Trick or Treat? SharePoint – The Frightening Truth

For some companies, implementing SharePoint can be a real life horror story, with only 14% of SharePoint implementations meeting customer expectations. But why is this? SharePoint is built by Microsoft so surely it’s the best choice when looking for a new intranet right? Well not always.

So is SharePoint really an intranet nightmare? Not all of the time. We are not trying to hide the fact that SharePoint, for many large companies, is a great intranet software solution that meets the needs of huge businesses across the globe and if you have vast budgets, time and resources, you too can achieve such success.

We want to highlight the problems companies might face when held back by restricted budgets and time.

Haydn Smith, Senior Intranet Consultant and Matt McCourty, Enterprise Sales Director have reviewed many surveys and statistics from SharePoint users themselves to better understand the time and effort a single project can take. In their hour long spooky webinar, they discuss their findings with a tongue-in-cheek approach, explaining how SharePoint can take the form of three traditional terrifying characters.

SharePoint: The monster?

SharePoint can quickly evolve into a huge, complex project with a monster mash up of different parts to deliver a complete intranet software solution.

Many companies chose to add plug-ins such as:

• Newsgator
• Nintex
• Mediarich
• Quest software
• And of course… Yammer

This ultimately leads to having multiple:

• Suppliers
• Procurement processes
• Contracts
• Update/upgrade paths
• Support

As mentioned previously, this is not seen as a problem for large companies who have the time and resource to manage each individual add on, but as a company where your intranet team is a small portion of your employee count, this could lead to conflict and time-wasting within the business.

SharePoint: The un-dead?

You are most likely aware that SharePoint, like all intranet software solutions, release regular upgrades for their users, leaving many intranet teams excited for new features and updates they can soon have access to.

Surveys and statistics highlighted by Haydn and Matt, show that completely migrating to a new version can take at least 18 months leaving those cool new features just out of reach for the time being.

From the beginning of your project to getting stuck in and using your brand new intranet can also take a long time – a minimum of a year in some cases, where users have shown that by the time they introduced SharePoint 2010, SharePoint 2013 had already been launched.

SharePoint: The blood sucker?

The above two terrifying characters have shown how SharePoint can drain time and resource from your company, but what about your budget?

Haydn & Matt will show a number of statistics on costs from current SharePoint users including:

5.7% of the average SP 2010 project goes on SharePoint itself.

So where does the rest go?

SharePoint is not a monster, the un-dead or a bloodsucker but at times the whole project can feel this way, leaving intranet managers having to explain to their board why their project is overdue, over budget and why staff just aren’t enjoying it.

Watch this free webinar and see how you can enjoy a faster, more reliable project when adopting Interact.