"E-mail is dead, social collaboration follows in their footsteps and enables contemporary, more efficient communication." Although this message has been ubiquitous in the IT industry in recent years, the reality in many German companies speaks a different language ,
The construction company Leonhard Weiss from Göppingen / Satteldorf in Baden-Württemberg, for example, does not run without e-mail. The smooth operation of the construction sites throughout Europe depends on the free flow of diverse business documents, as Head of IT Atilla Kücük describes it: "Our employees are constantly involved Around 900 templates to handle the processes from the site registration, the facility to the procedure correctly. There are huge amounts of emails every day. "
While email exchange is convenient for employees, managers worried about the growing document chaos. The majority of these documents remained in the local mailboxes and PST files of employees hang, the central storage on file servers long remained a pious wish that has been ignored in everyday life.Instead of File Server: Manage documents centrally with SharePoint
In order to transfer the unstructured file management into an orderly, central document management, IT started the project ePOS with Microsoft SharePoint some years ago. Kücük explains the goals at that time: "Our company consists of various, relatively independent business areas such as road and network construction, engineering and turnkey construction as well as track infrastructure, where a variety of document repositories exist. These should all be merged into one central structure. "Another important part of the project was to create a portal that serves as a central access point for all business processes, including SAP.
The key point in moving to SharePoint was the introduction of metadata. Documents can be clearly categorized and also found again - unlike folder structures on file servers. Another important goal in the introduction of SharePoint was also the employee self-service for the assignment of authorizations. This should allow controlled access to documents, allowing users to independently manage and assign permissions to others.
Poor SharePoint usability as an acceptance hurdle
While the basic idea of the original SharePoint concept proved to be good, problems soon arose in its implementation, at times the ambitious project even threatened to fail. The responsible persons had underestimated the hurdles on the "last mile" to the user. For the employees, the changeover to ePOS meant a certain amount of additional work, which was particularly noticeable when filing documents.
While the entire handling of corporate documents used to be done in the Outlook client, a new, somewhat bulky administration interface came into play with the SharePoint portal. This was particularly noticeable when uploading e-mails and documents, which now had to be supplemented with several keywords in the new system for classification. But the SharePoint upload dialogs turned out to be a brake on efficiency because users can only select one file at a time.
