SharePoint Tip of the Month

July 2010: Real Business Value of My Sites

When organizations consider whether or not to include SharePoint personal sites (My Sites) as part of their overall SharePoint deployment, some of the first things that come to mind are related to the personal perspective of social networking. Ideas tend to gravitate towards things like:

• It’s a place to store my favorite music and my vacation pictures
• I can have my own blog and talk about whatever I want
• It’s like Facebook, but for our corporate intranet

But the My Site is about more than just about sharing personal interests. There is real business value to be gleaned from the personal site features.

Consider some of the following scenarios:

• A division is working on a process improvement initiative. By searching for key terms related to the improvement effort, the division can identify others throughout the organization who have worked on the same or similar efforts. By locating others who have worked on similar projects, the division can eliminate unnecessary and costly duplication of effort.
• As a company hires new employees, they strongly prefer to hire from within rather than going to the outside. This benefits them by saving money on costly recruiting fees. It also helps employees ramp up on their new jobs faster, since they are already trained on more of the internal company systems and processes. With employees maintaining their personal sites with information such as skills, areas of expertise, and recent projects, hiring departments can more easily locate the right individuals from within.
• A project manager is initiating a new project. Using the people search, she can identify members of the project team. Additionally, she can look through recent documents and blogs by others with similar experiences in order to make use of their best practices.

When it comes to personal sites, companies often just turn them off or establish draconian policies to limit their use. Yet, just like other areas of SharePoint, personal sites provide an opportunity for real business value. When used appropriately, the My Sites feature of SharePoint can be another tool to help companies improve productivity, reduce costs, and achieve better results.

This month’s tip contributed By Ben Nadler, Abel Solutions Senior SharePoint Consultant.