Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Building Powerful Intranets With SharePoint

Organizational intranets are evolving from being an employee collaboration and document sharing platform to be a more powerful platform that incorporates the best of breed features of new generation technologies and solutions. The concepts of mash up applications with web 2.0 technologies are being brought into the intranets to provide a single source of truth to the entire organization in a self service manner, with users given the primary focus as the contributors to the content of the intranet through collaboration tools and business solutions.

For a continuously successful intranet implementation, a clear strategy and plan needs to be created with dedicated teams to manage the intranet environment. This will allow your organization to easily identify the corporate intranet needs and implement the same in a structured and phased manner, aid in marketing the intranet as a business tool to the users, and allow them to gracefully accept the intranet in an efficient way.

The success of an intranet is totally dependent on the users as well as the ease of management of the infrastructure. It is very critical that the every piece of information from within or outside the organization must reside on the intranet which can be easily accessed by users and centrally managed. SharePoint is a ideal platform with capabilities like integrated document management, content management, extensible search, self service approach based interface and capabilities to extend the platform with the use of development frameworks which can be utilized to configure the intranet as a single source of truth for all the user communities across the organization.

Implementing an intranet and configuring it to deliver information must be the beginning of a phased approach that will transform the intranet to be a business tool for the organization. Applications and utilities should be implemented that would promote individual level, team level, departmental level and organizational level process automation. Moreover, Extranets should work together with the Intranets to provide and extended Enterprise which reaches out to the customers, partners etc. SharePoint can be a single platform that can be extended to provide collaboration and business applications that can not only cater to the employee requirements, but also to the collaboration requirements of customers, partners etc. via an extranet.

To support the informational, collaboration and business requirements of users located in offices that are sprawled across the globe, the intranet must be capable of delivering content with multi-lingual support, and truly integrate the teams across the world to seamlessly work together. SharePoint with its multi lingual capabilities and site variations provides a centralized management console with regional and localization settings, which can be easily used to deliver information to the audiences across the globe.

We believe that Microsoft SharePoint provides such an infrastructure and collaboration capabilities with innate extension and integration features, and can be effectively used as a platform to bring together distributed teams by providing centralized collaboration and process management capabilities with contextual information delivery.

OptimusBT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is a global leader in providing Business solutions that are primarily sharepoint based and utilize existing client infrastructure. For over 5 years, OptimusBT has paved the road when implementing complex, global solutions in the areas of Sales, Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Human Resources, and others across industry segments around the world.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Social Networking With SharePoint

With the advent of 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 acknowledgment, 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.

OptimusBT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is a global leader in providing Business solutions that are primarily sharepoint based and utilize existing client infrastructure. For over 5 years, OptimusBT has paved the road when implementing complex, global solutions in the areas of Sales, Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Human Resources, and others across industry segments around the world.

SharePoint - The New Face of Your Enterprise Architecture

Business Users today have to operate on tens, if not hundreds of applications, as part of their daily routine to run through their quota of work, moving from one silo to another to another, and if that isn't enough, the increased application access and password complexity, making it absolutely hard to maintain focus on their core jobs. Add to that, a lack of interoperability between these systems, and a lack of a truly integrated experience, and you've just defined virtual hell. Not to mention, the virtual nightmare that it is, for the IT departments, to manage and maintain these varied platforms and applications on a day to day basis.

In a world where the focus has moved from "one solution for all " to "doing one thing, and doing it right", vendors are building software solutions that meet some specific need and Enterprises, in an attempt to stay current, and to give their employees the best-of-the-breed software end up bringing in a myriad of applications and platforms within their environments. The result: "Virtual Hell".

Positioning of SharePoint as a Business Platform

SharePoint Features and Benefits

- Provides out of the box collaboration features like blogs, wikis, discussions, project management, document libraries, lists etc., that are easy to use and allow information workers to share and manage contents.
- Allows building applications that are supportable, extensible and easily maintainable by business users
- Workspace templates along with the collaboration tools can be used to manage specific information about projects, IT, HR etc.,
- Advanced Document management capabilities with support of content types allow information workers to easily create documents, fill information and share them securely.
- Can be a single platform for Intranet, Extranet and Internet with support for hosting to provide applications and software as service
- Supports collaboration both within the internal users, external users, and anonymous users of the Enterprise.
- Supports out of the box reporting dashboards, KPI web parts etc. that can be used to build mash ups and integration with backend systems
- Offers a component, the Business Data Catalog that allows for integration of LOB systems with SharePoint, and surfacing the data from within these disparate systems, right into SharePoint.

