The Big 3 of SharePoint:
About a month ago M.I.S. Corporation had our bi-monthly Lunch With The Geeks. We know that everyone could not attend so I wanted to fill you in on some important information you missed out on. There are so many things SharePoint does it's hard to decide where to start. So we chose what we think are the three major features SharePoint has to offer: Collaboration, Document Management and Team Development.
First off you might be asking youself what is SharePoint? One definition is, "SharePoint is a collection of software elements that includes web browser based collaboration funcations, process management modules, search modules, and a document management platform". If you are like me you are probably sitting there thinking "I have no idea what that means." Three things that come to mind when I think of SharePoint are flexibility, adaptability, and a collection of parts. A clearer definition would be that SharePoint allows you to collaborate with your team, delegate tasks, create shared workspaces, wikis, document libraries, and the use of a community calendar.
SharePoint has similar functions to Outlook but instead of being individually focused it is group focused. The calendar allows you to see what everyone in the office is doing instead of just looking at a personal calendar. This function has come in handy many times here at M.I.S.. Let's say that you have a new client coming into your office for a meeting and you plan on using your conference room, but so does your co-worker. Neither of you know you both have a meeting at the same time and plan on using the same room. You both walk into the conference room at the same time. Talk about an inconvenience. With the Sharepoint calendar you could have seen that your co-worker was planning on using the conference room at the same time you were so you could make other arrangements.
Another feature that we use on a daily basis is shared workspaces. You can use a workspace for an internal meeting or a group project with one to as many different members of your team as needed. A workspace allows you to set up an agenda with dates and times items need to be completed, invite people to the workspace, and upload multiple documents to work on as a group.
I think the most important feature on SharePoint is the task library. This has covered my butt many times here at M.I.S.. It allows anyone to go in and assign a task to someone else in the office. So let's say your boss wants you to write up a document for a new client but you do not have SharePoint at this time. He asks you Friday afternoon right as you are getting ready to leave and it is probably the last thing on your mind. He asks that you have this on this desk Tuesday morning. Now it's Tuesday and your boss asks for the document. You sit there and you do not have it ready because you forgot. Now what do you do? Well with the internal task library your boss could have created a task for you letting you know when it was due and what he wanted in it. Once he creates the task you recieve an email alert with all of the information about this assignment. Then come Tuesday morning you have it on his desk ready for him. It's the perfect solution for not dropping the ball.
Document Management on SharePoint is a great feature. It allows you to create categorized lists for easy searching, and create custom views specific to your needs. If you company is like ours you get tons of mail, bills, reciepts, and documents every day. To reduce on filing cabinets and random paper stacks around the office I take them and scan them into the computer, upload them onto SharePoint, and place them in the appropriate category. Let's say I wanted to see how many times we ordered pizza from Imos this year. Instead of looking through the category where I place all of the receipts, I would create a customized view to look by vendor. This allows me to find all of the receipts from Imos quick and easy.
In my opinion the best feature SharePoint has to offer is document versioning which allows you to view older versions of a document. How many times have you been in Microsoft Office changing a document to fit a client's specific needs and then click save? I have, tons of times! Well at this point if you ever want the orginial document back you are out of luck. With SharePoint document versioning it allows you to upload a document and work on it, change a little or as much as you need to as many times as you want. When you click save it saves it right back onto SharePoint. But let's say you need the orginial document again. Well all you have to do is click the version history and restore the orginal document. It's as easy as pie.
Team Development is a crucial aspect of a growing office environment. SharePoint allows you to have multiple ongoing discussions with everyone in your office. For example it's your annual holiday party at your office and you are trying to coordinate everyone's availability. Instead of sending out 50 emails back and forth you could start a discussion and everyone could participate. It does not fill up your email box and you can see everything everyone has said about that topic.
My favorite feature of SharePoint is the Wiki. The Wiki allows you to share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, collaborate with your team on a design, create instruction guides, build an encyclopedia of knowledge, or just write down daily information in an easily accessible and modifiable format. As you know every company needs a company handbook or policy book. And to keep the book updated every few years is not cheap. We recently put our company handbook on the SharePoint Wiki, which allows us to change it at anytime and it makes it accessible to every employee at our company.
There are so many other functions I could tell you about SharePoint and how much it has helped M.I.S. Corporation stay organized and work together as a team.
If you have any questions or are interested in seeing a live demo on SharePoint please contact me at (314) 594-5207 or send me an email at
abierman@mis-corp.com.
Ashley Bierman