Back to Blog

What is VisualSP and How Does It Drive SharePoint User Adoption?

By Michael Blonder
Updated July 31, 2024
image_What is VisualSP and How Does It Drive SharePoint User Adoption

VisualSP is our flagship SaaS product that provides context sensitive help to users at their moment of need. The short paragraphs below explain what VisualSP is, how it works, and why it is a digital adoption tool that has become essential to modern digital workplaces.

What is VisualSP?

VisualSP is a plug-and-play add-on application that provides in-context interactive guidance and help using popup walkthroughs, videos and more to SharePoint and Office 365 users.

The digital adoption tool helps employees use SharePoint to the fullest and allows companies to attain the intended business results.

VisualSP removes almost all barriers to digital tools usage.

What are the problems that VisualSP solves?

SharePoint-enabled companies fail to help employees adopt SharePoint. And, in many cases, after deployment, the platform is left underused or ultimately abandoned.

Moreover, when user adoption fails, companies can't achieve the indispensable business benefits such as data security, team collaboration, and higher productivity.

Here is another problem, to help employees to start and continue using SharePoint, many companies rely on training programs, help sites, and help desks. These tools are important but they are not effective enough to help employees to use SharePoint to the extent that the intended business results can be achieved.

  • Training programs tend to be a waste of time; employees forget most of what they learn within 24 hours after class.
  • Help sites are tiresome. To find help, employees have to interrupt work, navigate to a help site, search for the help item or tutorial, and then, 5 minutes later, return back to work. Sometimes, they don't even find the help they need.
  • Help desks are frustrating. After requesting help from IT teams, employees have to wait, sometimes for hours, for replies before they can continue with the task at hand. Sometimes they don't get the right answer first time.

The frustrating tasks of trying to remember steps, waiting for replies, navigating websites, making searches, and clicking multiple times actually discourage employees to use SharePoint.

How VisualSP solves these problems?

To remove the need for employees to go through all those frustratingly disruptive steps of navigating, searching, and clicking, VisualSP embeds help items directly into the SharePoint environment. It makes the needed help items viewable instantly, in-context, right within the open SharePoint work-space window.

With the VisualSP tab always visible within the SharePoint interface, help is always just a click away. To find the right help, it only takes one click.

When working with SharePoint, whenever a user needs help, all they have to do is click on the VisualSP tab, view the help item, and continue with the task at hand, without having to leave the work-space window.

Help items come in different mediums: annotated screenshots, pdf tip-sheets, screen-capture videos, and step-by-step walkthroughs. Pop-up walkthroughs are used to provide guidance as well as to display warnings, reminders, and guidelines.

Companies can customize default help items and add their own help items to the system.

Built-in analytics allows administrators to see which help items have been viewed and by which users, giving a way to track progress.

With barriers to increasing usage removed, companies are able to achieve sustainable SharePoint user adoption.

Why is sustainable user adoption super important?

It is only after a workforce masters SharePoint that they are able to actually use the platform to achieve all the set business goals.

With successful and sustainable user adoption, thanks to VisualSP, companies are able to actually put SharePoint capabilities at work. Below are ten most common goals.

  1. Enforcing governance policies, regulatory compliance, best practices, and maintaining control over how documents are created, edited, shared, and used in an organization.
  2. Leading everyone to follow business workflows and computing processes for maximum productive output.
  3. Giving users the ability to learn exactly at the moment of completing a task. Learning-by-doing, which is the most effective way of learning, helps users to master SharePoint quickly, considerably shortening the typical learning curve.
  4. Easing, simplifying, and speeding up new hire on-boarding processes and improving new employee retention rate.
  5. Reducing the workload from the number of help request tickets that IT support teams receive. This allows them to free up time to focus on other important tasks of fixing things and building better solutions.
  6. Shortening the typical temporary drop in productivity that always happens during the SharePoint adoption process. This prevents frustration and the possibility that employees will fall back to their more familiar third-party tools.
  7. Tracking user learning activities and measuring progress. You can't improve what you don't measure.
  8. Delivering micro-training. This improves learner engagement and information retention by allowing users to learn SharePoint in bite-sized digestible chunks over a period of time. The approach reduces the overall training cost.
  9. Turning SharePoint into a super intuitive and user-friendly application. This keeps employees always ready for the next upgrade or migration and makes companies agile enough to ensure successful ongoing digital transformation.
  10. Driving deep-and-wide usage and attaining return on investment. The value that companies gain from SharePoint is directly proportional to the number of users and the depth of usage.

SharePoint has many other capabilities. By making the platform easier to use, VisualSP gives organizations the ability to produce intended business results.

Why is VisualSP a successful SaaS product?

Already being used by over 2 million users across 200 companies, VisualSP continues to steadily grow the user base.

Organizations that use VisualSP quickly realize how user training, help, and support are easily automated and how document management, collaboration, and productivity are set to rapidly improve over time. We actually benefit a lot from word-of-mouth.

My team of developers and marketers focus a lot of time on gathering feedback and prioritizing improvements that serve the highest number of users. We build VisualSP together with our users.

VisualSP is a one-click help and walkthroughs system for both SharePoint and Office 365.

Have a question?

To see VisualSP in action, request a free demo here.

If you have any question or need more details, please contact us here.

 

Fuel Employee Success

Boost employee productivity with VisualSP's easy-to-use platform for in-app guidance
Get Started Free
Table of Contents