The recent increase in adoption of SharePoint 2010 in a wide variety of environments has led to the development of a number of third party tools, said to enhance or accelerate the abilities that exist natively within SharePoint.
How much value can these third party tools provide?
The first thing to understand is that, in most cases, third party tools are built on top of the SharePoint platform, they used code based and configuration based changes to perform tasks that SharePoint then completes itself. So the value the third party tool usually adds is not ADDITIONAL abilities to the platform itself, but instead:
1. It may have an interface or way of presenting data, such as workflow planning, that is more intuitive than that that comes with SharePoint. SharePoint designer is the primary development tool for SharePoint, but you do have to be a technical user to leverage its ability. One advantage may be a simplification of tasks within SharePoint through a more user friendly interface.
2. It may ACCELERATE the process of setting up specific areas of functionality. So, if you are planning an enterprise content management system through SharePoint, without third party tools, you have to create every repository, set up all content types, determine classifications, customize searches, as well as many other tasks needed for ECM. With third party tools, you can enter in taxonimical and classification information, and have the third party tool generate all of the necessary supporting structures, including content types and repositories, automatically.
The important point here is to see where the value of most third party tools lie. It does NOT typically increase the actual abilities of SharePoint, as the tools are themselves are actually built upon the SharePoint platform. The advantage lies in the way they present information and the acceleration of specific tasks within SharePoint.
If the barrier to using a new technology or setting up an environment in SharePoint is both bandwidth(available time) and ability to use the tools that come with SharePoint, then a third party tool, properly investigated, may be a good solution.
However, the abilities of SharePoint and SharePoint designer "out of the box" are extensive and deep. It is important to understand what those abilites are and how they function before making a third party tool decision, to ensure you are getting good value for the purchase and not simply replicating functionality that already exists and is readily available in SharePoint.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
Records management and business process collaboration, two different needs?
In SharePoint 2010, we have a technology which completely supports Enterprise Content Management. From improvements to interface and configuration abilities to improvements on the server side such as:
Allowing servers dedicated to records storage, allowing the core SharePoint site to maintain its speed and reactiveness to user input even under heavy load.
Allowing dedicated search and index servers to handle the job of indexing and allowing rapid searching of up to millions of records.
we now have a toolset that can truly handle both physically and through configuration abilities the enterprise level records management process.
The first steps to planning a content management solution is deciding upon classification and key data schemes for the various types of documents in your organization. This results in setting up site collections to support the classification scheme and contain the document repositories, including archive areas for documents that are retired either manually or by a rule or set of rules (such as age, document type).
One advantage of this classification scheme is that it allows configurable searches, so that searches can be restricted to specific document types, such as meeting minutes or quarterly report powerpoint presentations.
These are the core tasks of setting up SharePoint Enterprise Content Management.
But there is another need for these documents, beyond having them in a single location properly categorized with routing and archiving routines.
And that need is in collaborative business processes. On the one hand, you have all of these documents carefully organized into categories each represented with a document library. This means all related documents are typically found together, such as meeting minutes, or departmental processes or policies. But a collaborative business process probably requires documents from DIFFERENT areas or categorizations to support that process.
So, a quarterly report may require prior quarterly reports, departmental report templates, board or stakeholder input, key project documents, etc. If the user had to search for each of these documents in support of the quarterly report, they would have to search different areas in the Records management scheme.
Fortunately, SharePoint supports exposing the same documents in multiple locations, meaning that, just because a document resides in the 11-077C document classification document repository, doesn't mean it can't also be exposed to a team site set up to support the quarterly report. The team site can have a one time set up that links to all documents through its document repository to the team site. These document links are used as regular documents, to the user, there is no difference in abilities.
Any updates to the documents in either area, document classification repository or team site repository are reflected in the other, and new docouments added to the team site can be auto routed to the correct location in the classification system as well.
The seemingly opposing needs of enterprise records classification, and the need for collaborative local document areas can be effectively countered by exposing documents in the classification scheme to other document repositories associated directly with specific business processes.
Allowing servers dedicated to records storage, allowing the core SharePoint site to maintain its speed and reactiveness to user input even under heavy load.
Allowing dedicated search and index servers to handle the job of indexing and allowing rapid searching of up to millions of records.
we now have a toolset that can truly handle both physically and through configuration abilities the enterprise level records management process.
The first steps to planning a content management solution is deciding upon classification and key data schemes for the various types of documents in your organization. This results in setting up site collections to support the classification scheme and contain the document repositories, including archive areas for documents that are retired either manually or by a rule or set of rules (such as age, document type).
One advantage of this classification scheme is that it allows configurable searches, so that searches can be restricted to specific document types, such as meeting minutes or quarterly report powerpoint presentations.
These are the core tasks of setting up SharePoint Enterprise Content Management.
But there is another need for these documents, beyond having them in a single location properly categorized with routing and archiving routines.
And that need is in collaborative business processes. On the one hand, you have all of these documents carefully organized into categories each represented with a document library. This means all related documents are typically found together, such as meeting minutes, or departmental processes or policies. But a collaborative business process probably requires documents from DIFFERENT areas or categorizations to support that process.
