Published on the 29/05/2012 | Written by iStart

Information overload. It defines the age we live in…

Distraction, clutter, and search angst are daily productivity killers causing headaches and wasting hours. Believe the disciples, and Microsoft’s SharePoint is on the cusp of greatness, bringing order to clutter, collaboration to fragmentation and timeliness to information and decision making. But listen to the unconverted and it’s badly designed, slow and another marketing snow job holding together the Microsoft stack. Your IT department probably already has the product, so iStart canvassed a couple of experts on implementing SharePoint to help you decide if it is a fit for wider use within your business.

What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is a software platform built by Microsoft with the primary aim to make it easier for people to work together. SharePoint lets users set up web sites to share ideas and information with others, and collaboratively manage documents and content. SharePoint search and metadata allows users to easily find and locate documents and information from across the organisation.

SharePoint’s Business Intelligence capability makes it easy for users to publish reports, set-up dashboards and drill into information enabling better decision making. SharePoint is also adopted by a number of organisations for their public web presence.

Microsoft has taken a very unique approach to enterprise content management as opposed to other vendors. SharePoint as a platform can support any enterprise content management challenge. SharePoint changes the way business uses content management from ‘how does this technology make me do my business?’ to ‘how do you want to work?’. This is a dramatic change for a number of organisations who have become used to having their business processes driven by their chosen technologies.

Content, Information, Document and Knowledge Management – where does it fit?
SharePoint is the platform that underpins your enterprise content management challenges. SharePoint can provide management of well defined and structured content management such as records management and it can also cope with the challenge of unstructured content such as blogs and wikis.

SharePoint not only manages concrete artefacts such as documents, procedures and how-to-guides, but also the softer ‘tacit’ knowledge that exists within an organisation, encouraging collaboration between people. SharePoint contains personal spaces where users can manage their organisational profile, record their likes and dislikes, areas of interest etc. Keyword search is tailored to not only return documents but also links to people within the organisation that could help you. This is based on things such as your profile information, role, areas of interest and the documents you have been working on. All of which helps people collaborate better.

Why SharePoint over a ‘best of breed’ solution?
In the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) space SharePoint is growing its perception as a ‘best of breed’ solution. Looking at the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant SharePoint sits alongside IBM and Oracle in the leader’s quadrant.

The ‘Unified Platform’ is SharePoint’s point of difference over other solutions.

In the past an organisation’s ECM requirements required them to deal with multiple vendors and differing platforms. For instance the public website was on a different platform to the document management system, which was again separate to the Intranet platform – all of which creates a headache for enterprise search. This approach often led to higher licensing and support costs, and often lower user adoption due to inconsistent and unfamiliar user interfaces.

While SharePoint may not be ‘best of breed’ at all these tasks individually, as a whole it is a much more compelling solution. For organisations that use Office applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, SharePoint offers the best integrated experience allowing organisations to gain the most from their existing technology investments.

There is a rich set of features that can be applied to most business problems, but if your business problem can’t be solved by out of the box features then you can usually find a solution from the ecosystem of partners that build add-on solutions.

What kinds of business requirements or circumstances lead to recommending SharePoint over other packaged solutions?

There a number of circumstances but often the following will be among the key reasons:

1. Organisations wanting to streamline investment in a single platform
2. Requirements for a core collaboration tool for projects or improved team work.
3. Where an intranet portal is combined with document or records management.
4. To provide an extranet for customer and supplier communications and collaboration
5. For a content management system for a glossy public website.

Where several requirements exist, IT departments can build forward focused roadmaps to plan the delivery of projects with a clear understanding of costs and on-going benefits over a number of years.

SharePoint also delivers value where an organisation has already invested in the Microsoft Office suite. SharePoint easily demonstrates how it can be used to gain further productivity enhancements, say through reduced training effort or consistent user experience. This leads to higher levels of adoption.

Other times SharePoint plays a role for smaller organisations wanting to better organise and increase efficiency, so an Intranet or Document management solution might be implemented as a starting point.

SharePoint is also frequently a fit on Microsoft Dynamics projects such as AX ERP, CRM and NAV financials. The roadmap for these products will only see this grow.

The licensing model for SharePoint means organisations can ‘dip their toe’ into SharePoint using the free ‘Foundation’ version and then upgrade to Standard or Enterprise once they understand how it could work for their business.

What types of projects deliver the low hanging fruit for SharePoint – where should initial efforts be focused?
The initial step for an organisation undertaking a SharePoint implementation or looking to realise value from an existing implementation should be to undertake a road-mapping exercise. SharePoint is so feature-rich that there are a number of areas an organisation can derive value from. A clear roadmap should make it obvious where the low hanging fruit lies. A lot of organisations make the first step by adopting SharePoint as an Intranet platform. SharePoint encourages collaboration and immediate efficiencies are realised through the breaking down of silos within the organisation.

For others it may be document management or the creation of ‘Project or Customer Workspaces’ to enable greater sharing with customers or suppliers.

