If You Are Determined to Make SharePoint Fail, Read This

At the inaugural SharePoint Saturday Stockholm (#SPSsthlm) event today at the World Trade Center in downtown Stockholm, Sweden, I gave a slightly cheeky presentation to the business user audience that recaps and article and ebook I wrote a couple years ago called How to Kill Innovation in SharePoint in 5 Easy Steps, the slides for which you can scroll through below. For the native speakers, I also inserted some intentionally poorly-constructed Swedish translations, which was fun.

While dripping with sarcasm and humor, the point of the presentation is to highlight the 5 main areas that will most impact SharePoint’s success:

  1. Skipping the information architecture
  2. Deploying it, and walking away
  3. Not planning for governance
  4. Ignoring the growing influence of social
  5. Not having a user adoption strategy

There are certainly many other ways that you can sabotage your SharePoint deployment – and these areas are equally true with competing platforms. My goal with this content is really about getting the attention of executives and business decision-makers, to help them understand that SharePoint out-of-the-box doesn’t “just work,” but that it takes planning and deep dives with your end users and iteration to develop a successful system. And the additional time and money spent on these seemingly non-technical strategies are essential to that success.

I’m always concerned over how my humor and sarcasm will land with an international crowd, but I did get a positive response, and some great follow up questions. Hope people viewing the slides enjoy it.

Christian Buckley

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and M365 Apps & Services MVP, and an award-winning product marketer and technology evangelist, based in Silicon Slopes (Lehi), Utah. He is the Director of North American Partner Management for leading ISV Rencore (https://rencore.com/), leads content strategy for TekkiGurus, and is an advisor for both revealit.TV and WellnessWits. He hosts the monthly #CollabTalk TweetJam, the weekly #CollabTalk Podcast, and the Microsoft 365 Ask-Me-Anything (#M365AMA) series.