Migrating from WordPress to Sharepoint?

Owing to the user-friendly aspect, a large number of organizations are increasingly realizing the need to migrate from WordPress to Sharepoint. These companies prefer to host the content within distinct libraries or lists utilizing a metadata structure. Moreover, they want to make use of a powerful search engine that would empower users to conveniently arrive at the data they are searching for.

The WordPress to Sharepoint migration projects are very intricate, but yield effective results once the problem areas are tackled before going for the actual process. In fact, moving to SP is much more than copying the content to any SP site from the source destination of the data.

Content Analysis

A good understanding of the content as well as its usage is important. This analysis phase involves the verification of the content volume and usage along with the permission setup. It is significant to comprehend the manner of data usage and the procedure that is involved in creation and modification of content. Knowledge of this is a great help while setting out libraries and sites. Here data is organized into categories depending upon what can be moved rapidly, what is possible to be archived and what might create problems. Hence, when you are migrating from WordPress to SharePoint, this phase is crucial for planning the project as well as its successful completion.

Cleanup and Preparation

Migrating offers a great opportunity to clean archive content and directories which have become obsolete. One of the key aspects to ensure a successful migration is to solely move those items which require moving. This leads to a short migration life cycle and also enhances the content's usability through retention of that data which is actually relevant in today's business perspective.

Taking care of site configuration

Once you arrive at a specific amount of data that is ready for migration, the generic configuration of the site libraries as well as the site itself can be defined. You can also go for search engine configuration, defining metadata and also establishment of permission groups.

One issue that you might face is defining the metadata. The content that needs migration may be present within an environment wherein there is no metadata, for instance a file server where the content resides in a folder structure This folder structure should not be used for classification of data since content in SP always revolves around metadata. In such case, a robust metadata structure should be built within the destination library which assists the users to locate the content. Following this, content types, lists or libraries need to be created with specific focus on the source location's security setup. It is best to split the content into a number of libraries or ascertain fresh permissions setup for business owners.

Testing

After configuration of the destination sites, you can perform certain test migrations making use of a limited set of documents to ensure that there is proper configuration of the current site structure. Involvement of key users is advisable for carrying out certain tests through addition or modification of documents.

Migration of data

This is the phase wherein the real migration from WordPress to SharePoint takes place. There are a number of migration tools which enables successful migration.

Testing during migration

Owing to a number of organizations or technical concerns, migration jobs are usually carried out in batches. So there is good opportunity to perform certain testing procedures after the completion of each batch. This makes it convenient to quickly correct any faulty migration procedures, thereby ensuring an appropriate working ambiance in the end.

Once all these steps are meticulously followed, it ensures successful migration from WordPress to SharePoint. For more effective results, you can always involve the end users. Define certain key users, let them comprehend SharePoint and then gather their feedback. This will help you collect useful information and also enhance the user adoption procedure. This would help you leverage the benefits of SharePoint portal development.

We provide SharePoint development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Integrating Crystal Reports with SharePoint -Things to Keep in Mind

The popular business application, SharePoint, is now widely preferred by most software companies. With the newest versions coming up, this web application platform is used for a number of purposes, out of which the sharing of electronic documents and images of the scanned paper documents are the most prominent ones. SharePoint enables developers to create websites, which further allow an easy uploading as well as managing of documents. Even the communities can be formed around particular functions, necessitating access to the documents. These documents then become ready for searching, collaboration, management, updating or archiving.

The Need for Integration

While SharePoint with its multiple functionalities is of immense use, it cannot be denied at the same time that it is not so useful when it comes to the business intelligence system. It is here that the integration of SharePoint with Crystal Reports becomes necessary. The integration largely helps in making the information accessible as well as ready to analyze from the organization. Once the integration is done, the data can be drilled into different sets, which makes the process of categorizing them easier. The integration supports accomplishment of the following tasks:

• Analyzing data in thorough details
• Identify the relationship between costs as well as revenues of your organization
• Identify processes and products that are adding value as well as reducing the margins.

