Collaboration basics for everyone

While Sharepoint has been a hot application for almost a decade now, there are still many organizations that are wondering what Sharepoint's capabilities are. Where I can I start learning about Sharepoint, what is MOSS, what is WSS, what is portal, what is webpart, what is master pages, what is a site collection, what is collaboration....

Certainly not the only way, but here is an introduction that I saw worked for many. The basic premise is how can I translate what I use today to Sharepoint's capailities with the goal of combining these tools later on to promote collaboration. After all it is what Sharepoint touts and it is what its foundation of many components are built on.

File Share folders translated to Sharepoint Document Libraries

Meeting minutes, project documents, product development artifacts, vision statements, SOW in Word, Excel, Visio, powerpoint, jpg, pdf's or files in general are stored in file share folders organizaed by folder name and file name. In Sharepoint, these same documents are stored in libraries or referenced from a library (in case they are stored in other repositories). The advantage of Document Libraries will be realized in utilitizing many powerful features of Sharepoint. Just as simple as meta tags and views or as complex as workflow.

Excel Spreadsheet translated to Sharepoint Lists

Defect tracking used to track bug lists, Inventory of assets, Project portfolio, Team roster in excel spreadsheet can be entered as Lists in Sharepoint. Similar to libraries, the advantage of Lists will be realized in utilizing many powerful features of SharePoint. One feature I like is the creation of views and rendered in various site collections. Another feature is the roll up feature targeted to respective audience.

Email correspondence translated to Discussion Threads

This is one of the best features of Sharepoint that I really like. With the difficulty of email management, the threaded discussion is a savior. It keeps the topics organized and stakeholders focused. While this is a nice feature of Sharepoint, it requires a lot of behavioral change. The incentive is to help everyone manage their emails better. It does not eliminate email, it brings sanity in emails by receiving quality correspondence.

The underlying big benefit of Sharepoint on artifacts mentioned above is all the presentation can be viewed over the web, hence one is not limited to a desktop program or to a designated file share repository. For more information, check this out http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011199881033.aspx

Would you need to a strategy to implement Sharepoint?

Sharepoint has been a very hot application in the last few years in the technology and business world. Microsoft quickly describes Sharepoint as an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. It furthers outlines six high level pillars in an attempt to guide organization on how to best capitalize Sharepoint's capabilities; Collaboration and Social Computing, Enterprise Content Management, Portals, Business Process and Forms, Enterprise Search and Business Intelligence.


The six pillars sound simple but it takes a good strategy to realize the value of these in the organization. Without a well thought out strategy of implementing Sharepoint will later require a lot and costly rework or retrofit of setting the foundation for better implementation of the pillars of Sharepoint. Just to caution, do not also overdo the strategy because one might miss the low hanging fruits that await to realize the investment of the product.

Sharepoint strategy is not a simple task. There are many challenges in deploying a strategy for Sharepoint.

The ease of use of the out of the box features put a lot of pressure to bypass strategy. One can literally create a site in 30 seconds from a basic template that is immediately functional for a group of users. It is mind boggling to the users of why a strategy still needs to be developed.

There are many who claim of having the best solution for Sharepoint. Solution offerings vary from a strategy, roadmap, governance, implementation, templates, features, composite applications, etc. There is information overload of suggestions, presentations and claims of how to setup Sharepoint in an organization.

The six pillars of Sharepoint suggest the various business issues that Sharepoint can solve in an organization. In many organizations, these 6 pillars could be handled by different teams in an IT shop, each may have different strategy and platform. With Sharepoint, it may infer that silos of IT teams may need to converge to use a universal product.

Sharepoint is fairly new in establishing its footprint in an organization. Information Technology solutions have always cater to sales, financial, payroll, service systems. Though the space the six pillars play in was formally introduced for at least more than a decade now, they may still trail on applications in the legacy functionality space. However, the social networking, the gen Y and the productivity tools to manage cost and to stay competitive are here that these six pillars need to be taken seriously.


The strategy of Sharepoint is very critical to the organization. It is not only to capitalize on the investment of Sharepoint but also to leapfrog from its status quo operation gaining big advantage over the competitors of an organization. There are many implementation of Sharepoint across many industries and organization and I am sure there are great strategies developed and some lessons learned from others.