Why SharePoint is Still the Ultimate Choice

Originally posted on the Emgage Blog here:

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When my wife and I got married, a friend who was moving back to Canada decided to give us an apartment full of furniture to start our new life together. It was awesome, there was only one problem…

He gave us a long sectional which we liked a lot but for the fact that it did not have any legs and that it sat low to the ground. But he gave it to us and we were grateful.

After 6 years of carting that sectional from house to house last year we finally decided that we were through with it and that we would put it on the curb and offer it to members of our local community via Facebook.

Surprisingly…

As I turned the sectional on its side to get it through the doorway I heard a strange rattle from inside the sectional. What was it? What could it be?

We peeled the back off the sectional and to our surprise inside the sectional were two large packages. My mind first went to suspicion. Was my friend into drugs? Could this be a big stack of money?

As we excitedly opened both packages we were amazed at what we saw: inside our sectional all this time, completely unused and still packaged up, was a perfect set of legs.

We excitedly put them on, and to this day the sectional we were going to throw out, the sectional we considered worthless, now sits front and center in our living room.

I often tell this story as I think it is a metaphor for how many enterprises are thinking about their SharePoint Environments.

They’ve been carrying them around for a while, using SharePoint in part, without ever really fully understanding the deep power lying latent within their SharePoint.  Some are even thinking of discarding SharePoint and buying into other different third party options that glisten on the surface but lack the deep potential and unshakable foundations of SharePoint.

In today’s workplace, work itself is changing, it is increasingly becoming knowledge based, it is increasing virtual and increasingly mobile. While most corporations would never think of getting rid of their physical office space, they are on the precipice of throwing away the one tool that could provide a central, highly connected, collaborative virtual hub for a mobile and productive workforce.

There is deep power within your SharePoint environment lying latent waiting to be discovered, you just have to go deep inside of it to find the legs that it is supposed to have. And that is the very essence behind what we do at Emgage, we have created products, Prime, Turbo andTurbo View that take your raw SharePoint environment and utterly transform it into a centralized work-hub that greatly enhances the communication and collaboration through-out your organization.

Don’t throw out the couch (your SharePoint), there is so much more waiting to be discovered inside.

Free E-Course - Improving your SharePoint Websites Search Rankings

The video below is a recording of the first session in a 3-part E-Course run by SharePoint Specialists Emgage.

Your SharePoint website should be deserving of an audience. The higher ranked your website is on search engines like Google (for appropriate Search terms) the more your organization will be viewed as a trusted authority.

SharePoint is difficult to optimize for search but it is NOT impossible. In this free, 3-part E-Course on building a SharePoint Site with great SEO Geoff Talbot takes us through the process step-by-step. 

Session 1 is recorded below. To take part in additional sessions visit here and sign up.

To watch more webinars from Emgage visit their Work Platform Webinar Center.

3 Keys to choosing an Enterprise Software

No one would replace their beat up old Prius with another old Prius if they could access the awesome efficiency of a brand new Tesla. It simply wouldn't make sense.

Yet too many organizations are looking to replace InfoPath with a tool that is exactly the same; a tool that requires hours of coding and IT support. Emgage, has developed the premiere InfoPath Replacement Turbo, a product that sits on top of SharePoint and allows Users to create complex business applications without writing a single line of code.

Watch as Harout from Emgage test drives Turbo in the webinar below.

3 Keys to creating Successful Enterprise Technology

When you are choosing any piece of enterprise technology for your company, there are 3 essential criteria that you should consider.

1. It should be as natural as possible.
2. It should result in a significant decrease in the amount of work required.
3. It should have a positive economic impact.

Step 1: As Natural as Possible

Successful enterprise technology should be trending towards making work as natural as possible. This means hiding all the technical elements, putting them behind a wall so to speak, and creating a user interface that is natural and user friendly. One of the primary problems with InfoPath in its current state is that it requires a lot of coding, it typically requires an IT Department to create a form on the Business User's behalf. As a piece of enterprise technology it is not natural to the user, it is not intuitive, it doesn't allow the User to solve their own problems.

So what?

 As a result then, the process from problem identification (the User says: I need a form to solve this problem) to problem solution (User has a form to solve a problem) is far to convoluted and not natural. The form request has to be submitted to the IT department, where there is often a bottleneck. In the IT department, a person who is unfamiliar with the problem then attempts to create the solution. Again, this takes a long time.

