Streamline SharePoint Extensions for Business Users

The Struggle to Manage the Complexity of Modern IT

SharePoint has become the collaboration tool of the enterprise. It brings together groups across the “organizational boundaries,” and allows those groups to reach out to each other and discuss business issues from different sides of the company. Most organizations feel that this helps create community and brings disparate departments together to reach a common goal.

However, beyond the team-building aspects of the tool, challenges arise for the SharePoint administration team. Most often these issues result from five major areas of conflict within the business:

• Content management
• Workflow
• Administration
• Mobile
• Social

To maximize the organization’s return on its investment in SharePoint, IT administrators should use the Extend SharePoint Prioritization Tool, available in our IT Downloads. This spreadsheet helps the organization determine which functions within SharePoint provide the most benefit to the business, and which will allow IT to prioritize its time in fixing problems and creating a more streamlined usage for business users.

The tool shows the five major areas of problems along with the most likely scenarios of trouble within each. This tool is not an exhaustive list of possible problems—it’s more like a jumping off point for most SharePoint administrators. Individual enterprises will have unique concerns that may or may not fit within one of the categories.

Use the list to organize current issues and make note of issues that could occur. Add your own company challenges to the list for future reference. Decide whether functionalities may require custom solutions that can be created or purchased. Prioritize which areas should come first and which will affect user behavior.

Once SharePoint has been deployed and extensions and functionalities are working within the business groups, be sure to go over company policies and procedures with users. To help you create company-wide governance of SharePoint, download our SharePoint Governance Template, also in our IT Downloads.