Microsoft SharePoint is one of those products that has quietly crawled into almost all organisations in New Zealand. It is now one of Microsoft's flagship products, even though it is a very different product to the other Microsoft Office suite of products; here are some of it's characteristics:
- complexity: deployment SharePoint is tricky - sure you can install it the way all MS products are installed, just press Next, but to set it up correctly and tune it for your organisation is hard work and require specialist skills.As a matter of fact any organisation planning on SharePoint should also plan on full-time SharePoint admin person too.
- multi-use: SharePoint can be used in very many different ways, many of these ways are not obvious to users. Unfortunately this has resulted with most organisations only using a percentage of it's capability.
- support: as it is not a single-use product like practically all other MS (Office) products are, you cannot really get support for it from Microsoft, but have to rely on local 3rd party vendors (who you have to pay separately). This is actually good though as SharePoint being such a flexible product, you can deploy it in a very localised way (so even if MS did offer supprot, it might be no use for you).
So what are the ways you can use SharePoint then:
1) website framework - this is how most organisations use MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) and why not as Sharepoint includes a lot of website authoring tools you do need and is an easy product to customise with your company's branding.
2) web portal - allows you to open a portal to your user base so they can customize their own look-and-feel of the website. This is enabled with Microsoft's portlets called web parts and there are a lot of them; everything from calendars to search and map components.
3) application launcher - is a special use of portal that enables you to collect all your legacy/internal applications together as thumbnails that you can use to launch the apps. Great to implement as within Sharepoint is also included a lot of tools for managing and searching against your thumbnails. This is what I would use for single-topic map repository - with SharePoint on top allowing searching by region, use case and device with type-ahead (Google-like) search engine (BING?).
4) business intelligence platform - enables you to build special portals that can be used for BI dashboards. BI is the biggest growing part of Sharepoint and includes a lot of great tools for location intelligence and reporting too.
5) application development framework - great for developing web apps and systems as it includes form/report builders and even it's own workflow module, not forgetting a lot of supporting developer tools.
6) collaboration platform - almost all projects I have been involved with use Sharepoint for managing and sharing the project documents, source code, change/bug control, project management/reporting and issues/risk management.No wonder as it supports all the Office products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.
7) document/content management system - lots if tools and capability for customizing for your DMS/CMS deployment. Actually the only pure specialist single-use product deployment strategy for SharePoint and user base is growing strong.
So how do YOU use SharePoint in your organisation? Did I leave out any good ways of use that are worth mentioning?
- complexity: deployment SharePoint is tricky - sure you can install it the way all MS products are installed, just press Next, but to set it up correctly and tune it for your organisation is hard work and require specialist skills.As a matter of fact any organisation planning on SharePoint should also plan on full-time SharePoint admin person too.
- multi-use: SharePoint can be used in very many different ways, many of these ways are not obvious to users. Unfortunately this has resulted with most organisations only using a percentage of it's capability.
- support: as it is not a single-use product like practically all other MS (Office) products are, you cannot really get support for it from Microsoft, but have to rely on local 3rd party vendors (who you have to pay separately). This is actually good though as SharePoint being such a flexible product, you can deploy it in a very localised way (so even if MS did offer supprot, it might be no use for you).
So what are the ways you can use SharePoint then:
1) website framework - this is how most organisations use MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) and why not as Sharepoint includes a lot of website authoring tools you do need and is an easy product to customise with your company's branding.
2) web portal - allows you to open a portal to your user base so they can customize their own look-and-feel of the website. This is enabled with Microsoft's portlets called web parts and there are a lot of them; everything from calendars to search and map components.
3) application launcher - is a special use of portal that enables you to collect all your legacy/internal applications together as thumbnails that you can use to launch the apps. Great to implement as within Sharepoint is also included a lot of tools for managing and searching against your thumbnails. This is what I would use for single-topic map repository - with SharePoint on top allowing searching by region, use case and device with type-ahead (Google-like) search engine (BING?).
4) business intelligence platform - enables you to build special portals that can be used for BI dashboards. BI is the biggest growing part of Sharepoint and includes a lot of great tools for location intelligence and reporting too.
5) application development framework - great for developing web apps and systems as it includes form/report builders and even it's own workflow module, not forgetting a lot of supporting developer tools.
6) collaboration platform - almost all projects I have been involved with use Sharepoint for managing and sharing the project documents, source code, change/bug control, project management/reporting and issues/risk management.No wonder as it supports all the Office products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project.
7) document/content management system - lots if tools and capability for customizing for your DMS/CMS deployment. Actually the only pure specialist single-use product deployment strategy for SharePoint and user base is growing strong.
So how do YOU use SharePoint in your organisation? Did I leave out any good ways of use that are worth mentioning?