Now, there are few things to be considered to ensure that the integration of SharePoint and CR goes off well while also paving the way for the required benefits.

Points to Consider for Successful Integration

To begin with, a CR scheduler should be incorporated, which allows scheduling of reports that need to be sent at specific date and time to the particular business users in the desired format. The incorporation of the Crystal Reports scheduler offers the members of the organization with the required information without a wastage of time and efforts and they can, therefore, engage in quick decision making. The reports created by the business users can also be stored centrally with the help of SharePoint and accordingly, accessed by the staff members who are in need of the same. Crystal Reports pave the way for scheduling reports on the use of SharePoint to get an idea about how the web application platform is influencing the work of the staffs.

Yet another important factor that has to be considered in this regard is that of using the SharePoint system in the automation of business process. The newly integrated report scheduler, if used, on an event-driven basis, enables a rather process automation. Consequently, modification to files or databases lead to a chain of actions, saving the hard work that had to put into the task otherwise by an employee.

The events include receiving orders from customers and triggering an automatic sending of the packing slip to the warehouse, reducing of the inventory levels, ordering the new products along with materials to fill up for the lack of stock, scheduling delivery of the given order and also billing the customer. Earlier, these actions had to be not only performed by the individuals but also necessitated the inputs from several professionals belonging to the various departments of the organization. Now, the automation is done electronically, saving the transactions that seem to be lagging behind, cost of staffing and the obvious chances of human errors.

Considering the importance of the integration of SharePoint with Crystal Report, companies are now going for Crystal Reports Distribution or what is also known as CRD. CRD can actually work wonders in reducing costs while at the same time, increase the margins and efficiencies. Scheduling and automation of information across any organization is easier than ever before. Custom sharepoint development teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide SharePoint application development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Sharepoint in Healthcare

The dynamics which existed between hospitals, physicians, patients, laboratories and other hospitalists is fast undergoing a lot of changes. Blame it on the metamorphosis of the healthcare ecosystem. It is now widely accepted that Physicians need to be connected to better insights, decision making tools, patients and other required stakeholders to be able to execute their job better. This is where active use of info systems has made a huge difference. But the result has been an explosion of digital content which needs to be handled in a secure manner given that it is expected to be shared across all the stakeholders involved in healthcare at some stage. From all this arises the need for a platform which provides the facility for efficient collaboration and communication in addition to ensuring high security. Microsoft’s SharePoint is one such platform which has stood out for the amount benefit it has offered to its users in the healthcare industry. Starting from improving the efficiency, driving down operational costs to finally improving the quality of care, the platform has rich features which can be used to develop excellent customizable healthcare solutions to suit the needs for healthcare setups.

SharePoint provides a platform which is quite comprehensive in terms of meeting the demands of the dynamic changes which have been taking place in the healthcare landscape. For instance the main focus areas for all stakeholders in the healthcare are as follows:

• Excellent data management adhering to the regulatory compliances
• Better efficiency in operations
• Reduction in costs for providing care and in running healthcare setups

These factors if achieved are expected to result in better outcomes. Now the outcomes of implementing SharePoint, as is depicted by the wheel, can easily map the aforesaid requirements. With excellent content management features, the platform makes it possible to handle varied types of data i.e. web, records, images, rich media etc. all using a single platform. It becomes a one shop solution to handle the complete content life cycle. This is well complemented by the search facility available that is based upon allocating unique identification numbers to documents. This makes it possible for each document to have a permalink and so be identified irrespective of where it is stored. Even looking for people based on identified traits for e.g. department, experience, specialty etc. is also possible. There are also solutions available to ensure that the data is handled as per the the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security standards.

