For successful implementation of collaborative tools, don’t focus on the tools themselves but on the company culture and on driving behaviour change - according to Forum subscribers.

Meeting last week to assess each others’ approaches to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, subscribers concluded that whilst the tool must work (and work simply), they must be secondary to the culture.

All agreed that IT chiefs considering collaboration technologies must be aware that the company culture must be ready for the degree of openness and transparency they bring.

10 tips towards successful collaboration (with thanks to our presenter on the day):

1. Users won’t automatically use collaboration tools - as they do with Outlook. Encourage users to engage with collaborative tools.

2. Worry less about strictly defining processes. Once users start using collaborative tools they’ll come up with their own way of working with it.

3. Develop and engage a senior business steering team for knowledge management and collaboration initiatives. Link activities to business strategy and corporate goals in order to encourage engagement - be aware that stakeholders exist at many levels of the organisation.

4. Define and obtain top-level buy-in to an open security model. Make sure that business managers understand that web 2.0 means that anyone can contribute - and very often do.

5. Engage business champions to impact design and find ways to develop, share and use best practices and reusable templates. Try to avoid over-customizing and re-inventing.

6. Make it easy for users to find things. For example, make documents visible on the main page of a site, encourage use of alerts and standards for navigation and look and feel.

7. Ask business managers to articulate business goals as part of training sessions - business units should teach parts of the training themselves.

8. Re-engage with each business group after implementation for a ‘health check’ - the natural tendency for project teams is to ‘move on’.

9. SharePoint is “more like a buffet than an a la carte”. It’s hard to anticipate which of the available options will be most used - don’t impose too much IT control.

10. Treat SharePoint as an “automobile” (getting you someplace), not a “band-aid” (covering something up and eventually falling off).