SharePoint 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. Common areas where Enterprise 2.0 solutions prove particularly useful are IT helpdesk, Active Directory user provisioning and profile management, eProcurement and the like. Well designed Enterprise 2.0 solutions virtually become key strategic assets for any organization's business performance.

OptimusBT, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner is a global leader in providing Business solutions that are primarily SharePoint based and utilize existing client infrastructure. For over 5 years, OptimusBT has paved the road when implementing complex, global solutions in the areas of Sales, Finance, Procurement, Manufacturing, Human Resources, and others across industry segments around the world.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

SharePoint Performance and Website Speed

Those of you who use Microsoft SharePoint 2007 for hosting your web site are probably used to speedy page load times and a rich set of features to offer your visitors. The thing is however your experience may not be what the majority of Internet users will experience when they visit your page.

The main reason for this is the geographical location of your web site. The further away it is from whoever is trying to visit the longer it will take for it to load. Website speed is incredibly important in overall guest satisfaction, and has been proven to increase sales as well as overall SharePoint performance. If a hard earned visitor is interested in your web site, but when they try and visit they are met with slow load times and a laggy response, you can guarantee that they will close your page and find one that performs better.

On top of physical distance from the server there are any numbers of things out of your control that could cause this type of poor SharePoint performance. This is precisely why optimizing your web pages to allow for the fastest experience for your visitor is the smartest choice you can make. Using a website optimization server component like Aptimize that you effortlessly install on your web server will automatically analyze the requested web page and make optimizations that will increase your visitor’s page load time by 33%-75%.

On the surface a dramatic increase in website speed seems like enough of a benefit to both you and your visitors, but Aptimize does much more. Your new highly optimized web pages use technology such as file and image combining, as well as Gzip compression of the data. What this means is that it take less requests on your SharePoint server to complete send the page, and this means less stress on your web server. You can also start benefiting right away with an up to 50% reduction in your bandwidth costs alone.

In short, the benefits of using website optimization software is far reaching and essential to give your website the edge against its competitor’s. Before you start worrying that all these optimizations are going to take countless man hours to set up know this, Aptimize requires absolutely no change to your current website’s code and all these optimizations are preconfigured to your specific web server within minutes of installing.

You are doing yourself a disservice if you do not check out how Aptimize can take your website’s performance into the stratosphere. Faster page load times will get your potential customers and visitors the information they request as quickly as possible, this has been proven to increase conversions on a web site. Your SharePoint performance is really this important to your website speed, make the right choice and take a closer look at how Aptimize can help you.

How slow is your SharePoint website or intranet? Take the Website Speed Test.

Web Performance links

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Building Extranets in SharePoint Hosting Sites With WSS 3.0

SharePoint 3.0 hosting in extranet mode makes it extremely easy to open up hosted SharePoint web sites for external access. Building extranet in SharePoint hosting sites offers more enhanced support for authenticated third party users in dispersed communities.

Building extranets in SharePoint hosting sites with WSS 3.0, using internet protocols creates a private network to securely share information on operations or, any other level with pre-approved users. These users include vendors, partners, suppliers, customers and other businesses. This B2B environment is kept in complete isolation from other internet users. Extranet in a SharePoint hosting site may be viewed as part of the company internet which has been extended to other users. Basically it is intranet mapped onto the public domain.

Web sites making use of extranet SharePoint WSS solutions allow business managers to share information in an extended business environment. Security is in place to ensure security information and compliance standards are met. Localized IT staff is able to manage extranet users even if these scale into the thousands. A new layer of security has been integrated into SharePoint 3.0 hosting, and this has improved the level of protection of hosted SharePoint web sites. Stringent security is required by extranet and SharePoint WSS is able to provide this.

Building extranets in hosting Sites expands authentication choices and provides a central point for group management, and extranet users which span into multiple SharePoint operations. Building extranets in hosted sites securely extends communication, document management and collaboration beyond the boundaries of the organization, and will improve operations with suppliers, distributors, partners and customers alike.

