Setting up SharePoint - Don't Try & Do Everything In-House

Unless you were a competent builder, would you try and build a house yourself? While you may build your dream home eventually, you’ll probably spend a lot more time and money doing so than is necessary and in most cases, you’ll be reverse-engineering the mistakes you made along the way for years to come.

Even if it’s not MindPoint, we’d urge you to get advice from a SharePoint expert because the set-up and implementation of your solution is the most important part of your project, especially from an agility point of view. It’s at this stage that most mistakes are made and those mistakes are always expensive and time consuming to fix. Get things badly wrong (at the beginning of the project) and you will struggle forever to get your users to build faith in the solution and, as we’ve said, adoption is critical.

The SharePoint market is very competitive right now and while it is easy to find people who claim to have SharePoint experience, it’s harder to find (and keep) people with the right skills and experience – there is significant brain drain in the market thanks both to the popularity of SharePoint and the sheer number of poor implementations. Try to get expert advice from outside early on, especially on architecture, strategy and governance.

The wealth of information about SharePoint on the web, particularly on Microsoft’s own websites, makes it seem tantalisingly easy to try to build your SharePoint solution only using in-house resources. You can certainly find out enough online to build a SharePoint system, and you may even get the configuration and architecture right – we have seen it happen on occasion.

If you are planning a SharePoint installation or upgrade in 2016 please do speak with us first. There’s no sales spiel or hard sell – just straight talking and practical advice. Book your free call with us here.