So you saw the title and thought – “HUH, what is this guy smoking?” Well, I totally understand, it isn’t exactly the most conventional title, but stay with me, it will all make sense shortly.
One of the biggest challenges in SharePoint the world over is change management. The simple fact, which continuous to baffle minds, is that amazing solutions are churned out from provider to provider, but many users that are surveyed simply don’t use them.
User Adoption – Still a Challenge
Why is this? Well, if I knew, I think I’d be one of the richest persons on the planet as this problem is not limited to Microsoft products or SharePoint, but all IT systems the world over. I bet my good friend Veronique from Let’s Collaborate would love to know the silver bullet answer to fix user adoption, but she too will confess that there isn’t one standard answer.
Growing Adoption – Interesting Scenario
So I was driving in my car the other day and saw a guy in front of me throwing rubbish out the window. Another person also dumped some litter on the side of the road. As I looked at it, I immediately thought about how difficult it is to keep our streets clean if people don’t use rubbish bins or city dumping grounds. (Read: centralized repository)
I immediately thought about SharePoint (yes, I’m a nerd). How does this relate? Well here goes.
Consider this – Let’s say a document is a piece of rubbish and people just put documents all over the place. How difficult is it to have a consistent user journey or build a file plan that makes any sense? Now I know that SharePoint has some funky tools to bring content together, but imagine you don’t even upload your documents and just leave it in your email, desktop and “I” drive. Now that would be a mission to consolidate right?
So, how do we move forward? Well it’s “simple”. hehe, not really, but ja, sometimes small things make a big difference. Start with uploading your documents into SharePoint and simply distribute links and not the actual documents. If you have all your documents loaded into SharePoint (albeit in various sites) it will be MUCH easier for your Knowledge Manager to consolidate the information and present it back in a file plan / user journey type scenario that makes any sense.
Don’t Litter – Save Documents in SharePoint!
So in closing, next time you think of saving your document as an email attachment, or dumping it on your desktop, consider what you are doing to your SharePoint “environment”. 
Francois Pienaar 
You’re right, your good friend does agree! 🙂 And another answer to the question is cos we’re building systems for people who won’t be using them. A quote from one of my other good friends Tracy. 🙂
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I’m new to SP but not this problem. The problem space is pretty big. People think of documents a ‘mine’ and tend to keep them where they can manage them. Converting from ‘mine’ to ‘company property that I need to share’ is harder than just switching from emailing copies of doc to emailing links – heck this is a huge problem on the web. How many links do you get to docs stored in DropBox?
The underlying issue, for companies, is that they need some kind of document control strategy, then build/buy solutions that address that strategy, then ENFORCE use of whatever system they buy/build. There are not that many companies that have people to think about this problem and money do do something about it so you wind up with these isolated ‘solutions’ implemented from the foot soldiers that are wicked cool but are never taken up by the enterprise. Oh, and to make matters worse, each home grown fix uses a different underlying system. Or worse yet, maybe everyone IS on SP but each person/functional group goes their own way with site design and layout and how they use lists and libraries so, in the end, it’s not possible to find anything on the top level site.
Like I said, big problem.
Then again, this problem keeps me busy and employed!
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