Cleverness comes pretty easy to marketing folks. If we weren't clever, we'd have a harder time staying employed, but there are times when it can go to far. Here's an example. For the last six months, I've been maintaining a portal on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) for the sales team at NewsGator. I populate it with annoucements, calendars, links, blogs, and documents that team should find useful. It also serves as a great demo site for our enterprise server product since there is a lot of interest from customers and prospects in trying to drive greater usage and value out of their portals. I don't put anything sensitive in it (unless you started actually opening the documents and mucking around, so it seems like a win/win all around.
Now, one of our rock star developers, Daniel Larson, who is a SharePoint MVP (there are only something like 40 in the US, so he really knows his stuff), goes and develops a much cooler (and useful) version of the technology. I add it to the portal and take full advantage of it. Sounds good right? Not so much
The problem arose because he creasted this feature that lets you click on a list, like a calendar and make the items show up in this reading pane in a way you can tag it, mark it as read etc; So I have that there. But this kind of forced me to change the layout of the page around and remove some things in an effort to keep it manageable. So now, I get it from the sales guys because it looks different to them and also from some of the developers because it looks redundant.
So net/net, I end up sort of pleasing no one. I'm going to train the sales team so they understand it and I'll probably ignore the developers, so it will work out fine in the end. But, still not a great problem to have.
Technorati Tags: Internal Communications, Enterprise 2.0
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