There are many companies all over the world who are busy migrating from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.  What will you do differently this time? There is a brilliant banner in one of our big banking groups, that says in one sentence what I’ve trying to communicate to many IT departments about their SharePoint deployments for a year now.

How will your SharePoint business run tomorrow?  How is it running today?  Do you have an 80% + adoption rate with people using best practices and all the functionality – or is it just as another dumping ground? Do you have good governance in place, a support team, efficient training, you’re communicating regularly to your user base? No?

Over and over again we hear how Exco won’t put anymore money into SharePoint because the 2007 version was a failure. There was little or no ROI shown so they don’t see the need to invest in 2010.  “There was no adoption, people aren’t using it, so why must we throw more money at it”.

This is such a catch-22 situation on so many levels.

The reason why SharePoint was bought in the first place is seldom for the right ones. There is seldom an actual business need addressed.  At times licenses are free on the Enterprise Agreement so there’s even less strategy involved.  There are very seldom the right skills internally to manage a platform like SharePoint.  IT Departments everywhere continue to treat SharePoint like any other software when it is absolutely not!  Business is seldom engaged and so restricted on what they can do they don’t touch it. As a result, everything falls down.

Then a new version comes out, the salesmen do their jobs and in a flash the answer to all your problems is SharePoint 2010.  And so an upgrade is scheduled.

But refer back to the poster now.  What are you going to do differently with SharePoint 2010?  If you follow the same path you did in SharePoint 2007 without any changes to your strategy – what makes you think 2010 will succeed? It won’t.  It will just get worse, SharePoint is more powerful than ever before.

You need to do things differently – and invariably, those things cost money.  But neglect to budget and plan for changes and you will be right back where you started 2 years from now, just in time for the next version to come out.

And then it’s back to square one.

It is a bitter pill to swallow for the people with the cheque books, I get that, really; and it’s even harder for the people who have to write that motivation for the extra investment. There are people out there that really get it, you have one of them in your business right now.  That person coming to you trying so hard to convince you they can make it work is exactly the type of person you need to do just that.

The extra investment has to be weighed up against writing off the platform and the investment made to date.  It will not succeed without the right backing.

SharePoint has unbelievable capabilities that can offer business professionals endless ways to streamline their paperwork, communicate and share better.  But it takes a change in culture, someone actively driving it every single day to succeed, ongoing education and support of all the roleplayers – and unfortunately that takes money.

The alternative is fail again.  So what changes do you need to make?  If you don’t know, call in the troops and get help.  There is plenty available.