Adrian Gates (Adrian@apps4rent.com) is a Business Manager with Apps4Rent (http://apps4rent.com/sharepoint.html); which offers premium hosted Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint Hosting Services and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Blogging For Test - SharePoint As a Blog

This is the first article in a series designed to help answer the questions "What can SharePoint do?", and "How do I do that with SharePoint?". Today we are going to show you how easy it is to implement a blog using your hosted SharePoint account. Later on in the series, we will take on subjects like basic websites, SharePoint design and different types of sharing and collaboration servers.

On to SharePoint as a Blog.
The very first thing we will do is navigate our preferred web browser to the URL of our hosted SharePoint account. When the authentication pops up, enter your user name and password, and press enter.Once logged in you will be presented with the default view of your Administration panel. The SharePoint site that I am using as a demo for this series looks like this:

My Default Screen
From here, we need to click on "View All Site Content" at the top of the navigation bar at the left. This brings up a page that gives you information on all the content that is currently hosted by your site. My demo site is already set up for one blog, so it looks like this:

A view of all the content on my Sharepoint Site

The next step is to click the "Create" button to go to the "Create" page. This is where you will go to make anything for your site, but for right now, we are looking for "Sites and Workspaces". Follow that link to the "New Sharepoint Site" page. Here is where we really get started:

1. Give your blog a name and a description. My demo blog is going to be "Bligitty Blog". Remember that the title you choose will be displayed on each page of the site.

2. Designate a web address for your blog. You will notice that the URL of your blog is the URL of your main site with the addition of the name you choose.

Input your title, description, and URL.

3. Select your language and template. The template we are going to use is "Blog", so select it in the template list under the "Collaboration" tab.

4. Set permissions. Here you have the choice to use the same permissions as your main site, or use a unique set of permissions for your blog. For the purposes of the tutorial, we are going to use the same settings as our parent site.

5. Set up your navigation and navigation inheritance. These two options allow you to add links from this site in the navigation of your main site and inherit the top menu bar if you wish. We are choosing "yes" for all of these options, but you can just as easily say "no".

6. Click the "Create" button. Bang! Done and done.

You now have a fully functioning SharePoint based blog, ready to rock and roll, and inform the world! Admin links to the right allow you to manage or add new posts, set blog permissions, manage comments and other blog admin tasks. Now get to work posting your content!

Adrian Gates (Adrian@apps4rent.com) is a Business Manager with Apps4Rent ;which offers premium hosted Exchange, Microsoft Hosted SharePoint Services and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Ways to Use SharePoint Effectively in Your Business

We're listing some common business needs that can be solved by using a SharePoint Services 3.0 site. Maybe you'll find a few things here that you've been trying to find a solution for within your own organization.

I'd like to share with you the top 20 ways that SharePoint can solve your common business needs. And I want to emphasize that these 20 are only a few of the many ways to utilize the SharePoint Services. Once you start using it, you will begin to realize the many other valuable benefits that can easily be accomplished by the everyday user.

Shall we get started? Let's see if you can find a few productivity solutions here that you've been trying to find for your own organization.

With SharePoint you can:

1. Store all your emails on a secure and centralized Website for easy archive.

2. Keep a central task location for assigning tasks to team members. These tasks will automatically show up in your team's Outlook 2007 To-Do List. Those tasks will also link to your projects so you can easily find out what tasks are still open for each project.

3. Organize large events and store the related documents, assigned tasks, and generally post anything and everything related to the events. It will also integrate with Outlook for added efficiency.

4. Collaborate with team members on all documents and stay on top of who did what. Earlier versions can easily be restored in case someone has made too many mistakes. Projects can also be linked to related documents.

5. When tasks are assigned to team members they'll automatically be notified that they've just been assigned a new task. Alerts are sent when there have been updates to the tasks.

6. Use SharePoint as a robust, but simple project management solution for your organization or team.

7. Use the efficient check-in / check-out management feature to sort your documents.

8. Implement a help ticket resolution for your organization or team without breaking the bank.

9. Start a private company blog to communicate and share ideas with your team that's viewable only by those you give access to.

