Half of businesses using Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration tool are frustrated with the solution, according to research carried out by Vanson Bourne.
The research shows that 87 per cent of businesses overall, and 92 per cent of enterprises with 3,000 or more employees, have deployed Microsoft's SharePoint solution.
However, 22 per cent of respondents are frustrated with the solution's poor user interface, while 51 per cent overall, and 64 per cent in the financial sector, complain that the software requires a high level of customisation.
"The bottom line is that collaboration technologies are being deployed to give users productivity gains," said John Safa, vice president of engineering at document collaboration software provider and Microsoft partner Workshare, which commissioned the research.
"So, if they aren't easy to use and users aren't adopting the systems, that investment is wasted. These solutions are meant to help employees get their jobs done more quickly."
The research surveyed 100 UK CIOs, IT directors and senior IT professionals at enterprises with more than 1,000 employees.
Likely the biggest problem with SharePoint is that it is many things and like most, it is an 80% solution. The problem is that there are far too many people calling themselves "experts" and "architects" that know a small part of the product, thus missing the key elements in success. IT is also usually a problem - they treat it like any other application so they don't know how to drive adoption, proper usage, etc.
I've done hundreds of implementations across industries and haven't had a problem yet!
Want to get the most out of it? Get the right expertise to help you set it up.
Posted by: David Sterling 18 Apr 2011
Getting people to adopt new technology is never easy, and as the article correctly points out, getting people to use SharePoint is especially hard. Beyond all the obvious ways to ensure adoption (training, compelling reasons for use, pilot programs, etc.), the big way to drive adoption is to find ways to get people to adopt it without making them change their daily work habits. harmon.ie (www.harmon.ie) is one such way - for example, when users send documents as email attachments, harmon.ie uploads the document to SharePoint and sends a link instead. No need to change work habits.
Posted by: David Lavenda 17 Apr 2011
I work in a large company so we are stuck with the SharePoint 2003 version (We are also still using IE6 and XP!) - too expensive to change due to our process costs. Trying to find out who owns a site to gain access is the biggest challenge. Design wise - looks like it's been designed by a 12 year old and never been tested by the users. Later versions may improve on this but a lot of corporate users tend to get stuck with old junk costing a fortune to use in time wasted.
Posted by: Will 15 Apr 2011
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