Time and again, communication has been the deciding (or crucial) factor in the success or failure of an organization. It has been generally observed that due to some reason or other (big team size, diff geographical location, etc), there exists a gap between team members as such. This indirectly hampers the productivity (of team) as well as that of organization. In scenarios like the one mentioned above, Microsoft SharePoint comes acts as lifesaver tool. Be it internal communiqué (among the team members) or external (for vendor, customers, etc), SharePoint can be of assistance in every aspect. Lets understand how that is possible.
Hosting requirements
Microsoft SharePoint takes care of complete hosting requirements of an organization. Be it site hosted over web, or internal (intranet) or for that matter a brief duration project site, the objective can be achieved. To make the task at hand simple, there are ready-made templates available (part of SharePoint library) so that you spend more time creating valuable content and less time designing and scheming. Whether you want to create a Team site, a blog or an Enterprise Wiki, it’s just a matter of few clicks and you are all set.
Enterprise Content / Document Management
Typically in an organization there could be several contents such as:
• Documents like Articles, Brochures, Case study, Lesson learned, Project Plan, etc.
• Images
• Video
• Audio
• Presentation etc.
Preserving all this is important since quite a good amount of man-hours has been used up in preparing these documents (data). Also its possible that more than one people can be working on single document at the same time. In this emblematic situation SharePoint can provide reliable one point source of Content Management platform.
SharePoint does not only provide a robust platform but also provides option of versioning, label, checkout and check in, etc. Depending upon the rights data could be visible or hidden from particular set of user(s). System can be programmed in a way such that specific doc is required to get approval before being published and more such high-end features are possible with the tool.
Search Feature
Over the time as the organization grows, so does the data that is stored in different aspects of SharePoint server. Some day, user might want to search for a document or an old report from the repository. This task is made simple by the Sharepoint highly efficient Search feature. Please refer to the image below: As evident from the above picture, different kinds of search criterion such as relevance, size, date, etc is possible.
Insight and Composites (Common Business Practices)
To complete the solution for a SME, SharePoint also enable integration with database such as SQL server. Since it has got built in templates for report generation and most regularly used business practices, its beneficial for the user to create different kinds of reports for decision-making purpose. Advance functionality such as dashboard creation and data manipulation is also possible. Tight integration with Excel and Visio makes it even more productive and useful. SharePoint is said to be equally beneficial for SME’s as well as relatively bigger companies, which are in growing phase. Low cost of deployment as well as maintenance makes it even more lucrative. No matter Organizations worldwide are now able to recognize the benefit of this tool and trying to implement for various departments and business units.
