“While I worked with Peter at HP, he developed a distance learning course for the attorneys and staff to help them fully benefit from HP’s huge SharePoint investment. He established a broad base of site administration support among the Legal Admin Staff and this made a big difference in an environment with a cost-constrained IT department as well as severe travel restrictions.”
Stephanie Corey, Former Chief of Staff, HP Office of the General Counsel
While your IT group provides the basic infrastructure support for SharePoint, it may or may not have the resources to train or advise business users on how to adapt SharePoint to their needs. As a result, SharePoint may only be used as a passive, un-managed storage repository for random documents — a content graveyard for material that is never used or shared.
Peter Dorfman addressed this issue for the Office of the General Counsel at Hewlett Packard (a global legal department of over 1000 people) by training more than 100 administrative assistants, paralegals and attorneys to manage and administer SharePoint for project teams within the department. This relieved the lawyers of the need to rely on HP’s IT organization for support and guidance, establishing a trusted base of administrative support with responsibility specifically for the Legal function.
Training was provided using SharePoint itself as the delivery medium, in a distance learning format, with weekly lessons delivered to audiences in the US, Europe and Asia.