In Chapter 4 of my forthcoming book SharePoint 2013 User Adoption Planning and Governance, there is a section titled ‘Collaborative Ownership’; it is my take on the creation of simple rules to manage a SharePoint solution (note – an implementation of a SharePoint environment could be defined as a solution)…
Excerp: “For those entrenched in trying to get information workers to buy into using SharePoint, SharePoint User Adoption seems to be a black art. In a way, it is because the kind of enticements and methods you use will be relative to the product that is being supplied. In reality, complexity of User Adoption is based on the breadth of the SharePoint solution being implemented.
This article shows the different types of people there are in terms of the User Adoption (which has a lifecycle), and attempts to identify the related high priority areas where you should focus your communication and training programmes. Note. The kind of users involved are ‘generic’; and therefore you should use this as a model for any SharePoint solution – irrespective of version. The key areas of SharePoint I will focus on relate to Information Architecture, Term Store, Search and User Profiles and in SharePoint 2013”.
The article I wrote for MSDN newsletter is located here:
One of the key methods of gaining User Adoption of SharePoint is ensuring and pushing the integration it has with Microsoft Office to information workers. After all, information workers generally use Outlook as their ‘mother-ship’. Getting those users to switch immediately to SharePoint or, asking them to visit a document library in a SharePoint site which they will need to access could take time, especially since it means opening a browser, navigating to the site, covering their beloved Outlook client in the process.
Another quick “How To” from Geoff!
I needed to quickly find a way to enable multiple file upload (not Drag / Drop); because I was demonstrating the capabilities of a SharePoint site to clients, and was doing this on a VM with Office 2013 on the same box as the server – so I needed a lot of files! When using SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 on a Windows 2012 sandbox, you may find that using Windows Explorer View, or using Drag Drop to add multiple files to a document library will not work. You will find strange messages appearing asking you to add the site to Trusted Sites in IE (when it is already displayed in the list), and you may also find that when searching for information on how to resolve this that people will say “Hey installing the WebClient / Restarting the WebClient works”.
Well in the past it has worked – however, specific information concerning how to deploy the service is not altogether available for Server 2012 – there are some minor differences. And, in Windows Server 2012 the Web Client is not installed by default. This means deploying the Desktop Experience feature to the server.
This article describes how to install the Web Client Service in Windows Server 2012 which will resolve how to have the Windows Explorer View operational in SharePoint Sites on the Server.
Once done, go back into the Team Site and try using Windows Explorer View
Yippee ! All works – hope this helps you out if you run into the same problem…
Microsoft Outlook provides a Task management feature so that users can create and manage personal tasks. These tasks can be assigned to one or more people, and can be linked into their personal Calendars in Outlook. Whilst the same functionality exists in SharePoint, the integration of Tasks in SharePoint with Outlook leads to some compelling benefits.