So, a quarterly report may require prior quarterly reports, departmental report templates, board or stakeholder input, key project documents, etc. If the user had to search for each of these documents in support of the quarterly report, they would have to search different areas in the Records management scheme.
Fortunately, SharePoint supports exposing the same documents in multiple locations, meaning that, just because a document resides in the 11-077C document classification document repository, doesn't mean it can't also be exposed to a team site set up to support the quarterly report. The team site can have a one time set up that links to all documents through its document repository to the team site. These document links are used as regular documents, to the user, there is no difference in abilities.
Any updates to the documents in either area, document classification repository or team site repository are reflected in the other, and new docouments added to the team site can be auto routed to the correct location in the classification system as well.
The seemingly opposing needs of enterprise records classification, and the need for collaborative local document areas can be effectively countered by exposing documents in the classification scheme to other document repositories associated directly with specific business processes.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Is SharePoint the right choice?
The recent interest in SharePoint shown by many areas of both public and private sector organizations has led to an increase in attempted solution development both within and contracted out to solution providers, both managed and ad-hock.
But is SharePoint the right choice?
Are the business processes you are interested in managing suitable for the SharePoint Environment? SharePoint is a highly configurable set of business support tools, but they do have a focus and certain things that it does very well.
SharePoint is considerably more configurable and flexible than most proprietary enterprise level solutions available, such as large scale financial or health systems. But it certainly isn't a replacement for any of these systems. You can expose specific areas of these systems through SharePoint to inform or participate in a business process, but SharePoint is not suited to the specific, enterprise level complexity that these systems have.
The other end of the solutioning scale involves custom development tailored to a specific business or organizational area, there is a great deal of control over interface and data management, the toolset is custom built to a specific set of requirements provided by the client. This type of solution development is appropriate for an organization with very specific needs and the ability to support large scale development. .NET being one flavour. It may be the only solution for a company with large scale highly specific data intensive needs.
SharePoint is a hybrid of these two approaches. It is certainly more flexible than most proprietary solutions, and contains toolsets and abilities that would be too labour intensive to reproduce using custom development.
This decreases the range of projects that are suitable for SharePoint right away, obviously highly complex systems such as accounting systems, transportation tracking systems, student information systems, and many others are not good candidates for SharePoint. And highly complex custom systems still require custom development.
So what is SharePoint good at? One big area of course is information management.
"living documents" are created, stored, and all updates and changes are managed and tracked, anything from HR policy documents to custom company templates. Automatic archiving, the retrieval of last versions and rolling back changes, all surrounding document management.
Of course, information isn't limited to documents, data coming from infopath forms, stored in SharePoint lists, can come from many sources. From vacation requests to issue tracking, from a client list exposed from your CRM through SharePoint to tracking attendees at a conference.
This information, in addition to the built in versioning and other tools, can also be routed and updated through the use of Workflows.
A vacation request system automatically informs appropriate approvers of new requests, tracks the progress of the request through the system, and provides information from time tracking or resource planning systems to ensure that there is sufficient vacation earned and that major projects or other organizational events have backup plans for missing employees.
The workflow integrates these tools together along with the office suite. So you can take a process formerly managed in excel, such as tracking orders or event contributors, import that information into SharePoint, and automate many of the processes surrounding that information. Informing the appropriate people that an order has come in, having that order tracked through to product completion gathering the appropriate information at each step along the way and allowing easy access to the overall status of all orders in the system.
More complex workflows can also manage processes such as:
- Course Development
- Thesis Tracking
- Case Tracking
- Collaborative Publication, such as multi-person legal documents
So information management means gathering, tracking and manipulating that information as it supports the associated business process from start through to completion. Informing the correct people at each stage, allowing reporting on the status of that information in the system.
If you job involves creating, updating, or approving information through a known process then SharePoint can probably help manage that process. Business Analysis, who typically collect information concerning data collection and management in a business process from clients or stakeholders, and document and organize that information into requirements, can manage that information very well in SharePoint. Many positions at an organization can benefit from those capabilities, from CEOs to project managers, from Business Development users to administrative assistants.
These core abilities of SharePoint are expanded greatly with some powerful data manipulation abilities such as excel services and performance point, to allow analysis of data and inform decision making. In combination with the other abilities also covered, you can see how the development of items such as quarterly reports could be made easier, quick access to company health data exposed through SharePoint, all documents that support that information stored and tracked in SharePoint, meeting schedules and attendees quickly available all in one place.
Other tools expand the abilities of SharePoint as well, from the comprehensive "my sites" social collaboration tools to blogging, discussion group and wiki tools, these tools can also support a business process or be dynamic content of their own.
Exposing all of that information and combining it with more typical web toolsets, such as wikis and blogs, allows the generation of dynamic content that can be both internally and externally exposed, CONTENT management is the other key ability of SharePoint. Some institutions have even used SharePoint as an online course delivery platform, it is certainly well suited to creating a web presence with non-complex out of the box access to many common web tools.
