One of my frolleagues alerted me to this great post:

Getting users to understand and adopt social software can be hard in general, but SharePoint has so many options and options within options that users are literally scared of using it. I saw the glazed-over stare of users time and time again when they attempted to use SharePoint. Generally, users would have a specific idea in mind and would attempt to click around hoping the answer would appear. This resulted in one of two things: they would give up or the very persistent would ask IT to walk them through it.

SharePoint: Not the Social Answer — Jim Goings.

Jim goes on to detail his efforts to get folks to use SharePoint, including the strategic use of pizza. And then, the big payoff:

You know what we had in the end? A freakin’ glorified file server.

As I’ve said before, usability is the most critical success factor in any application deployment. Any return on investment (ROI) you think you might gain vanishes if nobody uses it.

Feature/function comparison spreadsheets need to go the way of the dinosaur. IT needs to come up with a better way to justify their spending (and as soon as I figure out what that would be, I’ll blog it.

I’ve seen or heard the following about using and managing SharePoint sites. Please let me know if anything should be corrected:

It takes nine clicks and one moment of typing to add someone to a SharePoint site.

1. Click People and Groups
2. Click New
3. Click Add Users
4. Click Address Book icon
5. Type name in Find textbox
6. Click Search icon
7. Click name in resultset
8. Click Add button
9. Click OK button
10. Click another OK button

I’m tired just reading that. To be fair, users experience something similar in some of the default templates in Lotus Quickr, but I know that we’re working on reducing the number of clicks.

In Lotus Connections Activities (which, of course, does not do everything a SharePoint teamsite does), it takes three clicks and some typing:

1. Click Add Members
2. Type a name (as you type, matches from the LDAP appear dynamically)
3. Click name in resultset
4. Click OK

Restoring a teamsite that has gone down requires the restoration of the entire SharePoint instance’s database first.

All the data and files are stored in the SQL Server database as a BLOB. Even a simple document. If a teamsite goes down for any reason, you must first restore the SQL Server database for the entire SharePoint instance, then extract the content for the teamsite you want to restore, then create a new teamsite, and then re-deploy that site with the extracted content.

I’ve only personally experienced adding a user, but not restoring a site, so corrections are welcome, if necessary.

When an organization doles out bonuses, raises, awards and promotions based on individual contributions, what’s the carrot for social participation?

I, for example, am mainly measured by my individual efforts: how many customers I work with who go on to buy my software; what leadership roles I fulfill inside and outside the organization; what assets I create for others to reuse. This is all right and good, for how else can an individual be measured? My manager can’t promote or give a raise to an entire community, after all. I contribute socially anyway, because it’s just part of my DNA. But that argument doesn’t fly for the majority. “Do the right thing” is usually somewhat eclipsed by “What’s in it for me?” – otherwise, I doubt humanity would have survived this far.

What’s missing is a measurement of how well I use my network. (I’m barred from using ‘leverage’ ever again, per one of my work pals – he mentally pukes every time that and a few other words appear. Like ‘harness’ and ‘foster’. Blech.)

If we can measure this, it will improve.

But, how do we measure a person’s prowess at making their individual contributions better because they knew who knew what, and had a relationship with them such that they could tap their expertise (there’s another blech phrase), whether directly or through their social contributions, at a moment’s notice?

To network, one must be social, must participate in online communities as well as offline, must spend time getting to know others and letting others know them.

Aha. Being social requires a stiff price: spending our most precious commodity, Time.

So really, we are asking people to spend precious time to do something for which they are not measured.

Fix this, and you will have removed a major obstacle to the inside-the-firewall business adoption of social networking and productivity behavior.

I just finished presenting to the eBusiness team at a large consumer goods manufacturer. It was mostly communications and marketing folks, sprinkled with a few of their business partners (nice change from the usual IT-only suspects I present to!) Their IT group also talked to them about their upgrade timeline throughout 2008. Quickr 8.1, Sametime 8, and Notes 8.0.1, plus Connections 1.0.2/2.0. Busy busy busy!

The best part? I actually got to listen to them! I typically never get a chance to collaborate with my customers, so I felt extra special that they asked me to stick around and help them brainstorm about how to solve some problems that the eBusiness division had identified. What’s more, we needed to solve them within the current business constraints, as well as the current and near-future IT environment.

It was like I was back in consulting services for a few hours!

Here are a few:

Problem #1: “I get invited to too many meetings where I cannot provide value.”

They described how many in their eBusiness group get invited to internal meetings when they shouldn’t be. They wished the people asking them to attend could first figure out IF they should invite someone from eBusiness, and if so, WHO in particular would provide the most value during the meeting.

