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Top 5 Business Benefits
SharePoint is a productivity tool that brings its owners several specific
benefits:
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It improves collaboration among employees by providing more and better
communication options, project management features, scheduling tools, emailed
user alerts when content is changed, and more.
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It helps organize, track, find (search) and keep organized anything that is
relevant and important to your business: tracking equipment, managing documents,
collecting forms, who is doing what, and much more.
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It enables businesses to define, streamline, enforce, and document its various
business processes by using workflows.
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It brings together company data from multiple sources and enables reporting
against it in a timely and accurate manner.
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It has capabilities to rapidly create and enable various business applications
like help desks, project centers, library managers, meeting rooms and equipment
schedulers, and many others.
All this is possible with a set of included technologies and tools for
publishing, Microsoft Office integration, Project Management, InfoPath
electronic form collection and processing, scheduling, and other. Check the list
of features and solutions below for a more complete inventory.
In conclusion, SharePoint enables more efficient and more organized
operation with at the same time happier and more productive employees now
working in a more organized working environment. A natural consequence of
deploying SharePoint is therefore one of businesses doing more in less time and
therefore growing faster and with less strain.
A more fundamental level of understanding of SharePoint benefits and also of its
full potential is to know its solutions and become familiar with its available
features.
Solutions and
Features
SharePoint was designed to solve some very specific existing problems in the
enterprise. By doing so it abstracted some common pieces of functionality that
are required to quickly assemble these solutions. In the process it enabled easy
construction of entirely new applications, solutions, and tools.
Solutions
Solution in SharePoint sense is a collection of features that were combined and
applied toward solving a particular problem. One must understand that these
solutions are not fixed in stone rather they are highly configurable and users
are expected to modify them to fit their requirements.
Documents Management
Store, exchange, publish, and manage company documents and other electronic
assets with check-in/check-out functionality, versioning, approval workflows,
expiration policies, and more. Document management in SharePoint is one of the
most celebrated solutions among its users.
Content Management
Content management is everything that SharePoint was designed to do to help
manage your digital content that is images, slides, documents, or entire web
pages. Features include things such as approval workflows, check-in / check-out,
versioning, and other.
In addition MOSS has the so called publishing feature and pages that can guide
an entire new web page or web site creation process. With publishing features
employees can easy modify and add company electronic assets to web pages.
Project Management
SharePoint is also a project management program. It allows for creating,
tracking, assigning, and reporting about tasks and project members on each
project.
Scheduling and Appointments Management
SharePoint has state of the art calendaring and scheduling features that
integrate with Outlook and allow easy managing of events, appointments, and
meetings.
Communication Platform
Effective business communication is the key to getting things done and therefore
is at the center of SharePoint enabled solutions. Blogs, Wikis, User Alerts,
Announcements Lists, and Discussion Forums all work to fill this role.
Business Intelligence: present, deliver, store, and archive company most
valuable information assets in form of excel workbooks as reports, dashboards,
and key performance indicators (MOSS only)
Business Intelligence solution is new in SharePoint 2007 and is only available
in MOSS. Users can publish excel workbooks, create key performance indicators
(KPI), manage data connections, create dashboards with SharePoint or Performance
Point Servers and more. Business Intelligence is not a single feature or
solution in SharePoint rather it is a collection of features that allow for a
variety of solutions but essentially all solving the same group of summarized
information delivery problems.
Custom Solutions
SharePoint is a truly extensible platform that allows for easy construction of a
number of solutions not listed above. SharePoint was designed from ground up to
allow information workers and business users to assemble ad-hoc solutions with
literally no programming and with very elemental training.
SharePoint solutions are not meant to be independent of each other. Rather one
can for example manage a project, which is one of publishing a document, where
project members are collaborating with schedules, meetings, tasks management, a
discussion forum, and have SharePoint report on their use of hours in a typical
business intelligence manner.
Features
There is a somewhat blurry line between solutions and features because many
features that are part of a solution are often themselves made of several more
elemental features. That being said, we have concluded that all things that we
thought do not quite fit above should naturally be listed below.
Search
Search in WSS is more a feature then a solution and besides indexing of content
it allows for searching of content based on keywords.
In MOSS, search is more of a solution which has in addition to indexing also
several features of its own like definition of search scopes, specification of
more complicated search criteria, and even some web parts for constructing
customized searching pages and solutions.
InfoPath Forms Management
InfoPath electronic forms creation and use is a powerful technology in its own
right. It is however tightly integrated into SharePoint, which can serve as a
storage, collection, delivery, and aggregator of these forms’ data. Forms
themselves can be quite sophisticated and part of a workflow that presents
customized views to different types of users. For example, an employee
submitting data and a manager approving it must see and work on different things
in a form.