One of the benefits of using info systems, apart from the efficiency factor, is that it gives you access to a lot of data – which can be subsequently analyzed and used in multiple ways. The Insights capability of SharePoint makes it possible for users, who need not be IT literate, to pull out customized reports and dashboards in seconds. Various types of analytics can be performed on the valuable data available to make more informed decisions. Without having to write codes, the Composites feature in SharePoint makes it possible to build collaboration platforms using easy-to-use interfaces. Thus, depending upon need, stakeholders can use customized platforms to successfully collaborate amongst themselves and share best practices besides communicating in an effective way. With its capability for process and system integration besides workflow automation, a number of actions can be easily performed using this platform resulting in tremendous increase in the efficiency levels. There is also a flip side to this. The collaborative platforms also increase chances of cyber-attacks. Since information is expected to be shared across various players in the healthcare value chain, it opens up opportunities for hackers to gain access to critical patient information. Use of mobile devices – laptops, tablets, and smartphones also put patient data at risk since data is accessed remotely in these cases. It is the job of the IT administrators to address such challenges and build impregnable networks to avoid such attacks.

Implementation of a SharePoint application can be in either On-Premise, Cloud or Hybrid. It kind of offers you the flexibility to choose the option most suited given the size of your operations. With its integrated suite of collaborative capabilities, the platform makes it possible for healthcare setups to meet the demands of modern healthcare infrastructure – provision to collaborate, achieve better clinical outcomes, high levels of efficiency and reduction in the cost of operation. Custom SharePoint development teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

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

SharePoint 2013 Assessment Uncover the Benefits

A constant increase is noted in the number of organizations using Microsoft SharePoint to build websites. Each organization also has option to choose from a variety of SharePoint technologies and products to meet its specific requirements. Along with securely storing, organizing and sharing information, the web application development platform also allow users to access the data using any of the widely used web browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Microsoft recently released the updated version of SharePoint with a set of innovative and extended features.

The latest version of the platform provides a comprehensive solution to manage information, while availing the advantages of your existing IT systems, structured processes and compliance. At the same time, the framework is also optimized to make it easier for users to access information, process and collaboration in a familiar and consistent way. If your organization is already using SharePoint, then you must be aware of the features and benefits of this platform and custom SharePoint development. But you must know the benefits provided by SharePoint 2013, if you are planning to migrate to the popular web application development framework.

Top 5 Benefits of Upgrading to SharePoint 2013

1. Avail the Advantages of Cloud Service: Many enterprises are investing in cloud computing to meet the latest trends in technologies. Many reports have highlighted that more and more companies will include cloud services as part of their infrastructure very soon. With SharePoint 2013, an enterprise can easily embrace the cloud services. You can use Office 365 to run the latest version, while availing its features and benefits. Also, you have option to avail all features in cloud by choosing a solution that can be run in virtual machines through Amazon Web Services or Windows Azure. The feature further enables you to make and implement a hybrid architecture that takes advantages of your entire IT investment.

2. Improved Workflow Manager: Microsoft has designed SharePoint 2013 with an efficient Workflow Manager. The feature makes the web application development platform suitable for all types of enterprises regardless of the size of their workflow. The improved workflow manager also saves the time and efforts when the workflow is huge. Further, an organization can use the workflow managers to easily integrate new work flows. As the business models and work processes are becoming complex, the workflow manager infrastructure is useful for leveraging all types of services.

3. Support for Mobile and Social Computing: Many experts have highlighted the shortcoming of previous versions of SharePoint in handling mobile devices. Microsoft has updated the web application development framework with features to facilitate mobile web browsing, along with rendering customized content according to the device. Also, SharePoint 2013 allow users to stay connected with their business systems on the go by sending direct alert notification to apps installed on their smartphones. Similar to mobile computing, the latest version also comes with additional features to support social sites. Microsoft also allows users to access discussion threads, reputation building through community, and other community sites without incurring any extra expenses.

4. Improved and Integrated Searching: The search feature of SharePoint is hugely popular among users. The feature enables them to effectively index websites and SharePoint sites along with existing NTFS file share. But platform was using a paid but highly effective search engine called FAST to locate the files. But the search engine is now embedded in the platform. Also, the search engine is optimized with analytics integration. So the updated version display the search results in a modified way. At the same time, it also use query rules to allow users to create promoted results. Along with search presentation, a user can also avail the advantages of continuous crawl to generate faster search results.