The range of tools and configuration options in SharePoint is vast, and the ability to custom code areas provides further flexibility. However, these abilities are still focused on business processes that can use the suit of tools provided by SharePoint, highly customized systems or customers that require specific interfaces or deep complex data schemas are not good candidates for SharePoint.
The core of professional analysis to determine suitability is a simple question:
How compatible is the current or proposed business process with the SharePoint Solution toolset?
Determining what the client or stakeholder needs are in detail, and seeing if the technical abilities of SharePoint can meet those needs, THAT is the first key stage to determining if SharePoint is the right choice.
But is SharePoint the right choice?
Are the business processes you are interested in managing suitable for the SharePoint Environment? SharePoint is a highly configurable set of business support tools, but they do have a focus and certain things that it does very well.
SharePoint is considerably more configurable and flexible than most proprietary enterprise level solutions available, such as large scale financial or health systems. But it certainly isn't a replacement for any of these systems. You can expose specific areas of these systems through SharePoint to inform or participate in a business process, but SharePoint is not suited to the specific, enterprise level complexity that these systems have.
The other end of the solutioning scale involves custom development tailored to a specific business or organizational area, there is a great deal of control over interface and data management, the toolset is custom built to a specific set of requirements provided by the client. This type of solution development is appropriate for an organization with very specific needs and the ability to support large scale development. .NET being one flavour. It may be the only solution for a company with large scale highly specific data intensive needs.
SharePoint is a hybrid of these two approaches. It is certainly more flexible than most proprietary solutions, and contains toolsets and abilities that would be too labour intensive to reproduce using custom development.
This decreases the range of projects that are suitable for SharePoint right away, obviously highly complex systems such as accounting systems, transportation tracking systems, student information systems, and many others are not good candidates for SharePoint. And highly complex custom systems still require custom development.
So what is SharePoint good at? One big area of course is information management.
"living documents" are created, stored, and all updates and changes are managed and tracked, anything from HR policy documents to custom company templates. Automatic archiving, the retrieval of last versions and rolling back changes, all surrounding document management.
Of course, information isn't limited to documents, data coming from infopath forms, stored in SharePoint lists, can come from many sources. From vacation requests to issue tracking, from a client list exposed from your CRM through SharePoint to tracking attendees at a conference.
This information, in addition to the built in versioning and other tools, can also be routed and updated through the use of Workflows.
A vacation request system automatically informs appropriate approvers of new requests, tracks the progress of the request through the system, and provides information from time tracking or resource planning systems to ensure that there is sufficient vacation earned and that major projects or other organizational events have backup plans for missing employees.
The workflow integrates these tools together along with the office suite. So you can take a process formerly managed in excel, such as tracking orders or event contributors, import that information into SharePoint, and automate many of the processes surrounding that information. Informing the appropriate people that an order has come in, having that order tracked through to product completion gathering the appropriate information at each step along the way and allowing easy access to the overall status of all orders in the system.
More complex workflows can also manage processes such as:
- Course Development
- Thesis Tracking
- Case Tracking
- Collaborative Publication, such as multi-person legal documents
So information management means gathering, tracking and manipulating that information as it supports the associated business process from start through to completion. Informing the correct people at each stage, allowing reporting on the status of that information in the system.
If you job involves creating, updating, or approving information through a known process then SharePoint can probably help manage that process. Business Analysis, who typically collect information concerning data collection and management in a business process from clients or stakeholders, and document and organize that information into requirements, can manage that information very well in SharePoint. Many positions at an organization can benefit from those capabilities, from CEOs to project managers, from Business Development users to administrative assistants.
These core abilities of SharePoint are expanded greatly with some powerful data manipulation abilities such as excel services and performance point, to allow analysis of data and inform decision making. In combination with the other abilities also covered, you can see how the development of items such as quarterly reports could be made easier, quick access to company health data exposed through SharePoint, all documents that support that information stored and tracked in SharePoint, meeting schedules and attendees quickly available all in one place.
Other tools expand the abilities of SharePoint as well, from the comprehensive "my sites" social collaboration tools to blogging, discussion group and wiki tools, these tools can also support a business process or be dynamic content of their own.
Exposing all of that information and combining it with more typical web toolsets, such as wikis and blogs, allows the generation of dynamic content that can be both internally and externally exposed, CONTENT management is the other key ability of SharePoint. Some institutions have even used SharePoint as an online course delivery platform, it is certainly well suited to creating a web presence with non-complex out of the box access to many common web tools.
The range of tools and configuration options in SharePoint is vast, and the ability to custom code areas provides further flexibility. However, these abilities are still focused on business processes that can use the suit of tools provided by SharePoint, highly customized systems or customers that require specific interfaces or deep complex data schemas are not good candidates for SharePoint.
The core of professional analysis to determine suitability is a simple question:
How compatible is the current or proposed business process with the SharePoint Solution toolset?
Determining what the client or stakeholder needs are in detail, and seeing if the technical abilities of SharePoint can meet those needs, THAT is the first key stage to determining if SharePoint is the right choice.