Winning SharePoint Commitment in the Enterprise
Microsoft SharePoint promises today’s organizations a vision of universal access to corporate information. It’s designed to be the single place where users can get everything they need to work better and smarter, and collaborate with colleagues no matter where they are. Despite its versatility, more than half of organizations that have implemented SharePoint report that it doesn’t fully meet their functional expectations.
Get More Out of SharePoint by Putting More In
The biggest obstacle to SharePoint success is patchy end-user adoption. The whole point of SharePoint is to become the de facto “go to” source for all relevant enterprise information. But the reality for the vast majority of organizations is that not all relevant data is stored inside SharePoint.
In fact, almost three-fourths of SharePoint’s 125 million users don’t have access to external data repositories within SharePoint—such as email, CRM, document management systems or other critical information held inside legacy applications. The reality, of course, is that user adoption will remain lackluster if users are continually forced to leave SharePoint to find and access the files they need.
Ultimately, SharePoint is just a shell (albeit a very powerful shell). Getting what you need from it will inevitably involve significant development, which is why organizations often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing and maintaining SharePoint. But users and IT departments crave simplicity. With all the issues around custom coding and the need to ensure greater user adoption, it’s not surprising that more companies than ever are looking for a better way forward.
Many organizations are beginning to discover that they can achieve their goal of universal information access without sinking time and money into custom coding through the simple addition of enterprise indexing. And they’re finding that the result delivers an experience that employees love.
Enterprise indexing solutions (such as ViaWorks™ by VirtualWorks) insert a lightweight virtual layer between SharePoint and your data silos. By separating access to data from its physical location, you can allow people to get what they need from a single, searchable interface without worrying about where that information currently lives. It means you can now give users access to everything they need all from within SharePoint. This includes both native SharePoint documents as well as external data from many other sources. Better still, you don’t have to move everything into SharePoint to do it.
The Five Keys to Unlocking SharePoint’s Full Value
1. Incorporate external file stores. Forcing people to hunt for information across disparate application silos will simply compel them to abandon the main goal of SharePoint as a new and better way to interact and work together. Enterprise indexing gives you the ability to integrate external data sources, both structured and unstructured, within SharePoint. This can include all your DMS, CRM, ERP, email, scanned files and cloud apps. So your users can finally get universal access to the information they need from a single location.
2. SharePoint consolidation. Many of today’s SharePoint installations are very large and growing fast. Because they are easy to set up, SharePoint instances tend to proliferate, magnifying the problem of document sprawl within SharePoint and making files even harder to find. Enterprise indexing federates multiple SharePoint instances together without converting anything, whether you’re bringing multiple sites together or upgrading to a new version. All your users will know is that they get access to all the information that may have previously spread across multiple sites from a single point without logging in and out of multiple sites.
3. Make everything findable. Research shows that nearly a third of users are ?reluctant to commit their files to SharePoint. Why? Because they fear they’ll never be able to find their critical information again. Users need to be able to look inside all content stored in SharePoint and beyond, not just see the file names. Enterprise indexing goes beyond capturing just metadata and makes content full text searchable, including text buried deep inside scanned documents and image files (PDF, TIFF, JPEG, DWG, CAD).
4. Bring it all together. To make your users truly love SharePoint (rather than simply tolerate it, or even ignore it), you need to make sure all your company information—including your document management, CRM, scanned files, Office docs, emails and attachments and legacy apps—is available from the same user interface. More explicitly, if you want user adoption rates to soar, you need to make all this information available from within SharePoint. People don’t want to change workflows. They don’t want to jump from one interface to another. And they don’t want to waste time trying to find stuff across silos.
5. Leave your data where it is. With enterprise indexing, you can migrate your content without being forced to physically migrate your content, simply by indexing everything where it already is and making it available from within SharePoint. Enterprise indexing lets your most active and legacy data stores stay exactly where they are. It automatically federates SharePoint sites and all other data stores without converting a single byte.
Organizations that succeed in getting their users to embrace SharePoint can transform their business. The investments you made in SharePoint were smart. Now, it’s time to multiply your ROI. The simple addition of enterprise indexing can turn the promise of SharePoint as a universal information access platform into reality.
Please contact us at (877) 356-3463 or visit us at www.virtualworks.com.