What can SharePoint do for you? 


By Matt Rowley on June 07, 2010

Often when talking to clients about SharePoint capabilities, I get the question, "What can this product actually do for us?"

     

SharePoint is a web based collaborative environment that provides content management, search capabilities, integrated reporting and analytics, and workflow and routing processes.

     

Here are some suggestions to help you determine how you can implement SharePoint to provide value to your organization.

     

1. With such a broad capacity to provide value, SharePoint solutions should be driven by organizational and/or business process related requirements (or pains).

     

2. Let the business requirements of your organization determine the SharePoint capabilities to utilize. There are six focal areas of the SharePoint platform: Collaboration, Portal, Search, Content Management, Business Processes, and Business Intelligence. Each area has its own set of features and functionalities.      

     

SharePoint's 6 focal areas:

     

3. The best approach at implementing a successful SharePoint deployment is to focus on one, possibly two, of these areas which will provide immediate value to your organization.

     

4. The quickest way to get value from SharePoint is by presenting Dynamics data in web pages using dashboards, KPI's (Key Performance Indicators), and web parts within SharePoint pages.

       

How has Brittenford helped clients using SharePoint?

  • Workflow approval processes – invoice, expense, PTO, etc.
  • Document management – proposal collaboration, invoice, PO, PR storage and routing
  • Dashboards – operational, financial, sales
  • Report Libraries – central repository of various web based, dynamic reports

 

Bottom line, think about what your specific business needs are, review the six fundamental areas of what SharePoint can do, then determine which area will be of immediate value to your organization. 


Remember successful, valuable SharePoint implementations are driven by business needs.

           

           

      

 
Categories: Microsoft – General , Microsoft SharePoint, Reports and Dashboards | 1 Comments  

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Comments


Bret Fisher commented on Thursday, 24-Jun-2010
Sometimes because SharePoint is discussed as a platform so much in marketing, management still can't get a mental picture of "problems it will solve day to day" until we give them some specific scenarios to imagine. At a very basic level, one major feature is web-based document storage. Just moving your office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) into a SharePoint "site" will yield instant benefits. If SharePoint is accessible from the Internet, you are no longer "locked" into using your work PC or being on the work network to access the files. Because of built-in search, you can now have Google-like search to everything in those documents. If you set up an alert in SharePoint for documents you can be emailed when that document has been updated. You can "check out" a document so others can't edit it while you are. It can save versions of the file so you can compare changes over time. All those features are gained by just moving files over. And that's just part of one of the many features of SharePoint.
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