One sentence summary

YOIN is our online knowledge sharing application based on Sharepoint 2007. We use YOIN as a document management system and collaboration platform.

Company information

YNNO is a Dutch management consulting firm on new ways of working. We operate at the intersection of physical workspace, technology, business processes. YNNO was founded in 2001 as Twynstra Workinnovation and changed to YNNO in 2006 at our fifth anniversary. We serve our clients mostly in the public domain, healthcare and financial services. YNNO is affiliated to Twynstra Gudde, the largest independent management consulting firm in The Netherlands. Currently YNNO employs 35 people. Our main external knowledge blog is YNNO Research

Case description

We needed a replacement for our Document Management System (EMC Documentum) and needed an online space for knowledge sharing. We needed an environment that was easy accessible from multiple locations over the internet. We did not have an intranet and wanted one environment for all our knowledge sharing needs. It had to have more capabilities than DM. We wanted to have a platform that had enterprise 2.0 features like wiki's and blogs.

We use YOIN for all our projectwork and it is a fundamental part of our quality system. We are a ISO 9001 certified company so we needed this to be reliable. The impact of YOIN is great but because we use it every day. We want to extend our platform with more functions and data during the coming period.

Enterprise 2.0 solution

We chose sharepoint for its platform capabilities, integration with office platform and gaining marketshare of sharepoint. Our clients are thinking about sharepoint and we want to be able to share our insights. At the start we did not want to have a empty environment but we wanted to migrate our exisiting documents from Documentum before we started using YOIN. To enable adoptation we had a little bit of configuration upfront. We wanted to let it grow freeformat. People started to ask for community sites to share knowledge from day one!

We already used sharepoint 2003, meaning people were familiar with the sharepoint interface. Users got a small one hour introduction to find their way around YOIN. In YOIN we did not make metadata manditory to take down barriers for usage, people now can use tags! Tags are being used by almost everyone, no questions asked!

Results / Benefits

• Usage and content is up bigtime, because of the easy way to connect to YOIN
• People use search much more and are retrieving more content
• Mailtraffic is going down because people are using YOIN to share documents and news

We will share more results and benefits later on!

Hurdles / Challenges

• Not everybody is using it at the same frequency, we are hoping the network effect will take place and force people to use it more and more!
• We still allow email to everyone, but we will stop this later to get all news on YOIN. People can use RSS to get their information.
• Mysites are not rolled out yet to get the social side going, but we will do this this month!

Lessons learned

• Begin small with your current content and let it grow
• Personal attention to end users is a great adoption stimulator
• Bring down barriers to enable sharing and collaborating

We will add more later

Screenshots

Information about the case

Authors

Maarten Bahlman (email maarten.bahlman at ynno.com or http://www.linkedin.com/in/maartenbahlman)

Robbert Homburg (email robbert.homburg at ynno.com or http://www.linkedin.com/in/robberthomburg)

Disclosures

We are consultants at YNNO and endusers of YOIN. Maarten is projectmanager YOIN and Robbert is Enterprise 2.0 evangelist at YNNO. We have no relationships to any vendor mentioned in this casestudy.

Comments / questions from readers

feel free!