What Is Sharepoint?

Summary

Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 is a system that lets you store and actively manage all company information, and presents the information in an easy-to-use way to staff, customers and partners via a browser. It can do pretty much anything a company wants to do with information! It is low cost and relatively easy to install and configure.

It has been around for a few years, but when it added document management functionality in 2007 it became immensely powerful and the usage of it has spread faster than any other IT system.

Work tasks, issues, requests etc rarely only involve one piece of information. Often staff need to find an email, look at a report, copy text from an old document, ask a colleague about recent communication with a customer. Companies really struggle with this because of all the different systems they have, because the information is hard to access and because the information really just isn’t managed. SharePoint solves all this! The resultant benefits are substantial and wide-ranging.

In addition to managing all sorts on information, it can very easily integrate with other systems (such as CRM) to be able to also present information stored to users. Information can be automatically filtered and presented differently to different types of users. Hence, it can be classed as a portal, an intranet, a web site, a search engine, a document or content management system, a forms processing system, a database. Customers can use one or many of its features, but the real power comes from using it to manage, or provide seamless access to, ALL company information.

Anyone who has used the BBC website will be aware of the power of being to access a wide range of information from one place, whilst behind the scenes different parts of the BBC manage the information in different ways. SharePoint uses the same philosophy, but within organisations. It really adds great value to collaborative team and project working. It is very low cost product, but very stable and easy to install. The big challenge is how best to harness its power and implement it in a professional way.

Microsoft’s own definition is: “Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight”.

Sharepoint has a whole host of features:

• Document and Forms Management
• Collaboration
• Task and Plan Management
• Internet Site Management
• Reporting Dashboard
• Data Management

It can also link to other sources of information very easily.

All information contained within it, or linked from other sources can be displayed in a very easy-to-use way.

However, it is modular and companies can choose which parts of Sharepoint they want to use. It can start small and have features incrementally added.

Because it is Microsoft, it is aimed at all sizes of company and can be deployed and configured relatively easily.

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