Tag Archives: marketing

The Four C’s to Sell MOSS

You’ve been tasked with bringing some order to the chaos of your various organizations’ file shares, e-mail servers, and externally facing websites. After all the research and analysis you’ve done you’ve decided that MOSS 2007 is the optimal solution to solve the problem. The problem? Selling it to management. You can demo MOSS with all its fantastic features and Office integration, but your management needs some “bullet point” reasons why they should invest in MOSS.

In Essential SharePoint 2007* the authors lay out the “four C’s” of company portals that MOSS can satisfy. These can be used as a good starting point to sell them and bring MOSS into your organization.

Communication is a fantastic reason to bring MOSS into your organization’s processes. Many companies are plagued with disseminating important information both to internal and external individuals, and MOSS can aid in delivering timely, relevant, and accurate information to your target audience. Through the use of MOSS sites geared for news, announcement web parts, blogs, and audience targeting—MOSS can greatly help your organization accomplish this much-needed functionality.

Collaboration is the strong point of MOSS and also the easiest to sell. Your organization struggles from discerning which document is the most recent, and people in your organization realize that e-mailing around a document is not an effective way to collaborate. Here is a great time to talk about the workflow capabilities in MOSS. Demonstrate an approval workflow which engages the management instantly by showing them how the whole process can be automated, contained in one area, and management can see what’s holding up the workflow. Add onto this team sites with robust document management capability with an extensible security model, and you’re well on your way to convincing them.

Consolidation is probably the reason you were tasked to find a better solution than file shares. There is no way anymore to know where to get what and if it’s even accurate. With enterprise search you can ensure that your users can always find the document (with a good metadata structure/information architecture). You can also sell the Business Data Catalog (BDC) which can crawl those old file shares and bring them into the same search interface. You’ll also see eyebrows rise when you show them the business intelligence capabilities in MOSS such as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which will help your management make the best decision on the most up-to-date information.

Consistency is something that we all long for in our IT applications. Right now your public facing website, other marketing materials, and even standard company documentation can’t look the same for any length of time. With the use of master pages you can be sure that the interface changes you make will be reflected across your entire MOSS installation. Having problems keeping that PowerPoint template up to date? Creating a content type will ensure that your users will always have the latest version of the companies template.

These are four great selling points of MOSS to bring your management on board. When partnered with some simple demonstrations that will create a strong case for MOSS.

*Jamison, S., Cardarelli, M., & Hanley, S. (2007). Essential Sharepoint 2007. Reading: Addison-Wesley Professional.

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Business Site Design Cliches

I have seen many professional sites for businesses/organizations, and there are a couple of design cliches to avoid.

Stock Photos
So many companies think that by adding some pictures of two employees (that don’t work for the company) sitting at a computer smiling will somehow make people more interested. Well, it doesn’t, and the abuse of stock photography in business designs has gotten out of control.
Splash Pages
Well, this one is for any site, but professional sites fall prey to have some ‘cute’ splash page with an animation or vision explanation.
Writing for Microsoft Word and Not the Web
It’s amazing how many professional sites think they need a white paper on their front page. Put down MS Word for a second, and think about how people read on the web. If you need an example then write content more suited for PowerPoint then Word.
Lack of Unity in Marketing Materials
It seems like many companies hire completely different people to do different aspects of their marketing. Try and stick with on firm and design in designing all your marketing materials.
The Business Tagline Stinks
Using a business tagline and displaying it prominently is not a bad thing; unfortunately, most of them suck big time. Be succinct, yet full and descriptive (easier said then done right?).
Abusing DHTML
When I speak of DHTML abuse for this genre I’m speaking mostly of DHTML navigation. Most companies don’t think through their IA enough to where they can avoid drop-downs. Secondly, most of these implementations are also poor at best.
No Typographical Unity
We’ve all seen those professional documents where they seemed to want to put as many fonts as possible (and varying sizes) in the same document. Well, it’s time to learn serif and sans-serif and how they look together.

Are there any I missed?

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