If you've been following the conversation around a business solutions architect role and various tech biz hybrid roles… You may have heard about Ron Fetters and his role and efforts around really helping our business users adopt SharePoint. Let me tell you about 2 of our new initiatives designed to specifically help the business community in their SharePoint adoption and move toward engagement.
I appreciate the blogs that came up around my last post around the role.
Here are a couple of recent programs we came up with to address some of these gaps in needs and really around adoption and engagement. These are new to me. If you've heard of something similar I'd be very interested in your feedback. @joeloleson
ShareLab
Our SharePoint team and their expertise is made available on a weekly basis. Come by to the big conference room on the 2nd floor or join our web conference for remote users. ShareLab is what we call this open accessibility that happens once a week for an hour.
"I trust you are all out there making some great things happen with your new SharePoint knowledge. That is good news! I am excited to hear about your "cool" sites.
We have scheduled our second weekly SHARELAB, tomorrow 10:00-11:00 AM at the xxxx
Several of our team will be there, so feel free to stop by and ask questions, talk about design, tell of your great plans, and accomplishments!"
So you get the idea. We are supporting an hour where our expertise is made available to the general population without first going through help desk. Now of course this isn't for break fix issues, but more around the types of support issues that help desk would send you away anyway. Come with your SharePoint Designer, Infopath, and Information Architecture issues, strategy and plans. Being able to see what our customers is hugely insightful.
As you look at this, it's not asking much from our team to make ourselves available once a week for an hour, but the feedback, the interaction is really huge for our ability to scale and better understand our customers and how they use SharePoint.
ShareLove
Ron, our trusty business focused solutions guy is ready and willing to help you when you're struggling, or trying to come up with a strategy. Let's take for instance your move from file share to SharePoint, or to take an existing paper form into an Infopath form with a SharePoint workflow. He'll help you work through the strategy and map out a way to make it work. He can spend an hour or two at your desk and listen to your business needs and help you map it out, and then help you do it the first time. He isn't going to do the work for you, but if that's your need there's a team specialized in small SharePoint application development that can take your small project requirements and build it out… for a small SharePoint price billed back to your cost center.
I'm excited to be better positioned to help our customers in the ways on their terms.
Ron is a very busy guy, but the work he's doing is helping adoption, engagement, and increasing our client satisfaction in ways never possible with just ops, engineering, and development.
You like these ideas? I'm partnering up with Rob Bogue the SharePoint Shepherd. You'll soon see this link: Too Few Employees Using SharePoint? Too Many Help Desk Calls? Follow the Shepherd for a solution. He's committed to be a 1 year sponsor on my blog, he's brilliant at these types of strategies. I encourage you to reach out to him.
If you're interested in sponsorship opportunities contact Bonnie Surma for SharePointJoel.com advertising and sponsorship opportunities… at joel.oleson@gmail.com