MOSS adds the ability to serve, fill, and submit forms in a web browser in
addition to using the InfoPath dedicated rich client application.
Deeply Integrate with Microsoft Office Suite of Applications
Much of the content managed by SharePoint is created with Microsoft Office and
SharePoint is actually considered an extension of the office suite to allow
users to share and centrally store and manage files of common or individual
interest.
Create Surveys
Users can create and respond to surveys that support branching logic.
Track Issues
There is a special list which can track issues and their status in the process
of being resolved.
Create Custom Lists and Libraries
Many templates are provided for commonly used lists and libraries. For those
uses where an appropriate list does not exist, users can create their own with
unique columns.
Create Workspaces
Workspaces are created for a single record like document or a meeting. They
provide an extended workspace that relates to that one record with its own
tasks, calendar, and anything that is normally available in SharePoint. If
record is a meeting for example, one can manage its agenda, attendees,
deliverables, files, etc.
Create Sites and Site Collections
Sites and site collections are the highest level containers for all content in
SharePoint.They host a collection of elements like various libraries and lists that are
bound together with its own security and for some common purpose. For example,
human resources may have their own site for managing employee benefits,
providing employees with common fill-out forms, etc. Site collection groups
different sites into a larger unit when such integration serves a common
purpose. Site collection might be created to provide a common calendar and other
common resources to all smaller groups of employees or departments that have
created their own sites.
Integrate Data from Other Databases and Applications (MOSS only)
This feature is mostly enabled with so-called business data catalog or BDC and
is only available in MOSS. It makes data stored in other databases and places
available inside the SharePoint as if it was created by SharePoint. This feature
is great for integrating all data in the company for purpose of reporting.
Attach Workflows and Create Business Processes
Workflows in SharePoint are attachable processes that can guide any multi-step
tasks through a series of events required to complete the task. Most common is a
three-state workflow. With workflows, a company can document and enforce all its
operations business processes.
MOSS adds several other workflows such as approval, feedback, and
collect-signatures workflows. Other workflows can be programmed with SharePoint
Designer or Visual Studio and made part of the SharePoint. Workflows in
SharePoint leverage the full availability of the underlying Microsoft Workflow
Foundation.
Create Applications
All things available in SharePoint can be used to create new sites and solutions
with little or no programming. Our company has for example created an entire web
application for managing a law office without writing a single line of code.
Secure Access and Manage Content Permissions
SharePoint has a group based security model adopted from the underlying Windows
Operating System. SharePoint users can be directly imported from existing
Windows accounts list and placed into SharePoint groups. Groups are assigned
permissions to read, create content, redesign elements, and so on. Properly
configured security assures that only right people have access and permissions
on intended content.
Create Alerts
User alerts are a great feature of SharePoint. Each time your task, list,
library, or any other element is changed you can receive an email message that
notifies you. Reminders on due tasks or other timed content can also be placed
on your list of alerts.
Make Branding
Look and feel of all SharePoint pages can be modified with SharePoint Designer
to reflect the style and branding of the company. This is particularly important
when sites or pages are exposed to partners or other users outside the company.
A logo on top, footer with copyright and contact information on bottom, unique
company colors and other styling are all examples of the applied branding.
Use Publishing Feature (MOSS only)
To publish a web page or an article is a process which SharePoint simplifies by
making available content that might end being part of the page, it provides
check-in / check-out, versioning, and a make-it-published feature among other.
Approval, feedback, and other workflows can also be attached to the process.
Audience Targeting (MOSS only)
Audience targeting allows list and library and other objects creators to define
more narrowly which groups of users can access them and what they should see.
Single-Sign-On (MOSS only)
Single-sign-on feature allows users to define and store login properties for
other business software and then be able to enter those applications with only
having to log into SharePoint.
Data Connections (MOSS only)
Users often require connections to other databases and systems on the network.
To simplify management of these connections and make them available from one
central location, SharePoint has a library that was specifically designed for
this purpose.
Web Parts
Web parts are custom building blocks that are placed on pages to enable and
extend many features of SharePoint. Example of web part is one of piece of code
hat can retrieve real time stock information and display it in page in
SharePoint. MOSS comes with many additional web parts. New web parts can be
programmed by developers and made available to users and SharePoint
configurators.
Extend and Develop
New web parts, workflows, solutions, and action logic can be developed and added
to SharePoint. These are programming tasks and require skilled professionals.
They can all greatly extend the possibilities of SharePoint. In conclusion, SharePoint is an extensible collaboration and resource management
platform with a treasure chest of solutions and features that can be used either
individually or in concert in just about every forward looking business out
there.
Please call us, if we can help with any of the above.
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