Getting Your Employees to Use SharePoint in Office 365

For organizations who are new to Office 365, one of the challenges to getting to the full potential of the platform is getting employees to use SharePoint Online. As with any productivity / collaboration solution, it is only effective if it actually gets used. As part of the discovery process we have with clients (aka sales process) we hear over and over again the IT person's frustration over not being able to get their users to use SharePoint.  Often it is part of the reason they are looking at our  business application templates (www.spmarketplace.com). After 

further questioning of the client we discover some common things:

• No Definition. They have not clearly defined what exactly SharePoint is and its role in their organization
• No Buy-in. It is amazing how often SharePoint is thrown out there with little actual buy-in from management and departments.
• No Training. There may be little knowledge of SharePoint (lack of training) in the organization
• No Context. If they have setup a site or sites, there is often no context to the organization, with a spattering of document libraries, team sites etc.
• Blah Interface. SharePoint 2013 native is not bad, but users are used to 
• web sites that convey corporate branding and colors.

This situation often occurs because SharePoint Online happens to come with Office 365, and while there is clear use of email (Exchange), Office, and in some cases Lync all because they were used before on-premise, SharePoint is the new kid on the block to the organization. Also, it does not help that many Microsoft 365 implementation partners also don't have a lot of SharePoint experience, so they do not position it correctly. So given this reality, how can you successfully bring SharePoint to your organization?

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