When a customer asks me to come and demonstrate SharePoints collaboration features, here is the first thing I do.
Create a site using the blank site template.
That's right. No shared documents, nothing on the home page
The problem with starting with the default team site collaboration template is that people immediately start thinking about documents and publishing of announcements. The number of times I have seen a SharePoint collaboration site with 20 document libraries is depressing.
Once I have people's attention by not showing them anything, I start asking some questions.
- What do you do
- Why do you do it
- What information do you have
- What do you collect
- What decisions do you have to make
- What is the output
- 'Who' for each of the above
Then I look for a key piece of metadata. It may be the names of their processes or the names of the stages in a process.
I then create a list containing these values. Now I can look at the lists/ libraries required to store and track information (documents, tasks, contacts, blog's and wiki etc). I add the metadata list to each of the stores as a lookup column. Next I add some data to each of the stores showing how I can classify or tag the information. People immediately see the value of this but then I blow them away with the next step.
I describe the concept of a workbench, where all of the information I require is in one place. I create a web part page and first add the metadata list so that everyone can see the important terms. Then I start adding web parts for all the other stores and connect them to the metadata list so that when you click on an item (step in the process) all the other web parts filter the results so you are left with a view of everything that you should be interested in (whether you know it or not). This is when the light bulb goes on.
I then add the search results web part to this page to pull in other potentially related organizational information from other sources. Now this is an information dashboard!
This is in opposition to the normal process of going into each repository in isolation, trying to find the important stuff and then copy and pasting it into another location.
Before the presentation I will usually go to live.com and search for some data relevant to the customers industry that I can export into excel. Then I discuss the challenges of trying to get people to maintain lists of information and how multiple copies if the truth ends up all over the place. Next I export this spreadsheet to a SharePoint list and demonstrate item level versioning, views, alerts, exporting and reporting this data in excel or access.
That's when the light really turns on and people realise that SharePoint is also a database (yes we know SharePoint uses a database, but users see that SharePoint can be their application front end and database back end) which they lost when IT banned Access from the desktop and left the users with no other choice but Excel.
Now the customer doesn't have to come up with a justification for a collaboration platform, they have a solution to facilitate and most likely improve business process which has a tangible benefit. Wikis and blogs start getting pushed down in importance as people realise there is still a lot of room for improvement in the way things are done.
This is why I hate seeing people just put in a wiki or blog solution. We don't need more islands of information and don't tell me that search is the solution. It is a useful tool but it doesn't make up for short sightedness!