Forum Discussion
Can IC work without SharePoint savvy?
Specialist knowledge is needed outside of a traditional IC role e.g. a detailed understanding of the platform and any technical considerations relating to the business architecture. An understanding of information architecture, metadata. It can also support IC for
- escalations when something goes wrong with the tech or requirements change
- platform / tech training
- special events where IC want to step outside of an existing template / process etc
A traditional IT role won't always sufficiently understand the needs of a comms team (exceptions can be business partners, as you've mentioned it could be someone in IT with a dotted line in to the comms business area.
The ideal would be a dedicated channels / intranet / IC tech manager who understands both comms needs and tech (I may be biased in this regard as this is my role). A dedicated role also helps ensure a wide variety of inputs are considered e.g. championing an overall user experience and needs from other teams such as HR / operational teams.
Expertise should live somewhere in the business. Whilst an initial view could come from an outside contractor knowledge should be embedded in to the business for ongoing maintenance, adaptations, training etc (unless there's a close, ongoing relationship with a supplier which is likely to be expensive).
For SharePoint specifically, there have been a lot of improvements but OOTB there are still big challenges when used for bigger businesses. I'd say it's impossible for large organisations to use SharePoint OOTB. It looks like Microsoft would prefer to allow 3rd parties to create customisations and fill in gaps.
SharePoint training does seem to focus on information management and only some specialists offer an intranet / communications management perspective. I can only think that this isn't more widespread due to 3rd party involvement for SharePoint intranets. You're often limited to training and consultancy with your 3rd party supplier on their specific flavour of SharePoint.
I agree with almost everything in your post, except one thing. I've been part of too many:-) intranet projects and now the time has come to use SharePoint OOTB. During the last two years I've been responsible for the solution at a number of customers ranging rom 500 to 100.000 employees. It works great. The number one thing you need to be aware of is that you need slightly adjust the requirements to fit. For example: You cannot get exact the look that you want. You maybe need to implement e.g. the brand with images and other small adjustments as well. But you get a really great intranet that will evolve automagically when Microsoft updates MS 365.
If you go with a third party product, whatever they say (I've been part of that) they will lock you in and they will not be capable to follow in Microsoft's tempo. I understand that I'm a bit controversial here but I have the experience to back it.
- Interesting to know, I'm trying to implement a mostly OOTB project at the moment and there are still major gaps. Some degree of compromise is reasonable, there's a very real battle between what I'd consider to be relatively standard business expectations and current SharePoint functionality. The SharePoint roadmap does seem promising at least.
- Can you share some examples?
kvadratmartin Off the top of my head, my (mainly audience targeting moans)
- Unable to re-order news items, ordering news items means audience targeting is ignored, you cannot keep the most important news in the most prominent position
- From an aesthetics POV, you can only use the hero web part at full width which doesn't support audience targeting, the news web part cannot be used at full width
- Cannot auto apply audience targeting groups to articles so a large number of comms people need to manually reference / add audience targeting group(s) for everything they create
- Not all components have audience targeting capabilities so where you may be able to adjust a link, you cannot target e.g. associated text or an image.
- All images are clickable even if just used for aesthetics, doesn't make for a great user experience. Where possible I've used a workaround with the markdown web part but for full width images you need to use the image web part and it's not ideal for other editors.
- Theming is extremely limited unless you involve a SharePoint developer, hopefully this will improve with the brand centre release- Microsoft recommendations engine seems very flawed and it makes it incredibly difficult for a user to influence what they see. On an individual note, it recommends I read news that I authored.