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.
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
- Integration with Microsoft Workplace 2007- Microsoft SharePoint Server or MOSS efficiently integrates Microsoft Workplace, thereby rendering Workplace documents in internet pages.
- 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.
- 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.
- Outlook 2007- With an application of the Workplace Outlook, the document libraries can be easily accessed as well as synchronized.
- Access 2007- Entries can be synchronized applying this web application platform to view data and prepare reviews even when the person is offline.
- PowerPoint 2007- PowerPoint slides can be shared with customers by applying SharePoint 2007.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Incredulously, there are now well over 10,00,00,000 web users across the globe, around more than 500 companies using this multi-functional platform “SharePoint”. It’s one of Microsoft's large-scale enterprises and in past 5-6 years Microsoft sold over 36 million user licenses. It is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive enterprise search and content management, accelerating shared business processes and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Regardless of location and devices, we are able to log on to our collaborative, SharePoint-based environment to work with our colleagues on documents, projects or business processes.
SharePoint sites are quickly created and managed well by supporting specific content publishing, enterprise content management, records management and business intelligence needs. With Sharepoint one can conduct effective searches for people and documents, participate in forms-driven business processes. It even accesses and analyzes large business data. It offers a way for people to work together in a versatile way, working together in online and offline applications, in any location.
Capabilities of SharePoint Server
1. SharePoint sites deliver a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across internet, intranet and extranet. It also brings all users together to share information and knowledge base across organizations.
2. Collaboration, Portal, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process and Forms, Business Intelligence and licensed for Internet/Extranet.
3. SharePoint search gives users the ability to find the people, content and information they need by combining an integrated, with enterprise search technology.
4. SharePoint communities empowers organization to work with people in ways that are most effective for them. Allow employees to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and ideas, connect with colleagues and find information and experts without difficulty.
5. SharePoint Insights enable users to access and act together with information across unstructured and structured data sources. It empowers users to discover the right people and expertise to make better and more accurate business decisions.
6. SharePoint Content enables users to participate in a governed, compliant content management lifecycle. SharePoint content makes it possible to skillfully balance user experience with organization policy and business process.
7. SharePoint Foundation is made for small business organizations or departments looking for a low-cost entry-level or a pilot solution for secure, Web-based portal.
8. An organization can use the SharePoint Foundation to coordinate schedules, share, organize documents and participate in discussions through team workspaces, blogs, wikis and knowledge base on the platform that is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server.
9. It works perfectly with other technologies like MS Office, MS Unified Communications and MS Exchange Server. And it has centralized administration allows managers to access application management features, system settings, manage security settings, upgrade SharePoint, change general application settings etc.
10. It can customize application very easily and helps in organization branding. It also looks after the security issues, by managing permissions to sites, lists, folders, documents, web applications and more.
SharePoint Designer is a tool of choice, among developers, for rapid application development. With the help of SharePoint Designer, advanced users and developers can quickly create customized SharePoint solutions. Expert users can compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios, from many collaborative sites and web publishing to line-of-business data integration and business intelligence solutions.
These great solutions leverage the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy-to-use environment. Additionally, developers can use SharePoint to get a rapid start on SharePoint application development projects. With its advanced features and tools, organizations can quickly respond to growing business needs by building ultimate effective solutions.
We provide SharePoint development services. If you would like to know more about our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
One of the rapidly growing and rampantly used products of Microsoft, SharePoint has become a favorite of a number of fortune 500 organizations. It is a marvelous tool possessing a wide array of capabilities. SharePoint caters to high grade business analysis in order to recognize opportunities and problems, thereby assisting businesses to enhance content collaboration as well as boost access to business intelligence. This web application platform also makes sure that robust data security, auditing processes and compliance are perfectly in place.
However, simply installing and making SharePoint available will not be able to guarantee its successful implementation all through the organization. While there has been considerable increase in the deployment of SharePoint in the business world, empowering users to adopt this platform and sustaining the same with proper security can indeed be a great challenge. Here we bring to you some crucial guidelines that will facilitate SharePoint adoption in your enterprise to reap business benefits from it.
- Analyze your specific needs: Prior to the implementation of SharePoint, it is essential to understand the organizational goals, initiatives and objectives because of the fact that SharePoint comes with a number of features that are compatible with particular business requisites. It is also advisable to have a look at the current application usability, procedure and populace concerned, the problems linked to them and how the platform can address the issues.
- Designed architecture: In order to make the SharePoint environment user-friendly and rich, it is important to have in-depth knowledge of SharePoint design and how the templates can be well defined through leveraging a number of navigation and content types. Lots of organizations go for the development of web pages with inadequate planning and do not consider accessibility by end-users in order to update the content. Maintaining proper flow while building the architecture will pave room for convenient access for end-users who will be able to derive complete benefit from the existing features. Hence, innovation in architectural plan and design offering space for new features and fulfillment of requisites surely assists users to come up with quality output.