10. Gain more control over your company's documents with the content approval function.

11. Offer training materials to your teams, clients, and/or partners in a password-protected Website that can be accessed anywhere in the world.

12. Offer a secure and private place to share documents and other information with clients and/or partners.

13. Access and work with your data using your Internet-enabled mobile phone for added convenience while traveling or out of the office at client meetings.

14. Create better team communication and brainstorming sessions where everyone can participate when their schedules permit.

15. Centralize where company and team project announcements are posted. Everyone will receive a notification via email or mobile phone automatically, anywhere in the world.

16. Take the project tasks, team discussions, company contacts, centralized calendars, team blogs, and files offline. and then sync the updated information later on.

17. Create "central" documents (and syncronize), so all team members, clients, and/or partners are able to work on the same document and make changes. Updates are accessible with a click of a button. Everyone can then sync back to the "central" document and have all edits merged into that single document.

18. Easily add custom fields to any area and capture the information that's most important to your company, all without the help of a web designer or IT person.

19. Pull up and update Microsoft Access 2007 database from a local desktop and sync information to a central location that can be accessed from any where at any time.

20. Create a project dashboard where on one page you can view and filter on common project elements, such as: project details, project documents, project tasks, project issues, project calendar, project milestones, project lessons learned, project risks, project change orders, and more.

On top of it all, you won't spend a fortune to meet these communication, collaboration, and organizational needs.

Don't even get me started about the integration features between SharePoint Services 3.0 and the Microsoft Office 2007 products, especially Outlook 2007 - It's fantastic! A few of the ideas above do require Office 2007.

Keep in mind that a little training goes a long way in increasing productivity in the products you use in your business. I highly recommend taking the time to learn this efficient and effective tool and watch your productivity, along with your profits, soar!

Andrea Kalli Virtual Trainer and Assistant, LLC offers a wide variety of business services, to include: Productivity training and support for Microsoft Outlook and Windows SharePoint Services, Administrative Office Assistant services, and Podcast Production and Support services. She has more than 12 years of office administrative experience, with a primary focus on maximizing team collaboration and communication for daily work and managing projects.

As a Certified Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant, she supports your internet marketing needs such as Website Analysis, Search Engine Marketing, Blogging/Podcasting/Social Media, Email Marketing, and Affiliate Marketing.

Outlook / SharePoint training and support, Podcast / audio editing, Certified Internet Marketing Assistant.

Affordable training courses for today's business professional. Outlook, SharePoint, Word, PowerPoint, Social Marketing, Blogging with Wordpress, Photoshop, and much more.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

3 Useful Applications For Microsoft SharePoint WSS

3 Useful Things SharePoint WSS can do without Upgrading to MOSS

When most people think of SharePoint, they think of giant intranet sites that multinational companies use to manage content and communicate internally. They think of months of customization and design, complex licensing, and long returns on investment. In short, they think of SharePoint MOSS with all of the bells and whistles.

But there's good news. SharePoint WSS is free. It's fast to set up, and best of all, it's useful. Many small businesses are finding huge value in SharePoint WSS without the development and licensing fees a full MOSS deployment.

Of course, the question is, "What does it do?" The following are 3 useful things to do with SharePoint WSS without endless development or upgrading to MOSS.

SharePoint WSS Document Collaboration

Although some of the more abstract collaboration tools (Wikis, Profiles, Social networking) in Microsoft SharePoint rarely get much traction, the document collaboration tools are usually very popular and useful.

Let's say HR is designing the new employee manual. SharePoint WSS allows the company to create a webpage with bulletined boards and discussion threads about the manuals. HR can survey employees. Check in / Check out keeps different employees from editing the document at the same time, which saves version hassles down the road. Past versions of the documents are also accessible, and as each employee checks the document back in, they can make notes on their changes.

Use Views to make Team Calendars really useful.

Most companies use team calendars and company calendars to list events, deadlines, and meetings in one place. These calendars can even be integrated with Microsoft Outlook. It's one of the most popular features.

Views make calendars really useful because they allow users to filter events by type. Instead of seeing 20 events on the same date that may or may not be pertinent, users can filter events by type to only what they want to see.

If a user just wants to see the availability of the large conference room, and an overlay of the upcoming deadlines and his own availability, views will filter out all of the other appointments.

