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SharePoint: The Swiss Army knife of server products

Is it just me or do your relations, friends and friends of friends seem to come out of the woodwork as soon as they know you “work with computers”? Had I taken a different career path and taken up taxidermy I suspect I’d not be subjected to quite as many “while you are here can you just have a look at this....” moments. A recent social visit resulted in me reinstalling a “friends” SUSE Linux PC. It took me the best part of half a Saturday – My reward? Three cups of tea and a “you must come round for dinner”…I assume dinner will be served the next time the computer goes belly up.

I’ll not name the company; lets just say it’s “family”. A small’ish company, selling and importing a range of  goods, employing a tad over 110 staff and they NEED SharePoint! I’ve been telling them this every Christmas and at family gathering for years – literally. It’s not right, relatives are supposed to be chasing me for “free” consultancy not the other way round. The thing is, I’ve been getting all enthusiastic about the solution (SharePoint) and missing the “problem”.  I’m guilty of assuming that everyone knows that SharePoint is the answer, even when they don’t know what the problem is.  Me saying  “SharePoint  SharePoint” sounded like “Rhubarb Rhubarb” to someone who spends his days importing widgets from China.

 

Homework

I’m doing a part time Foundation Degree in business management, for homework I did a piece of research and associated report called “The Business Value of Electronic Collaboration in the Workplace”. I persuaded this business to volunteer as my guinea pig. I knew that SharePoint was the solution but they needed something more than my say so and Microsoft’s marketing to prove the point. I’ll go out on a bit of a limb and suggest that SharePoint would have a positive effect on some aspect of your business. 78% of people I surveyed recently agree that SharePoint could deliver some value to their business. This research was a great exercise for me in understanding how to connect SharePoint capabilities with the business run-time. It’s not just about problems, its recognising that perfectly adequate processes can be improved through SharePoint (BPIO to you sir).

I surveyed anyone with a PC…a number of questions were asked, I’ll repeat just three:

• How often do you spend more than 10 minutes locating files?
• If you need to find a document, are there several shared drives that might need to be searched?
• Do you sometimes write proposals or other content and later discover there was existing material you could have repurposed?

How would you answer?

100% of the respondents agreed or strongly agreed they spend excessive time searching for content. A bit more granular research indicated that just one group were “paid” a salary of £1444.00pa just to look for files. It’s a bit crude as ROI calculations go but it was enough for the business owner to ask me about solutions (That would be SharePoint, did I mention that?) I know that this business also have an antiquated procurement process that could be collapsed and driven through Windows Workflow and SharePoint but it’s up to their new Microsoft Partner to help with that. The incumbent but now outgoing provider of IT services never got beyond printer and file sharing. Which is a great shame as SharePoint Services are free and would be a great “value add”. Yes, some of the SharePoint capabilities are free ! Even for Small Business Server customers.

The definitely not free Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is the fastest selling product in Microsoft’s history and it’s not hard to see why. As the number of documents and sheer volume of data that flows though an organisation increases, the harder it is for staff to find and react to information. With SharePoint, organisations can open up information previously lost, locked up in departmental silos.  Add to this the ability to automate and collapse work flows into SharePoint, it becomes clear why this was the quickest product in Microsoft’s history to achieve 1$ Billion of revenue. In today’s competitive market place, the company that gets the response back to perspective customer in the most timely and accurate manner is likely to secure the business.

The trouble with SharePoint:

SharePoint is a Swiss Army knife of a server application, OK it’s a bit bland and unexciting when you first install it, you’ll soon find the big blade really useful even if you are not 100% sure what some of the other curly bits of metal are for.

For the record, SharePoint does not have an API for removing stones from horses hooves.

Just imagine though if you could develop your own “special” blades and snap them into your penknife...nice ! That’s SharePoint, the big new blade could be a simple intranet site or a portal for a team to share files, or a link with your SAP system or…it’s got to be worth investigating what the other blades are for.

May we help you find your perfect blade?

If you are short of a crazed relative screaming SharePoint at you at every Christmas bash, if you are thinking of deploying SharePoint or simply want a better understanding of what you are missing out on, I think we may have a solution. Working with our own Paul Thomas (I created the outline based on customer comments, he did the work) we’ve come up with a one day workshop:

The Business Value of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007. 

I’d urge you to put this course in front of your directors, senior business managers, key stakeholders, project managers, technical managers, systems architects and analysts... and relatives !

Perhaps you have already deployed SharePoint, if that’s the case you may also be interested in:

SharePoint 2007 Advanced Features for End Users 

My favourite blade (I think I’ve pushed the penknife metaphor far enough)

I like the Slide Library, it comes with MOSS only so if you’re using the free capabilities offered by SharePoint Services you’ll need to upgrade. I’m pretty good with PowerPoint, I’ve been writing content and proposals from the second Harvard Graphics was released through to today with PowerPoint 2007.  My wedding speech in 1989 was a Harvard Graphics presentation – yet still she married me. I just did a quick DIR *.PPT* /S in my home directory, I have 2271 PowerPoint files as of today, say each has 15 slides... Thats a lot of content.

What the slide Library allows me to do is to put individual slides into groups within SharePoint. Say I’ve written a piece on training ROI, by publishing it, any of my colleagues can reuse that content without typing a word. Unlocking the silo that the individual home directory can be.

 

 The Home directory can be a barrier to sharing files, data and knowledge

Of course, this does rather assume we are using Office 2007, it’s my view that this integration will be one of the key driver for Office 2007 – Given that Office has a new look and a new file format there has to be a compelling reason to upgrade! Such is the integration with PowerPoint 2007, any updates to the master slide are notified to users of the slides. So if we use a slide with our price list for widgets on from the library, and it changes, we’ll be asked if we want to update our deck – before we send it out or go to present it. 

The slide library in action, Daryl and Gary build presentations from existing content both are notified if the library copy of a slide changes

To see the slide library in action, have a quick look at this site. Insert slide 68 if you want to see why people are looking to SharePoint. While we are talking about Office, did I mention that you can render Excel in SharePoint?

 

I look forward to seeing you on our SharePoint workshop (we’re very proud of it) in September.

 

Till next time