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1. Establish a vision for SharePoint

Some of the questions that need to be answered when establishing the vision would be

• What will SharePoint mean to your organization?
• What is the best way to implement it so it provides the maximum value to the organization?
• Should it be an intranet, extranet or a collaboration platform?
• Should users create their own communities or should they be restricted?
• Will the document management features be useful for automation workflow and document handling?
• Can Dashboards be of any use to your user community? Etc.

2. Establish a Business Case before you plan the infrastructure spend

We have seen many a times that IT organizations invest a lot on building servers, hardware, network storage etc. without considering the overall business case for the SharePoint platform. Some of the questions that are necessary to be answered include

• Who are the users of the intranets, and what are their profiles?
• What business units need the support of the intranet?
• What are the different types of scenarios that need to be supported by the intranet?
• Should the intranet support cross departmental processes?
• Can the intranet be paving way to create paperless processes?
• How can you reduce time and cost spent in managing the processes? Etc.

All of this in totality [with or without the large infrastructure spend] will make the SharePoint project focused and successful.

3. Sell the SharePoint idea to as much business units/departments etc

Sell the SharePoint Portal idea to as many people as possible to create awareness among them. This is very important for users to accept the new environment, and seamlessly fit into to the overall intranet environment. Some of the ways in which you can promote the idea would be

• Create awareness workshops to focused groups of audiences in your organization
• Create Proof of Concepts of different functional sections of the intranet, and use it as a mechanism to sell the idea
• Provide the users with some hands on experience by creating Pilot projects for the SharePoint intranets, and exposing the users to the applications.
• Project the benefits in terms of increase in productivity, reduction in costs, ease of use etc. to different kinds of audiences within your organization

4. Start a grass roots organization for supporting the Portal

Identify the important user profiles – which would include Contributors, content editors, content authors, administrators, end users, approvers etc. from as many of the business units and geographies as possible. Have champions for the various sites based on the interest level, and the ability to spend time and contribute effectively towards the development of the Intranet.

5. Create Processes for Content development, publishing and administration of

SharePoint Intranet

Content is king in Portals. Establish content development, review and publishing procedures for all types of content and make sure relevant and interesting content gets to the site. Do not make the process too elaborate or you will lose all the volunteers for content development or publishing. The processes must be developed by giving importance to the different governance considerations, policies and procedures around security, data exposure and other aspects. Including administrative strategies for backup and recovery, intranet maintenance etc. upfront during the design process would save a lot of time later on.

6. Involve the users to make the intranet more usable and also useful

It is not enough if the intranet has been implemented in your organization. It is very important that the users find it useful and usable and spend enough time on the intranet on a day to day basis to carry out their daily tasks.

The intranet implementation must be aligned to provide the users what they ask for and meet up with their expectations in one way or the other. The intranet will be an utter failure if it does not provide the necessary features, functionalities and most importantly tools that would help them carry out their day to day activities at a faster pace.

One of the ways in which user involvement can be achieved includes creating surveys, and gathering information on the tools, functions and features that the users would like to have on the intranet.

The bottom line is – for whatever it takes; keep the users happy for it is they who decide the success or failure of the intranet implementation.

7. Plan on implementing powerful search capabilities

Most of the users come to the intranet to find information that they will not find elsewhere. If the information exists and is not findable, then it would serve no purpose than to disappoint the user. A Powerful and flexible search is a must in your intranet implementation which would allow the users with the capabilities to target information using different parameters and queries and find the right kind of information in a short span of time.

Microsoft SharePoint search provides flexible APIs that can be used to improve and customize the search to meet your information requirements.

8. Democratize the intranet

Apart from allowing the users of the intranet to interact between themselves and with external users of the organization, it must also provide for an “Architecture of Participation”. I.e. the users must be equally capable of contributing to the content of the intranet without the dependency on any other user roles in the organization by encouraging user communities.

SharePoint by default is a self service capable platform which allows the users to carry out most of the tasks with minimal development and administrative interference.

9. Mirror the outside world

Almost all the users are well aware of the tools and utilities like Instant messaging, Blogging, wikis, link sharing, social community applications like Orkut etc. that the World Wide Web provides. They know the benefits and the usage of the tools and use them almost on a daily basis. When these tools are implemented in the organization’s intranet in the context of the collaboration and communication of users within the organization, it would add more value to the users, as well as the organization as a whole.

10. Keep the Content fresh and up to date.

A Portal is not a static web page. It is like a daily newspaper. People get fresh content with new feature updates on a regular basis.

SharePoint is a platform for business which is web based and can be used to create powerful business Solutions. Up until now SharePoint was positioned and implemented with a narrow focus of being a just Platform for Intranets that are front-end heavy and a simple system for limited document sharing and forms automation solutions. SharePoint Server is and will be a bigger platform encompassing solutions for Web enabled Applications, Extranets, Intranets, Document Management, Business Intelligence and Complex Workflow. Therefore SharePoint needs to be leveraged and internally marketed in as such a way that represents the true capabilities it presents the next generation web enabled organization. A well-planned solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will promote better collaboration, content management, knowledge discovery, and business processes across your organization while being secure, cost-effective, and manageable for your IT department. To satisfy this broad set of goals, it is important to identify key stakeholders across all relevant disciplines and include them in your planning team.

