SharePoint – More than just a file storage!

“The work­sta­tion is chang­ing, why not the file repos­i­tory?”

Some employ­ees ask them­selves these and other ques­tions because they clearly per­ceive that their work­place is chang­ing. In addi­tion to cen­tral­ized and decen­tral­ized col­lab­o­ra­tion, employ­ees are increas­ingly work­ing with an Inter­net browser (IE, FF, Safari, App on the smart­phone, etc.), because appli­ca­tions are increas­ingly being run via an Inter­net browser instead of installing them. And the idea of the com­pa­nies, which every­one has cer­tainly heard before, is: “Every­thing is acces­si­ble from every­where and doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion are stored cen­trally”. But can this idea also be put into prac­tice?

With Share­Point, there is no need to send doc­u­ments via e-​mail, as links are sent. These links are struc­tured like the already known Inter­net addresses and lead the employee directly to the doc­u­ment. Whether Word, Excel, PDF or other file for­mats, the doc­u­ment is accessed via the link and can be edited imme­di­ately.

– Tip: The edit­ing is done with the Office online ver­sions for Word, Excel, Pow­er­Point etc., but you can also switch to the locally installed appli­ca­tion at any time.

Con­se­quently, the company’s idea is that all doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion are cen­tral­ized and acces­si­ble to every­one with Share­Point. This lays the essen­tial foun­da­tion for today’s increas­ing cen­tral­ized and de-​centralized coop­er­a­tion.

Share­Point has also advan­tages for project work and inter­nally required infor­ma­tion. In addi­tion to send­ing links, all related infor­ma­tion and doc­u­ments on projects, inter­nal top­ics and released doc­u­ments and illus­tra­tions can be stored cen­trally or in a team-​oriented man­ner. This means that the infor­ma­tion can be pre­pared and released in Share­Point, depend­ing on how your com­pany struc­tures are designed.

This results in the fol­low­ing ben­e­fits for your com­pany: No doc­u­ment or infor­ma­tion remains in the mail­box of a sin­gle employee until it is processed. The work is done cen­trally. Doc­u­ments are also marked with a unique sta­tus, such as “In process” and “Released”.

Imple­ment knowl­edge man­age­ment

Share­Point solves a prob­lem which, in our expe­ri­ence, is car­ried around by many com­pa­nies: In view of the increas­ing impor­tance of a faster infor­ma­tion exchange as well as knowl­edge build­ing and knowl­edge exchange with simul­ta­ne­ous cen­tral­ized and decen­tral­ized col­lab­o­ra­tion in projects, a cen­tral doc­u­ment stor­age with doc­u­ment man­age­ment and knowl­edge stor­age is a pre­req­ui­site in every com­pany. This is usu­ally main­tained mod­er­ately only with a file server, a sim­ple folder struc­ture or a file repos­i­tory.

With Share­Point and cen­tral doc­u­ment stor­age together with doc­u­ment man­age­ment and knowl­edge stor­age, many time-​consuming queries via e-​mail and tele­phone calls – where the infor­ma­tion is and how up-​to-​date it is – can be saved. Demands are often asso­ci­ated with time and thus con­sume valu­able pro­duc­tive work­ing time.

In our project expe­ri­ence, Share­Point is a ver­sa­tile appli­ca­tion. The flex­i­ble user inter­face can be adapted to a wide range of appli­ca­tions. It is also ideal for project work and knowl­edge man­age­ment in your com­pany. Since the last update of DIN EN ISO 9001, knowl­edge man­age­ment has become a sup­port­ing pil­lar of the cor­po­rate cul­ture, which you must prove within the scope of (re-)certification. SharePoint’s many cus­tomiza­tion options make it the ideal plat­form for stor­ing and retriev­ing knowl­edge.

Share­Point means doc­u­ment man­age­ment:

• Doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion are avail­able cen­trally for all employ­ees (with autho­riza­tion con­cept).
• Shar­ing of ver­sioned doc­u­ments and ver­sion con­trol, as well as archiv­ing to com­ply with inter­nal and legal require­ments, reg­u­la­tions and laws.
• Use knowl­edge man­age­ment by build­ing and main­tain­ing infor­ma­tion, for exam­ple via wikis, blogs, cal­en­dars and newslet­ters
• Man­age projects, project con­trol­ling and task lists for easy cen­tral plan­ning and coor­di­na­tion.

Yet many won­der what Share­Point actu­ally can do.

Cre­ate and upload doc­u­ments

In the Share­Point web inter­face, you can upload doc­u­ments directly using drag and drop or cre­ate new doc­u­ments.

