We always love when our CEO, Brad Geldenhuys, imparts his wisdom. Read on for some quick tips on SharePoint ROI from the man himself.
Having been in the SharePoint consulting game for over a decade and built a global SharePoint consultancy, I have heard this one too many times, “We have SharePoint but I don’t know if anyone uses it and it’s hard for me to sign off on any SharePoint work cause I don’t think it’s worth the ROI”. In any given scenario it doesn’t matter what framework or platform is being used, as long as you are using it correctly and its technology based it’s always going to give you ROI. So how do we fix this issue?
It’s continuously difficult to tell if your SharePoint site is actually being utilized with out of the box tools. One of the biggest issues is the lack of Web Analytics or Site usages reports that come OOTB with SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online. Sure you can see how many hits a page got, but that doesn’t even begin to cover what is actually needed to get true ROI.
- First things first, download and install SharePoint Vitals it’s the best SharePoint analytics tool on the market and there is a FREE version which can get you started. Once you are all set with SharePoint Vitals for web analytics and SharePoint site usage you will have all the data you need to understand why you are not getting your SharePoint ROI
- Monitor the Top 10 Active users and approach them to understand why they use the platform, what works for them and what doesn’t work for them. Make a list of low hanging fruit and get those items fixed or completed ASAP.
- Monitor the Top 10 slowest users, having a slow SharePoint site can cause death and/or divorce, so find out why this is happening by speaking to the users and see what you can do with the help of IT to get that resolved.
- Monitor the Heat Map to see where your users are accessing SharePoint. If you want your users to be mobile and have published SharePoint externally and nobody is using it externally, find out why. This could be for a number of reasons but it is important to allow users to access SharePoint from anywhere on any device. So look at creating a responsive design or trying out the SharePoint solutions on a mobile device to live the experience. Fix what doesn’t work.
- Use Site Map to show sites with the most usage and hits, and then use these sites to advertise and market other solutions/applications/business processes to those users. A lot of the time people use bookmarks and do not rely on the landing page for navigation. With proper SharePoint usage data you can see how many hits specific sites get, who those users are and then target them with the specific sites you want them to use.
It’s pretty easy when you have the right tools, so good luck and enjoy getting the true ROI out of your SharePoint environment.