Step 2: A Significant Decrease in Work

A lot of knowledge work is repetitive, so the goal of enterprise technology should be to organize and automate repetitive actions so that the user can work faster and concentrate his or her energy on things that truly matter. When you think of the analogy of a marathon runner who takes 33,000 steps on average to complete a marathon, you can see that the technology, in this case the running shoe, needs to be as light as possible so the runners legs carry very little repetitive weight.

"If your enterprise technology is too heavy, to work intensive (re:InfoPath), then the knowledge worker will get worn out not only by their work but also by the technology that was designed to assist them, not hinder them."

Again, the goal of Turbo from Emgage is to carry the burden for the knowledge worker, providing them with actual solutions that reduce the load of repetitive actions.

Step 3: A Positive Economic Impact

Look at the example of the TESLA and ask: "Why has it been so successful?" Clearly there are several reasons, but one reason that stands out (clearly) is that it has a positive economic impact on a day to day basis for the user. Simply put, it is fully electric and so you do not have to fill up with gas.

When you are looking for an InfoPath Replacement, one of the questions you also need to ask therefore is, "what product will have a significant daily, positive economic impact on our bottom line?"

In particular with knowledge work and enterprise technology, you must ask, "what kind of technology will reduce the amount of human resource invested in providing a solution?" The fuel that knowledge work typically runs on is "human resource hours," so your goal in looking for the best InfoPath Replacement should be to significantly reduce human resource hours

Summary - Successful Enterprise Technology

The requirements for finding an InfoPath replacement clearly mirror the requirements for acquiring any piece of enterprise software. It should result in easier, more natural work that improves your bottom line.

Collaborative Technologies from Emgage

Technology that works is bought to you by Emgage Inc, the employee engagement specialists and Industry Leaders whose products Prime and Turbo, significantly solve big work problems.

"Collaborative Technologies built to empower the Knowledge Worker"

Why We Exist

We exist to make work more efficient, more productive and more rewarding. Our focus is based around developing collaborative technologies that empower the knowledge worker, helping them to solve real work problems. As consumers, we are all used to engaging with super-intuitive software products and tools from companies like Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook. And yet the moment we enter our office we are often confronted with business solutions that lack the same level of intuition and ease of use. Why is it so easy to update a consumer site or social media channel and yet so frustrating difficult to post a transaction to your accounting system? At Emgage. we're in the business of making Enterprise software simple and easy to use. Interestingly, the problem of poor business software stems from how others go about making such collaborative technologies. Ironically, while trying to create the best collaborative software possible, developers, stakeholders, management and end users are often segregated and don’t understand each other. At other times we get lazy and recycle what worked in the past without questioning if it fits our new needs and paradigms. By the time software is delivered we realize that our requirements have changed but the software is too brittle to flex with these changes. The result is an unintuitive and ineffective software that frustrates users and hurts business productivity.

“We believe it is your right to work with business software that does not frustrate and is delightful to use.”

Businesses shouldn't have to suffer from decreased employee productivity, simply because they have business applications that do not understand the knowledge workers' needs and how they work. The best collaborative technologies are able to change with you, adapting to solve new problems in creative ways. And this is our mission, to drastically improve how organizations create and use collaboration software. Our commitment to this purpose is expressed in our Business Software Bill of Rights as a promise to each and every one of our customer.

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Great Resources For Intranets

We've put together a number of great resources over the past 12-months to help you increase technology adoption within your organization.

1. Training Video - Increasing Intranet Adoption
2. SlideShare - How to build an Intranet that works
3. WhitePaper - Intranet Best Practices - How to create the best Intranets

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Great Resources For Websites

We've put together a number of great resources over the past 12-months to help you with your external facing website

1. Transform your SharePoint Website
2. WhitePaper - Optimizing Your SharePoint Website

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Great Resources For Business Apps

We're putting together resources that will help you create business applications and forms that allow your Users to create Apps without knowing any code.

1. The TESLA of all InfoPath Replacements

 

Part 2: Optimizing SharePoint Websites for the Search Engines

In today's blog post we are going to unpack some specific techniques required to optimize your SharePoint site. Read Part 1 right here.

Optimizing SharePoint Websites for the Search Engines

Search engine optimization can be broken down into two basic areas.

1. On-Page Factors - how you tell the search engines to file your content.
2. Off-Page Factors - what others are saying to the search engines in regards to your content.

