plan that has no due date is USER ADOPTION. And to your horror, no one is taking your words seriously and people don’t care. The bottom line is this: for you to get people to take advantage of your hard work, you have to add one more task assigned to yourself — don’t give up.

Unfortunately if thinking about "user adoption" is the last step, then you've already failed. Written by a software vendor, this article - underpinned by an assumption that the software is perfect - advises people to Break Down the Resistance, Stop the Whining and then Babysit, aka Enforce change. This approach is more than overtly paternalistic and I'm surprised they don't just recommend getting rid of the users who are blemishing the hard work of the technocrats. Part of me wonders if this attitude is just symptomatic of the Microsoft SharePoint ecosystem being geared towards software development and implementation, rather than a well rounded mix of people, process, technology and content (like we do at Headshift | Dachis Group). What do you think?

“SharePoint forms the heart of our social networking capabilities within Accenture,” says Crawford, “We use it as a content management system, a publishing platform and for internal communications.”

Corporate Demographics	Social Demographics
230,000 employees	SharePoint 2010 platform with NewsGator add in for Social
Located in 120 countries	Yammer for microblogging
$25  billion in annual revenues	115,000 employees have filled out profiles
Headquarters in Ireland	5000 profile updates a month
CEO: Pierre Nanterme	1000 blog posts a month
List of Executives	12,000 video items posted to Accenture Media Exchange
	4200+ monthly microblog updates

Accenture’s social business initiative also includes a broad based video strategy. Starting with Cisco’s Telepresence at the high-end and desktop video at the low end.

Good timing with this post from Mark Fidelman, since I've been talking about Deloitte's experience with SharePoint, Newsgator and Yammer and enterprise microblogging in general. Its not entirely clear how the complete stack described above is working together at Accenture, however they clearly see value in both tools.

Following on from my post about Deloitte's contradictory experiences of using both Yammer and Microsoft Sharepoint, it begs the question - what enterprise social business software should you be using?

In the video above, CIO's from two companies, Equinix and Flextronic, talk about this issue. The approach taken by Flextronic - who employ 200,000 employees in 30 countries - is a combination of open infrastructure and experimentation, using small pilots. This exact approach won't work for everyone, but if we boil this down to a core idea that everyone can apply, then I would recommend a design thinking led approach:

In this interview, Jive's CEO Tony Zingale provides some good inputs into this design process:

• The consumer Web 2.0 is driving demand, but don't wait or expect Facebook (and others like them) to build a solution suitable for the enterprise.
• The cloud vs self-hosted question is important to some companies (although I would add, not all).
• Its not worthwhile trying to build it yourself - but make sure what you buy is built from the ground up, to be a social system.

So what do built from the ground up social business tools look like? Here is a good overview from tibbr:

As the tibbr video shows, social business tools can integrate with existing enterprise information systems (systems of record). In your organisation, this might include existing information management platforms like Sharepoint:

We also need to support other simple 'social' business activities needed by users, for example calendars and scheduling etc:

Also, pick tools that allow us to 'nudge' users, rather than forcing change:

Consider all these points and you should find that users love the tools you provide them...

BTW If you are interested in some theory behind these examples, see my presentation, Architected for Collaboration, and my post on Designing Social Workplaces.

With its office based and field staff all over the state, McIntyre is striving to improve communications with the public and the employees of TransGrid through social media and internal communications. One of the tools he will be using to communicate directly with employees is the newly developed and region specific intranet site “The Wire”. He also participates in regular graduate and company wide forums using online tools like Yammer. Here, McIntyre updates employees directly with any TransGrid related news and listens to his staff’s feedback as they share their thoughts organisational policies and industry issues. This creates a corporate culture of inclusion, along with internal polling of high employee satisfaction and a very low turnover rate – it would seem that TransGrid is one of Australia’s best employers.

Mentioned in a general article about TransGrid, who own and operate the high voltage electricity transmission network in the Australian state of New South Wales, is a great example of how even industrial organisations like this (i.e. not an IT or consulting company) benefit from the use of enterprise social computing. In this case they use a combination of Yammer and an intranet, which I believe is based on Microsoft SharePoint.

We’ve recently profiled MITRE’s social networking site, “Handshake,” as one of the best that we’ve seen. The name “Handshake” alone conveys the intention of MITRE to create an online experience that mimics those we have in person. CEC members, you can dive deeper into the case study and learn why it works better than your average SharePoint MySite or other clunky technologies.

Interesting comment, on a post about how MITRE measures the impact of its internal social nework. I've blogged about it before, as like Broadvision's Clearvale platform it also runs on Elgg.

Unfortunately the detail for this comment is behind a membership paywall, but based on my experience of Elgg and SharePoint I would caution against assuming this means Elgg is better than SharePoint as a whole. Elgg's architecture is built around people primarily, where as SharePoint is built around information and data. The nuances are important and could well justify the original comment, but not against either platform being better than the other.

92% of enterprise organisations using collaboration software use SharePoint and for over three-quarters of organisations (78%) SharePoint is the only collaboration technology that they use. But on average only 60% (3 in 5) of SharePoint sites are active; many organisations are clearly failing to maximise their SharePoint investment.

Research commissioned by Fujitsu. This is just the IT manager's perspective. I wonder what the users think too?

Hat tip to Michael.

I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I'd look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.

I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?

It worth considering Andew McAfee's criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software - particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software's architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.

Hat tip to Martin Koser.

Originally, Recovery.gov version 1.0... was powered by Drupal, an open source content management platform offering blogs, forums, newsletters and podcasting among its features. But users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised. Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds. As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.

In response, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board charged with tracking stimulus funds made the decision to change not only the site's look but also its core focus and through the Government Services Administration (GSA) they solicited a contract to redesign the site.

...

Development time that would have otherwise been spent building a custom 60% solution was freed up by the decision to use SharePoint, and that allowed the team to address other key business problems, such as how to get data from hundreds of disparate sources. And while Microsoft has long been viewed with disdain for their near monopoly on corporate business platforms, this time, it saved taxpayers a good sum of money.

We were just talking about Tim O'Reilly's comments on the Whitehouse.gov shift to Drupal yesterday, but in this instance the flow has gone completely the other way.