Doc­u­ment fold­ers

Doc­u­ment fold­ers are an impor­tant func­tion in Share­Point. Doc­u­ment fold­ers are a col­lec­tion of related doc­u­ments, for exam­ple, for quo­ta­tions or project doc­u­ments, that is, a sep­a­rate Share­Point folder. All doc­u­ments belong­ing to this Share­Point folder are “tagged”, “labelled” or “marked” – as one employee would say. In this way, all doc­u­ments belong­ing together receive the so-​called com­mon meta­data. Meta­data can be project num­ber, doc­u­ment cat­e­gory or doc­u­ment sta­tus, for exam­ple.

Intel­li­gent doc­u­ment fold­ers

SharePoint’s Non-​Plus-​Ultra is the func­tion for intel­li­gent doc­u­ment fold­ers that are auto­mat­i­cally stored in the cor­rect loca­tion and can con­tain many tem­plates of their own. Exam­ple: If you have con­fig­ured the doc­u­ment folder so that doc­u­ments are auto­mat­i­cally avail­able when they are cre­ated, users can see them on the wel­come page and work right away. The pre­req­ui­site for this is the set­ting of con­tent rules. Intel­li­gent doc­u­ment fold­ers allow exten­sive con­fig­u­ra­tions for doc­u­ments and autho­riza­tion set­tings.

All that remains for all employ­ees is: If a new order, a new offer or a new project is pend­ing, the employee can cre­ate all the pre­req­ui­sites with one mouse click to start work and work cen­trally with all col­leagues. And of course he can then very eas­ily send the direct link of a doc­u­ment folder by e-​mail.

Use Doc­u­ment IDs

Each doc­u­ment is assigned a unique ID. Users can even search for doc­u­ments with this ID. In this way, every doc­u­ment in Share­Point can pre­cisely be iden­ti­fied. And that means for doc­u­ment man­age­ment: The Share­Point option to assign a unique ID allows direct access to the file via URL, even if the file is moved to another loca­tion.

Advan­tages

• Project man­age­ment with doc­u­ment fold­ers
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion in teams and projects
• Use of many devices
• Sup­ports acces­si­bil­ity through spec­i­fi­ca­tions and set­tings in the fol­low­ing areas

o Read­abil­ity through colour con­trasts

o Nav­i­ga­tion via key­board, mouse or voice out­put

o Alter­na­tive text and tran­script

• Find rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion quickly and thus accel­er­ate work processes
• Busi­ness processes and work­flows: Spec­ify how Share­Point should han­dle doc­u­ments. For exam­ple, auto­matic renam­ing, stor­age and archiv­ing if a spe­cific sta­tus has been defined for a doc­u­ment.
• Reduc­tion of e-​mail traf­fic and cen­tral infor­ma­tion dis­tri­b­u­tion:
• Opti­mum process sup­port through

o Stor­age of project work and project doc­u­ments together.

o Use of cost con­trol, project plan and busi­ness intel­li­gence (Microsoft Pow­er­Apps) for easy project man­age­ment and eval­u­a­tion.

o Achieve a cen­tral appoint­ment cal­en­dar and task lists.

• Use knowl­edge man­age­ment and knowl­edge exchange via wiki, blog, forum.
• Autho­riza­tion con­cept: Basic gran­u­lar, con­fig­urable autho­riza­tion con­cept can be set. You can even con­fig­ure per­mis­sions to require users to check out doc­u­ments to pre­vent acci­den­tal changes.
• Pow­er­ful and intel­li­gent search func­tions and fewer fold­ers at the same time

Sum­mary

Our expe­ri­ence and know-​how: With Share­Point, a company-​specific struc­ture of the entire plat­form is always nec­es­sary and the sim­plic­ity of work­ing with links is irre­place­able for inter­nal orga­ni­za­tion and for project man­age­ment and coor­di­na­tion. For exam­ple, the meta­data must be defined in advance so that it can be reused in doc­u­ment fold­ers.

As a plat­form for col­lab­o­ra­tion, web con­tent man­age­ment and doc­u­ment man­age­ment, Share­Point sup­ports col­lab­o­ra­tion within the com­pany, at company’s depart­ment, team and project level. Every com­pany with a Share­Point envi­ron­ment needs its own test­ing and devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment. At best, this test and devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment repli­cates the final pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment. Nowa­days this is real­ized via vir­tual servers. Run­ning them on Microsoft Azure reduces deploy­ment time and costs sig­nif­i­cantly com­pared to a tra­di­tional instal­la­tion. With Microsoft Azure-​VMs (IaaS), both an “upgrade farm” and a test or devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment can be put into oper­a­tion in a short time and with­out cap­i­tal com­mit­ment.

To min­i­mize hard­ware and soft­ware costs, you pro­vide highly avail­able Share­Point servers as a col­lab­o­ra­tive solu­tion for your orga­ni­za­tion with a Share­Point recov­ery envi­ron­ment in Azure. Depend­ing on the load on the sys­tems, you can flex­i­bly scale your envi­ron­ment up and down and you only pay for what you actu­ally use.

If you have any ques­tions, please feel free to con­tact us: info@​ipdynamics.​de