SMART SharePoint – SharePoint Guide

It’s always nice to read something that is as advertised.

I received a newsletter in my inbox from my friend, Mark Miller over at endusersharepoint.com. He had a link to a good document for "A Manager’s Guide to SharePoint." He recommended it and so do I.

A Manager’s Guide to SharePoint

I have read about 100 of these types of documents, and I am typically bored to tears after the 2nd page. This was digestible and, dare I say, almost pleasant; strange but true. It’s a concise overview of many documents I have read and it nicely puts together a high-level guide of SharePoint. Anyone can read it and they would come away with a great understanding of what SharePoint is, why it’s useful, how it can be used, where it can be painful, why you’ve got to get it and why it’s taking over the world of business.

I also saw some old friends in the text like "SMART" goals being applied to adopting SharePoint. This reminded me that life is pretty simple. We tend to complicate SharePoint with lengthy documents that contain all we know and all anyone would never care to know or not have time to read. Applying SMART goals to just about anything is probably a good idea and a decent reminder that we’re all pretty much trying to do the same thing: make life and work easier and more enjoyable. I could go into pages and pages on my philosophy on life, but then I would be contradicting my current, brilliant point.

Disclaimer: there are two things that are missing from the aforementioned document.

While it talks about how nicely SharePoint integrates with Exchange, it does not mention CRM or Project Server integration. It integrates nicely with both. I can overlook that. The document would have been a page or two longer, and I say the shorter the better.

Hosted SharePoint can alleviate many pain points

While it did a great job of mentioning the pain points of SharePoint, it failed to mention that hosted SharePoint solves most of those issues. Yes, this is biased commentary, however the hosted option is great at alleviating the pain of: end-user adoption, cost of developers, cost of administrators and help desk support, internal training, the cost of hardware, the worry about security, backups, patches, upgrades, monitoring the health of your environment, datacenter needs and audits, operating system issues, etc… Plus, if you see us at one of the many conferences we sponsor, we do Samsung NetBook Giveaways sometimes, and always some pretty cool pens and these funky little screwdriver flashlight thingys.

So, enjoy the read. I recommend it. It’s not earth-shattering, but I wasn’t depressed or lost in tech-speak. It took just about 10 minutes to read and I actually feel like I’ll remember all the main points made in this guide.

Make the most good with your day. Keep it simple. Go Cards!