Comprehensive reporting solutions and dashboards provide the busy executive a quick snapshot of the right information, at the right time, in the right format, in real time. SharePoint based reporting solutions and dashboards leverage SharePoint’s intrinsic features like extensibility, integration capabilities, flexibility, and collaborative framework to facilitate building robust, secure and tailored solutions that virtually become the one stop shop for all the critical information requirement of business users.

Issues with the current state of the Enterprise

• Business systems are in multiple technologies, with specific processes that take too much time and money to make changes
• Information within Business systems are not easily extended to use in the content of the user with documents, websites, or to be shared with customers, business partners, suppliers and others securely
• Licensing models of enterprise systems make it cost prohibitive for enterprises to licenses all users who need to be casual users or consumers of information from these systems
• Lack key features like Workflow, Forms, Self Service, Document Management, Web Publishing, Integrated reporting and Search functionality

SharePoint in the Enterprise

Benefits

• Leveraging existing investments in SharePoint software to deliver more functionality and solutions in SharePoint
• Reduced training costs
• Integrated systems with Microsoft Office, Outlook, Active Directory, Exchange

Furthermore, SharePoint will also allow creation of applications that will be put together in portable, manageable components called “web parts” that can be targeted to customers, employees, and partners

• My orders, My Invoices, My Benefits, My Inventory, My Supplies among many quick to add features that pull together information from multiple places within an organization

SharePoint can be the single source, collaboration platform to access the various information and services from all areas of the organization

• Allows for seamlessly accessing information pan enterprise in a secure, personalized and centralized fashion.

Some Facts as to why SharePoint can be used as the Target Platform for Building Business Applications for the Enterprise

• SharePoint with its business user friendly and self service driven application model reduces the need for business to cultivate their own independent “IT shops”
• Reduces the need for custom software development by making many of the common forms, workflow and collaborative applications configurable based on a “point and click” model.
• Enterprise wide adoption of SharePoint could lead to reduced licensing costs of other software by being the 80% solution for various Content Mgmt, Document Mgmt, Reporting and Collaboration needs across the Enterprise
• The Web architecture of SharePoint lends itself to developing collaborative infrastructure nationwide, overseas, and with Business partners
• Native integration and collaboration features with Outlook, Active Directory and Microsoft Office making it the platform of choice upon adoption of Exchange/Outlook for Email
• The new feature of SharePoint allows for easy integration of the ERP systems and centralization of the Document Management, Reporting applications etc.
• The fastest growing product platform for Microsoft and is predicted to be adopted by 90% of the companies in the next few years –Aberdeen Group.

With the Advent of the Web 2.0, the concept of Social Networking has experienced a great deal of visibility as a means to increase productivity, through shared knowledge amongst groups of people or communities. And with this concept really taking off on the Internet, there is acknowledgement, within organizations, of the fact that the community concept really is a means of developing, harnessing and maintaining long term organizational memory, and communities are in fact an effective way for organizations to capture unstructured data, and to share knowledge outside of the traditional structural boundaries.

It has been further observed that Social Networking within enterprises can also assist in the extinction of Information and capability silos by identifying subject matter experts and resources. The fact that now it could be possible to discover and identify people, teams and information related to their specific initiatives and efforts, through an understanding of the web model, has information workers wanting these social networking applications at their disposal more than ever. And even Organizations have started to realize the potential of these applications and as a mechanism to unlock and surface unstructured data and valuable information.

Having said that, it is absolutely essential for organizations to invest in, and choose the right kind of application to host these solutions. And we are going to discuss, in this article, about how SharePoint’s inherent Social Networking capabilities, along with its robust platform could just be the right application for you.

Some of the Social Networking Components of SharePoint

User Profile: This is the Profile information of a user, where users store their personal information.

My Sites: These are personalized Sites created for each user, allowing him to create blogs, wikis, store his personal documents, Share information with others, etc.

Organizational Hierarchy Web Part: This Web Part shows, where the user is situated, in terms of hierarchy, in the corporate pantheon.

Colleagues Web Part: This web Part allows the user to mention who colleagues are and define his relationship with them though the use of Meta data.

People Search: This feature allows users to be able to search for colleagues based on filter criteria.

Though SharePoint, does not have all the components to be called a complete Social Networking Solution, such as bookmarking, Tagging, the ability to publish this internal data on the Internet, and more extensive support for Forms based authentication, etc, but nevertheless, It is a great platform for building robust and flexible Enterprise 2.0 solutions that are extensible and secure, and leverage Web 2.0 in a holistic fashion to empower business users, and help organizations become more agile, efficient and productive, all in a seamless and secure fashion., but it is a great starting point, and given the fact that it is already being touted as a great publishing and Business platform, and with the progress being made in the social networking aspects, it is a good platform to bet on.