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My 30,000 metre view
Fred Fredrickson 12th May 2010
SharePoint has tried to fit into the organisation I work for (about 3,500 employees). It has some useful functionality, but for the time and effort required to set it up for a particular purpose, the payback just isn't with it.

It has its champions (mostly programmers) who setup services for their work areas, but others give up in frustration and go back to standard office procedures for managing and sharing information.

I don't think this is necessarily the fault of SharePoint. There comes a point where technology just expects too much from its users, where data and documents become lost in a maze of complexity and no matter what scheme you apply to try and organise it, humans just don't get it.

As for social networks in an enterprise environment, forget it. Where I work, Facebook and similar sites are blocked because it is feared employees will spend too much time socialising and not working. Why would an internal, employer-sponsored social network be any different? Reminds me of when bulleting boards and news groups were introduced many years ago, or more recently chat. Great for a few months, till users worked out they were much more efficient when they ignored such distraction, just did their work, and organised meetings when they wanted more than a couple of people to contribute.

SharePoint might have some great social networking features, but is that what enterprises really need?
ie8 fix

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