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That is a question we often get asked. Despite the excitement associated with one of Microsoft’s biggest and fastest growing technologies, it is not always crystal clear what it is, especially to the business user.
What Microsoft Office SharePoint Server has to Offer
The Technical View
Technical people get excited about SharePoint because it’s an excellent application development framework. It incorporates tools designed to allow them to create customised applications that incorporate functionality such as: Document Management; Search; Business Intelligence; Intranet, Extranet and Internet with Content Management; and a host of other integrated functionality. It is shipped with a default implementation and some standard templates which can allow you to be productive pretty quickly. But if you take that approach long term you are not really harnessing the full power of SharePoint.
The Business View
If you’re a business user, you may have heard a lot about the “collaboration” capabilities of SharePoint. Typically, your business will already have Line of Business Applications for supporting Customer Relationship Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Resources, Production and many others. You will also have provided your workforce with desktop productivity tools – usually Microsoft Office. But there is a fundamental disconnect between them. A disconnect between Task Workers who follow structured processes and collect, record and manipulate structured data and Information Workers who largely occupy a world of unstructured data such as e-mail, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets.
Information Workers often interact and share knowledge through meetings and water cooler conversations, which in today’s high speed global world is becoming increasingly hard. Often, the most structured activities they undertake are e-mailing multiple versions of documents amongst themselves, and taking meeting notes. The result is that organisations rarely get the best out of their intellectual and knowledge capital, fail to comply with quality or regulatory guidelines, and don’t communicate effectively either internally or with their customers, partners and suppliers.
SharePoint is a set of integrated tools that allow you to overcome this disconnect using integrated functionality that provides a familiar portal view of their world, and covers document management, search, intranet, extranet, social computing, and business reporting dashboards.
The benefits are substantial. You will drive cost efficiencies through more effective and efficient use of your valuable people resources. You will be able to ensure and prove compliance, and you will provide a mechanism to collect and make available the full range of intellectual and knowledge capital of your business to make you more effective for the future.
How can Rubicon Software help?
If you need help to envision and design a solution to ensure maximum benefit, then you will find our Consulting Services valuable. In particular our unique CUETIP application maturity method will help you to really drive value from your implementation without compromising your timescale and cost constraints.
If you’re already clear about what you’re trying to achieve with SharePoint, we can apply our SharePoint Project Execution Services, Training Services, or Support Services to the problem either on a full lifecycle project basis or as individual resources to supplement your own team.
Please Contact us to discuss how we can help
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