Idea for #1: Add a rich-text field to their Lotus Connections Profile, “Invite me to collaborate when:“ (obviously, this could be done with other profiling solutions as well). Each person could then describe situations in which they would provide the most value. Of course, for people who will never fill out a profile, seekers would need to make a judgment call based on the person’s organizational position, “frolleagues”, how others have tagged their profile, and social contributions (blog, social bookmarks, shared files, community participation, projects they’ve worked on in the past, etc.). Or, perhaps the group could use a wiki to describe how each individual contributes to the organization (assuming seekers take the time to read it, of course).

Problem #2: “I work with external business partners who do not understand us.”

They described how they frequently partner with external organizations to get work done, and continually spend time getting each organization up to speed about what they are all about before they can even begin to collaborate on a project.

Business constraint: They have not used their existing Lotus Quickplace extranet deployment to collaborate with outside folks, because the internal process to request an external team site is not an easy one (legal and security compliance constraints make collaborating externally a laborious undertaking). And frankly, sending email will always be easier than visiting a website to share documents and other information with external folks. Why? Because that’s what the majority of people out there know how to do, and won’t take time to learn anything new.

Idea for #2: Set up a single external Quickr place, with general public reader access, and create “this is what we’re all about” content to which they can point their partners. Then, they could create inner rooms that can be locked down to only those partners they want to share private information with (this is a feature of Quickr). The point here is that they don’t need to request a team site for each partner; the site manager (a business user) only needs to create an inner room whenever the need arises, and invite the partner.

Once they have the Quickr site set up, they’ll still use email. How? Well, when they are about to send an email with an attachment, a box will pop up and ask if they’d like to save the attachment in a Quickr site, and just email a link to it (you can do that with Notes 7 and Quickr 8.0, too). So, they don’t have to change the way they work today, which is critical to the success of any type of new collaboration or social networking solution, IMO. They can add/delete/check in/out/version documents to the external site in Windows Explorer, since each site shows up in Windows Explorer as “just another drive”. They can also do all of this within MS Office.

Clearly, the value of Lotus Quickr (and really, any collaboration/social networking solution) lies in how it integrates with existing tools.

Since they’ll be upgrading their external Lotus Quickr deployment to 8.1 (shipping March 28), and they’re deploying Lotus Notes 8.0.1 later this year, they will eventually be able to ignore the website almost completely. This is because they’ll have a Quickr sidebar in the Notes 8.0.1 client (available for Outlook clients also). They’ll be able to easily drag a document link from the external site into an email. So, they can still keep emailing with their partners, and just send links to the documents. And, they’ll be able to right-click an email and add it to the site. Great way to keep all correspondence in one spot.

The partners will be able to use the Quickr sidebar, too, if they have Notes 8.0.1 or Outlook 2003+ (I think – might need 2007, not sure). How? They’ll download the Connectors (an .msi file) from the Quickr site, and install it if they have appropriate rights to their desktop. If they can’t do this, they can always email content and documents directly to the Quickr site, since it has its own email address.

IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1 sidebar in Microsoft Outlook

They also thought that they might create a profile for each individual at the partner that they work with, so that others can get a better idea of what to expect when they collaborate with him/her. Since they won’t be deploying Connections Profiles externally this year, the idea was to allow each partner to create a profile page within the Quickr site. And of course, lock down who can see which profile, or just create them within the inner rooms that are already locked down to the appropriate people.

This idea, of course, led to creating profiles for each project they work on with their partners, using Quickr’s wiki component. This would help partners get up to speed more quickly about what the project is all about, and because it’d be a wiki page, any internal team member can keep it current. This reminded me of Microsoft’s internal Micropedia effort (which I think is a very cool idea).

And then there’s Lotus Bluehouse, a SaaS offering currently in beta.

I know of another vendor that has focused primarily on external community solutions. I hear they’re adding project-focused features in a future release – it’ll be interesting to see how their, our, and other external-facing collaboration solutions play within customers’ existing business constraints, while satisfying their needs. (god, that sounded so markety and salesy, didn’t it?)

Gotta open it up, but lock it down, and work in my existing IT environment and existing user tools. All at the same time. Fun!

I’m a broken record lately on conference calls and at onsite customer meetings. You gotta stop comparing lists of features between vendor solutions. It’s a fruitless exercise.

“Blog?”

“Check.”

“Wiki?”

“Check.”

“Integrated telephony?”

“Check.”

“Document management?”

“Check.”

“User profiles?”

“Check.”

“Ok, which vendor has more checks?”

“Ah, they all have everything. Let’s just go with the vendor we were going to pick all along, ok?”

“Sounds good to me. Let’s go play golf.”

Today, it’s all about how you USE those features. Is it a painful or pleasant experience creating a wiki? How many clicks does it take to add someone to your space? Can I get to people’s profiles from my inbox or contacts list?

Anyway, my point is this: Encourage your customers to evaluate collaborative and community-building software solutions using “walk-through” scenarios. Perhaps we can finally move away from the feature comparison column fodder.