5. Optimized Performance: Microsoft has further optimized SharePoint 2013 to meet the requirements of rapid web application development projects. The updated version handles the bits of data stored on local disks in a streamlined way to generate application presentations. So the client receives only the data that has been modified on a viewed web page. Also, the portions of SharePoint site that are not updated or modified are presented from the cache. Similarly, the changes in the SQL levels affect the documents stored in SharePoint document library, only if the SQL delta is modified. The streamlined data processing enhances its performance, and makes SharePoint 2013 the best option when large documents are modified and updated on a regular basis.

Microsoft has also simplified user licensing to make SharePoint 2013 popular among small enterprises. As the enterprises are no longer required to buy advanced licensing, they will love to migrate to the web application development platform to complement the needs of their entire business operation.

We provide SharePoint application development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint programmers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

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.

How to Avoid 5 Deadly Sins of SharePoint in the Enterprise

It has been 10 long years for SharePoint in the industry and the software is being credited huge success with respect to installations and sales. The fact that the platform of SharePoint 2010 has greatly improved in perspective of the massive technological advancement as against the predecessors, is certainly undeniable.

However, it is unfortunate that most of the organizations across the world are making use of only a fraction of the capabilities of the software. This particular work approach is often leading to frustrations and disappointments within the organizations. The issues that tend to crop up are quite complex; however, the common themes or approaches can be categorized and identified as the five deadly sins in an organization.

Here is a brief explanation of the issues and the ways of avoiding them to maximize the success quotient of SharePoint implementation within an organization:

1. Treating Governance as an One-Time Event: The term ‘governance’ is being much talked about in the present age. Owing to its much-hyped popularity, a number of organizations have attempted implying SharePoint governance. However, most of the time it ends up as nothing more than a weak effort of writing a plan and storing it in the document library. Governance should never be considered just a one-time shot since it is generally an active process. With SharePoint extending deeper into diverse areas of an enterprise, the significance of existing governance is turning out to be greater. The odds of ownership and the position of SharePoint within an organization are quite common. It is to be remembered that governance can greatly affect adoption, in case the controls are too rigid.

2. Leadership Abandoning Responsibility for Roadmapping and Information Architecture: The lack of ability in finding information quickly and easily is one of the increasing disappointments and frustrations faced by most of the business users. While a number of organizations are using SharePoint for quite some time, yet the usability is restricted within just file share. It has also been noticed in a number of cases that the software implementation has made the experience of users worse as they tried finding information spread across expansive websites, pages, discussion threads, document libraries, and wikis.

What made this happen? Unfortunately, the rise of this particular issue within an organization can easily be credited to management’s failure. Taking up a proactive approach to define the terms of processes, architecture, procedure, and training that allows efficient information management would have helped combat the issue. An organization that lacks a solid roadmap and information architecture for ensuring business growth with the passage of time will go on struggling with the most basic management items restricting their evolution into a more productive and collaborative footing.

3. Treating Training and User Adoption as an Afterthought: A particular issue that often tends to crop up within an organization is considered the worst sin that can happen to anyone. This is because it affects the support and confidence of your specific user base largely. It is likely for most people to welcome change and adapt to the same in a bid to try something different in terms of adding value and worth to the organization and their jobs. However, presenting a tool to someone that is hard to use can certainly lead to a loss of support.

This poses as great danger concerning SharePoint as it can virtually reach out to everyone in an organization. Once you tend to lose that support or confidence, gaining that back for another attempt is not only a difficult process and time consuming, but also expensive. It is common to witness IT taking technical approach and rolling out SharePoint with few considerations for effective impact upon users. This approach certainly calls for greater disaster and turns out to be worse.

