Blog...thoughts from Taylor Made
The Business of SharePoint
Overview
Many businesses I talk to have heard of Microsoft SharePoint (who hasn’t?), some of them are even using it as a place to dump their documents (see document management below). The one thing most of them have in common is they are not using it correctly or simply don’t get the hype of SharePoint. Hopefully this post will address this and highlight most of the common questions I get asked around SharePoint as well as giving you some quick business wins.
What is it?
Microsoft SharePoint is “… an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.”
There you go, isn’t it obvious what SharePoint is now?
Perhaps this is why there is some confusion around SharePoint. How do you summarise a system which is as diverse as SharePoint? To me SharePoint is an extremely diverse server based application which used correctly can bring a number of benefits to your business. It’s a business tool for business people. Am I starting to sound like Microsoft?
It’s a web based collaboration platform which can be moulded to bring benefits to most businesses. It’s like the umbrella application for your business which can bring your staff and business applications closer together. Or as one customer said to me “it’s a spider web!” … whatever
SharePoint isn’t a new technology, its not bleeding edge. It’s been around for over ten years in one form or another. It’s only became really popular since Microsoft released Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Server 3.0 (WSS – lighter free version).
Why should you use it?
Here is one very good reason why you should use SharePoint; it’s also one of the most popular areas we implement for our customers.
Document Management
We are all used to storing files on a fileserver; we have a shared drive and a private drive. We are probably all very disciplined in how we structure and name our documents and folders, right? Wrong! With storage becoming cheaper and cheaper file servers are becoming full of gigabytes (or even terabytes) of unstructured content. How frequently do you have to hunt for your documents? Or attempt to find a document somebody else has created? Come on admit it, we all spend a vast amount of time clicking through what feels like thousands of folders to find everything but the file we are looking for or even worse the file might have been attached to an email!
Well SharePoint is your answer to unstructured data. Within SharePoint we have the concept of Document Libraries. You can think of a document library like your shared or private area on the file server. You can store files in it and even create folders. You can browse to it through Internet Explorer or directly from an application. I sometimes refer to it as a big bucket; just throw all your files into the bucket. You’re probably now wondering how a big bucket of files is going to help you find your data quicker. Well here’s the cleaver bit! When you add your file to your bucket you can tag it, then you can select a View which can quickly filter and sort you documents by the given tag. It can even hide the folders with in the Document Library to give you a flat view!
Real world example:
We have a SharePoint Document Library for storing documentation related to ISO 9001, each time we save a file to this library we tag it by a “Document Type” the available tags under Document Type are, policy, procedure, forms and guides. Now when I select the View by Document Type the Document Library quickly reorganises all the documents so that they appear in a nested view by the Document Type tag. This makes it much easier to find the file you are looking for. We could also setup a view to only show you the policies edited with the last 6 months, for example. Views By Owner or By Department are also used.
The key point here is to make sure you define your tags (meta data – data about data) correctly don’t just dump all your files into your bucket!
I think you’ll agree tagging is pretty cool, but wait until you hear about Workflow in my next post.
Enterprise Search
Another great feature of SharePoint which will save you from the Unstructured Data kayos theory (okay I know that’s a bit OTT) is Enterprise Search! I’m sure the first question you have for me is “Why is it called Enterprise Search?” Well, good question.
The SharePoint search engine has been designed to allow users to easily find data/information across your entire business, hence enterprise. I better just clarify this, it can not find information on a screwed up piece of paper hidden behind your bookcase. If your cleaner can’t find it, then I’m sure SharePoint can’t! The point is if the information is in SharePoint or another system, email, file server, line of business application, CRM for example. Then we can configure SharePoint to help you find that information. Yes, SharePoint can search all these areas at the same time as well as ask a “Federated Search Engine” like Bing to answer your query.
Example showing, SharePoint 2007 Enterprise Search – result set from local SharePoint and Bing via Federated Search.
The more observant readers would have noted the screen grab above shows “about 38,400” results came back for the “matt Takhar” search, which took 2.61 seconds to complete. You’re probably now thinking how is that helpful? You now have to look through “unstructured search results”?!? Well the good news is you can narrow your search results by using scopes and properties. A scope narrows the search to a predefined area, for example you could configure a scope to look at the Customer Data area on your file server, the Customer public folder in Exchange and Customers in your CRM system. Using the scope would only search those areas. A property helps point the search at a peace of meta data (remember data about data). For example you could set the Document Type property to Policies for our earlier example, now only documents tagged as Policies will be returned in the result set.
Conclusion
To conclude Document Management and Enterprise Search are often two areas of SharePoint that can help businesses like yours. Store your information correctly and find it a lot quicker. Save time, save money.
To find out more about SharePoint, including the new version Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 please contact me directly or a member of the Customer Management Team on 01329 239900.
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