Nearly Great SharePoint

Well, yet again the England football team failed to deliver with a disappointing draw in Poland. They might be ranked 5th in the world but they really still aren't great. A bit like some SharePoint projects. They promise so much but can be a total washout.

The Microsoft SharePoint bandwagon continues to smash through all sizes of UK companies and shows no sign of slowing down. Some organisations might call it their Intranet or given it a trendy name like ‘The Hub’, but most are already using one of the many versions of SharePoint.

Businesses often select key people in the organisation to form a ‘SharePoint Project Team’ and very soon these people become fans of SharePoint. They pass their enthusiasm on to directors and managers convincing them that SharePoint will give them great savings and revolutionise the way employees work. Man-hours will be reduced, Rain Forests will be saved and morale will rise.

SharePoint goes live the SharePoint Project Team and IT Department congratulate themselves, the future looks rosy and there is even a triumphant double page spread in the company magazine. Then six months later somebody notices that nothing has really changed. The problem is the everyday employees in the various departments haven’t really started doing anything differently. Paper forms are still being sent around the office, out of date telephone lists are still pinned on noticeboards, room bookings are still made by ringing lots of peoples, Training Records for one employee are still being stored in multiple locations and ‘Near Misses’ are still just noted by a large sigh of relief from the Safety Manager. So why hasn’t SharePoint streamlined all these standard internal systems?

The answer is probably that the employees just haven’t got the time to replace the way they have always worked with automated systems on SharePoint because they are too busy filling out paper forms and taking phone calls.

What companies really need is somebody to have done all the donkey work for them. Must companies have the same functions (Safety, IT, HR, Finance, Purchasing, Training, Reception, Projects etc.) and all have to do many of the same routine jobs. Jobs like report IT problems, record employee details, submit Expense claims and control the access of visitors.

The secret is that somebody has done the donkey work for them. The UK SharePoint specialists Office Talk have been selling a bundle of 10 SharePoint Templates since 2009. It is available for all versions of SharePoint since 2007 (including the free ones!) Office Talk’s pack of 10 SharePoint Department Templates which available ready to use for just £199.95 per company. It really is that missing ingredient to make SharePoint great and to help make the time savings that that the SharePoint Project Team promised.

[To find out more about the Office Talk 2010 SharePoint Template Bundle visit http://www.office-talk.com/index.php?id=151]