SharePointSharePoint Products and Technologies facilitate collaboration within an organisation and with partners and customers. Using the combined collaboration features, users in your organisation can easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization.
Users can, in a controlled environment, create shared workspaces for events, calendars and documents. They can receive alerts when content is altered and can access the workspace using their normal browser. SharePoint integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products allowing users to update shared documents from within their familiar applications allowing a ‘single version of the truth’.
SharePoint’s functionality addresses some fundamental issues that users and administrators have suffered from in the last ten years – although we now have the applications to produce letters, emails, spreadsheets and CAD files, we are snowed under with the information we have produced. Even a simple project may contain hundreds of emails, both internal and external with customers and suppliers, numerous files, documents and meeting agendas stretching back years. The question ‘how do we find this information?’ has become far more critical than ‘how do we produce this information.’
The traditional solution involves the use of complex and often personal folder structures to accommodate the subjects within subjects that make up a typical filing system. But when data is held on multiple servers and PCs and within that environment every structure is different then finding and then accessing the data becomes a major issue – and a major waste of time.
Creating web pages on the fly addresses the access issue – setting up a site to share documents, meetings or calendars is a few button presses. The fact you can also access the site from home or abroad is a bonus. Add webparts which reflect your organisation’s particular way of working. Add links to the databases you use and show them in a format your staff understand. Add MySites, so users can see the information that best suits them. The possibilities are endless.
Finally, SharePoint is not an end in itself. It is a fundamental part of future versions of Microsoft Office. You can save a meeting agenda directly from your familiar Word screen into the site of choice - see Collaboration. Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher will all have this facility.
Microsoft see SharePoint as key to the future of office applications and Ratio One are here to help you achieve that vision.