SharePoint has various faces, the "must have" of the corporate world or the "let’s build our Intranet on SharePoint" all with the objective of it becoming the 'Font of all Knowledge' for my organisation.
Intranet
This is easily achieved but only if it is approached correctly and managed accordingly. There are many SharePoint Tutorias on YouTube, or we can train you one-on-one. Recently we were asked to develop application plans for both a small growing software house and a large multinational company both looking for SharePoint to deliver solutions. The first needed to rise above the competition as it tries to increase the market share of its UK customer base and the other needed to ensure Internal information was available and easy to find across 20+ international offices and both used our SharePoint Templates.
Extranet
The first case used SharePoint as an extranet providing each new customer with a SharePoint site during the sales process that enabled an improvement in their communications between customer and company and left a permanent location for quotations and updates with the Sales team. It portrayed them as a knowledge organisation using technology in a supportive way for their clients. Future enhancements will continue to use the site for support and improved ongoing communications.
SharePoint as a toolbox
A large organisation should take the same approach to SharePoint but multiplied as many times as is required. In this case the initial stages looked at expanding their existing Global intranet but preparing the design and architecture for the platform to become the 'Toolbox' of the organisation a location for local collaborations, small workflows and larger applications linking into various databases and services. The biggest difference that a large SharePoint rollout has to consider is Governance and Information Taxonomy (both subjects to be covered in future posts).
Recipe for success
Large and Small SharePoint applications require the same approach of defining the outcomes, recognise the audiences, question and listen to the voice of the people (the users of the system), understanding the processes and ensure that the deliverables are measured and tracked and SharePoint tutorials. A simple recipe for success but one that can ensure your SharePoint installation is both used and adds benefit to the business.
This level of pre-design work will ensure the development team have everything at their disposal to create the perfect SharePoint application that has a reasonable chance of working first time... well maybe with a few tweaks.
