In February, I was the guest speaker at a Colligo Networks webinar on 7 Ways to Get More from your SharePoint Deployment Now! There were a number of questions that were asked during the discussion that we didn’t get to on the day, so we said we would answer by blog (and email). So … question #4 …

Melissa: Go-To Person, and on Colligo Contributor

Melissa asked: “(1) At our organization, the “go to” SharePoint person is a non-IT employee, rather someone knows SharePoint very well but also provides guidance/support on how to change the company to be a collaborative culture. In your experience, how does this differ from other companies’ approaches?”

My response:
– It’s fine being a non-IT person, as long as they have a good grasp of what the technology can do. It’s a fine line to walk — to much indepth knowledge at the geek level is bad, vs not enough depth to know where and how it could lead to transformation. It sounds like you have identified a workable approach for your firm.
– There’s a range of approaches at other firms — including those that take your approach.

Melissa also commented: “(2) We discourage the use of emails and sending attachments at our organization but rather send links to libraries, use SharePoint for discussions, issues, etc. This tool seems to me will just give our users an excuse to keep using emails and attachments.”

My response:
– If your people have fully embraced the use of SharePoint through a browser, then great work! Colligo Contributor and the Outlook plug-in are not needed at your place.
– If you don’t ever need to copy email and attachments from Outlook into SharePoint, then you don’t need Colligo.
– If you don’t ever receive external emails that you want to capture into a SharePoint site, then you don’t need Colligo.
– If your people are happy with the response time to work with SharePoint through a browser, then you don’t need Colligo.
– If any of the above are untrue, then I recommend checking out what Colligo Contributor can bring to the table. I’m not a salesperson for Colligo … I just have a long-standing respect for what they do and how they make work practice easier for end users.

What else should be said in answering this question?