The Human Side of Collaboration

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The best-laid plans of knowledge management often beach themselves on the shoals of human behavior. In general, it is safe to assume that users fear change and will resist it whenever possible. I have seen many technically excellent knowledge management and collaboration systems designed, built, and deployed, only to sit idle while users continued with more familiar behaviors to get their jobs done.

You can make your portal much more successful by bringing users into the process early and often. Take serious heed of the pain felt by users, and understand their priorities. For instance, if traveling to remote locations is wearing people down, you may want to focus on real-time collaboration tools. One of the best technology solutions in this area is the ability to conduct software demos and training remotely through a combination of voice and application sharing. Video can be a nice touch, but they add surprisingly little to the content of many meetings.

If users are most frustrated with their inability to find the right versions of documents or collaborate on documents, you may want to put team web sites with document management at the top of your list. What incentive would encourage users to move documents from their laptop hard drives to a shared resource? Would simple document management features such as check-in and check-out paralyze any users?

Users adopt technology at different rates. Just as some people prefer online chat to telephone calls and others despise email, so it is with collaboration. Your user community spans a spectrum from early adopters to true Luddites who fight every innovation. Find ways to embrace your user community and bring people together who would otherwise not share with one another.

Technical barriers do not need to be high to effectively discourage users. Such issues as firewalls and VPNs or even browser security settings may be enough to stymie your users. Make sure that your test plan accounts for variations of infrastructure that could introduce these problems. What happens when a user is on the road? Can he access the portal from a public Internet terminal? Can he get to information he needs from a customer's machine? Does the portal require any software to be downloaded and installed on the desktop?

Whatever your priorities may be, follow the old adage of underpromising and overdelivering. Be conservative about your schedule estimates for rolling out new features and introduce nothing without the training that must go along with it. You would be far better off to have 100% adoption of a system that only has 40% of its full planned functionality than to have 40% adoption of a system with all of its functionality implemented.

The largest part of the collaboration functionality in the Microsoft portal platform is provided by SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, and Office. These capabilities are the core of an enterprise portal. You can supplement them with additional advanced features, but you are likely to roll out this collaboration core first, as explained in the following section.

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Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers
ISBN: 0321159632
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 164

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