SharePoint has been a run away success in many organizations and judging by the number of award winning Intranet’s that have been built on the SharePoint platform, a great number of organizations are experiencing real results. Having been involved in a number of Intranet projects on SharePoint, particularly SharePoint 2010, this is not always the case.
There have been many articles written about why Intranets fail in general (such as this great piece from the Step Two guys) but what I want to cover in this article are some of the common issues that are specific to implementing SharePoint as your Intranet platform. You might be surprised to see that most of the issues are not technical but revolve around change management, shared understanding, basic project management and business/technology alignment. However, I want to explore these areas in the SharePoint context to see if there are any insights that we can glean.
Concentrating on technology and not outcomes
The classic mistake for many organizations is to implement SharePoint without understanding why they need it, what they are going to do with it and hope it’s a panacea for organizational woes. Enter the very expensive SharePoint consultant that decides to start the discovery process by leading with technology: Read the rest
Jim Ehrenberg (SharePoint Pros, Inc.) 