One of the big challenges my colleagues and I have faced since coming together nearly two years ago is helping people to realise what SharePoint can do and how it can do it.
As one of the first two permanent SharePoint people in the team, replacing a string of contractors that came before, a huge amount of time has been spent trying to get people realising the potential they, and SharePoint have. I will hasten to add at this point that the contract resources I worked with and inherited the SharePoint estate from were both wonderful - Iyabo and Chirag, should you read this, thank you for everything I learnt from you both
- but as with any position in any industry, permanent staff face different, ongoing, challenges.
Being my first blog, I am going to go a little off topic and provide a bit of background about myself. This is less about vanity and more about my perspective when it comes to how I approach my work, whether it is development or support. Let me start by saying, I am not even beginning to claim that I am an expert, I am purely writing from experience here.
Until 4 years ago I was working in retail, I had some ad hoc management duties but I was mostly dealing with customers face to face. My first IT role was on a Service Desk providing first-line support in the public sector. Anyone who has worked in IT in the public sector will know that this can be a highly restrictive environment due to a fully understandable need to strictly adhere to various rules and regulations. From there I moved to another Service Desk. In October 2016 I moved from first to second line as a Support Engineer focusing on SharePoint etc. After a little over 6 months I was made a 'full', third-line, Engineer. As of late 2017, that also includes having two new Support Engineers in the team.
The takeaway is that I have a lot of customer service experience and that I haven't been doing this very long so I am still learning every day. Anyway, enough about me, lets get back to the main point of this post...
Like most people, our production tenant is all over the place, has more sub sites than I am willing to hazard a guess at and, when coming in to the team was entirely based in classic view. The last point is pretty much a given, I started just as modern started rolling out.
So... here is the real question. You have an estate in serious need of remediation, new features rolling out and poor adoption, how do you keep on top of what is new, provide a better product and increase user engagement all in one go?
The answer is surprisingly simple.
Build yourself a showcase site. Not only build it, but make it the best, most feature rich site collection on the entire tenant. Once you have built it, communication is key. Keep in mind, this isn't an overnight process.
Now that we have a showcase we are also running a community call (think PnP monthly call but aimed at end-users) and we have pilot-users for early adoption. This is allowing us to really highlight what SharePoint, PowerApps, Flow etc. can do and is really driving us forward.
The most important thing here is to know what you want to achieve and to make it engaging.
The direct result of this has been a marked increase in our unique daily SharePoint users (at last check it was nearly double) compared to before we launched the Showcase.
We are using the showcase to show people what can be done in SharePoint, moving the perception away from it just being a cloud storage system as it was previously marketed. Not only that, but we are able to use it to help with training. For example, every web part available on modern pages has its own page with a config guide, best practice advice and interactive demos. We have done the same with list and library columns.
Not only are we able to train, but we can be transparent. We are using news to tell people what we are working on and to release new features. As I write this I have my first draft of some how to guides for column formatting alongside some code-samples for our end users to copy and paste, with instructions on what they should change to make it relevant to their needs. Essentially this will allow our end users to start using JSON to correctly format columns in a sensible, controllable way.
You may be asking what the benefits of this are. Sure, we have increased the number of users, but if they are looking at the showcase and not working on their own sites, what's the point? Well, this is where we have seen the greatest benefit of all.
After ESPC in Dublin last year myself and my line manager abandoned our idea of systematically trying to restructure the SharePoint estate. We would never have been able to keep up and, if we had rolled out a consistent template in a sub site structure as originally planned, we would have missed so many new features that we would just be going around in a big circle. We estimated 18 months minimum for a full restructure which, in Office 365/SharePoint Online terms is like eons.
We decided instead to build the showcase, make it good and let the users come to us asking for new stuff. The results have been incredible. We have been able to roll out our first few Hub Sites, with some of our departments now being 100% in Modern Team Sites or Communication sites, with no sub-sites left. The majority of the team's time over the past month has been spent dealing with requests from people wanting a new site "like the showcase" regardless of if they have an existing site. It also goes beyond this, and we can drive our own plans a little here. Where people are asking for functionality that we have demos of, but they only have a classic site, we are able to inform them that they will have to move to a new, modern, site to get the functionality they want. We know this isn't true but it works brilliantly.
The best thing about all of this is that working on the showcase is, genuinely, really good fun. We have the full support of the business to sit and play around with new stuff as and when it is released, allowing us to always be taking on new challenges and, most importantly, we are never sitting still anymore.
Finally there is an additional, unplanned benefit, that we have seen as a result of making an awesome showcase of what we, and SharePoint, can do. We have been able to start rolling out SPFx solutions and will shortly be implementing site designs with custom extensions and web parts included. This has come about almost entirely due to how good the showcase is. No longer are we being pushed to always look at out of the box solutions.
No longer am I being reminded that no one is able to fix anything I build if I get hit by a bus and no longer, thanks entirely to Microsoft is there the situation where, as a developer, you are on your own if you do any custom work.
All in all it is brilliant, myself and the team are happy, and this keeps us surging forwards in to an age of people utilising SharePoint and the cloud in a way that makes it a joy to support them and all of it is because we built one Site Collection.
If you only do one thing to push SharePoint adoption and modernisation, build a showcase site collection and make it the best site you have. Show people what SharePoint can do in a way that is interactive and informative so they feel like they are discovering it for themselves and not having it shoved down their throats.
We did and our daily usage has nearly doubled over the past couple of months and the customers are now coming to us to ask for their sites to look like our showcase.
In future the blog will be less text heavy and will be more development focused, but keeping a real life business perspective. I felt this post was important as I know that our business is not the only one facing similar challenges.