SharePoint Assessment & Roadmap: The Key to a Successful Collaboration Platform

By: Jim Eagleton

Senior Director SharePoint/ Collaboration

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a robust collaboration platform that offers a wide variety of features to help organizations drive efficiencies and effectiveness across the enterprise, with employees, partners and customers. A well-planned and integrated implementation promises excellent results. However, to leverage the true potential of the platform requires up-front analysis of the business objectives and IT infrastructure to ensure the best fit solution that is aligned with organizational priorities.

In our experience, we’ve seen customers fall into a few broad groups that outline the opportunity matrix for SharePoint:

1. A business that implemented an older version of SharePoint and wishes to upgrade to the latest to avail the new features and capabilities
2. A business that implemented SharePoint as a point solution for a given project or team and wishes to expand its reach across the enterprise, ensuring standard usage and integrated governance policies
3. A business that uses a few of the features of SharePoint, but now wishes to leverage the full capabilities of the product
4. A business that has no collaboration platform as yet and wants to ensure an implementation that follows industry best practices and aligns with their business priorities

Infogain’s SharePoint QuickStart program is a five-day assessment and roadmap program that will help your organization get started quickly and take full advantage of the benefits of collaboration. If you are interested in setting up a meeting to discuss the opportunities for a SharePoint implementation, please contact us.

Accelerate Time to Value

Infogain’s SharePoint QuickStart program is a five-day roadmap planning and information assessment wherein a senior consultant from our Collaboration / SharePoint Practice works with you to provide the thought leadership and strategic “next step” guidance to ensure a comprehensive framework for your SharePoint environment.

We empower you to:

• Connect with business users immediately
• Educate your team on critical decisions about the SharePoint environment
• Pilot SharePoint capabilities in conjunction with your business processes
• Expedite user buy-in of the platform
• Prioritize project requests from departments, project teams and even customers
• Balance strategy options and implementation priorities

Unlocking the Full Potential of Collaboration

Knowledge worker productivity and business process efficiencies are just two of the beneficiaries of a collaborative work environment that is well aligned with an organization’s business strategies. The ability to find, access and share unstructured data is becoming a top priority for a business to retain its competitive advantage. Through effective collaboration tools, organizations can benefit from reduced IT and maintenance costs, increased productivity and user satisfaction, more streamlined and efficient business processes and, ultimately, greater business agility.

Utilizing Microsoft SharePoint for Collaboration and Beyond

Collaboration drives efficiencies. And, in today’s global economy, efficient organizations require a central repository, or area, for sharing information. People within the organization need a designated place to actively retrieve, update, and view historical changes to documents and information with the appropriate controls relative to access and security.

Why is Collaboration So Critical?

A few examples are provided below.

Policies and Procedures: Many organizations are becoming extremely mature in the creation of Standard Operating Procedures and Policy documents. Whether it is due to legislation like Sarbanes Oxley that runs across all industries, or an industry-specific compliance requirement, the need to access and control documents for policies and procedures is often not only important, but required by legislation.

Technology Implementations: As organizations evolve and increase their technology and infrastructure capabilities, system integrators are often called on to assist with implementation activities. Many times, these implementations run in parallel within an organization and share common tasks and documentations. A single area of collaboration allows multiple streams of work to run, without work being lost or redundant. Once again, implementations in industries such as Insurance require access to and control of documents for CFR Part 11 Validation requirements, hence a driver towards an area for web collaboration.

Organizations Growing Geographically: With organizations growing nationally and internationally with vendors in various locations, web-based interactions are increasingly necessary to enable teams to create and hold meetings, and manage shared work spaces.