For business users with no prior SharePoint experience, using SharePoint for the first time has it’s advantages. You don’t carry any baggage of previous versions with you; it’s a clean slate. But there are 150 million business users out there that don’t have this luxury and are set in their ways. They have been on a previous version and sooner or later get moved to a new version; from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010 or 2013.
This is no easy task, even when your content is migrated by IT. The new look and feel can be extremely confusing plus you need to unlearn and relearn a ton of new functionality and ways in thinking and working. If your content has not yet been migrated and you can get access to a new version, start by trying to replicate a team site and content you currently have. You could ask your IT department for a test site. Most big companies have access to new versions.
One of these days I’m going to be forced to use our intranet on SharePoint 2013 because it’s hosted and will be upgraded whether I like it or not. It will go from this :
On to this :
I’m not finding it easy. There is very little content available to business users on using the new version as yet. (SharePoint 2010 new users are lucky, it is very well documented now). Google searches are not helping much. It’s going to be a couple of years before there’s enough online business and community help, but it will come. In the meantime, I’m glad I’m going on leave! 😉 Future blogs will cover the (slow) journey to a new version.
Views from Veronique 
Thanks for being a regular reader. 🙂
By documentation I mean blogs from people all over the world actively using SharePoint 2013. That’s where I get 99% of my help from. So people in my position – the one responsible for learning it and conveying that knowledge – it becomes tricky. All the content out there is still technical. I need the business content.
We had a question about that in our user group this week too. We had to cut the conversation short because it was taking over the whole show. We’ll have to have more sessions about that in future.
More social tools aren’t going to help your company one iota though if it’s not a socially savvy and actively driven culture already. Internal social tools can just be disruptive if they aren’t managed properly – driven from the top, proper education on how they work in place, consistent communication of business benefits of using them, etiquette in using social tools well documented and communicated. Are you using SP 2007 now? How well is it being adopted and managed? 2013 won’t solve the soft issues if they’re not being sorted out now.
Luckily there’s a very high concentration of SharePoint MVP’s in Canada, so you’re spoilt for choice on consultants I would imagine.
The thing too is that SP2013 is still very very new, so much of what everybody knows is just theory and tested on dummy environments. I’m waiting to see what happens in real-life over time. Because one thing for sure is – what Microsoft says any version of SharePoint can do, and what you Should do with it and the Implications of using it in real-life are two vastly different things. 🙂
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[…] For business users with no prior SharePoint experience, using SharePoint for the first time has it’s advantages. You don’t carry any baggage of previous versions with you; it’s a clean slate. But there are 150 million business users out there … Continue Read More… […]
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Thanks for your blog post. After attending SharePoint Saturday Ottawa (Canada), I was wondering if our organization could jump to SP2013 instead of 2010 in 2013 (the year). Since demos showed improvements in the social tools, I thought that most of our users would adopt SP more quickly and completely. Your revelation about limited user documentation makes me want to waver but… who reads the documentation anyway?
Regardless of which version, I hope to have guidance from a SharePoint consultant with best practices, revisiting governance and getting it right.
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