Why SharePoint?

All successful technologies help a person to do something better, faster, and for less money. The same is true of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Server 2010. Most people would define SharePoint as a great collaboration platform. While that is true, another equally justified way of defining SharePoint is a platform to manage information that will greatly improve your life and may some day save you or your organization’s skin as well. SharePoint helps you manage information like no other application. From simply acting as a repository for data to performing intelligent operations on data SharePoint does just about everything involved in managing data. Intelligent operations or processing includes classifying data through metadata and tagging to make it easier to find, routing data to different locations based on rules, archiving data, freezing the state of data, auditing all operations performed on data, disposing of data based on rules, processing data through complex workflows, and much more. A scenario will help you understand all this.

XYZ Biz is a company that handles the details related to awarding government contracts. For example when a government agency decides to build a new highway, it outsources all the work related to inviting quotes for contracts, evaluating the quotes, and awarding the contracts. Though XYZ Biz makes good money it has to tread carefully through this whole process or it will land in a legal soup. A couple of times companies that didn’t get the contract complained of foul play and corruption against XYZ Biz. Fortunately XYZ Biz has a strong implementation of SharePoint Server 2010 that helps it keep all legal documents and evidence handy. It also ensures that the processes related to sending out tenders, evaluating tenders, and awarding contracts are automated.

• The requests for quotes are announced on a SharePoint site hosted on the Internet. Normally an employee of XYZ Biz writes out the invitation. Once he checks in the page a workflow sends the page to a manager for approval. The manager modifies the page and approves it. The workflow sends the page to the Legal department of XYZ Biz for a second level of approval. The Legal guys verify the document and then approve it, which results in the page getting published and becoming viewable by all on the Internet.

• Companies upload their quotes on the SharePoint site. While uploading they are prompted to fill in a host of metadata without which the documents cannot be checked in. Once uploaded a workflow is initiated and a mail gets sent to the appropriate person in XYZ Biz. This document then goes through multiple levels of approvals and is finally processed as per the workflow.

• The documents are moved to various locations based on the metadata so it becomes easy to classify them. These also get tagged for easy searching.

• Also the documents, once submitted, get frozen—that is, no changes can be made to them—and they become records that can be used as evidence in case of any lawsuits.

• After a specific time the records get archived. They can still be retrieved whenever required.

• The documents are easily retrievable even if they are routed and stored at different locations. This is thanks to the document id feature of SharePoint, which ensures that the documents can be retrieved through the same URL regardless of their locations.

The preceding scenario gives a simplistic outline of what can be achieved using a few features of SharePoint. Keep in mind that SharePoint has many more features, and much more is possible that was not covered here, as you will see as you read further in this book.

Saying that SharePoint greatly simplifies collaboration among large teams is a huge understatement. SharePoint simplifies collaboration like never before and does a lot more. Here is another scenario to help you better understand the problems that SharePoint solves.

XYZ Manufacturing is a company that deals with manufacturing. A large part of its business process involves writing documents such as purchase quotes, purchase orders, purchase invoices, sales quotes, sales orders, sales invoices, and so on. These documents are usually written in a Word document with a specified template. These documents are complex, and it takes a few days and contributions from multiple team members to complete them. In addition once completed the documents are emailed to multiple departments for approval. Either the documents are approved or comments are sent back for changes to be made. Once the whole process is completed the documents are emailed to the customer. After the customer approves the changes the documents are considered final. Any new changes in the future need to be done on a new copy of the document so that the original agreed upon document is always available to review. In addition due to legal reasons some documents need to be preserved for a span of at least one year. Sometimes employees have to search for documents from a vast store of thousands of documents.

Business is good, and XYZ Manufacturing has grown from 15 employees to 500 employees in the last five years. To increase efficiency, teams of 15 to 20 people have been formed who work together on the complex documents. With the increase in the number of employees the company faces new problems in ensuring seamless collaboration among employees. Some of the recent incidents highlight the problems:

• A few weeks ago an employee working on a sales order overwrote the updates done by another employee who was also working on the same document.

• In another incident an employee sent an incomplete document for approval.

• Two weeks ago an employee sent a sales order to the customer. All hell broke out when it was realized that the document was not approved.

• Another employee sent the wrong copy of the document to the customer. The poor employee got confused in the many emails in which the documents were sent to and fro as an attachment.

• A few days ago XYZ Manufacturing found that some documents were permanently deleted that should have been retained for legal reasons.

• XYZ Manufacturing realized that most employees are doing rework as it has become impossible to search for the right document from the thousands of historical documents.

• Multiple meetings have been happening for one of the sales orders, and the information is dispersed in email. Because information is dispersed in individual mail boxes, it has become extremely difficult to track information, which has greatly reduced productivity in meetings.

• Reporting critical statistics has become impossible.

The scenario might be a bit exaggerated, but these are the kinds of issues faced when the size of a company grows and you do not have a good way to manage the processes. Faced with these new problems XYZ Manufacturing decided to implement Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The following explains how SharePoint helped to solve each of the preceding problems:

• The first advantage that XYZ Manufacturing got, which was an important factor, was a short duration and the ease with which the SharePoint implementation was done in the company. Also the company didn’t have to do many administrative duties such as re-creating users, and they were able to use the Active Directory user and groups thanks to the brilliant integration of SharePoint with the Active Directory.

• The implementation team also quickly identified the different kinds of teams that were going to use the SharePoint application. A team site was created for each team (more on this later). Administrative privileges were provided on the team site to some users in each of the teams who were identified to be the System Administrator for the team site.

• Training was imparted to the users. Thanks to the consistency that SharePoint provided in various features across the application the learning curve was small and efficient.

• Now the employee can prepare a document as a draft in a central location and prevent the document from being available to other users unless the document is complete. When the user wants to make the document available to other users she checks in the document.

• The check in/check out feature of SharePoint also prevents accidental overwriting of the document by another user.

• Once the document was complete it can easily be sent for approval using a workflow. Thanks to the workflow it is now ensured that the document never goes directly to the client. Also the comments are now recorded in one location rather than being dispersed in emails.

• The fact that the document is in a central place in SharePoint and not in multiple emails avoids the confusion of identifying the latest and complete version of the document.

• The versioning feature also helps track the history of the document without needing to store multiple copies of the document. It also is easy to store and track comments and other metadata information for each of the versions.

• Documents accidentally deleted are now easily retrievable thanks to SharePoint’s Recycle Bin.

• Using various features of SharePoint, such as Record Retention and Information Management Policies, documents can now be stored for the specified period automatically. This helps overcome the issue of document storage for legal reasons.

• The powerful SharePoint search functionality makes searching for historical data easy.

• Using Meeting Workspaces the team can now track all information from multiple meetings at one place.

• Using the powerful Business Intelligence features of SharePoint the team can now track various critical statistics and adjust accordingly.

Don’t worry if you cannot fully understand everything mentioned here, especially if you are new to SharePoint. All these features will be covered in detail throughout the book. For people who have worked on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007, most of the features should look familiar. The important point is that the preceding scenario represents the possibilities using just the out of the box features of SharePoint. You just need to configure a few things here and there; zero code writing is required. And of course SharePoint provides a rich mechanism to implement customizations through code that can greatly expand the SharePoint’s capability. Further applications of SharePoint become clearer as you progress in this book.