Understanding Business Scenarios


SharePoint products and technologies form a versatile set of building blocks that you can use to solve a variety of business problems. Like all technical solutions, the success of a SharePoint implementation depends strongly on you understanding the business problem to be solved and creating a cohesive plan to address the issues. In this section, I'll examine some of the common business scenarios in which SharePoint Portal Server can play a role.

Augmenting Personal Productivity

Perhaps the most obvious and straightforward scenario involving a SharePoint deployment is the improvement of personal productivity for employees . I have already addressed in detail the system and data challenges that are facing users of the Windows desktop, but a productivity solution based on SharePoint products and technologies can also be used to make relevant applications, documents, and data available to end users more quickly.

The typical end user spends a significant amount of time searching for documents and information each day. This time is essentially lost productivity during which users browse document management systems, reporting systems, or the Internet. Documents are easily lost on file servers because no standards for file taxonomy, naming, or version control are in use. What's more, business users are often frustrated by technical barriers such as mapped network drives or server names .

A SharePoint solution targeting personal productivity would make relevant content easier to retrieve by creating specific sites for end users. These sites can contain relevant documents, links, and search results for a particular community of users. Such sites eliminate mapped network drives and separate log-ins that hinder productivity. Figure 1-3 shows a document repository targeted at a group of sales professionals.

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Figure 1-3: A document repository for sales professionals

Increasing Team Productivity

Along with personal productivity solutions, SharePoint products and technologies can also create team productivity solutions. Increasingly, team productivity is a vital part of business success. Today, most organizations have some combination of formal teams and ad hoc teams. The formal teams are often fixed and departmentalized whereas the other teams may form spontaneously or for a limited time. SharePoint products and technologies support both kinds of teams .

Because formal teams are generally long-lived, a SharePoint solution may contain several fixed sites for these teams. These sites may be created during an initial rollout and then enhanced over time. For these types of teams, SharePoint Portal Server supports both document and meeting workspaces where team members can collaborate even if they are not physically present. Along with meetings and documents, team members can also take advantage of threaded discussion forums that facilitate collaboration even if team members are not present in both time and place. Figure 1-4 shows a typical threaded discussion forum.

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Figure 1-4: A threaded discussion forum

Ad hoc teams can benefit from the same collaborative features enjoyed by formal teams, but the sites that host these groups may be created on the fly. SharePoint Portal Server is a truly decentralized model. The philosophy is intended to support team building and productivity from the boardroom to the company softball team. A collaborative solution focused on team building may give site-creation permissions to many individuals who can then easily create team sites directly from within the portal. Figure 1-5 shows a typical site-creation link available within SharePoint Portal Server.

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Figure 1-5: A site-creation link

Supporting Remote Workers

Increasingly, the concept of a central place where employees commute to perform work is fading. Organizations today have more telecommuters, outbound offices, and mobile workers than ever before. For an organization, this has typically meant an increase in support costs. Outbound workers often require high-end laptops, remote synchronization, wireless connectivity, and more client-side software. Using a SharePoint solution focused on remote workers, organizations can eliminate some of the maintenance required to support these workers.

Solutions built around SharePoint Portal Server may be made accessible outside of an organization's firewall. Using this type of approach, an organization can make sites and services available to employees as long as they have an Internet connection. This means that telecommuters can easily access required resources with less software installed on their local machine. For mobile workers, such a solution can ease the burden of data synchronization by integrating such operations within the portal.

Integrating with Partners and Customers

Because SharePoint solutions can be safely exposed outside the firewall, they make excellent platforms for integrating with customers and partners. SharePoint Portal Server can host specific self-service sites for key customers and communication sites for partners. This same idea also allows subsidiary companies to communicate and collaborate with parent companies ”all without having to integrate at the system level.




Microsoft SharePoint[c] Building Office 2003 Solutions
Microsoft SharePoint[c] Building Office 2003 Solutions
ISBN: 1590593383
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 92

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