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Sharepoint: what is it and what are the advantages?

Sharepoint: what is it and what are the advantages?

Old Apr 25, 2014, 2:28 am
  #1  
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Sharepoint: what is it and what are the advantages?

My company's IT leader has announced that we will be getting Sharepoint in the next year or so and that this will revolutionize the way we work and communicate between offices and with clients. I've done some quick Google research but still don't quite understand what Sharepoint is or why it's so revolutionary. I assume some of you here have experience with it? What exactly is it? What does it do? How does it make work easier, especially for a firm that does consulting projects across multiple jurisdictions?

Sorry to ask so many stupid questions, but as you can tell, I am not a technology person! Thanks in advance for any replies!
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Old Apr 25, 2014, 2:32 am
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Google searches do deliver a lot of info, and most of it is rather useless. Just wait till they have implemented it.... or start with the Microsoft sites, even though they aren't that great on the info either.

But in essence it's a tool that can be used to facilitate sharing of information/files so people can more easily work together on the same files and where location doesn't really matter (off course it's a lot more and a bit more complicated than that).

And tell your IT leader he/she is a bit late in the game....

Last edited by RTW1; Apr 25, 2014 at 2:43 am
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Old Apr 25, 2014, 1:36 pm
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We've been using sharepoint at my company for a few years now. As far as I know we don't use it to communicate outside the company but what we do use it for is a centralized network accessible location for (e.g.):
- Submitting expense requests
- Creating calendars of events that sync to outlook
- Repository for controlled non-engineering documents (SOP, Work instructions, Forms, etc.) It's also used for the document change processing of the same documents i.e. controlled documents are now solely electronic.
- Job tracking
- High level project tracking (e.g. milestone dates)
- Processing Non-conforming product (i.e. Quality disposition)
- Purchase Requests
- Contact/Supplier Lists

And a lot more that I probably don't see because it's not related to my position (R&D).

It's been a net positive but I'm sure there are alternative solutions.
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Old Apr 26, 2014, 7:34 am
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Originally Posted by Unimatrix One
My company's IT leader has announced that we will be getting Sharepoint in the next year or so and that this will revolutionize the way we work and communicate between offices and with clients. I've done some quick Google research but still don't quite understand what Sharepoint is or why it's so revolutionary. I assume some of you here have experience with it? What exactly is it? What does it do? How does it make work easier, especially for a firm that does consulting projects across multiple jurisdictions?

Sorry to ask so many stupid questions, but as you can tell, I am not a technology person! Thanks in advance for any replies!
I am a SharePoint developer. The phrase "this will revolutionize the way we work and communicate between offices and with clients" is a bit over the top.

Out of the box it has some nice collaborative features but to get a really significant integration into your business processes will take a fair amount of effort and cost. If done well you can achieve increases in efficiency and reductions in manpower costs.

It is an excellent product but like everything in life YMMV.
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Old Apr 28, 2014, 1:21 am
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Originally Posted by cheltzel
Out of the box it has some nice collaborative features but to get a really significant integration into your business processes will take a fair amount of effort and cost. If done well you can achieve increases in efficiency and reductions in manpower costs.
...and if it's done badly enough, you've got something heavier-weight than an SVN server (or OwnCloud) plus a copy of MediaWiki that works less well than either (and without being free to excuse the faults of the former.)
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Old Apr 28, 2014, 1:05 pm
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In all my years I've never seen it used as anything other than a subject repository. Basically a place where all the project artifacts are stored. A database for documents. Nothing exciting, and certainly nothing revolutionary.
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Old Apr 28, 2014, 7:13 pm
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I do believe whether Sharepoint will make a big difference to your company's productivity depends on a) what is your level of productivity/integration with existing tools and b) how deeply you use MS technologies.

For example, I work with Fortune 100 companies that use MS Sharepoint + Lync + Outlook rather effectively for collaboration (web based meetings + presence + document sharing + IM + VoIP) --> having attended several multi-site meetings this way, I can confirm they work very well. Its not to say you can't achieve similar stuff with a combination of other 3rd party tools, but if you invest into MS technologies as a whole, these pieces will fall in easier together than trying to stitch them together.

Take my own company as another example: We are an IBM lotus notes shop (now, now, don't judge us...). One of our teams decided to use sharepoint for "knowledgebase" generation, but because the rest of the company was not using MS tools (not counting Office/Win), it soon got relegated to a 'document store' like others have point to above. But because we use IBM products, our IT has actually done a good job integrating our emails with presence+VoIP + mobile messaging + converting customer and contact data as lotus notes databases as well as integrated workflow stuff - performance management etc. So our employees/managers actually get quite a bit done from their notes client. Similarly, customer contracts/NDAs/proposals/presentations/etc are all automatically available for our sales folks to see/review any time via Notes.

There are of course views on bloatware, web based tools etc, but hey this works very well too. So I guess how effective Sharepoint will be for you will depend on how effectively your IT integrates it with other company processes.

my 2 cents, anyway.
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