Do you often find yourself frustrated about not being able to e-mail large files to your colleagues, customers or partners? Or do you find that after spending significant time reviewing and editing a document that you were working on the wrong version? Have you ever wanted to have easy access to company news and frequently used documents, like human resources materials, but never had a way of simply managing them all in one place?
Challenges like these often hinder the productivity and collaborative abilities of organizations, not to mention the detrimental impact inaccurate or outdated materials can have.
These days, most of us save our documents on a hard drive and e-mail them when we would like to share them. Or, if we're a bit more advanced, we use shared folders to save documents and collaborate with our colleagues. However, if you e-mail a document to be reviewed by numerous people it's extremely difficult to manage the versions. And, if you're using shared folders, knowing who made particular changes and reverting back to previous versions can be difficult. FTP sites are also an option but are typically lacking in user-friendliness.
And for easy sharing of important news and documents, you hear a lot about Intranets. But in reality most smaller businesses can't justify hiring Web developers to build and manage these sites on a consistent basis.
As an answer to these issues, Microsoft developed Windows SharePoint Services.
Personalize, Integrate & Collaborate
Windows SharePoint is a collection of management tools that were specifically designed to help personalize the work environment, improve integration and increase collaboration. They securely integrate data from multiple systems across a company under one single log-in enabling users to better work together on documents, tasks and projects.
The key features of Windows SharePoint are:
• Document Workspace: This feature allows users to create a Document Workspace site where users can easily share and collaborate on files. Users can create documents and e-mail them like they always have in the past, except with SharePoint the documents are stored on a Windows SharePoint Services site and the e-mail recipient accesses them via a link. This way, everyone has access to the latest version and the system tracks any changes. Because it maintains copies of each version, users can revert back to a previous version at any time. It's an excellent tool for project tracking. A law firm, for example, could create Document Workspaces for each of its major cases enabling the staff and other trusted parties to collaborate on documents.
• Meeting Workspace: Following the same concept as the Document Workspace, the Meeting Workspace is an innovative tool for managing meetings. The tool enables users to easily schedule meetings and store relevant documents on the SharePoint server.
• Alerts: Another great
feature is the server's alert notification capability. Users can create
customized alerts to notify when changes are made to relevant information,
documents or applications. Users can elect to receive an e-mail message
notifying them of a change on an immediate, daily or weekly basis.
• Browser-based Customization and Web Parts Pages: If the "out of the box"
features don't provide everything you need, you or a professional developer can
add-on customized sections to expand functionality.
While the standard Windows SharePoint Services product is a great fit for any size organization and comes "free" with Windows Server 2003 and Windows Small Business Server 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is priced separately and targeted toward mid-size and enterprise companies and includes a number of additional features, including:
- News and topics
- My Site, with personal views and with public views
- Information that can be targeted to specific audiences
- Index functionality and search functionality across file shares, across Web servers, across Microsoft Exchange Public Folders, across Lotus Notes, and across Windows SharePoint Services sites Alerts that notify you when changes are made to relevant information, documents, or programs
- Single sign-on functionality for enterprise application integration
- Integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server
The most significant difference between SharePoint Services and Portal Server is the price. While SharePoint Services comes bundled with the products mentioned above, Portal Server is a standalone product that costs approximately $5,600 for the base product and 5 Client Access Licenses.
Benefits of SharePoint
There are many benefits to using SharePoint. In general, it creates a way for organizations to connect users, teams of people and knowledge-enabling users to collaborate more easily and work more efficiently. And, it is a secure and stable solution that companies can rely on for managing their most mission-critical projects.
Its robust search capabilities provide a tool for users to quickly find relevant information and its document versioning and approval workflow are excellent for streamlining business processes. And, by being able to reuse timely and relevant information and access best practices across an organization, users can avoid re-inventing the wheel on each new project.
SharePoint has been designed for users without a technical background to easily create their own websites to share information and collaborate on documents, as well as update their own site to make it more dynamic. And for more complicated features, non-technical administrators can hire an application development team like IT Solutions to customize certain areas or build additional sections to integrate with the primary solution.
IT Solutions has already worked with a number of clients to deploy the SharePoint Portal technology and leverage the feature-rich capabilities of the solution to enable their organizations to more effectively communicate internally as well as with their customers and partners. For more information or to schedule a free demonstration of SharePoint, contact IT Solutions' VP of Application Development Jim Higgins at 215-886-7166 ext. 13, or jim.higgins@itsolutions-inc.com.
For more product-specific information on SharePoint, visit: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011204871033.aspx