Sustainable SharePoint and Office 365 adoption is not easy to achieve. Most companies struggle to help employees use the platforms sufficiently enough to produce the desired business results.

When adoption stagnates or fails, productivity drops, frustration takes over, business processes fragment, and return on investment shrinks. Helping users to fully embrace the platforms is worth the effort.

With SharePoint and Office 365, employees’ productivity heavily depends on the magnitude of usage and the total number of users. Extensive usage enables all the many other major business benefits that the platforms provide.

To drive adoption, there are a number of steps that companies usually take, concurrently or sequentially. Primarily, the steps would mostly include training programs.

Training programs are helpful. However, their effectiveness is very limited, especially when it comes to helping users make heavy use of the platforms. The paragraphs below explain the reasons and outline why using VisualSP is the much more effective strategy.

Why training programs are not effective

Besides being prohibitively expensive, training programs rarely produce sustainable results. In just a couple days, users typically forget what they learn from training sessions. Consequently, when the time comes to complete a task, frustration would take over and a support ticket created.

Another common pitfall of training programs is the tendency to try to teach end-users all the features available in an application. The quest to turn employees into SharePoint and Office 365 experts is simply counter-productive. Users just want to know how to get the job done; they are seldom interested in knowing all the capabilities of a tool.

In many cases, although training sessions may help to introduce end-users to key concepts of an application, the effort tends to be futile.

It’s a mistake to rely on help documentation.

When stuck, users would search native help sites or the web for help tutorials. In addition to being exceedingly time consuming, many times, the effort doesn’t lead to consistent solutions. Imagine how productivity suffers when users have to browse the web every time a task has to be completed! This inconvenience alone is enough to discourage users during the adoption phase.

Also, the IT support team can be of help only to an extent. When help can't be found online, users are obliged to request help from the IT support team. The problem is that help from the IT department is rarely instant and may not always be useful the first time. Having all employees rely on the support team to provide help definitely puts an unnecessarily heavy burden on the team, a team that should be focused on solving break-fix problems instead of educating end-users.

To help your employees learn and adopt SharePoint and Office 365 successfully and sustainably, relying on training programs will not work; there is a much better way: contextual self-help.

Why using the VisualSP Help System is much more effective

To ensure that your employees use SharePoint and Office 365 to the fullest, give them access to the VisualSP Help System.

The reason why VisualSP Help works better is simple: it allows users to complete tasks intuitively.

The VisualSP Help System is a plug and play add-on application that follows a user with context-sensitive tutorials that show up at the moment the user is about to complete a task. For example, anytime you want to upload a document, the right tutorial shows up to guide you through the steps.

The out-of-the-box tutorials include tip-sheets, annotated screenshots, screen-capture videos, and step-by-step walk-thru bubbles. You can even create your own custom tutorials and help items in the system to satisfy your specific business needs.

This in-context, just-in-time solution efficiently provides users access to self-help, making SharePoint, Office 365, and all your business workflows completely user-friendly and intuitive.

When the learning curve is no longer a barrier, the usage of the platforms can only increase over time. This enables optimal productivity along with the many other business benefits needed in your company, including: reduction of the burden on your IT support team, facilitation of employee on-boarding, and return on your technological investment.

Over 2,000,000 users across 200 companies are already using the VisualSP Help System to ensure successful and sustainable SharePoint and Office 365 adoption. Schedule your demo today!

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