User experience has come a long way since the 1990’s.
From static pages that defined the 90’s to the interactive dynamic content dished out by today’s JavaScript developers, the web experience has evolved to become crisper and smarter. However, the user experience of the enterprise products have not kept pace with the seamless experience that products of the consumer world deliver. One big reason is that products are evaluated based on number of features and people mistakenly believe that bundled enterprise products with bulky features are better, despite the fact that most of the features are not used. Therefore, for enterprise product companies, creating an engaging user experience takes a back seat over new feature addition.
Enterprises love SharePoint. It is estimated that over 75% of the Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint. Microsoft says that SharePoint is their fastest growing product. From Enterprise Content Management to Corporate Intranets, SharePoint can be a platform to create pretty much anything for your organization, given its collaboration capability, customizability and easy-to-configure workflows. After being bundled with Office 365 subscription, SharePoint has also become popular among small to mid-level businesses. However, despite its large market share in the content and collaboration market, SharePoint has some major drawbacks. The primary complaints we often hear are that it lacks usability and control.
According to Protiviti’s 2014 IT Priorities Survey, nearly half of all organizations rely on IT to deploy, configure and launch SharePoint, as well as train business users. SharePoint isn’t an intuitive application as other consumer-based applications dealt with outside work. Enhancing a system built on SharePoint also takes time as it involves coordination between various internal and external teams. Therefore, while SharePoint is well entrenched among companies’ workflows, it is often a cumbersome way to work, and this makes the ROI on SharePoint unattractive. Another related issue is that SharePoint systems usually don’t give the user a good experience. How many times have we heard the phrase “Don’t make it look SharePointish”?
The future will belong to organizations who can unbundle and componentize their SharePoint sites. The organization will install SharePoint add-ins that solve specific problems. For instance, if you want an easy way to manage your SharePoint security needs, check the office store for add-ins that make maintaining SharePoint security simple. If you want an employee directory for your intranet, look up the office store. As these add-ins don’t require SharePoint resources and need minimal configurations, they result in a drastic reduction in deployment of resources and costs. The costs are further reduced because organizations won’t need a development team, once these add-ins are purchased. Extending the same concept to the intranet, instead of building a heavy intranet, loaded with features you might never use, pick and pay for only those SharePoint web-parts that you need. Thus not only making your site look elegant, “not-SharePointish” but also user engaging, rich and welcoming.
This Componentizing approach for building Enterprise Solutions will enable enterprises to gain effectiveness and reduce development dependencies. At the same time, it will increase speed-to-market. Moreover, allow the enterprise to respond to agile requirements quickly and at the same time be economically viable.
