SharePoint design, training, support, add-ons

Shared Drive replacement - Records and Document Management - Intranets - Knowledge Bases - Asset, Job and Customer Management - Business Process improvement...

Microsoft SharePoint continues to go from strength to strength - especially with WSS3 and MOSS 2007. This includes its flexibility, scalability and the ability with its lower cost structure to implement incrementally.

However, SharePoint's flexibility can also lead to a spawning of tens or hundreds of sites or libraries - all without a solid information architecture. Thus the promise of creating order and easier filing and finding is not delivered - you end up with the same chaos and frustrations you had in shared/network drives!

Many organisations lack the budgets or stomach for full scale EDRMS implementations. Often, even if they had budget, a softer and more customised approach is likely to lead to success, as the organisation itself is just not ready. Our specialty for SharePoint is helping you exploit this technology by:

• developing showcases and pilots to understand potential and build business cases
• crafting straightforward user interfaces and navigation
• mentoring, training and supporting your people on the ground - including hands on training events
• developing classifications and metadata tuned to make the most of the technology
• contributing to the vital supporting projects - change management, core data definition, policy/procedures

In evaluating how SharePoint can add significant business value with minimal software development, ILC came across two excellent add-on products. We are now solution partners for these two innovative organisations - offering training, support, design and sales...

CorasWorks add-on functionality to SharePoint allows...

• Content Aggregation - Grouped, sorted, filtered, searchable views across document libraries and lists wherever they are in your site and subsites
• Navigation - list driven menuing to complement WSS3 or MOSS navigation
• Ad-hoc Workflow - powerful business process functionality can be built into cross site views for email alerts, updating metadata, moving content, creating new list items - all without programming

This is particularly useful for WSS2 and WSS3 deployments - allowing content to be viewed and if needed, moved across sites without expensive software development. The functionality is also very applicable to MOSS implementations, giving aggregation well beyond what MOSS search and standard webparts gives out of the box. Below is a practical example of our work - in this case based on WSS3 and CorasWorks :

Aggregated Views - CorasWorks This shows an aggregated view of documents over a number of libraries - that can be further filtered by a word or phrase. This allows staff to work in their usual document libraries, aas well as gain overviews - grouped and sorted by library or metadata (in this case Document Type). This can include aggregations like all documents I have modified in the last week in any library, or all documents, tasks or issues for a particular customer or job. These views can be prepared and intergrated into the site's navigation by BA's or power users can craft their own views on the fly for a particular business need.

See more examples and access to white papers on CorasWorks use here

Offline SharePoint access

Very elegant offline reading and updating of SharePoint content - perfect for field workers or road warriors. This includes access to libraries/lists including their native SharePoint views. Metadata can also be accessed and updated. New documents can be dragged and dropped from Windows Explorer, allowing users to then enter metadata.

Email drag and drop - A compliance "must-have"

Outlook drag and drop of emails and/or their attachments into SharePoint favourite libraries - a must-have for user friendly record keeping compliance and business productivity.

See more examples, product download and access to white papers on Colligo here

Contact us for more details on how to use SharePoint and why in many instances the addition of CorasWorks and Colligo make a substantive difference to the effectiveness of creating and sharing information and knowledge.

(c) 2007 Information Leadership Limited