Hi Bill,

I'm not involved at all in the purchase and installation of SharePoint, I've been involved after that's done.

1. Setting up an evangelism site right in the beginning for all things SharePoint. It became the go to place for everything - electronic forms for site requests and changes; FAQ's, info, feedback, surveys, tracking helpdesk calls, training materials, etc.

2. Establishing a governance forum and getting business and IT to attend monthly. Making the governance plan a wiki instead of a Word document. And adding acceptance of the governance plan to the site request form.

3. Designing a sensible and ongoing training plan for business users and support structure for when they have problems.

Have to mention a fourth one though - communicating weekly with the user base. Built credibility and trust eventually; and patience if there were any problems on the platform.

V...

1) No more public drive file shares all files are shared from SharePoint much more structured and searchable

2) All of our video stock 4500+ is now delivered through SharePoint with the back end being Windows streaming media services, A big win for end user adoption.

3) A simple SharePoint WiKi for our knowledge base and FAQ’s for end users.

Three simple steps but great for user adoption

Lots to choose from but i would say:

1. The Business Process Management (BPM) features fo SharePoint (MOSS and 2010) have saved so much time compared to previously employed manual processes. A real (soft) ROI business benefit. Commonly used for HR solutions but used more and more for other applications.

2. Social networking in SharePoint 2010. New ECM features have allows social networks to communicate and share around documents and document lists by allowing tagging and 'I like' features. Not widespread yet - but I'm sure when organisations get over the 'fear' of opening up My Sites their users, this will be a really popular feature.

3. Enterprise Content Management features are much more comprehensive and usable due to the new ribbon tool bar in SharePoint 2010. We love the new document ID feature - so simple yet really really effective

Just my thoughts - interested to hear yours on mine!

Chris

Based on my consulting experience with SharePoint over the last 5 years, these are the three things I see contributing to successful SharePoint projects:
1) Learn
When it comes to success in any project, it's all about experience. Try it out. Look for things that are familiar, try to understand the things that aren't familiar.
2) Test
SharePoint makes web content creation easy. So create a test site, a test list, a test page, a test workflow, a test farm. Whatever it is you think you need, don't be afraid to try it out first.
3) Plan
Want an intranet portal? Think about how you'll organize it, who'll contribute and how you'll customize it. Implement it, try it out, then start a new round. A little planning at each iteration goes a long way
-Tom