B&E leverages the Microsoft SharePoint platform in order to provide the collaboration and content management solutions your workers need.
This Microsoft product acts as an integrated platform for users to access all necessary applications, intranets, internets, and other information necessary to perform their functions. SharePoint connects people with information and commonly used applications that streamlines business processes and increases efficiency. In addition, SharePoint enables users to engage in collaborative activities that dramatically increase business productivity. All of this is done in a secure environment with a comprehensive user permissions schema.
The Capabilities of SharePoint
SharePoint is an amazingly versatile product that is capable of performing a number of different business-critical functions all through one centralized platform. SharePoint can service a number of different business requirements.
- Collaboration
- Business Process
- Business Intelligence
- Portals
- Search
- Content Management
Most jobs require people to collaborate for a greater part of their work in order to produce a finished product. Whether it it through sharing information, working in teams, or managing projects collaboration is a necessity. In order to collaborate effectively people must have the tools to communicaate, share infomartion, and coordinate details and deadlines. SharePoint helps businesses by giving its users all of their important tools.
Team Productivity
Teams are the basic component of any organization structure and effective team collaboration can ensure effective business process. Teams can quickly build and adapt their own sites to match their work demands and styles. SharePoint provides a variety of templates to help teams quickly create working sites. these sites can easily be customized later if business processes change. A team can use their site to:
- Manage documents
- Track issues and deadlines
- Create a calendar
- Share links, contacts and information
Creating, Reviewing and Approving Documents
SharePoint enables the collaborative creation, review and approval of a document. General templates of commonly used documents can be saved to a Shared Documents library folder that can be accessed by multiple users. these general documents can serve as a easy way to make sure everyone has access to the most current version of a document. In addition, previously used documents can be placed on the site so that they may be referenced by other users who may be creating a similar document or may require information from that report.
Document Workspaces can be created so that a group may collaboratively make additions or comments to a document without long email chains or multiple versions. Users can also take advantage of workflows to create approval systems so that documents can be approved in a timely and consistent manner. SharePoint also enables valuable metrics to be taken of their procedures which can be used to improve the business process.
Capturing Community Knowledge
SharePoint provides organizations with a central location to capture best practices, share information, and promote standardized business processes. Businesses can create wiki and blog sites to alert their employees about best practices or enable them to work together to solve a common problem. These can be created at any level and dramatically increase and organizations ability to capture that "unwritten" knowledge which helps increase efficiency and productivity.
The increasing push by many IT professionals towards a Service Oriented Architecture means an increasing integration between applications to help streamline business processes and integrate the business logic of an organization into its IT processes. SharePoint provides a solid starting foundation for this new type of IT design. SharePoint integrates seamlessly with Office applications that users use everyday to complete their tasks. Additionally, the addition of forms and webparts throug the SharePoint Sever enables organizations to embed common business activities directly into the SharePoint site.
Integrate into Microsoft Office
Users can integrate SharePoint directly into other Office products, such as updating the metadata related to a document from any Microsoft Office application that the document is opened in, or using outlook to respond to tasks and forms. All of these application-based sharepoint features also work on any HTML-enabled mobile device.
Use Infopath Forms
Users can create infopath forms for the submission of critical data in easy to use and easy to view web-based forms. now tasks such as submitting and invoice or the completion of an expense report or the request for leave form can all be accomplished via one platform with the easy of modern consumer web-based forms.
Workflows
Using SharePoint, any number of workflows can be created to streamline business processes. These can range from simple document approval forms to complex field entry forms. SharePoint will automate the notification and monitoring of tasks with deadlines attached to them. Users can also interact with SharePoint directly from Microsoft Office application to complete their assigned task and notify the server of the task completion all in one document.
SharePoint allows users to connect a number of disparate data sources in databases, speadsheets, files and emails into one central location. this allows users to aggregate, analyze and report on data with newfound ease and accuracy. SharePoint can lower the time needed to perform complex business intelligence function while providing a more complete picutre of the data.
Dashboards and Scorecards
In SharePoint specialized Report Center sites help users and manage business intelligence data. It is a central location reports, dashboards that display important business information with drill down capability, data connection libraries, and key performance indicators (KPIs). These tools greatly increase user productivity.
Information can now be displayed in dashboards that can aggregate large amounts of data from numerous sources and provide visual tools like virtual maps and graphs to further assist users as they analyze data. If a user need to find a specific line of data, a simple double click will drill down into the aggregated data to show more information.
Data connections libraries give users access to a whole range of databases all from one centralized location. it is no longer necessary to remember where reports are stored on vast networks as all of the information can be accessed through SharePoint. User permissions also make it easy to control who can access what information
KPIs are vital to assessing business performance, now SharePoint can quickly and accurately show users their KPIs side by side with the data they're working with. KPIs can also be accompanied by visual aids as well to further increase their usefulness to users.
Reporting
SharePoint can help management generate all the necessary reports and metrics on their organization in order to run the most at optimal efficiency. Data gained from user KPIs which are monitored in SharePoint allows managers to quickly analyze their business processes find best practices or star performers. Reports can also help other users spot trends and anomalies in data pulled from other information sources.
| Additional Resources |
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 SharePoint Datasheet |
| SharePoint Evaluation Guide (Microsoft Paper) |
Architecture and Design
Buchanan and Edwards can help you implement any number of SharePoint Solutions. Our proven practice starts by strenuously evaluating your existing system architecture as well as your goals for the SharePoint Server; whether they be an enterprise document management system with complex workflows or a series of team sites built for fast collaboration and communication. We carefully assess your business needs and help you build the MOSS best fitted for you. We are capable of rolling out any of the MOSS's capabilities be they collaborative environments, business intelligence, business processes, enterprise search, content management, or portal functions.
Migrations
In addition to building SharePoint sites from scratch, B&E can work with your pre-existing application including other version of the SharePoint Server, non-Microsoft centric portals, and other applications that mimic SharePoint functionality. B&E will ensure that all of your data and business logic captured in previous systems will be migrated over to a new SharePoint 2007 Server. With years of SharePoint experience and experts in the SharePoint platform, you can trust us to transfer your critical data according to industry best practices and with proven safeguards.
Custom SharePoint Development
In order to take full advantage of the multitude of opportunities offered by SharePoint you may require custom web parts or workflows. B&E has proven track record of creating top-of-the-line custom SharePoint parts that great increase our clients' ability to utilize the SharePoint platform. These customized parts include integration with existing applications and data stores, business processes enhancements, and complex workflows and forms. B&E has extensive experience designing and implementing these customized features in all six aspects of SharePoint with clients such as the Department of State and the Department of Justice.
