I wanted to let this go when I heard it, but I can’t. Under-estimate the power and size of SharePoint, and by association, Office 365, at your peril. It is a massive, enterprise-ready platform that is nearly 2 decades old, adopted by hundreds of millions of people globally. What does this mean? It means that it takes time to plan, rollout, adopt and support. Any medium sized business up needs to plan for a minimum 3 to 5 year plan to get optimal success from this platform.  It was hectic enough with SharePoint on-premise, enter SharePoint Online and the problem has tripled because it changes weekly.  SharePoint is a full-time job!

What you don’t want to do, is invest millions into the configuration of your SharePoint intranet, and then spend no time or money on the adoption / training of it – and worse, pulling the plug on the adoption plan a quarter of the way into it. Your platform is going to fail. Every time. This conversation has been going on for over a decade and it’s still an issue.

You simply cannot expect staff members who have less than a year experience in SharePoint, to go for a few sessions of training and be ready to provide support for the entire company – especially when it is not their full time jobs! It is an insurmountable task that is setting them up for failure and placing the entire platform at risk. I’ve been at SharePoint full-time for 12 years, and I still learn something every single day about this platform that I did not know. How are newbies supposed to cope on their own, along with their day jobs?

You have got to plan a long-term adoption strategy and stick it out or your intranet investment is going to waste. Don’t believe me? Ignore this advice and call me in a couple of years to tell me how it ended. Do it properly, or don’t do it at all, because it’s going to be a very expensive mistake to make if you don’t.