There are a number of projects that can yield maximum returns with little effort. Depending on the pain points the organisation is dealing with you could consider any one of the following projects as an initial entry point into a longer term SharePoint deployment:

1. The Intranet: For a lot of organisations their current intranet is out of date and bares little resemblance to their current business practices or organisational structure. Each department should receive a site so they can publish content and announcements with the whole organisation. This is also an ideal way of introducing the various business users to the new SharePoint technologies in a way that does not seem too overwhelming for them.

2. The DMS: Gone are the days of having 38 large white ring binders with every policy & procedure printed and bound. The quick solution here is to publish all the policies and procedures into SharePoint to create an online policy centre that enables employees to browse the latest electronic copies of the documents as well as rich keyword searching. This level of searchability is usually an instant hit with business users because they don’t need to know what policies cover which areas, they can simply query the DMS with keywords.

3. Collaboration: Collaborative sites can be created quickly and easily to facilitate collaboration on documents or projects or even areas of interest. Business users can collaborate in a semi-structured environment and hopefully get the corporate knowledge out of their inboxes and into their SharePoint team sites where it can be searched and managed through version control and routine backups.

What are the skill sets that are required in a project team? (under the…‘people, processes and then technology’ approach)
The key to a successful deployment is a team with the following skills:

1. The ‘Intranet Committee’: Form a group made up of key stakeholders from each and every division. These committee members need to understand what success looks like, and have the power to make decisions from a business perspective and also have the power to change people’s position descriptions.

2. ‘Champions’: The SharePoint Champions are the key to success for any project. Selected from key business areas to represent their teams they bring their requirements to the project team, and act as a conduit back to the business.
They act as advocates when they return to the business to ‘Champion’ the SharePoint cause. They help the project team gain traction with business users and help identify the ‘low hanging fruit’. Get them energised and engaged early on in the project with a series of ‘Show & Tells’ around the SharePoint feature sets.

3. SharePoint Admin: Someone needs to take ownership of the overall SharePoint Project. The SharePoint Administration role should be filled by someone with a good understanding of SharePoint and how it can be configured and managed.

4. SharePoint Developers: These days there is so much functionality available ‘out of the box’ that I think it is a mistake to have a developer on the project. The ‘build vs buy’ debate has shifted dramatically with marketplaces allowing you to buy add-ons at the click of a button. Any development can usually be outsourced, but watch out for customisations that will come back and haunt you when you try and upgrade to the next version.

Overall, a user-centric approach is important in SharePoint solutions, so important skills are in user experience design. This ensures the solution will connect and engage with the target audiences. There is also an emphasis on management consulting skills to get clear understanding of the business challenges that are being addressed. Wrapped around this, strong project management and methodology is a must, as well as understanding change management, and the governance planning required around SharePoint implementations. People experienced with previous SharePoint implementations are a very valuable asset in any team.

What do you get ‘out-of-the-box’ with SharePoint?
SharePoint is feature-packed right out of the box. Users can get started by setting up sites and workspaces, lists and libraries, all from predefined templates.

Corporate Taxonomy and Metadata. Workflow. Content publishing and approval. Personal spaces and Search. There is a lot included without any additional setup.

SharePoint out-of-the-box… 1. Web Content Management 2. Document Management 3. Collaboration 4. Intranet, Extranet and Internet capabilities 5. Enterprise Search 6. Electronic Forms 7. Lightweight Records Management 8. Approval Workflows 9. User Details Searching (aka Corporate White Pages)

DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY ALL THE FEATURES AND DON’T EXPECT THE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE YOU DO THINGS A CERTAIN WAY

Is SharePoint performance typically quite slow to upload/search/update documents?
This may have been a perception in the past but is not the case today. With proper scoping and capacity planning SharePoint performs as well as any modern ECM solution.

What does a bare minimum infrastructure look like?
The bare minimum infrastructure required for SharePoint 2010 is a ‘single server farm’ this will typically consist of a single 64 bit Windows Server (2008 R2), with SQL Server (2008 R2), and SharePoint (2010) installed, usually with 8+ Gb of RAM. This is sufficient as a development environment or for a small organisation. From here SharePoint can scale to meet the requirements of almost all organisations, this can be achieved by the addition of standalone SQL Servers and the addition of SharePoint servers to handle increased web requests and loads and also to support disaster recovery and redundancy.

Does SharePoint work with non-Microsoft applications or repositories?
A number of integration solutions exist or can be created via web service integration. Some off the shelf integration scenarios are with Lotus Notes and SAP. Microsoft has released DUET which enables enterprises to integrate their on premise SAP deployments with their SharePoint deployment. SharePoint also has a service called ‘Business Connectivity Services’ (BCS) which enables SharePoint to access key information from your corporate line of business applications. This information can be used as metadata and also makes the information searchable. So for example, you could tag contracts with the customer ID from your corporate CRM system. Then when you search for a specific Customer ID you are able to find the customer’s contract, as well as pull up their CRM records.

Does SharePoint ‘plug in’ to Outlook/Exchange server?
SharePoint has out-of-the-box integration with Outlook / Exchange, allowing users to set up ‘team’ calendars in SharePoint and have them appear in Outlook. With a small configuration ‘contacts’ can be managed in a SharePoint list and have them show up natively in Outlook.

