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Have you picked up on the fuss around SharePoint? From what we hear from our customers and the industry in general, SharePoint is a hot topic. Bill Gates has been recently quoted as saying that SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest selling server product – ever! SharePoint is clearly a product that is resonating with organisations and is experiencing massive take-up in the marketplace. This article looks at which areas of an enterprise should be migrated over to SharePoint and which should stay in place.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (aka MOSS or SharePoint) is a tool for organisations to develop, share, manage and find and view corporate content and processes. The content is usually the outputs of ‘information workers’, such as Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc), Acrobat files and so on, but it can other content, like media files and structure content (think ‘database’ information) .
SharePoint is in essence a portal product in that business users primarily (but not exclusively) access content via a web browser. This makes it a relatively straight forward matter to enable access to the content anywhere a browser is used – inside and outside the corporate firewall – and from a variety of devices, such as mobile access.
SharePoint’s features break down into 6 main areas: Collaboration, Portals, Enterprise Content Management, Search, Forms & Workflow, and Business Intelligence. To explain what SharePoint is, it is helpful to compare it’s functionality with what is normally done without SharePoint.
| Feature |
Now |
With SharePoint |
Collaboration
|
Emails with attachments, Exchange public folders, file shares |
Self service team sites and document sites, with notifications, announcements, RSS feeds, ‘anywhere access’, offline synchronisation, MS Office integration. Server-based Excel spreadsheets.
|
Portals
|
Multiple technologies
(ie. For intranet and website), little personalisation or content targeting. Have to go to multiple locations to find content (file shares, Exchange Public Folders, Lotus Notes); Highly custom development.
|
Single platform for all portals (web site, intranet, extranet); MySites for Web2.0 functionality.
Single gateway to enterprise content. Out of the box portal templates.
|
Enterprise content management
|
Content publishing bottlenecks, Manual (or no) publishing approvals. ‘Stale’ content. |
Distributed publishing model; content publishing control in the hands of the content producer. Approval workflows.
|
Document Management
|
Limited. Access control. Back up & archiving (possibly) |
Security, Versions, check in/out, alerts, global rules for content types. Integrated with Ms Office.
|
Records Management
|
Limited or none. Separate tool. |
Document retention and disposal policies. Records Centre.
|
Search
|
Mix of low cost, low functionality and expensive, highly featured tools. Different technology. |
Integrated search. Search content in SharePoint, file shares, Exchange public folders, Notes databases. Search for people, by name, function, skills, etc. Search by meta data.
|
Forms & business processes
|
Paper based forms. Forms in Word/Acrobat that require printing. Specialised forms & workflow tools. |
Smart, self-populating forms, with associated business workflows. Eg/ Leave form & approval workflow. Browser-based forms (ie. That do not require any other client.)
|
Reporting & Business Intelligence
|
Usual reporting tools (Crystal, SSRS, BI tools); |
Reports available via central portal; Dashboards, KPIs, score cards.
|
Here’s 5 points to get you started:
Feature-wise, SharePoint is a veritable ‘Swiss Army knife’, covering collaboration, portals, document management, record management, content management, enterprise search, forms, workflow and business intelligence. So the business users get a bunch of useful capabilities and, by having a single, integrated platform to support (i.e. rather than one application for the intranet, another for the website, another for document management, etc...) the management task for IT is greatly simplified.
SharePoint enables decentralised administration – empowering individuals to publish information, create team sites and to collaboration – without the constant need for working via the IT bottleneck.
SharePoint has a ton of capability ‘out of the box’, so functionality is delivered rapidly (= happy users)
SharePoint, now in its third major iteration, has matured from being a niche product to being a platform for managing information in the modern enterprise.
SharePoint is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office, improving information worker productivity while at the same time providing a familiar experience.
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