SharePoint Knowledge Base

Being SharePoint consultants means that our job is not to sell SharePoint to our clients, but to educate them on how to best use SharePoint. The easier people can figure out how to use SharePoint the more likely they are to use it better. This means less frustration, and a better return on the investment of building your intranet or public website using SharePoint. In our experience as SharePoint consultants we know well that the very first method is to turn to a colleague and say "hey how do you do this?" You don't want to hear from your neighbor in the next cubicle "look it up in the user manual" or take a webinar and learn how to use that!

All kidding aside we do suggest that you make a list of deep dive topics and post these in a SharePoint calendar for a "lunch and learn" and rotate the topics, keeping them to about 30 minutes. The popularity of the topics and the number of questions that get asked will serve as quick feedback as to the training needs. Perhaps even use a SharePoint survey that has branching logic?

But what about just-in-time learning? People talk about knowledge bases all the time but they don't necessarily explain what they would hope to see in one. What we have built is a framework for storing all types of unstructured knowledge within a structure in SharePoint which helps with SharePoint implementation.

We start with a wiki framework which is typically very unstructured and we immediately add structure (a table of contents). This framework is quite expandable and so later it can grow organically and still retain its structure. Even better, if we have done a good knowledge transfer the next question is could we now use this for other purposes like creating another knowledge base for sales, or this or that? That's what we want to hear. This this can serve as a framework that would show you the most recent videos, most popular videos, most viewed videos, and so forth. Even people who would not consider themselves content producers can do a Skype session or some other screen share and record themselves explaining how something works and then produce a video that can be changed over into an MP4 and linked into the system. SharePoint can play videos right from within the browser.

In almost all of our deployments of Porteo (our ready to go intranet) we have included Infopedia, as it provides over hundred pages embedded with videos that walk users through step-by-step procedures. The big hint here is that we recorded these videos and then sped them up so that they are all very brief to watch. The strategy here is that if people aren't getting it they can just rewind it.

We love helping with SharePoint and it's all we do so feel free to contact us!

Mention this post and we'll send you a white paper on all of the ways we can help you learn SharePoint! As SharePoint consultants we strive to empower our clients to unlock the full potential of your SharePoint environment.