Once SharePoint On-Prem or in the Cloud has been setup and configured the next step is to start creating sites so that content can start moving in.  This is a great start to kick off user adoption within your organization.  In a new site you want to ensure things are easy, make logical sense for what your organization, departments, etc. need to do day to day to accomplish their tasks.   The goal is to build something to start with that everyone can start utilizing minutes after being provided a link and permissions to their site.  Providing an someone an OOTB (out of the box) site template is not productive as you can see in the image below the OOTB site leaves a lot to be desired and 9 out of 10 won’t know what to do with it to become productive.

The goal of a site is to foster usage of the site.  Making it overly complicated or providing a OOTB template will ensure dissatisfaction with your users and they will either complain or just not use the site.  As we know that means 0 user adoption by the average user.  Below are some additional areas you will want to keep in mind while building & implementing a site within your organization.

  • Consistency
    • Department to Department
    • Project to Project
  • Ease of Use (At all levels)
  • Limit Non Best Practices
    • Permissions (Custom Level)
    • User Adoption

If you can achieve the above items user adoption is well on its way.  It also provides the organization something they have probably never done before and that is a plan a scheduled launch of the new site(s) and many other things like the following:

  • Establish Go Live!!
  • Marketable
    • Flyers, Billboards, E-mail Communications, etc.
  • Site Roadmap
    • Where do we go from here?
  • Ability to Implement New Features\Functionality
    • Groups
    • PowerBI
    • PowerApps
    • Process Improvement
    • Automation
  • Training
    • Consistent and Repeatable

By implementing consistency with a template (branded & built-in features) users will be able to immediately start utilizing their site with very little effort.  However, just because the template allows all users to start with the same foundation site does not mean that is where they want to be forever.  As the implementation or migration wraps up you want to schedule time with each department and focus one what kinds of processes and tasks that they deal with day to day.  Once identified it becomes easier to implement functionality specific to the departments and the ROI starts going up.

To help get things started I have provided a sample team site template that can be installed and give you the opportunity to test out site templates and all the other quick win functionality that I will be providing in blogs or if you have attended a session of mine here recently!  Enjoy and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Site Template Documentation

Quick Wins Site Template