What SharePoint Can Do for Your Organization
Many companies are seeing the benefits – including increased productivity and lower costs – of SharePoint’s collaboration, document management, and business process automation capabilities. SharePoint integrates tightly with Microsoft’s Office suite of programs, making it possible to edit and upload files (such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets) directly from Office into SharePoint.

Using SharePoint your team members can:

• Collaborate on Documents - Individual files can be dragged and dropped from the desktop to a SharePoint site; multiple files can be easily uploaded to the site. Once there, documents can be checked out, updated, and then checked back in by authorized team members. Users can also create document workspaces in which they post and edit documents.
• Manage Documents - SharePoint provides a wide range of out-of-the-box workflow functions for document management. Documents can be routed for review, approval, or signatures; issues and document changes can be tracked; document expiration and retention can be managed; and users can choose from 3 different options for numbering and saving different versions of a document.
• Manage and Coordinate Tasks - SharePoint integrates with Outlook to provide the ability to assign specific tasks to specific team members, who can then update the task to show progress or completion.
• Search for Content - With SharePoint you can set up one convenient web portal through which your users can search all of your documents and projects. Stop wasting time digging for things – just log into the portal, go to the search page, and ask for what you need.
• Create Popular Web 2.0 Applications - SharePoint makes it easy to create blogs, wikis, discussion forums, and RSS feeds; post events and announcements to the site; and use calendars to post meetings and other team events.
• Automate Business Processes - If you have a forms-driven business process that involves a variety of people and needs to be repeated on a regular basis, such as a hiring process with numerous forms and sign-offs, you can create work flows in SharePoint to automate the process.
• Use Dashboarding to See Where You Stand - Sales and marketing people often find this particularly useful. With SharePoint’s dashboarding features you can set up a web page that will take information from a data sheet (such as sales data) and display it graphically to create a helpful “snapshot” view. As entries are made into the data sheet the dashboard is automatically updated to reflect the change.

Key Improvements in SharePoint 2007 vs. Previous 2003 Version
The Enterprise version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 contains a number of significant improvements over earlier renditions of SharePoint, including:

• Collaboration - Users now have the ability to create wikis, blogs, and other social networking pages. Email integration and task coordination are available, and document collaboration options are greatly expanded.
• Portals - New preconfigured templates streamline the creation, customization, and deployment of divisional portals, organization-wide intranet portal sites, and corporate Web sites.
• Search - Search results in SharePoint 2007 are rendered more clearly than in previous versions, with security rules enforced so that users only see content to which they have access permission. Results include user-friendly features such as hit highlighting, duplicate collapsing and synonym suggestions. New functions include the ability to search for people and expertise.
• Enterprise Content Management - Enhanced document management functionality includes major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels.
• Forms-Driven Business Processes - Users can now design Web-capable forms in InfoPath 2007 and distribute them on corporate intranets, extranets, or even on the Internet. Users can fill out forms in a browser or HTML-enabled mobile device with no download or client components needed.
• Business Intelligence - The 2007 version of SharePoint provides business intelligence capabilities that enable users to share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions.

Getting SharePoint Up and Running in Your Organization
If you’re thinking of implementing SharePoint, Coyote Creek Consulting can help. As a SharePoint Gold Partner we have extensive experience in all aspects of working with SharePoint, from new installations to upgrades and migrations. Call us for assistance with:

• Solutions design - We’ll learn about your business requirements and design a solution to meet your specific needs
• Installations, upgrades or migrations - We’ll assess your situation, create a plan, and (if you don’t have the in-house resources available to make it all happen) seamlessly take care of the implementation for you
• Customization - We can help you with automation, customized portals, and other custom SharePoint applications
• Complementary products - We’re also knowledgeable about the underlying Microsoft technologies on which SharePoint relies, including SQL Server, Active Directory, and Exchange.

One of key factors driving SharePoint’s popularity is its ease of use for your end users. No need for your non-technical people to learn to use web development software in order to create their pages and portals. All they need to do is access their management console and “drag and drop” the desired components into place.

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