I’m happy to report that in most areas - life is pretty good right now: Kids are happy, thriving, Husband appears to be happy, garden is growing .. knock knock.. but things are OK just now.
In the strange world of SharePoint, however, all is not so rosy. I’m increasingly frustrated by the obvious misses that would really enable community collaboration - these are small “duh” things that would go a long way to improving our efforts to get people engaged and connected. So I’m working on a short list of the things that really annoy me about our Out of the Box implementation at J&J. Here we go:
One way around this would be to use RSS to feed information up to the main team site - but then we discovered that we can’t use RSS feeds from one site list or library to another - unless anonymous access is enabled. Argh!
2. “Join” button: We still trying to figure this one out - but I’d love to see a nice button on a community-based team site that allows a user to join - thus giving them the ability to contribute. The underlying functionality adds the user to the site’s Members group - and grants them contribute access. We know there is a link in an Action menu that has that functionality - I just want it in a button form…
3. Contribute includes delete: Mysteriously, the “contribute” level of access in SharePoint jumps in the ability to contribute with the ability to upload and delete. Why? It makes more sense to permission users for collaborative activity only - letting a large group of people reply, comment, tag, etc would be a lesser level of permission then allowing those users to also upload and delete stuff. The notion of collaborative engagement on a site is just not clearly thought out in the OOB instance of SharePoint.
4. Easy Alerts: We are desperately in search of a button that lets users click to establish an alert on the list (or whatever they are on ). NOBODY can figure out how to set up user alerts, and doing this on behalf of others is really awkward. Also, if as a site owner you want to set up an alert on the site for your community, the user interface for finding out who has what alert on a site is clunky, at best.
5. Distribution Lists, please! Last but certainly not least - the biggest “duh” moment for me is the missing link between Outlook distribution lists and SharePoint. There are a couple of disconnects here:
1. For us at J&J we cannot use published Distribution Lists as a means to set up an alert or to permission the list to a site. That means that for my community of 900 Procurement Professionals who are maintained in a set of four DL’s in our global address book - I have no way of setting up even one user alert for the main Announcements part of our site so that everyone gets updated for important notices - and I can’t paste in my list of 900 names - the max limit is 200. OK - I could paste in 200 names at a time and make multiple alerts, but I just refuse - it’s Soooo dumb! To add insult to injury, it’s very hard to discern who has an alert on the site - the user experience is terribly clunky.
2. The typical user behavior when setting up a group or community with a team site is that one person will have the list of people involved in the team located on their local Outlook distribution list as a group. That’s almost ALWAYS the way people manage their list of people in a team … So that’s easy, right? Just export your Outlook group that you’ve been using to SharePoint and you can use it? No such luck. If I had a dime for every person that said to me “You mean I have to type in all the names again?..” and who went silent as I fumbled an explanation .. well, it’s just sad.
The Distribution List issue is solved if we export our published DLs to something called Security Groups - using an online service request application that appears to date from about 1984. Slow and clunky - and the result would be that we would have to maintain two kinds of lists and make sure to re-export our DL to the SG every time we updated it (which is fairly often). A real PIA.
So we are trying to find workarounds for some of these problems (If you have an idea, please advise!) but I still wish we could deploy some of the proven solutions that make SharePoint much better for community connection and social networking.
If I take this insight to a more strategic level - the underlying disconnect is between the business-based site owners who are hands on their sites, and identifying these issues, and the IT organization that “supports” SharePoint. I say supports in quotes because there is a wide chasm between business and IT - and between that falls what I have referred to as “Applied SharePoint” - getting eyeballs on my complaints is hard at J&J - because I always want to make these fixes that will benefit everyone - and the way our IT relationship is set up - the requirement has to come from the business… So we get locked in a very silo’d approach to resolving problems, and constantly reinvent the wheel when customizing SharePoint to provide solutions.
I think some folks at J&J are realizing the challenges with applying SharePoint for optimal collaboration, community, and social activity - over time I’m sure this situation will improve. But for now - it’s pretty darn frustrating.
