How do you measure SharePoint Success?

Back in March, we kicked off phase 1 of the ‘Measuring Collaboration Success’ initiative (#MeasureCollabSuccess) by looking at how we, as a community, define “success” in collaboration, and, specifically, with SharePoint and Office 365. Far too many organizations claim to have deployed the platform successfully, only to struggle with unused licenses and an increasingly complex series of unsupported 3rd party tools and web solutions. So we asked people to help us define success, which we captured within the results of our first survey. You can download the resulting whitepaper here.

During this second phase, we look specifically at the measurements of collaboration success. Please take the survey and share your experiences.

The purpose of this initiative is threefold: to understand how the community defines collaboration success (captured in our first survey results), how they measure that success (the current survey), and then how they deploy in a way that ensures the defined goal is met and that the proper measurements are in place (survey coming in late August).

Collaboration is a fairly broad topic that can encompass everything from email to instant messaging to real-time video communication. While we use a variety of technologies, the goals are fairly consistent across organizations: to share information, improve communication, and support corporate culture. We may approach collaboration in different ways, but we all consistently fail at defining "success." And if it is not well defined, how can we measure it and claim success?

As I state in several places, the goal of this initiative is not about lead-generation for my company or any of the other participating companies. All responses are anonymous., If you’d like to receive the raw results of the survey, we do capture your email. However, we will not retain your email for sales or marketing purposes, and will delete the list after sending out the results when the survey closes in 6 to 8 weeks.

Our intent is to keep this initiative vendor-neutral and independent, learning from the data and sharing our perspectives with the community.

Panelists include:

• John White (@diverdown1964), SharePoint MVP and CTO at UnlimitedViz Inc.
• Sue Hanley (@susanhanley), Office Servers and Services MVP and President of Susan Hanley LLC
• Mark Kashman (@mkashman), Senior Product Manager at Microsoft
• Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin), Office 365 MVP and Evangelist at ShareGate
• Marc Anderson (@sympmarc), SharePoint MVP and Co-founder, President of Sympraxis Consulting
• Eric Overfield (@ericoverfield), Office Servers and Services MVP and Founder of PixelMill
• Gregory Frick (@gregfrick), SharePoint Architect at University of Washington Medical School and President of the Puget Sound SharePoint User Group (PSSPUG.org)
• Tal Ben-David (@cardiolog), Partner and Business Development Manager at Intlock – CardioLog Analytics
• Jason Himmelstein (@sharepointlhorn), SharePoint MVP and Office 365 Advisory Services Manager at Rackspace
• Adam Levithan (@collabadam), Senior Product Manager at Metalogix
• Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge), Office Server and Services MVP, CTO of 2toLead
• Andrew Simmonds (@innovationbrokr), Consulting Director at Clustre
• Vlad Catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu), SharePoint MVP and Founder of SharePoint-Community.net
• Jeff Fried (@jefffried), CTO and VP of Engineering at BA Insight
• Eric Riz (@rizinsights), SharePoint MVP and CEO of Empty Cubicle
• Michelle Caldwell (@shellecaldwell), SharePoint MVP and North American Digital Workplace Transformation Lead at Avanade
• Jeff Willinger (@jwillie), Director of Collaboration and Social Business at Rightpoint
• Michal Pisarek (@michalpisarek), SharePoint MVP and Founder at Dynamic Owl & Bonzai Intranet
• Jared Shockley (@jshoq), Senior Systems Engineer with SESIT at Microsoft
• Tamara Bredemus (@tamarabred), Director of Collaborative Services at City of Minneapolis
• Curtis Hughes (@c5curtis), Partner at C5Insight

You can follow the entire panel using the #MeasureCollabSuccess Twitter list.

Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to take this survey. For the comprehensive results of all three surveys, be sure to see my sessions at Ignite in Atlanta in September! See you there!