WHO:
103 Microsoft® SharePoint® experts, power users, developers, and business users attending SPTechCon took the SharePoint Challenge to discover why 80 percent of business people with access to SharePoint still resort to ‘email ping pong’ for editing documents1.
Participants selected the SharePoint technologies and email client they either used at work or wanted to test; Mainsoft supplied the test bed, tasks, and timer.
WHAT:
It’s time consuming to access either SharePoint 2010 or Office SharePoint Server 2007, which is a new interface for most business users. People have to switch contexts, juggle multiple browser windows, and learn a whole new way of collaborating. It makes much more sense to collaborate using SharePoint directly from Microsoft Outlook®, where business users already “live at work.”
In the SharePoint Challenge, participants averaged 61 seconds to publish an email on SharePoint, and 50 seconds to upload a document on SharePoint and add the document link to an email.
Using harmon.ie for SharePoint, a free Outlook sidebar from Mainsoft, people completed the same tasks in 11 seconds, which wasfive to six times faster than using a browser.
WHY:
Despite the clear advantages of using SharePoint, most business users store documents on their local hard drives and share them as email attachments, resulting in wasted time trying to find the latest version of a document and merging feedback from various people.
According to Challenge participants, harmon.ie makes SharePoint easy to adopt by making SharePoint incredibly easy to access and use. Efficiency gains can add up quickly as business users across the enterprise access SharePoint several times a day from email.
“We’ve been a SharePoint shop for about three years and haven’t had adoption like we’d like…SharePoint integration with Outlook is a really smart idea. Everyone uses Outlook, it’s on every desktop. If you integrate that with SharePoint you’ll have much better adoption of the SharePoint platform.” - Jay Neighbors, director of software development, Valley Services, Inc.
“At our company, the preferred method of distributing documents is via email. Everyone sends attachments...so we’ve got eight different copies of documents all over the place…I decided to take the Challenge and lo and behold, I was 74% more efficient using harmon.ie. Take that efficiency gain and distribute it across the enterprise and it could lead to hundreds of thousands of hours at the end of the year.” - David Gonzales, director of IT business operations, global manufacturing company.
WHERE:
Press contact: Jenna Dobkin
Mainsoft Dir. of Media Relations
Ph: (415) 652-2185
jennad@mainsoft.com
Note: 1. Results according to a September 2010 uSamp survey of 317 US business email users, conducted on behalf of Mainsoft. Respondents work in sales, marketing, human resources and legal departments of companies with 100 or more employees.
