User Experience Thinking: The File System and SharePoint

Mary Jo Foley is reporting on the ongoing SharePoint conference, and in summary highlights the user experience issues with moving to such a technology:

In spite of the wealth of features offered by SharePoint, not all customers are sold. Some said they are still confused over the SharePoint branding. Others said they don’t feel the integration between Windows and SharePoint is sufficient.

“SharePoint needs to have seamless integration (with Windows) and the ability to copy, move and map drives like a file share without the need for a Web front end,” said one user with a major Microsoft customer, who requested anonymity. “That would be ideal.”

But the biggest “brake” on SharePoint could end up being cultural, according to Directions on Microsoft’s Helm.

SharePoint “requires changing the way people work. We all know how to share files with Windows, while SharePoint and document management systems in general are still terra incognita. The experience of document management vendors like EMC/Documentum and FileNet suggests that you can’t make those kinds of changes overnight.”

Changing the way people work is a very difficult thing to do – enough said .

(For those not used to the term “terra incognita” it means “unknown territory”. It was new to me to )

Tags: Microsoft,SharePoint,User Experience