How To Build And Maintain An Effective Online Compliance Training Program

One of the hottest trends in the digital age across industries is the growing complexity of regulation. Whether the topic is online privacy, harassment, record retention, sanctions compliance, anti-trust, anti-money-laundering, or a host of other areas – organizations must continually revise policies and educate their users to understand the relevant laws and policies so they can make the right day to day business decisions.

Microsoft announced some changes to self-service group and site creation in Office 365 a little while ago that has some interesting governance implications - especially if you're the tenant admin. The focus of these changes seems to be making self-service site creation more attractive for organizations who may have been wary of allowing it previously.

I've been working with VisualSP a lot lately, now that my focus is on user adoption. One of my colleagues there recently collected a set of survey data about what organizations see as their biggest challenge. The clear winner was user adoption, and the next 4 were all topics related to that. I find this interesting, because it shows a growing awareness of the importance of user adoption.

During the keynote at #SPC18 last week, the MS team re-assured the attendees that SharePoint is seen as a 'foundational service' for Office 365, along with OneDrive and Exchange. Microsoft has seen a 200% growth in SharePoint storage used in O365. Out of all active SharePoint seats – 70% of them are for SharePoint Online (as opposed to on-prem). Their strategy has 4 pillars that are defining the dev work they are doing day in and day out. Here's a summary of those pillars and what features we're seeing happen for each of them.

Whew... what a busy couple of weeks. The SharePoint NA conference on May 21-23 was packed with interesting sessions and opportunities to connect. I'm just now getting past the obligatory catch-up cycle that follows one of these events, and I'm starting to look back through my notes. I thought I'd share a few highlights over the next few days to help me process the things I want to remember and perhaps help someone else who didn't get to go. Today, I'm looking back at the keynote from Bill Baer, Jeff Teper, Seth Patton, and a cast of 1,000's on day 1.

The MS team identified and highlighted six trends that are defining the digital workplace, and I thought some of them were helpful in analyzing our own personal and organizational goals from a big-picture / strategic perspective. For now, I'll let you read everyone else's posts about the numerous announcements made there, and I'll focus on the strategic trends the MS team presented, as well as my own thought processes that wandered off from there...

This is the fifth post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 Caveman Tenets of user adoption that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 will grow organically. This article is a deeper dive on the fourth and final tenet – Help that is actually helpful. The core idea here is to make changes to your support and training models to increase your users’ comfortable level. Doing this requires a strategic shift, but it is probably the most powerful of all 4 of the caveman tenets. All by itself, it can make or break your adoption efforts.

This is the fourth post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 Caveman Tenets of user adoption that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 will grow organically. This article is a deeper dive on the third tenet – Simple Solutions. The core idea here is to solve common pain points with something that is satisfyingly simple. Don't design the proverbial solar-powered rocket launcher with GPS and cup-holders when all the users really needed was a club. Clubs are easy to replicate. They cost little to maintain. They have a short learning curve. They are satisfying to use. When you've got a new club - everything looks like a nail.

This is the third post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 tenets that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 can grow. This article is a deeper dive on the second of those tenets. Measuring adoption is an area where a lot of times we overthink things. We track the wrong things (like page hits and unique visitors for a site) and build solutions that are way more complicated than we needed in order to tell our adoption story.

This is the second post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 tenets that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 can grow. This article is a deeper dive on the first tenet – Simple Governance Policies.

I’ve been doing some speaking lately on the topic of user adoption. It’s an important subject, not least of which because so many times we, as an industry, get it wrong. We either ignore it (build it and they will come) or treat it like a project (training classes will be complete by August 1). In my experience, neither of those things work. Success is not rocket science, though. There are many books and posts out there that discuss adoption from more conceptual perspectives related to vision, communications, and human behavioral changes. Those discussions are certainly valid, but I plan to tackle the topic from a more functional perspective and discuss strategies and activities as they apply to the team behind the platform.