SharePoint is an awesome tool for project management, workflow, document storage, and fostering a social work environment. Daily, it can be used for training, file sharing, and so much more. Unfortunately, an unbalanced SharePoint can be daunting for an employee and can cause confusion and disinterest in the platform. This is why making the experience as engaging as possible is essential.
Table of Contents
Get More Out of Your Homepage
SharePoint development should start with making the homepage as friendly and usable as possible. Make sure that links to communities, tasks, resources, updates, training, and so forth are right there on the homepage. This will help eliminate much of the need for employees to exhaustively search for what they need and will increase efficiency. A SharePoint development company will greatly help in implementing all of these features.
Train Employees on Personal Pages
Make sure your employees know how to use SharePoint for their personal pages so they can design them around the tools they will most often use. This will increase productivity, as employees will have personalized usable portals for navigation.
Utilize SharePoint’s “Social Media” Features
You can create corporate culture in SharePoint by creating online communities, running contests, sharing events, and hosting blogs and discussions. These are basically social media features that will better familiarize employees with SharePoint whether they use it for daily activities or not. Better familiarization can mean easier expansion and better integration of the platform into routine operations. SharePoint can even be integrated with Microsoft’s social network, Yammer, which will make the whole experience feel more social.
Keep It Fresh
The SharePoint experience can become stale to the end user if it is not updated with news, training information, meeting notices, and workflows. People will simply stop engaging with the platform if there aren’t valid reasons to visit. Make sure the homepage is regularly updated and that information is current and relevant.
Make It Mobile
Can your employees engage with SharePoint on their mobile devices? Today, many workers want to be able to access information while they’re away from their desks. SharePoint development needs to take into account the demand for mobile friendly content, so make sure while you’re making SharePoint engaging, you’re also keeping it mobile.
Ensure Users Can Search for What They Need
SharePoint allows searching of information through metadata, but it is crucial metadata are specific. Vague metadata will make it difficult to search for content, so be sure to invest time in writing specific metadata for your documents.
Keep Improving
As with any software, SharePoint receives updates, and there are always new features to learn. Keep learning, and keep rolling out training whenever there are new updates. If the goal is to foster a corporate community friendly towards SharePoint, then part of this goal should be to keep employees trained and informed and to keep them using the platform on a regular basis.
Leverage for Productivity
Sharing information in the workplace via the intranet is becoming more and more important everyday. Tools such as SharePoint can be daunting at first, but they can also be leveraged for efficiency and productivity. SharePoint development may take time, but creating an engaging experience will be worth the effort.