- Why Would an Organization Want to Use SharePoint?
- Sharing, Managing, and Finding Documents Made Easier
- Finding Relevant Information
- Providing Efficiencies for Meetings
- Adding Value by Using Alerts
- Engaging in Online Discussions
- Getting Information from Users
- Informing Users with Announcements and News Items
- Creating Sites to Meet the Needs of the User Community
- Expanding SharePoint by Integrating with Microsoft Office 2003 and Other Applications
- Replacing Corporate Intranets
- Hosting SharePoint Sites on the Internet
- Communicating with Partners and Customers Through a SharePoint Extranet
- Summary
- Best Practices
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Best Practices
Although having the ability to easily create sites encourages collaboration and sharing of information, it needs to be managed. Left unmanaged, an organization could end up with thousands of unconnected individual and group work sites that generate some of the same issues the organization was trying to resolve with a collaborative solution.
Even if no other SharePoint features are implemented, using its search capabilities will empower users to quickly find the information they need. Documents do not have to be incorporated into SharePoint to realize the benefit of SharePoint's search because file shares, as well as other external data sources, can be included as content sources to be indexed.
Using SharePoint document libraries for storing and accessing policies, procedures, and other types of user manuals that frequently change can save an organization the cost of producing hard-copy documents, the cost of distributing updates, and the labor cost associated with manually updating a hard-copy based manual. In addition, maintaining an online manual ensures that all employees are accessing the most current, up-to-date information.
Introducing users to the SharePoint environment through the Microsoft Office 2003 applications they are already familiar with eases the learning curve and improves acceptance of a new way of doing things.
Creating a portal structure that has various levels of sites targeted to specific user groups helps to manage the content and provides users with an easy way to get to the information they need.
Eliciting ideas by placing discussion items on an enterprise-level site opens up a forum for tapping resources that may otherwise be difficult to reach.
Let SharePoint do the work of letting you know when information has changed by setting up alerts.
Take advantage of Web Parts and components already developed to extend the use of the portal for accessing application data and for performing functions such as calculations from within the portal environment as opposed to launching a separate application.
Let IT control the overall security and configuration parameters, but encourage end-users to manage and control the content on non-top-level sites to take the burden off the IT department.