What SharePoint Gets Wrong

If you represent an enterprise-scale organization, there’s a good chance your office uses SharePoint to store and organize employee resources. SharePoint is Microsoft’s digital collaboration platform, and because Microsoft is the standard enterprise software for most companies, SharePoint becomes the default option for employee experience. IT teams know Microsoft, so everyone gets SharePoint.

Too many organizations accept SharePoint without question. While the Microsoft offering may be robust, it’s a bulky and often inflexible software. And because so many organizations fall back on SharePoint, Microsoft has little incentive to update the product for its numerous clients. Why should you or your employees have to resort to the default?

Enterprise-scale organizations can and should expect more from a digital employee experience platform. Here are four areas that companies can and should consider for the sake of their workers and their overall success.

Implementation

Operating at the enterprise level takes time—that’s a given. That’s all the more reason to not waste time with implementation. SharePoint can take more than a year to implement within an organization. No one has that kind of time, especially not your employees. Look for digital experience partners who can work quickly on your timetable.

It’s equally important to find a partner that can understand your business’s current level of digital maturity. Is this your first enterprise-wide digital employee platform? Are you a legacy organization looking to upgrade? SharePoint is SharePoint, no matter your needs. You deserve a platform that can meet you where you are from day one.

Customization

Your business has unique goals and concerns. Your digital experience platform should be unique as well. Employees deserve a simple, functional platform unique to their experience. SharePoint may be functional, but it is neither simple nor unique.

SharePoint is fundamentally an “out-of-the-box” product. This makes integration awkward and expensive for a modern office that uses a range of products and applications. It’s also difficult to alter the employee experience for different segments of your organization—every stakeholder gets the same fundamental experience, regardless of how well it fits their position. Microsoft has tried to fix this with Viva, which promises a smoother integration experience, but in reality, it’s Outlook x SharePoint. Similarly, SharePoint hasn’t developed for a mobile era. At the very least, large organizations should get a working app, right? Whether it’s their mobile app or email platform, SharePoint’s shortcomings reflect a more systemic issue - an inability or unwillingness to evolve to meet their enterprise clients’ needs.

Real customization extends beyond a suite of Microsoft products to meet the unique needs of your organization's software and employees. A comprehensive employee experience platform can customize content for different demographics (like location, interests, or experience level) within an organization. By partnering with a platform like DoZen, organizations can create a digital experience that reflects their employees’ journeys, their unique communications needs, and more in one intuitive place.

Service

Let’s face it: troubleshooting in SharePoint is a pain. If you haven’t been working with SharePoint for years within your organization’s IT department, then you probably don’t know how to solve a problem when it arises. [And when problems do arise, it’s hard to find the solutions. SharePoint’s lackluster search function makes problem-solving an arduous affair.]

When you’re operating a business at scale, you need to be able to find help reliably when you need it. Enterprise organizations deserve better service than a clunky knowledgebase. Seek out a partner that provides true white-glove service on demand.

Metrics

How do you measure the success of an employee experience platform? SharePoint doesn’t have a good answer; their metrics are limited and dubious. Consider page view statistics. While the numbers may seem high, SharePoint serves company content to employees as a homepage. This inflates the page view number without reflecting time spent or engagement. Numbers like these fail to show whether your communications are actually connecting with its audience. And because so many institutions accept the software by default, they have little external incentive to improve the accuracy of their reporting.

That may be fine for Microsoft, but it doesn’t serve customers. Enterprise organizations need to be able to measure how their engagement and communications are working against their unique set of KPIs. And they should be able to measure and assign value in whatever way makes the most sense for them. Platforms like DoZen allow you to assign weighted values to different forms of content on your employee hub, so you can calibrate your measurements precisely, adapt, and improve.

Just because SharePoint is the obvious option doesn’t mean it’s the best option. DoZen offers the measurement, service, personalization, and implementation that enterprise organizations deserve. Reach out today to learn more.