SharePoint Business Users: What is your biggest pain-point when trying to manage information?

Here's a list of challenges that I've come across when managing collaboration portals:

1. Information Overload - Many times, users will just dump everything into SharePoint. Usually that's what we want our users to do, but without any guidance or best practices being enforced, information can quickly get out of hand. Documents and spreadsheets are uploaded without regard to business context. You'll start having duplicate files, and out-dated or stale information. Growth is awesome, except when it's managed improperly. Make sure you've thought about how the collaboration portal will grow with the business.

2. "Findability" - With all the information silos found in SharePoint, I find that users depend on search in order to do their job. When search isn't working, or doesn't return reliable results, trust in the system is broken and information could very well be lost amidst a sea of other content. That's why it's very important to plan out taxonomy and metadata rules and guidelines, and train the users early and often on how to tag their content. It's easier to get users to tag content when you spell out for them the added benefits of doing so.

3. Lack of knowledge - In my experience, users just don't' know enough about the technology. Some users don't know they can use the Explorer View of a document library to mass upload files. Other users don't know that they can set alerts on a list to notify them of changes in content. This all stems from a lack of training, which I think many business rank as low priority. However, I believe it's crucial for enabling your users to succeed and avoid such headaches.

Michael Donahoo
http://donahoo-development.com