Tips to lure End Users to your SharePoint Portal

A lot of companies are already in possession of SharePoint, but I noticed that not every portal is equally popular. There are intranet / extranet solution who are barely used. It's a pity that they not take care of such a powerful product.

Below a few tips to bring life in your SharePoint Portal:

• Optimize the information architecture of your site.
• Analyze the needs of the users: It is important to have a general idea of the different types of users who will be accessing the portal.
• One of the nice things about SharePoint is that it's relatively intuitive; you don't have to do a lot of training. In my opinion, this statement is not completely true. SharePoint is only partly intuitive if you are quite familiar with computers. SharePoint training for End Users is a must - Only then they will see the usefulness of SharePoint.
• Don't ignore the look & feel. End users like to work in a neat environment.
• Make your SharePoint implementation more user-friendly.
• Make use of Web 2.0 elements like videos, wikis, RSS Feeds, weblogs, podcasts, ...
• Add some cool features like quiz , document rating, polling webpart, ...
• Make use of My Sites. It's always fun to play "Rate the picture" with some collegues.
• Make sure the search engine is easy to use (cfr. Google). You can also extend the OOTB search functionality with faceted search, federated search or others.
• Make use of statistic tools to monitor the usage of the portal (Site Usage Report, CardioLog, ...)