Let’s get this straight, SharePoint is not and does not have
to be the bane of your existence… or so says Tara Litzenberger, Communications Manager and Operations Lead at John Deere.  In her SharePoint for Corporate Communicators presentation, But SharePoint sucks!  How to turn your employees’ attitudes around,
Tara shared her tips and tricks for how to use SharePoint to solve common
challenges, partner with IT to make everyone’s lives easier, and more.

So you think SharePoint sucks, huh?  Well tell me this, is it SharePoint that
sucks, or are you just not used to using SharePoint?  In the case of John Deere, more often than not, it was the latter part of that
sentence that rang true.  Based on this,
it was up to Tara’s team to find a way to promote SharePoint across the
organization and help employees to understand how SharePoint makes it easier to
organize meetings, comply with budgeting policies, schedule editorial content,
share ideas globally, and more.

The first and most important step to achieving this goal was
to make the John Deere SharePoint site user-friendly.  One of the ways in which Tara’s team did this
was to put themselves in the beginner’s seat.
As she found, “people want to know what they want to know when they need
to know it.”  So what better way of
accomplishing this than to build a site that is accessible and easy to navigate?  When building their FAQs and “How Do I?”
pages, Tara and her team meticulously included a full range of questions and
answers from the seemingly obvious to the more advanced problems.  Although some of the questions may have seemed
like no-brainers to SharePoint veterans, it was important to remember when
implementing SharePoint that a large percentage of the users would be inexperienced in navigating the platform, and would need all the help that they
could get.

Another thing that Tara and her team did to make SharePoint
more adoptable in their organization was to pay close attention to governance.  In particular, they wanted to make sure that
the types of rules and policies that they implemented were relevant to their users.  In the case
of John Deere, they found that their audience greatly appreciated a high level
of structure and organization, and shaped their governance policy
accordingly.

One of Tara’s best tips was something that applies to more
than just SharePoint: know when to ask for help.  Whether it’s an internal resource or third-party consultant, there are a wealth of SharePoint experts out there that are
willing and able to help, regardless of the scale and scope of the issue.  As Tara stressed, don’t be afraid to take
advantage of the resources you have available to you!  Similarly, Tara recommended you utilize the
information you learn to help each other.
By making knowledge-sharing part of your corporate culture, you
contribute to transform your organization’s knowledge into a robust,
multi-functional resource for all employees.

With the above tips and tricks and more, Tara was able to
easily drive home why it’s beneficial to adopt SharePoint.
Simply stated, using SharePoint gets things done.  By helping employees to understand this
through education, assistance, and advocacy, Tara and her team were able to
change the attitudes of her employees and get them to *gasp* LIKE using SharePoint!