- Plan your implementation according to crucial needs: Instead of installing all the SharePoint application features, implementation of crucial features catering to particular needs is much better. Certain essential features include intranets, business intelligence, managing sales, document sharing and tailor-made applications accessible with the help of dashboards.
- It is vital to be proactive: Besides architectural planning and development in line with present business requirements, it is also essential to think proactively and develop templates for future capabilities and requirements. Proactive design meets the needs of end-users, thereby ensuring usability and sustainability.
- Be slow and steady: Doing a lot of things simultaneously is not a good idea. Rather, you should start bit by bit, and plan your implementation steadily with the passage of time. For instance, it is good to first aim at a specific group of capabilities or people, concentrating on particular concerns which people come across, such as accounting, managing sales, sharing of spreadsheets or business planning.
- Customization of end user training: Almost all the companies have the feeling that the SharePoint platform is easy to comprehend and utilize. However, the fact is that without adequate training, it is difficult for users. Although a number of DVDs, books, training institutes and online courses are present, guidance on tailor-made features in SharePoint is rarely available. This calls for arrangement of business-oriented training on the part of organizations before the employees start handling SharePoint. Guiding users on the ease of accessibility of the platform, creation of training manuals, PPTs and notes will definitely enable users to effectively comprehend the application and get motivated to adapt to the change.
- Security through permission levels: Security over the SharePoint platform is made available through a range of default permission levels, which constitute the fundamentals of security for assignment to groups. Group sharing is always better than individual sharing, and afterwards, users can be added within each group to validate all the permission levels prior to providing.
When SharePoint is implemented in an organization in the proper manner following the requisite guidelines and security measures, it indeed makes room for organizational success and can enable one to derive maximum benefit for businesses through leveraging SharePoint development.
We provide custom SharePoint development services. If you would like to know more about our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
SharePoint is a web-oriented tool from Microsoft that enables the user to locate and manage information across the web browser as well as share files in a more efficient manner. It is of immense help to businesses by serving as the central location for the storage of files, projects along with ad hoc information. In fact, SharePoint has the capability of searching the entered information as well as the information within any stored document. This in turn enhances the business productivity and helps in cost control. Let us discuss a few of the prime features of SharePoint before exploring how the perfect SharePoint solution can be built and leveraged for businesses.
Key features of SharePoint
- Document Management: This web tool facilitates several functions like check-in or check-out and also approvals.
- Discussions: The discussion board of SharePoint can remarkably trim down the time that is spent in meetings. An interesting feature is that the entire information related to the discussions lies centrally, is properly documented, has a back up, and can also be conveniently searched.
- Wikis: Internal knowledge bases can be easily developed with the help of SharePoint wikis. In this manner crucial information regarding the business operations is documented and retained within the business.
- Workflows: With the assistance of SharePoint you will be able to generate workflows focused on your business processes. This facilitates the replication of the same result every time there is execution of the process. Hence, a convenient means of tracking information flow is available, thereby leading to consistent results.
Techniques to Derive the Perfect SharePoint Solution
- All emails should be stored on a centralized and secure website to facilitate seamless archive.
- A centralized task location needs to be maintained in order to assign task to each team member. The tasks are automatically displayed on the To-Do List of Outlook 2007 and are linked to projects, thereby enabling one to identify the tasks that have not been closed.
- Large events should be organized and the relevant documents and assigned tasks should be stored, while posting whatever is linked to events. Integration of all this stuff with Outlook offers increased efficiency.
- So far as the documents are concerned, constant collaboration with every team member is a must in order to have a thorough understanding of each person’s tasks.
- On assignment of tasks to team members, there should be automatic notification to inform regarding the assigned task. Moreover, alerts are best to inform about updates.
- SharePoint should be used as a robust yet uncomplicated project management tool for the team or organization enabling management of documents and tasks within a single location.
- Document management should be done with the help of check-in and check-out tools.
- The content approval feature or the approval workflows should be properly leveraged for increased control over the organization’s documents.
- Training materials ought to be provided to partners, clients and teams within a website that is password protected and is accessible from anywhere across the globe.
- Documents as well as other information should be shared with partners or clients within a private and secure place.
- It is best to operate and access data through mobile devices having internet facility for increased convenience during travel or client meeting held away from the office.
- Brainstorming sessions and enhanced team communication should be practiced. Moreover, centralization should be done with regard to posting of announcements so that everyone is notified through mobile phone or email, irrespective of the place.
- All team discussions, projects tasks, centralized calendars, company contacts, files and team blogs should be taken offline and then the updated information should be synchronized.
- Central documents should be created to enable all stake holders to avail and modify the same document and access the update at the click of a button. All modifications can be synchronized with the single document.
- It is advisable to develop a project dashboard wherein common project elements like project tasks, project issues, project documents, project milestones, and so on can be viewed and filtered on a single page.
SharePoint comes with a range of features to facilitate and streamline business processes. Following the above-mentioned techniques can enable one to derive maximum benefit for businesses through leveraging SharePoint development.
We provide SharePoint migration services. If you would like to know more about our expert SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