Resources library

One of the best uses of SharePoint WSS is to create a resource center for employees. Common documents everyone uses can be stored in one place with a familiar web interface and easy searching.

Store client information, reference materials, company information and forms, marketing materials, and anything else the company uses on the site.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Positive Aspects of Using Sharepoint Solutions

Sharepoint development can be better known as enterprise information portal wherein people can access information and data on numerous platforms including internet, extranet and intranet. The purpose of sharepoint solution is to improve productivity by way of bringing in transparency into the system.

Advantages of implementing Sharepoint solutions:

Being an integrated solution, sharepoint development is much easier and simpler solution. The solution enables users to send, receive and store data quite comfortably.

It boosts productivity by facilitating users to review documents, issue tracking, get approvals and other such things without implementing any code.

Managing information is the prominent demand in today's growing business world. By using sharepoint development, users can store policies, manage auditing policies and control security settings as well.

One of the greatest advantages of using Sharepoint software is connectivity. The software provides a solid platform for people to come and connect with each other in order to transfer information and data respectively.

Sharepoint software is known for its security & safety features while transferring information from one end to another. There is information that can be available to anyone whereas, private data can be locked as well.

The software allows developers to create business intelligence portals wherein users can store information from web portals, dashboards, key performance indicators etc.

Without implementing any kind of coding, users can use electronic forms that enable them to collect information and data pertaining to business requirements from customers, suppliers, partners via a web browser. This particular feature helps in overcoming redundancy and eliminates errors from the manual setup.

Sharing of information without interpreting with sensitive issues can be made possible by using Sharepoint software solution. Interactive with Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet directly from a Web browser through Excel services which are running on Office SharePoint 2007.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

What is SharePoint Server Hosting?

There are many different hosting platform options. Therefore, it can be difficult to decide which one will best serve your needs. Here are some of the most important reasons why SharePoint server hosting is the wise choice. In the first place, SharePoint makes it easy for you to communicate with other members of your team, as well as your key personnel and contacts. You can set up special alerts which notify you whenever any information or documents have been changed or added. Members of your team can communicate using email, audio, video, and instant messaging.

SharePoint even includes discussion boards where members of your team can exchange ideas in topic forums. Additionally, it allows for targeting specific audiences, so that you can target team members who have the same roles to receive the specific messages pertaining to them. SharePoint also comes with built-in lists useful in sharing information, announcements, tasks, and contacts. You can add lists for whatever information you need to share. You can create libraries of photos and other graphics related to your projects in addition to document libraries. All the information in all SharePoint libraries is searchable by your team members, which makes it easy to quickly find needed information and documents.

SharePoint hosting 2007 empowers you and your team members by making it simple to create new sites, monitor the usage of each site, and control membership. Team members can modify parts of the sites to suit their own needs without altering the basic site information available to other team members. Since it is completely compatible with the programs in Microsoft Office, your team members are already familiar with its basic software components. Address books and calendars can be copied from Outlook to SharePoint, and vice versa. New sites can be created and edited with Frontpage. SharePoint offers templates which enable your team members to easily create documents and new sites. Moreover, since all the information and documents in SharePoint can be accessed 24 / 7 from any internet connection, team members across the country or globe can instantly obtain the latest information and changes. Team members don't have to waste time in searching for the documents they need; and all documents are marked automatically with the latest version number, which eliminates the need for wading through different versions to find the right one.

No matter whether yours is a small business or a huge corporation - or even just a club member looking for a way to keep other members informed - SharePoint Moss dedicated server is easy to adjust to your specific needs. Moreover, it grows with you, since adding new users is easy with minimal effort and time. SharePoint can be enhanced with Web Parts, which can add new features to existing sites. You can obtain Web Parts for accessing data, content, and applications from independent support providers on the internet; or your own developers can use any of the existing templates provided by Microsoft.

SharePoint Hosting 2007 provides your team with the tools needed for instant communications and implementation. SharePoint Moss dedicated server makes it possible for your team members to optimize group effort by centralizing documents and libraries, with instant updating and search capability. SharePoint server hosting streamlines your team's efforts, no matter what your organization's size.