After all, IT is supposed to prove itself as the most competent and skilled in terms of application of technology to business issues. With SharePoint, end-users and departments enjoy the convenience of creating and finding their own solutions for specific constituents and domains. If IT goes on to establish a bad example on the ways of gaining adoption and training its users properly, the stream of failure will spread and continue towards different levels of an organization.

4. Taking Human Resource Implications Lightly: SharePoint is a complex and extensive technology that holds a broad reach. Most of the organizations often tend to overlook this particular aspect of the software and depend on existing employees, having little expertise with the diverse range of necessary and essential disciplines of the software, to deliver complete business and platform solutions. What turns out to be worse is that a number of organizations tend to misuse a particular employee for the kind of role that is a total misfit.

This particular business problem with SharePoint indeed gives rise to multiple issues in IT and the enterprise as a whole. Some of the examples or instances shared by clients include:

I - Custom development of application as against SharePoint Out of the Box functionality that could have been easily leveraged. This leads to largely increased ownership cost in terms of the application.

II - Not improving the best practices of SharePoint development and design leading to expensive maintenance and enhanced efforts.

5. Lack of Education and Engagement among Executives: Most of the big organizations feature the objective of enhancing more collaboration and productivity within the enterprise. During the same time, a common theme that plays around the IT departments is that SharePoint lacks maximum support and attention from the executives. The executives surely want to reap the benefits, but fails making any investment as and when necessary.

The technology might not be perfect, but the issues that tend to crop with SharePoint are specifically 'man-made'. The course of SharePoint can certainly be changed; however, the road to deliverance begins with expertise and knowledge.

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

SharePoint Application Development- Get Essential Interactive Web Platform

Microsoft states that SharePoint is their most thriving server products, ever with 36.5 million in user license sales reported, for the years 2006-2011 and an approximate 2 billion in total sales reported as of 2013. Thousands of Microsoft partners around the world, work with SharePoint technologies, creating biggest partner's communities. It widely deploys apps, by SMBs and enterprises, across the globe. It is available in more than 70 languages.

SharePoint is most powerful collaborative platform, which delivers a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across intranet, extranet and internet sites. Users find news ways to share information with SharePoint, they search and discover the right information and people and how they build sites and experiences in a more self-service fashion. Technical people get benefited as they find better ways to organize documents, project details and timelines. They even can handle sites easily and grant permissions whenever they want to.

SharePoint applications are important for business and one can integrate with his or her website for a better performance. By getting developed under SharePoint technology it is sure to get a customized integrated solution. With out-of-Box features, one can get the compelling office integration as well as easy and flexible application deployment. It bestows upon users with so many diverse benefits and services. And adds value to company by serving them as a collaboration tool, portal, enterprise search engine, enterprise content management system, managing business processes, forms and offering effective business intelligence.

Vital Benefits of Using SharePoint

• Reduces the complexity of securing business information.
• Easily manages documents and ensures integrity of content.
• Improves team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools.
• Builds a collaboration environment quickly and easily.
• Gets users up to speed quickly.
• Deploys solutions tailored to any business processes.
• Provides sophisticated controls for securing company resources.
• Easily scales any collaboration solution to meet their specific business needs.
• Provides a cost-effective foundation for building web-based applications.
• Takes file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities.

Sharepoint empowers people to work together in such a manner so that they can get maximum benefits out of it. It makes people to collaborate and share their views, ideas and knowledge. This helps to find the ideas and expertise through various different communities. By combining an integrated, easy-to-manage platform with best-of-breed enterprise search feature can easily find content, information and people on the fly. SharPoint is highly secure, a comprehensive authentication and granular authorization system built in leads to secure development process. For easy customization, SharePoint also provides webparts which can be used as a plug and play object in your implementation. If you would like to get custom SharePoint webpart development done, that can help personalize your sharepoint application more precisely.

SharePoint websites based on their usability, design, creativity and ability to incorporate modern techniques. It is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft. Stands No.1 portal product holding an amazing record of Forrester Research. The new version of SharePoint, delivers great Intranet/Extranet platforms and acts as a great platform for building robust and reliable websites.

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