‘OnePlaceMail’ from Scinaptic.com allows richer integration for the storage and tagging of emails in SharePoint document libraries and this has added greatly to the user adoption of solutions.

In plain English, can you outline what it would take to set up a 3-step approval process, upload a draft document, update and approve it via an intranet page. How much effort from scratch?
SharePoint has an out-of the-box approval workflow that can solve the scenario above, easily creating tasks and emailing the owners at each stage.

Configuring such an approval process can be done in about 20 minutes. The first step is creating a column on your library that reflects the 3 steps you have decided to use. You then activate the site feature which adds the workflow to your site. You then add the workflow to the library and as you add the workflow you select the column that you created in the first step.

For more complex workflow SharePoint can be customised at 3 levels. Firstly a business analyst can use Visio to work with the business to create the overall flow, this can then pass to a SharePoint consultant that can craft this into a workflow that runs in SharePoint. Finally, discrete steps or ‘actions’ within the workflow can be passed to a SharePoint developer to complete; such as creating the code to update an external system.

For advanced business process management requirements third party tools such as K2 are sometimes used.

For DM, does every document need to be manually up-loaded and the right meta-data applied in order to find it again? (and any ways around that)
Document migration can be a major barrier for organisations looking to move to another system or platform. SharePoint out-of-the-box has the ability to upload multiple documents, and an Excel-style view to bulk load metadata.

SharePoint also contains functionality called ‘Content Organiser’ which uses information and metadata about a document to ‘file and save’ into the correct document library, without the user having to know where the library exists in the taxonomy.

For large scale document migration tasks 3rd party tools such as DocAve from AvePoint has connectors from a number of well-known ECM platforms to easily migrate content directly into SharePoint, without manually uploading.

A common technique that I use is to perform a bulk upload using Windows Explorer View and then using the DataSheet View to do a bulk tag. So for example if you upload content from the IT Policies folder you know ‘department’ needs to be set to ‘IT’ and ‘document type’ to ‘Policy’.

If you have a lot of content to upload and tag then there are a number of migration utilities that will allow you to do bulk uploads of content and specify the metadata on the way up. There are also some interesting tools coming out that will auto tag and classify your content as you upload it to the server such as datafacet.com or pingar.com.

Are there plug-ins that you would recommend for any SharePoint implementation?
SharePoint is supported by a large vendor/partner community that create a number of plug-ins to extend SharePoint functionality. There are a number of 3rd party add-ins that can be used, but this is very dependent on the problem.

RecordPoint is a great plug-in for anyone concerned with compliance, records management or public records. RecordPoint enables SharePoint to be set up and configured in a way users naturally work, this may be project focused and cross discipline. This is often different to the way a record manager sees the world. In the background RecordPoint classifies the records and provides the views needed by the record manager but doesn’t affect the way users interact with SharePoint. Again, this leads to much higher adoption and better ROI.

OnePlaceMail is another plug-in we use regularly for increased SharePoint and Outlook/Exchange integration.

We have already touched on a few of the common add-ons. Depending on the gap you are trying to fill there are a number of add-ons to recommend:

1. Create your own no-code web parts with the DataView Web Part which is found in SharePoint Designer 2010.
2. Outlook SharePoint Integration: OnePlaceMail from Scinaptic is an Australian-made product. You can run it for free for up to 25 users.
3. Workflow: Nintex Workflow 2010 enables ‘drag and drop’ workflow creation. Another great Aussie product!
4. iPhone or iPad integration: SharePlus or Filamente enable you to take SharePoint content with you on your favourite iDevice.

TAKE YOUR TIME TO EXPLORE THE PRODUCT. AS PART OF YOUR PROJECT HAVE A ‘PLAY ENVIRONMENT’ TO SEE WHAT WILL WORK BEST FOR YOUR PROJECT AND ORGANISATION WITHOUT THE FEAR OF BREAKING SOMETHING

What are the key things you would recommend to a business embarking on an information management project?
There are several factors:

1. Have clear goals: Have a well-defined goal before you start. Don’t get distracted by all the features and don’t expect the technology to make you do things a certain way.
2. Avoid the Big Bang: Don’t aim to deliver the ‘all singing, all dancing’ project. Keep it simple and don’t be afraid of a phased rollout.
3. Quick wins: Target the low hanging fruit. The business (and sponsors) will see value and generate excitement and enthusiasm for the project.
4. Avoid Analysis Paralysis: You will discover a lot of things that can be done with SharePoint and it’s important not to over analyse things. Keep the project goals in focus and plan to deploy the other features in later stages of the project.
5. Understand the technology: Take your time to explore the product. As part of your project have a ‘play environment’ to see what will work best for your project and organisation without the fear of breaking something.
6. Long Term Management: Factor in a ‘business as usual’ strategy to ensure the system is managed and updated on a day to day basis.

Our thanks to Rob Stewart, SharePoint solutions specialist for Intergen (www.intergen.co.nz) and James Milne, founder and lead consultant for Myriad Technologies (www.myriadtech.com.au) for their contributions.