5 tips for boosting SharePoint hybrid adoption with analytics

Your organization has implemented SharePoint, or perhaps a hybrid version including deployments across various environments. But, are you well equipped to thoroughly monitor your adoption rates, to see whether your users are benefitting from the portal? Recently, there has been a significant shift from On-Premises deployments of SharePoint to SharePoint on the cloud, resulting in multiple deployments that can be challenging to consistently track and monitor. It’s important to ask yourself, what does this mean for your organisation?

This recent phenomena is causing a lot of concern in the SharePoint community with respect to which direction organizations should go, to maintain control and understanding of how the portal is being used. In addition, Yammer has become the default social platform for Microsoft, thus adding an additional platform organizations should monitor.

In essence, Hybrid is the new normal.

Currently and in the future, deploying some form of a hybrid scenario, including some On-Prem, some Cloud, and Yammer, will be more common among organizations. However, when attempting to monitor all of these platforms, a problem arises. The metrics are scattered throughout all three platforms, resulting in siloed data. So how can organizations bring this all together and drive adoption?

1. Set Goals

What is it you want to measure? How do you want to understand what you’re doing? If you’re using all three platforms, what metrics will you pull so you can define your usage? Who are the champions? Who are the people who are really engaged within Yammer or in SharePoint? Are there cross-overs? Are there people who are heavily using Yammer and how does it compare to the adoption from SharePoint? Achieving a clear picture and defining these specific goals is the first step in driving adoption across these various platforms.

2. Measure your progress

This means looking at defining specific reports, and overtime seeing trends and then adapting to these trends. By implementing a high quality analytics solution, this can be achieved.

3. Generate reports

Generating reports is critical for understanding trends in the portal, and where things are going. Understanding who the key users in SharePoint and Yammer are gives you the ability to approach that person, appreciate them for their efforts, and utilize their expertise to help other users with hands on, peer-to-peer training. This is actually a very effective way to drive further adoption, since it’s not IT or stakeholders encouraging training but actually people from within the various departments.

4. Analyze your data

Now it’s time to look at trends over time and get a clear idea of how your portal is performing, as well as how your users are interacting within it. Analyzing your data and keeping track of it is crucial for making important decisions regarding your portal and encouraging user adoption.

5. Optimise

After you have generated your reports, and analyzed your data, you have one final step. What good is creating reports without taking action that’s based upon your findings? You can now optimize your adoption approach and ask yourself what are the best steps to take in encouraging adoption. Do you need to find more power users? Do you need a different approach, and focus more on internal marketing and SharePoint culture within your organization?

Perhaps there may be other ways you can achieve the adoption you really need based on the data you see. By understanding the strong, and the weak spots within your portal, you will now have the tools to further optimize your portal to make it more beneficial for your users.

These five steps will help you create a plan for driving adoption in your SharePoint portal, however this is not a onetime process. The key to maintaining consistent and upward trending adoption levels is to constantly monitor and optimize, so your portal can be as useful as possible. Additionally, finding the right third party analytics solution that can compile all your data into one platform will prove to be the most beneficial for monitoring your hybrid environments.