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Debbie Irelands Top 10 tips for being more productive with SharePoint

by Mark Jones | Oct 04, 2011

Debbie Ireland carried out an awesome session yesterday, her tips are as follows :

Encourage Collaboration - Use SharePoint for wikis and discussions.
Organise you data - External Lists, Metadata, Views.
Display Key Information - Web Parts - use external web parts (for things like FB, Twitter, weather, etc).
Use Visualisation - Dashboards for high level, integrate with other systems, use Visio web parts to visualise.
Improve Processes - Use Workflow, Get rid of paper forms and use InfoPath. Use DocRead to get your users to acknowledge they have read a document (shameless plug) ;)
Control File Chaos - Reduce time, use metadata. use Content Types and use Office to allow users to work at the same time. use templates with your content types. Create custom Views for your content types. Associate workflows to content types. Use Content Types! Co-Author documents. Document Info Panels.
Use Familiar Tools - Use Outlook for task management, sync calendars and contacts. Use Discussion forums. One that really suprised me is the ability to show social contacts inside Outlook too. Awesome!
Bring in Social - Use Org Browser, Tags and Notes, bring what we love about Facebook to SharePoint. Get Blogs going.
Provide support and training - Self Help (FAQ's, wikis), Solutions (Continuous Improvement), Support. Use the Productivity Hub which is site collection of training material that can be installed on your portal. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=7122
Make Search simple - Use managed metadata & best bets.

Compliance using DocRead

DocRead for SharePoint can help you manage policy compliance by:

Targeting documents or policies at specific groups of users
Allowing a specific amount of time for users to confirm agreement
Sending email reminders when policy compliance is overdue
Users self-certify that they have read and fully understood the policy details
Securely storing records of confirmed policy acceptance
Monitoring the user acceptance of policies via a reporting suite
Providing detailed reading reports and statistics
Report drill through to show who has not accepted the policy
Automatically sending historic compliance tasks and policies to new users when they are added to a group
Bringing policy compliance requests immediately to users attention when they log on

DocRead is simple to install and configure. It seamlessly integrates with SharePoint and can be added to any existing SharePoint site.

To find out more, visit the DocRead product site.