Friday, April 17, 2009

How Windows Sharepoint Services Will Benefit Your Small Business

Sharing of business data in small business used to be a nice thing to have; however in today’s business environment it is rapidly becoming a necessity in order to compete in the marketplace. Never has the demand for collaboration inside your small business, across multiple locations, geographic regions or with partners and clients been needed as it is today. Many small businesses continue to struggle with the concept of collaboration and how to do it effectively.

When collaboration in the workplace occurs effectively, productivity inside the business skyrockets, suddenly you can do more with fewer resources, both human and technical and the workforce is happy because they can work from virtually anywhere. The flipside of effective collaboration is exactly the opposite, productivity goes way down, dependence on technology support skyrockets, and the added cost is reflective in your human capital and expenses. Your team becomes frustrated and even may leave your firm when the tools are not available to do their jobs effectively, wherever and whenever they need to perform their tasks.

Introducing a new way to share business data! It is not that new actually; Windows SharePoint Services is starting to catch on in the small business market, larger corporations have been using document management systems for quite some time. Just like having your email hosted in house took a little time for the small business market to embrace, now SharePoint Services is making its way into the SMB market.

The added value of SharePoint Services is that many small businesses already own the solution; they just don’t realize that they do. Windows 2003 Server or 2003 Small Business Server have SharePoint Services included, however many businesses never implement it, this could be the result of poor IT services or just a lack of awareness of the solution and the power it brings. Small Business need strong outsourced IT services that will introduce new solutions like SharePoint Services to them and help them to understand how these new solutions will benefit them and their business.

How can your small business get ready for Windows SharePoint Services?

• First of all, it is important for small business today to be on the same page and moving in the same general direction, without this, no technology solution will ever work. Your team needs to be on the same page as the management and understand the company’s end goals and value proposition, once you have this done, then you can begin to mold a technology solution to meet your business needs.

• SharePoint Services is a tool to enhance collaboration in the workplace. In order to have the technology work for your business, you need to foster an environment that promotes collaboration. Without this environment, no technology tool will ever work. Business owners today need to make sure that the lines of communication inside their business are flowing in both directions.

• Once you have your people factors settled, then the technology can be allowed to enhance that. Still in this day, many people are nervous about what technology can do. The younger workforce has been collaborating and using technology for quite some time, however many people that have been in the workplace for a while, have concerns about technology. The message in your firm needs to be that this technology solution will aid in the employees overall success and when we are all successful, the company is successful.

Windows SharePoint Services offer some of the following benefits to a small business:

• Document Libraries are repositories for your team to work together on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and whatever else you need to work on. Inside the document libraries you can secure your information and set rights on what people can do or see, control document versions plus so much more.

• Shared calendars are available inside Windows SharePoint Services where you can post corporate events, important dates, meetings or whatever calendar information you need to post. With the calendar and many other features inside SharePoint you can also view this information inside your Microsoft Outlook application on your desktop.

• Has anyone on your staff missed an important meeting? With SharePoint you can put announcements right on your main page, so that everyone can see what is happening in your business. New product launches, important information or any other announcement that you may have in the past, broadcasted out via email to your entire team.

• Have online feeds sent right to your SharePoint site. SharePoint can link into any RSS feed service. This is great if you want to show items such as road reports, weather conditions, stock prices and any other information you need to see when released. SharePoint will become the portal for your small business to get the information you need.

• Another powerful tool inside SharePoint Services is the ability to control workflow process. Does your business suffer from workflow challenges? How does your business suffer when your team skips steps in the process? What if you had a tool that would increase productivity and results by managing workflow? Would your business prosper?

The most important tip to a successful implementation of Windows SharePoint is to keep it simple. SharePoint needs to slowly introduced to your team, include them in the implementation and planning of your site, promote buy-in from all departments in your business. When the entire team is involved, your rollout and adoption of SharePoint Services will be a success.

There are many additional benefits to Windows SharePoint Services; I encourage you to visit the Microsoft SharePoint website. Also, a strong information technology consultant can provide you with additional information on the benefits of SharePoint Services to your small business.

SharePoint will be the way files and information is stored in the future, don’t delay, understand how this new technology will affect your small business, prepare for the future, provide the tools for your team to become successful. Do more with less and watch your small business explode.