When I work with clients to help them better understand the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, we typically explore six major areas of functionality: Sites, Communities, Content, Composites, Insights, and Search.
SharePoint Sites, provides the basic capabilities required to engage employees, partners, and customers in an effective manner, both inside and outside the firewall. Sites puts the tools in the hands of business users to create and manage Internet, intranet, and extranet sites through an intuitive, familiar user interface. What do I mean by “familiar user interface?” I’m talking about not having to learn yet another UI for a new piece of software. Microsoft, with SharePoint 2010, has incorporated the same “Ribbon UI” that you find in the rest of the Microsoft Office products. This will equate to faster user acceptance, and a shorter learning curve.
SharePoint Communities is a set of tools that enables users to easily access expertise and interact with other people in new and creative ways across the enterprise through both formal and informal networks.
Think of this as having a Facebook-like site for the employees of your company. Not one where they would talk about what movie they saw last night, where they are going on vacation, or what animals they are raising on their farm, but one that focuses on their professional experience, their expertise, competencies, and credentials. I can attest firsthand how powerful this can be. When I worked for Microsoft, I had roughly 90,000 coworkers. Imagine trying to find the appropriate technical resource or subject matter expert to staff a project, unless you had a personal relationship or recommendation. Fortunately, Microsoft eats their own dog food, so I had the power of People Search in SharePoint at my disposal. So, when I talked earlier about driving insight from complexity, that’s a good example.
SharePoint Content provides the facilities for the creation, review, publication, and disposal of content, including conforming to defined compliance rules, whether the content exists as traditional documents or as Web pages. Content-management capabilities of SharePoint include document management, records management, knowledge management and web-content management.
SharePoint Composites provides the ability to quickly create customized business solutions without involving corporate IT in each request. At the same time, it allows IT staff capability to empower business users to create these applications while ensuring the environment’s stability and availability.
In other words, Composites enables business users to produce composite enterprise solutions using combinations of out-of-box features, without having to custom-build applications involving custom coding and development resources. An example would be rapidly implementing, within SharePoint, a custom form using a tool like Microsoft InfoPath.
SharePoint Insights provides the ability to not only rapidly deliver and share information that is critical to the success of the business, but also to turn raw data into actionable conclusions and to drive business results through sharing data-driven analysis. As the Business Intelligence component of SharePoint, Insights helps analysts and managers create dynamic dashboards and scorecards that can be easily repurposed and shared with associates.
Lastly, SharePoint Search enables users to quickly and easily locate relevant content across SharePoint lists, sites and external systems, and other data sources, such as file shares, web sites, or applications.
You know, one of the reasons we all like the Internet so much, and use search engines all the time, is because we are constantly exposed to ideas and information that we didn’t know existed. How many times have we all run a search on an engine like Bing or Google, and been exposed to a new concept, idea, or piece of information that we found useful. This is how search drives “Ideation”. It works for us at home… why not at work?
In addition to the out-of-the-box search functionality in SharePoint, Microsoft also offers a best-of-breed, high-end search solution called FAST, that can drive a more dynamic user experience, greater search relevance, and rich content processing, for applications inside and outside the firewall. FAST is available as a stand-alone server that can be added to any internal or external data environment, as well as FAST for SharePoint that can be added to the SharePoint 2010 ecosystem for both inside and outside the firewall search applications.
SharePoint 2010, with its enhanced ECM and search capabilities, makes it easy for companies to deploy a single, unified platform that provides their constituents with anywhere access and participation, via rich user experiences, to the sites, communities, and content, essential for success in an "always-on" world.
For a free Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Overview Evaluation Guide, just click here: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/Pages/default.aspx
For more information about AIIM, The Enterprise Content Management Association, stop on by http://www.aiim.org
If you'd like learn more about enterprise content managment and digital imaging technologies & services that can help your organization achieve its goals, check out MIR at http://www.midlandcorp.com
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