Johannesburg, 01 Feb 2007
Microsoft's SharePoint products and technologies platform have been on the market for some time. While SharePoint has seen wide adoption in Europe and the United States, its adoption in SA is about to accelerate with the recently-released 2007 version.
"Companies using SharePoint have realised the substantial business benefits the solution provides - assuming the deployment is handled professionally," says Dries van der Colff, technical director at Fulcrum Business Solutions.
"The 2007 release of the platform has added significant new and improved functionality that provides even more substantial business benefits."
Van Der Colff explains there are two main flavours of SharePoint. The first is called Windows SharePoint Services, and is aimed at small businesses and workgroups within larger businesses.
Windows SharePoint Services is available as a download at no extra charge for licensed users of Windows Server 2003. With a modest investment in the form of consultation by an experienced SharePoint implementation partner, small organisations and small groups within larger organisations can take advantage of this rich collaboration platform, and markedly increase knowledge-worker productivity within a short period of time.
Van der Colff mentions two real-life examples. The first, when his own company had urgent need of an internal IT issue tracking system. A very simple issue tracking system was up and running within two hours after the decision was taken, making use of a custom list in Windows SharePoint Services.
While the solution created in this instance is so basic it can't be called a helpdesk system by any stretch of the imagination, it serves the specific needs of a small company, at the fraction of the cost of a fully functional helpdesk system.
Another example of the versatility and power this product offers can be seen in a banking example. Van Der Colff says a local bank has a small division which is responsible for ensuring that new banking products are deployed successfully to all branches. Each deployment manager takes care of deployments for about 20 branches, and there are more than 500 branches countrywide.
"Once every few months, all branch managers are polled to assess the effectiveness of new product deployments," explains Van Der Colff. "This has meant mailing spreadsheets containing questionnaires to more than 500 branches four times per year. The files were returned to one person who had the job of collating this information manually.
"Obviously this was an inherently tedious and labour-intensive process. By making use of the built-in electronic survey functionality of SharePoint, the process of collating survey data is now automated, and the results are available instantaneously. The time, cost and accuracy benefits are obvious."
Van der Colff says the recently-released Version 3 of Windows SharePoint Services has significant new features, such as built-in support for wikis and blogs, as well as enhanced document management features, such as improved document versioning.
Serving the enterprise
The enterprise edition of SharePoint, called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, has all the functionality of Windows SharePoint Services, but with additional functionality specifically aimed at larger enterprises.
"Enterprise search functionality is arguably the main benefit of SharePoint Server," Van der Colff noted. "Some studies have found that knowledge workers spend an average 15% of their working day looking for information they know must be somewhere on the corporate network, but cannot find easily.
"The search functionality in SharePoint Server provides the capability to search for information located on the corporate network, not unlike the capabilities provided by well-known search engines on the Internet," Van der Colff added.
"One of the common concerns of all executives today is the security of intellectual property and internal communications. In the 2007 version of SharePoint Server, easy integration with digital rights management is also included.
"This allows companies to implement security processes that prevent documents or e-mail intended for internal use from being seen or used by unauthorised persons inside or outside the company."
With the initial introduction of SharePoint, Microsoft announced its intention to be a force in the collaboration software market. In 2007 the company has released a version of the product that will make it a leading player in this space, offering excellent integration capabilities as well as simple interfaces to powerful collaboration and content management functionality.
The cost, productivity, quality and security benefits of SharePoint for companies of all sizes are unmistakable.
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