Author news: "SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: The Business and Human Factors View of SharePoint"

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Guest post this morning by Michael Sampson. We’d also like to congratulate Michael and his wife, Katrina, on the new baby!

Michael here. My focus for the past couple of years has been improving the lot of the SharePoint end user. Microsoft Press published my first book on this topic late last year, Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways. The purpose of Seamless Teamwork is to demonstrate how SharePoint can be used to support team collaboration, innovation and the carrying out of daily business activities. It's a great book to give to your business users who are trying to figure out how SharePoint might help them.

But by design, Seamless Teamwork wasn't the final word on the topic. More was needed, and to that end, I've just published a second book on using SharePoint for collaboration. It's a broader book, looking at SharePoint from a business and human factors perspective. It's called SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration.

SharePoint Roadmap is not the kind of book you would give to end users. It's written for IT professionals, BUT it argues strongly for end users. There are six focal chapters in SharePoint Roadmap:

  • Chapter 2, focused on improving collaboration between people. This chapter talks through a number of models about how to think about this.
  • Chapter 3, which talks about where SharePoint naturally shines in supporting team collaboration, and how to address some of its shortcomings through add-on products.
  • Chapter 4, all about governance. I argue that optimizing the technical governance of SharePoint isn’t enough, and instead outline what is required. I also propose a structure and decision process for making governance decisions.
  • Chapter 5, on engaging with the business. Once you have a good sense of what SharePoint is capable of doing, you need to explore where and how those capabilities can used to do business better. This requiring engaging with business groups and teams, and I outline a number of approaches.
  • Chapter 6, on user adoption strategies. There’s little point in doing all of the stuff we do with SharePoint if no one uses it … so this chapter talks through a number of approaches to cultivating user adoption. And within this chapter, I talk about the meta-message of my first book, Seamless Teamwork.
  • Chapter 7, the final focal chapter, talks about how to get started. I propose that you play a game of SharePoint baseball, with base 1 being a pilot project.

In essence, SharePoint Roadmap takes the view that the IT department needs to look beyond the nice shiny bits and pieces that come in the SharePoint box, and start engaging with business people about how and where SharePoint can be used to enhance the way work gets done.

I invite you to download and read Chapter 1 -- it's free, and it will give you a much deeper sense of the focus and ethos of the book.

Ordering Details

SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration is available now and can be ordered here.