Six Ways SharePoint Rocks Your Company

One of the most visionary products to hit the shelves in the past half-decade has been SharePoint. In previous versions of the product many enterprises were looking at SharePoint as a glorified file storage utility, which is a far cry from what Microsoft intended with the product. With SharePoint 2010, however, folks are starting to really see the potential of the product to be a single point in which an organization can aggregate all of its information, and do so in a way that makes it easy to collaborate and to search through that information.

SharePoint is made up of six components that can truly boost a business’ efficiency and ability to collaborate:

1. Sites. SharePoint lets you build and manage both internal and external websites. SharePoint 2010 has native Web Content Management System functionality. While there are more robust Web CMS services out there, SharePoint is more than sufficient for most organizations. At a minimum, you’ll used this portion for your internal collaborative websites, but it can also be used to hold your entire intranet or even your public sites.
2. Communities. Social media is big right now, partly because it’s an effective way for folks to communicate in a group. Your employees are used to collaborating online via social communities like Facebook, and this component of SharePoint 2010 lets you bring that style of information sharing inside. From user profiles to blogs to wikis and even activity streams, this module takes those tools and puts them in your hands.
3. Content. This has always been SharePoint’s strongest suit. Whether you’re talking about task-related documents or whether you’re talking about records that need to be stored for compliance purposes, you can manage control, categorize, search and lock down every bit of content your company puts in.
4. Search. Even smaller businesses need to be able to wade through the information and documents they create quickly and effectively. The search module of SharePoint does for your business information what Google does for the rest of the world: it pours through the scattered information in your business and finds it for you.
5. Insights. Business intelligence is the art and science of using your business’ data to make decisions, eliminate problem areas and stay ahead of your competition. At one point in history, business intelligence was the purview of a single person or department, creating a single point of failure. With SharePoint 2010, the average employee now has access to business intelligence tools she can use to improve her own performance and efficiency.
6. Composites. One of the big challenges facing businesses is the fact that data gets scattered across multiple platforms and multiple systems. SharePoint 2010 lets you create composite applications that bring information and data from a number of systems (including SharePoint, of course) into a single location. This kind of data integration is key for project management.

SharePoint 2010 represents a quantum leap forward in information management for your organization. Perhaps most significantly, it offers a single platform on which your organization can create, manage, access, search and archive all of the important data it creates.