Today I had a meeting with a client and they said something that made me think a lot about SharePoint projects. They stated there were many things that needed doing, but said "there is not really a SharePoint project".

For me that made me think, what did they mean there was no SharePoint project? Surely it is one based on the fact that it involves SharePoint.

During my 3 hour drive back home, I got to thinking about this phrase and what it could mean. I finally came up with the following summarisation.

In all the projects I have worked on in the past few years they have always really been "SharePoint Projects". What I mean by this is that the product was selected and the design was all based around deploying the product and tweaking it to fit the business. What I realised on the way home is that often businesses spend too much time focusing on what the product can do for them instead of actually solving the business needs. Though this may be true to some extent I think we may miss the point of SharePoint is a platform that can facilitate technology changes but cannot change the business culture. The quote I heard today reminded and reinforced the idea of SharePoint being an enabling technology not just a product that we have to have. So I suppose the next question is how can we make sure we are selecting SharePoint because it is an enabling technology and not just because it is the cool thing to use?

My simple guidelines are these:

Involve the business users

This is probably the most important step; I have seen many projects where the users were not consulted and then the IT Department wonder why it was not adopted. As a SharePoint consultant this is a requirement that I ask for with any client.

Select real business processes and model them in the SharePoint Product

There are many sample designs, applications, templates and idea floating around about how you can use for example, InfoPath forms to complete timesheets or ideas for approval workflows. Thought these may be great, select actual business processes and then model them in SharePoint. Don't be afraid of actually saying a business process does not fit into SharePoint, not everything will.

Don't rush to get all of the SharePoint features installed and working

Often every organisation wants all of the features that SharePoint has when the system goes live. Even though it maybe achievable to actually do this, it can take a lot of effort and also will require lots of user change. As with any project limiting the amount of user change is a given but often there is a misconception that due to SharePoint being easy to use that the user base will simply adopt it over night. The key here is to plan out the feature set and then a devise a roll out project plan that allow small amounts of functionality over a period of time.

Remember that SharePoint is not just a product but a platform that can be built on

I think that often many companies do not know this or often forget this when working with SharePoint. It is a product, yes you can but it and yes it has a release management process for new versions. However when you purchase SharePoint what are you buying, a product or a platform? The answer is simple, both. If you concentrate on either one too much then you can run into problems later on. The easy way to resolve this is to see the out of the box functionality as product specific and then the platform is really the art of the possible and custom development opportunities.

These are just my own few steps that often help businesses when they want advice on how they should deploy SharePoint. So back to the beginning question, look at your company or client and ask yourself, Is there a SharePoint project or a business process, migration or a custom application projects. All are valid but if we approach any collaboration project as a product independent project and then apply SharePoint to it late your deployment will be a greater success.

Once you look at it differently you will realise that the actual requirements will also act as the user acceptance test criteria. These are my own thoughts; if you disagree of agree comment below. J