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SharePoint is used by many companies . Lots of them are struggling to use it strategically. How can SharePoint become essential for our organization? How can organizations drive SharePoint adoption? These are questions I hear a lot from customers. There are many SharePoint conferences out there. Do we really need another one? My colleagues and I at Entopic found many conferences address SharePoint from a technology and developer perspective. Which is great. There is clearly a market for this. However, we wondered if there are also conferences that address the business- and user-side of SharePoint. We found only a couple world-wide. For this reason we thought it would be good to organize a SharePoint conference with a business focus. And apparently more people were looking for something like this. There were 300+ attendees. Symon Garfield kicked off the conference with a keynote about how to implement SharePoint successfully. Symon discussed several reasons why implem...

What is the best way to benchmark your intranet? How can you learn from other intranets? Comparing intranets There are many ways to find intranet inspiration. Among others you can: Have your intranet assessed by an intranet expert Read a good book about intranet Visit organizations that have a (beautiful) intranet Visit a conference or workshop about intranet Join online or offline intranet networking groups This list doesn’t mention listening to your users, because I assume you're already doing that… Digital Workplace Survey 2013 Another way to learn from others is to join intranet surveys. The most well-known survey is Jane McConnell ’s. Jane is a well-known intranet expert. Jane’s internal research on intranet has been going on for years now. The scope of her research used to be intranet and has broadened to the digital workplace. Many organizations participate in her research. The survey is broad and deep. Filling out the survey takes about an hour of ...

Do you know more than 150 people? You probably don't. And do you have more than 150 friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter? You probably do. But are they really your friend? Do you really know all 150 of them? I don't think so. A long time ago I ran into Robert Dunbar's research on social networks. I wrote several posts about Dunbar's number and have been collecting interesting links as well. Just recently Dunbar was interviewed   by Technology Review about his number and social networks. What is Dunbar's number about? His research basically showed... ...that humans have the cognitive capacity to maintain about 150 stable social relationships.  The first time I read this I thought: What?! But it's is now my experience this is true. Even for social media friends and followers. I follow way more that 150 people, but I know and truly engage with 150-300 of them. Of course Technology Review was also wondering if Dunbar himself still thinks his...

Is email here to stay or will it die? Will it die because social media is here or will something else replace email? Recently Steve Dale wrote an interesting post about this topic. It's titled 'Email is dead: long live email!' . It was discussed on G+ and the blogpost itself has many interesting comments. I thought I'd share my comments here as well. Please read Steve's post first. I think it's an important post for social business people. Steve lists several reasons to use (and keep on using) email: Email arrives near instantaneously. It can be accessed from almost anywhere. It brings not just text, but pictures, documents, links, and more. Email is great for non-urgent communication. Things that don’t require an immediate response that others can deal with on their schedule. Email can provide a powerful documentation trail. Unlike text messages or phone calls, email provides an authenticated audit trail of past communication. It is hard to deny pas...

Just before the weekend I wanted to share this interesting 10 minute talk with you about hierarchies and networks. For one because it's just fascinating to watch how RSA visualizes this talk. Secondly because of the talk itself. Manual Lima's talk about "The power of networks" is fascinating. He gives an overview of how we used to try to structure everything in hierarchies and trees, because we like order and simplicity. And how we now shift to using networks more because trees simply can't describe reality. Knowledge, species, bacteria, our brain, our body, societies, etc. are highly connected. He wraps up his talk by asking if there is a universal structure? Well, do you think there is one? Of course there has been lots of thinking and talking about what this means for organizations, people and technology. The shift Lima describes is the shift 'social business' and 'enterprise 2.0' is describing. And it's the shift social technology is...

“Why can't we use LinkedIn for our intranet? At least it works, our intranet doesn't .” Maybe you considered this or heard it in your organization. The question intrigues me and I think we will hear it more and more in the coming years. What do you say in response to this question as internal or external consultant, Communications or IT manager? I'd like to share my thoughts in this post. Dissatisfied about IT The intranet is changing rapidly. The internet provides all kinds of free tools, like Dropbox, Yammer and Google Drive. More and more people are getting used to sharing (versions of) documents, online collaboration, sharing short messages, setting up and maintaining a personal profile, etc. Employees are often dissatisfied about the internal IT-tools and content-focused intranets. These tools cannot compete with the functionality we have on the internet. Free tools as intranet More and more employees are openly, and sometimes secretly, using free internet too...

I used to work for a large organization. One of the things that intrigued me most when working for that company is how little questions were asked. It seems like everybody was looking for ways to create a need and get people to ask them a question. The strange thing about looking for needs and questions is that I look for the ones that I can answer. In my work as a consultant I experience the complete opposite. Working for an organization always starts with a need, a question. Often I have to help the organization articulate the need and detail the question, but the need and question is there. As a consultant the big question is: do I or the organization I work for have what it takes to address the need and answer the question. To me this is a huge difference. Does this relate to your experience as a consultant or employee working for an organization?