The document solutions that we are talking about are ones that streamline or automate the generation of emails in Outlook and documents in Microsoft Office (specifically Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and also solutions that manage such electronic documents and emails. All too often these new document solutions, especially ones that utilise Microsoft SharePoint, fail to be adopted by their intended users.

What are the characteristics of document solutions that lead to good levels of user adoption? Do the document solutions in your organization have these characteristics? In this article we take a look at some document solutions for which user adoption has been successful and identify the key elements that made it work. These solutions all employ the MacroView Document Management Framework (DMF) to extend the native document management capabilities of SharePoint.

Better Office integration

The great bulk of organizations have never invested in a traditional DM system, but they are looking to step up from using Outlook folders to store emails and file shares to store other type of documents.  With its in-built document management capabilities, Microsoft SharePoint appeals as a cost-effective way to make that next step.  In many cases the cost effectiveness is increased because the organization already owns SharePoint licenses. However there are also many reports of how the attempted move to SharePoint for managing documents and emails was not successful – typically because users found the new SharePoint approach non-intuitive, inconvenient and generally quite non-user-friendly.

Excelerate Energy L.P. is an organisation where the move to SharePoint as the new way of managing documents and emails has been a real success in terms of user adoption.

Excelerate is the pioneer and market leader in innovative floating LNG solutions. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Excelerate has a presence in Buenos Aires, London, Rio de Janeiro, and Singapore. Operating in a regulated industry, Excelerate had a strong need to improve the way it was managing both documents and emails.

Charlie Price, Excelerate IT Manager, explains: “Based on our research we were well aware that the user experience provided by SharePoint out of the box was not good – users cannot even drag and drop to save emails the way they can in Outlook itself.  We found a bunch of add-ons that would let you drag and drop and generally improve the experience of using SharePoint from Outlook. But in the end we went with MacroView DMF because it also enhances the experience for users working in Word, Excel and PowerPoint and in Windows as well.”

User adoption at Excelerate has been excellent.  Feedback from users is that it is important to be able to interact easily with the SharePoint document store while you continue to work in familiar Office applications and also that the interaction experience is consistent across those applications. Excelerate users particularly like the way MacroView DMF lets them search for documents in SharePoint based on their content and/or metadata, without needing to leave their Office application and jump out to the web browser. They also like using the MacroView DMF Explorer application in Windows, which provides the SharePoint alternative to using Windows Explorer for file shares.

Minimising Profiling Fatigue

One way to gain an understanding of what makes users adopt a new document solution is to ask them what they dislike about the previous solution. When we ask users of document management solutions, an answer that comes back every time is the pain of profiling, i.e. of capturing metadata for documents as they are saved and updated.

As they implemented a new SharePoint-based document management solution, US employers association the Mountain States Employers Council took an interesting approach to this issue of profiling fatigue. They knew that they needed to capture metadata in order to enable more flexible searching and generally better management of their documents. So they decided to make the effort of profiling as productive as possible.

MSEC is a case-based business. As each document is saved, the user needs to select the Customer Case to which the document pertains. Those Customer Cases are managed in a line-of-business system, which also handles billing. Each year MSEC processes a large number of Customer Cases, so frequently the document being saved is the first one for a new Customer Case.

As a user saves a document, the profiling dialog displays in order to enable the capture of metadata. The dialog includes a control that allows the user to pick the relevant Customer Case. MSEC had this profiling dialog customized so that if the required Customer Case did not already exist in the LOB system, the user could add it as a new record in the LOB system without leaving the profiling dialog.

Feedback from MSEC users was very positive. Thanks to the new profiling dialog they no longer needed to suspend the saving of a document, go into the LOB system to add a new Customer Case, then restart the save and pick the newly added Customer Case. Instead the new Customer Case could be created and selected as part of profiling the first document for that Customer Case – without any wasted keystrokes.

The MSEC example highlights how by using innovative design, the profiling dialog in a document management solution can be an asset rather than a liability in relation to user adoption.

Fixing the Annoying Little Things

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference…little things like automatically removing illegal characters from file names, rather than displaying an error message to the user who is attempting to save an attachment to a document management solution.

Third Point Re is a successful re-insurance company operating in Bermuda, with a worldwide customer base.  For compliance reasons it is essential that all documents and emails relating to re-insurance policies and claims be retained and managed.

Third Point Re had opted to use document management solution that was based on Microsoft SharePoint, with the MacroView DMF software providing the ‘front-end’ user interface.  Third Point liked the way MacroView DMF let them drag and drop to save emails and attachments to SharePoint, especially how the attributes of an email (e.g. To, From, Subject, etc.) were automatically recorded as metadata, without any prompting of the user.

However there was one aspect of using SharePoint that Third Point Re users found annoying – which was the way SharePoint rejected file names that contained a range of illegal characters – such as tilde (~), number sign (#), percent (%), ampersand (&), colon (:), slash (/), etc.

While illegal in SharePoint file names, these characters occurred frequently in the names of attachments that Third Point Re was receiving and wanting to store and manage in SharePoint.

Third Point Re commissioned MacroView to customise the MacroView DMF add-on in Outlook so that as the user saved an email attachment, any illegal characters were removed automatically.

In addition, the original unstripped file name was recorded automatically in an additional metadata column in SharePoint. Subsequently, when the document was retrieved from SharePoint and inserted as an attachment in a new outgoing email, the original file name was re-instated.

The external party receiving the attachment is unaware that the file name had been stripped of its illegal characters as part of Third Point Re saving it to SharePoint.

This relatively small customization led to a real improvement in user satisfaction levels.  A frequent task was made less awkward and time consuming, while at the same time ensuring that ‘no-surprises’ service was provided to external parties.

Making it Easy to Re-use Standard, Approved Content

Something that local government areas around the world have in common is that they generate large numbers of documents. Warringah Shire Council which administers a local government area centred on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia is no exception. As part of moving to a new version to Microsoft Office, Warringah identified some 160 Word templates that needed to be upgraded. Careful analysis revealed that there were really only four base templates, with many variations in content.

Rather than upgrade all 160 templates, Warringah opted to use a product called MacroView ClauseBank, which makes it easy for users to find and retrieve standard, approved text and graphics content and have that content inserted in the Word document that they are working on.  Available content items are arranged into a tree structure that the user can browse. The user can also search for content items that contain particular words and phrases. ClauseBank displays fully formatted previews so that the user can confirm that they have found the correct content item. Selected content items are inserted into the user’s document at the current cursor position, with all styles and formatting maintained. Content items can also be retrieved into PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.

Behind the scenes, ClauseBank content items are stored in a SharePoint site. Each content item (also known as a clause) is a mini-document. Saving a new content item is a matter of saving a new document to a SharePoint library. The loading of a new clause document is made even easier by the way ClauseBank lets users right-click selected content in a Word document and choose Create New Clause. The ClauseBank solution led to improved user adoption of Warringah’s new document generation solution. It is a good example of how combining Microsoft SharePoint with Microsoft Office can pay real dividends.

Noel Williams is co-Founder and Chief Executive of MacroView Business Technology. MacroView specialises in document generation and management solutions based on SharePoint and Office. Contact solutions@macroview.com.au for more information