SharePoint Website Optimization - On-Page Factors

SharePoint websites are known to be more difficult to optimize in general because of header codes and inflexible page structures etc. But you should not confuse more difficult with impossible. I like to explain on-page optimization with the following metaphor, scary though it is...

"Imagine losing your 4 year-old son or daughter in the worlds biggest shopping mall with over one billion people (there are over a billion websites in the world). Also imagine that you've been told that there is a giant camera, an eye in the sky, that can quickly pass through the crowd, moving through the people extremely quickly as it looks for your child. What kind of information are you going to program into the camera? What kind of information will help them find and identify your child? The more information you give them the more quickly they will be able to find your flesh and blood."

The following elements are extremely helpful when it comes to finding anyone:

1. Their Name: The Meta-Title of your Content
2. Their Address: The Url of your Content
3. An Accurate Description: The Meta-Description of your Content
4. Distinguishing Features: The Headings in your Content
5. Accurate Photos: Alt Tags on the Photos in your Content
6. Habits and Particular Idiosyncrasies: The words you use in your copy, particularly in the first and last paragraph.

"When you are optimizing your piece of content, you want to use your targeted keywords to label your piece of content so that the search engines can find it easily and quickly when others are looking for it."

To overcome the challenges of optimizing a piece or content on SharePoint, I recommend that you be more aggressive in how you use your keywords. For example:

• Use the Keyword at the very beginning of your Meta-Title and your Meta-Description.
• Create friendly URLs where the keyword is used in the very first part of the variable.
• Avoid keyword stuffing with Meta-Tags. If you use more than 3-5 tags your piece of content maybe down-graded by the search engines.
• Use variations of your keyword at least 5-times in your copy.
• Use at least 3 images and alt tag them with keyword variations.
• Use your keyword in at least twice in your  H1 or H2 headings and use this keyword at the beginning of your heading.

 

SharePoint Website Optimization - Off-Page Factors

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post "off-page factors" are what other websites (including social sites) are saying about your particular piece of content. It may pay to think of off-page factors from this perspective, when no one is talking about your piece of content (linking to it, referring others to it, sharing it on social media), search engines like Google tend to think of it as unimportant. Conversely, when everyone is talking about your web content (Large numbers of links and social shares) then the search engines see your piece of content as being important and perhaps even as an authority regarding your particular chosen keyword subject and they tend to rank you more highly.

"Again, back to our missing child metaphor at the mall metaphor. Organic search is a form of crowd sourcing in one way, the kind of search where everyone helps the person searching find the "child" that they looking for. Your child is going to be found by the search party much more quickly if members of the crowd are pointing towards where they last saw him or her."

 

The following elements are extremely helpful when it comes to off-page factors:

1. Street Gossip: Social Signals. People sharing your links on social media
2. Announcements by Authority Figures: Directory links and links from high quality blogs
3. General Help : Links from general blogs.
4. Size of your Team: If your website is large and many of your own pages and posts are linked together, then the search engines think of your site as more of an authority and they will rank you more highly.

So again to overcome the challenges of optimizing a piece or content on SharePoint, I recommend that you be more aggressive with building your off-page factors. Ways to do this include:

• Have an aggressive internal link building strategy, where every piece of content links to at least 2 other pieces of content on your site.
• Have an aggressive social sharing strategy that involves a community of likeminded businesses who share each others content on social media (Social Monkee offers this).
• Get your entire site listed in specific directories (like DMOZ).
• Get your content featured on high ranking blogs.
• Have an aggressive blog commenting and community building strategy.

Summary of SharePoint Website Optimization

It is so easy to focus so much on the disadvantages that you face when it comes to optimizing your SharePoint Website that you miss out on the advantages. One of the advantages of building a website with SharePoint is that you can create a very deep and complex site, with multi-level navigation and different site collections.

The immense size and complexities of these websites is actually a huge strength when it comes to ranking on search engines like Google. The large numbers of images, pages and posts that you create also offers you another competitive advantage; every optimized piece of content represents another doorway into your business, the more doors you have, the easier it will be for potential customers and clients to find you.

 So don't be discouraged, in part 3 of this series next week, I am going to put together a video to demonstrate practically how you can optimize your SharePoint website.

You deserve the "Tesla" of all InfoPath Replacements

Join us for this free webinar.

You deserve the TESLA of all InfoPath Replacements: 

Is SharePoint a Pig?

Perhaps SharePoint is a pig? But is being a pig such a bad thing? Watch this great video below from Emgage on SharePoint Website Design.