SharePoint Knowledge Management: 9 Signs You have Outgrown It

In today’s fast-paced digital world, managing knowledge efficiently is crucial for business success. SharePoint, once a leading platform for enterprise collaboration and knowledge management, has served many organizations well. However, as technology and business needs evolve, it’s important to recognize when a platform may no longer meet your requirements. This white paper, brought to you by eGain, the leading AI Knowledge platform, identifies nine signs that your organization may have outgrown SharePoint and explores how advanced solutions like eGain could provide the capabilities you need to stay ahead in the knowledge management arena.

One of the most noticeable signs of outgrowing SharePoint is the increasing fragmentation of information across various sites and libraries. SharePoint’s structure, while initially robust, can lead to siloed information that becomes hard to manage and navigate. As your organization grows, so do the number of teams and projects, which can lead to a complex web of repositories that are difficult to integrate. As the number of SharePoint silos grow, your business struggles with increased content maintenance workload and delivers incorrect and inconsistent answers to users. See figure below.

eGain’s AI Knowledge system centralizes information in a single, accessible repository with a modern content architecture and configurable taxonomy. Our intelligent search and knowledge graph capabilities ensure that all relevant information is connected and easily retrievable, eliminating the challenges of fragmented data. With our solution, businesses can improve knowledge author productivity by 100% or more.

SharePoint’s search functionality can become inadequate as your knowledge base expands. Users often experience difficulties finding relevant documents and information quickly, leading to decreased productivity and frustration. Keyword search of pools of content across multiple SharePoint silos is no longer adequate for users to find trusted answers.

eGain offers advanced search features powered by artificial intelligence that operates on a centralized repository of taxonomized content. Our platform’s semantic search capabilities understand the context and intent behind queries, delivering more accurate and relevant results, even in vast knowledge repositories. For a large utility client, we delivered 6X reduction in wrong answers (getting up to 97% search accuracy) when compared to SharePoint search.

An intuitive and user-friendly interface is essential for effective knowledge management. SharePoint’s user experience can feel dated and cumbersome (Windows file search feel), making it challenging for employees to navigate and utilize the platform efficiently.

eGain provides a modern, intuitive interface designed to enhance user experience. Our platform’s clean design and configurable features ensure that users can find and use knowledge easily. We also offer embeddable widgets that can be plugged into the flow of work, driving knowledge adoption and business impact. Our clients report significant improvement in user adoption based on an experience that is easy, assuring, and valuable. One of our clients reported 60% improvement in knowledge adoption when compared to SharePoint.

As organizations grow, the need for insightful analytics becomes critical. SharePoint’s built-in analytics tools may fall short when it comes to providing deep insights into knowledge usage, content performance, and user engagement. As a result, knowledge managers get no user feedback nor do they have any insight into what content is valuable and where the knowledge gaps are.

eGain excels in delivering advanced analytics and reporting capabilities. Our platform’s AI-driven analytics provide actionable insights into knowledge utilization, helping you make informed decisions and optimize your knowledge assets. Incremental and continuous improvement of knowledge assets drives transformational business impact. Typically, we see knowledge projects starting off with a certain level of accuracy and adoption metrics and those metrics improve by 100% over a few months as the measure, manage, optimize loop (using our analytics) kicks in for the knowledge managers and authors in partnership with the user community.

Effective collaboration is a cornerstone of successful knowledge management. SharePoint offers various collaboration tools, but they may not meet the evolving needs of your organization, particularly if you require more advanced features for real-time collaboration and communication. Feedback management is one of the key areas where SharePoint struggles, given the lack of primacy of a user community in a document management system, the primary use case that SharePoint addresses.

eGain enhances collaboration with integrated tools that support real-time interaction and knowledge sharing. Our platform enables seamless collaboration through features like contextual feedback (associated with knowledge content), content workflows, and contextual knowledge sharing, fostering a more connected and productive work environment.

As your organization adopts new tools and systems, seamless integration becomes increasingly important. SharePoint’s integration capabilities might not keep pace with the growing demand for interoperability with other enterprise applications and systems.

eGain provides comprehensive integration capabilities with a wide range of systems and applications. Our platform’s API-first approach ensures smooth connectivity with your existing tools, enabling a more cohesive and efficient knowledge management ecosystem. We also offer certified connectors to leading CRM, CCaaS, UCaaS, and CMS systems, including SharePoint! So, ingesting content from multiple silos is easy. Furthermore, our North-bound APIs for publishing trusted answers that are generated in the eGain Knowledge Hub enable you to consume knowledge everywhere across channels and apps.

Managing and maintaining a SharePoint environment can be resource-intensive, requiring significant time and effort to ensure optimal performance and security. As your organization scales, these maintenance demands can become a burden.

eGain’s cloud-based platform minimizes maintenance and management overheads. With automatic updates, scalability, and built-in security features, our solution reduces the burden on your IT team, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than day-to-day maintenance.

The ability to tailor knowledge to the specific needs of your different user groups (for example, customer, novice agent, expert agent, field engineer, or partner) is critical to managing knowledge content and maintaining it over time. SharePoint offers limited personalization options, making it hard to manage content bloat because of user, context, and channel based personalization needs.

eGain offers extensive personalization and configuration options. From configurable workflows to single-sourced content architecture to personalized user interfaces, our solution adapts to your requirements, enabling your knowledge authors and managers to easily create and maintain knowledge for diverse audience and channel needs.

One of the most telling signs of outgrowing SharePoint is a decline in user adoption. If employees are increasingly resistant to using the platform and are seeking alternative solutions, it may indicate that SharePoint is no longer meeting their needs.

eGain’s user-centric design and advanced features drive higher adoption rates. By addressing common pain points and delivering a more intuitive, engaging experience, our platform encourages users to embrace and utilize knowledge management tools more effectively. In the case of one of our leading insurance clients, their users rated eGain knowledge as the #1 app out of nearly 150 apps on their desktop!

Recognizing the signs that you have outgrown SharePoint for knowledge management is the first step toward finding a solution that better meets your organization’s needs. eGain, with its cutting-edge AI-powered features and user-centric approach, offers a compelling alternative that addresses the limitations of traditional platforms like SharePoint. By transitioning to eGain, you can enhance your knowledge management capabilities, drive productivity, and stay ahead in today’s competitive business landscape.

For a personalized demonstration of how eGain can transform your knowledge management strategy, contact us today. Let us help you unlock the full potential of your organizational knowledge and drive your business forward with the power of AI.

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