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SharePoint - Reliable Solution for Small and Medium Enterprises

For the small and medium- sized business enterprises, sharing of data with collaboration from a variety of sources is of extreme necessity. The collaboration of these data gathered from the various sources along with sharing allows a person to get all the information at just one place. The ultimate result is reduction in resources along with increase in productivity to a significant extent.

Microsoft SharePoint comes up with a safe, reliable strategy for effective collaboration and sharing of data among a team. It has a lot of benefits for the SMEs. However, prior to looking at its advantages, let us take a glance at the prominent features:

Useful Features of Microsoft SharePoint

  1. Integration with Microsoft Workplace 2007- Microsoft SharePoint Server or MOSS efficiently integrates Microsoft Workplace, thereby rendering Workplace documents in internet pages.
  2. InfoPath 2007- Microsoft InfoPath forms are hosted around the internet browser by an application of SharePoint and InfoPath Forms Services. One can see the forms as well as fill them applying the browsers.
  3. Excel 2007- SharePoint internet site enables fast, easy loading of all excel worksheets. Customers have the option of editing the sheets by an application of the browser.
  4. Outlook 2007- With an application of the Workplace Outlook, the document libraries can be easily accessed as well as synchronized.
  5. Access 2007- Entries can be synchronized applying this web application platform to view data and prepare reviews even when the person is offline.
  6. PowerPoint 2007- PowerPoint slides can be shared with customers by applying SharePoint 2007.
  7. Enterprise Search- This platform enables enterprise search. It indexes the documents that are saved in the document libraries and person groups with the intention of facilitating the search.
  8. Business Information Catalog- SharePoint comes incorporated with the Business Enterprise Information Catalog (BDC) feature that helps utilization of the business enterprise data for backend server purposes like SAP. The data can be viewed with the internet based interface of SharePoint without the necessity of composing any code.

Benefits of SharePoint for the SMBs

As the owner of a small or medium- sized business enterprise, you will find the implementation of Microsoft SharePoint turning out to be extremely advantageous. In addition, SharePoint webparts development helps businesses to create and customize webparts for custom functions. However, to get the best out of MOSS, one must stay aware of the right ways of implementing it. Here is a brief overview of how SharePoint can be utilized in the desired way such that it helps the business enterprises in their operation.

Portal and Collaboration for Maximum Returns on Investment: Collaboration, though it has different meaning to different people, is mostly about socializing the content and preparing report or other documents with commendable ease. SharePoint, as collaboration software, is sure to deliver positive results. Now, most organizations deploy SharePoint with portal and collaboration as the first workloads for certain reasons.

To begin with, portals pave the way for rapid returns on investment by means of replacing the rather expensive existing solutions. Secondly, information sharing in the workplace becomes easier as well as more effective by virtue of document collaboration compared to file shares or email attachments. Thirdly, both portal and collaboration are low- risk workloads and they do not bring about complex variables to the environment like the custom application development.

SharePoint, being a feature- rich product that it is, necessitates a careful implementation of its functions only after a governance plan has been developed. This plan must be in keeping with the goals of the particular business organization.

Improved Enterprise Content Management: Microsoft SharePoint facilitates enterprise content management (ECM), which is an excellent way of connecting an organization’s people, processes and information. The small and medium- sized business enterprises, too, face the information overload problem and are therefore, looking forward to implementing this information access software.

ECM is actually an integrated platform and architectural framework that enables uninterrupted collaboration and not just organization or storage of content. Enterprise Content Management leads to greater productivity of a business organization.

External Expansion with Web Content Management: As an effective web content management platform, it is becoming all the more popular especially, among the SMEs. Microsoft SharePoint comes up with a newer set of WCM functionalities, which allows the business enterprises to use this platform primarily for their customer facing websites. With the increasing dependence on the web content, consolidation of both the external and internal presence of the organization on a single platform becomes feasible with this WCM feature of SharePoint.

Adoption of Cloud Computing: Resorting to “Cloud” is turning out to be an essential way of staying ahead in this extremely competitive business scenario. SharePoint adopts cloud computing, which brings about the following benefits for the SMBs apart from lowering the total cost of ownership to a great extent.

Cloud Computing enables completion of deployment tasks with less hardware to be maintained for the IT administrators.

Pay-per-user cloud services offer cost-effective ways for the SMBs as, they now have the opportunity to overprovision resources for meeting the high demands. Offering a target of 99.9% uptime, cloud enables SMBs to maintain high levels of performance. The cloud offerings, on the other hand, have disaster recovery plans, which makes the planning and management aspects rather transparent.

This web application platform with its multiple functionalities goes a long way in facilitating the progress of the SMEs. Monitoring of the progress of the tasks becomes easier too.

We provide SharePoint application development services. If you would like to know more about our expert SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.