SharePoint provides the best user experience when it is routinely evaluated to ensure that your current version and configuration align with your business needs. Here are some reasons why you may want to consider making a SharePoint environment assessment a routine part of your business process audits.

Your Version of SharePoint is Stale

If your version of SharePoint is more than a few years old, you’re missing out on the ultimate ability to create a flexible, functional content management environment. For example, if you’re still running SharePoint 2010 (or earlier!), you don’t have access to a rich suite of SharePoint content management and social features, nor can you deploy SharePoint across your mobile workforce. It’s always a good idea to consider if and how the newest version of SharePoint can fit your businesses needs and desired end-user experience. Each SharePoint update is designed to give business units more control, flexibility, and scalability over how they use SharePoint.

SharePoint Isn’t Acting the Way It Should

SharePoint instability isn’t always due to the SharePoint software itself. Regularly deploying security and functional updates can help, but SharePoint can also act unstable when:

• Security updates are installed, but not applied to the SharePoint content and service databases
• Not enough RAM and processing power is available for your current usage load
• SQL Server administrative and storage management mistakes

Many of these issues can be remediated by identifying your current storage requirements and usage profile and scaling your infrastructure to meet these needs. For some organizations, server maintenance tasks can be reduced or eliminated by moving your SharePoint workloads to the cloud via Office 365.

SharePoint is Slow

For 99.9% of your end users, they simply want SharePoint to work as fast as they do. But most of the time, SharePoint is slow because the infrastructure is improperly scaled or site owners don’t know best practices for structuring sites and content for easy search and retrieval. Without planning page design, content hierarchy, search queries, document and multimedia sizing and user permissions, SharePoint can become painfully slow and frustrating to work with even though it’s optimized to be lighting fast. The usage data and analytics provided by SharePoint can provide insight into how SharePoint is being used and if additional site owner training is required.

The SharePoint Experience is Frustrating

For some users, maximizing the value of SharePoint can be overwhelming. Other users will be excited by how they can enhance their experience through customization and add-ins. The users who feel overwhelmed resort back to email for internal and external sharing and communication. This split in user adoption leads to significant drops in productivity. Frustrated users, however, can provide awesome feedback. Seek out this feedback and use it to update the design and governance of your deployment to create a content management experience everyone is excited to use.

The SharePoint Experience is Missing Something

SharePoint comes with Office integration and a variety of content management and collaboration features, giving users complete control to create and edit documents with the robust suite of apps Office comes with. These apps interact with SharePoint and each other, too, making for seriously fast workflow. However, many business departments still view SharePoint differently than Office, using it as a simple storage location for finished documents. To maximize ROI and extract the full value of your SharePoint environment, Office applications need to be considered part of the total SharePoint solution and adoption plan.

Your SharePoint Software is Out of Support

Everything we’ve talked about so far comes down to how users experience SharePoint, and how they make SharePoint work for their business needs. SharePoint without reliable support can lead to considerable down time and vulnerability. At worst, it can lead to SharePoint being something unusable. Either way, an unsupported version of software will cause sudden and sometimes drastic shocks in how documents are created and both internally and externally shared. Upgrading older versions of SharePoint can be a daunting task, but an experienced partner can help you avoid costly mistakes.

The General Networks SharePoint Environment Assessment

General Networks provides a comprehensive SharePoint environment assessment. Through an on-premises or remote meeting, we will identify all the ways which you can get the most out of your SharePoint environment.

Our assessment merges your most critical business needs with the desired user experience, allowing you to obtain the most value from your current SharePoint deployment.

Contact General Networks today to revitalize your SharePoint experience.