Here are a few tips to help your workforce adapt and accept portals as collaborative, successful ways of working.

1.        Plan ahead – The intended total user base, volume of files, and concurrent users greatly impact the design of the farm, software development for SharePoint, and design of related items such as forms.  These considerations are important to elements such as the memory footprint a concurrently utilized application or process generates.

2.       Know your security – Having a set of security and permissions planned out and how that will divide access to your environment can help you best plan where certain content fits in your environment.  To help, create a color-coded Visio diagram indicating where each major set of permissions applies to help see where you can place content and sites with the minimal number of changes to existing permissions and design.  This will save you time and a *lot* of headaches down the road.

3.       Understand Authentication – Whether you’re designing a corporate intranet or a SharePoint-based web face for your company, knowing how to set up your authentication, what is appropriate for your volume of visitors, and what will have the least impact on performance are all key.  Consider where the most of the content will be served to and build your plan around anticipating the volume this will generate and the efficiency needs therein.

4.       Keep an eye on the news – The latest information from the web can often alert you to changes and updates to SharePoint, potentially even alerting you to an encroaching problem your users haven’t noticed yet and which you can resolve without an interruption to service!

5.       Expertise – SharePoint covers such a wide variety of skills and technologies that it may not always be possible or feasible to maintain a subject matter expert in everything from XML and Server Operating Systems to  Active Directory and .NET development.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help!  Local user groups are a fantastic source of subject matter experts who are usually more than happy to help you understand an issue or explain a fix for a known issue.