Perhaps you’ve heard of Microsoft SharePoint but aren’t using it and wonder, “What’s so great about SharePoint?” or “Should our company use SharePoint?” and “If we use it, what kind of benefit will we realize?”

Many people far more experienced than I have discussed, blogged about, and expounded upon SharePoint at length since its debut about 15 years ago.  You can run a Google search on SharePoint, and the number of hits returned will be near 59+ million or so.  I can’t tell you anything about it that someone else hasn’t already posted online somewhere.  What I can tell you is how Hallam-ICS started using it and what we’ve learned in the process.  Maybe our experiences to date can help you decide if you want to use SharePoint for yourselves.

Getting Started

We first heard of SharePoint as a tool to help us with our business needs back around September of 2009.  We had used SharePoint sites provided by others before, but had limited access.  Therefore, we had only used those SharePoint sites for the purpose provided, which was primarily the transfer of files.

Then a local consulting firm asked if they could give us a demo of SharePoint.  We could tell from the demo that SharePoint had vast potential to be useful in a variety of ways, so we decided to see what we could do with it.  At that time, we maintained on premise servers for all our system infrastructure needs.  We didn’t see any immediate value to changing that.  Dangerously armed with the minimal information (relative to what exists) provided by the consultants, we did some research into what this product was, what it could do, and the costs associated with its acquisition, provisioning, and use.

We decided that we’d get a system up and running with the help of the consultants and test it.  Since we weren’t sure just how extensively we might use SharePoint, we elected to acquire the free version, SharePoint Foundation 2003, to get our feet wet.

Getting Up to Speed

If your company is anything like ours, your employees don’t have an excess of free time.  For our first implementation, we learned by doing but, while I find that style of learning suits me, I don’t actually recommend it if you have the resources to spend more time learning beforehand.  Hands-on learning is a good format for retention, but the SharePoint platform is so large and flexible that a bit more time spent in research and planning would have gone a very long way.

Therefore, if your company is going to dive into SharePoint, you should be aware that it might take more time than you think for a support employee to get up to speed if she is not already familiar with the platform.  SharePoint training classes exist, but there is such a wealth of data to understand that the attendee will drown in it, and unless that person can dedicate most of her time to working with SharePoint after that, she will not be able to retain all that information.

If you cannot allow an existing employee to dedicate the time to becoming your SharePoint expert, you can hire consultants to set up your SharePoint site(s), which you can subsequently manage.  You can use the consultants for hosting, building, and management; or hire someone as a dedicated SharePoint administrator.  You can mix and match those options or come up with some others.  The size of your company and SharePoint requirements will dictate the choices you make.

Questions to Consider