2. Who am I?
• Denis Ngahu
• SharePoint Consultant and R&D lead at Alternate Ltd.
• Email: denis.ngahu@alternateltd.com
• Twitter: @denisngahu
• Skype: denis.ngahu
5. Why SharePoint?
• Being a collaboration platform, SharePoint is primarily designed to
help employees within organizations work together more
effectively.
• SharePoint provides features that enable true teamwork within the
organization while enhancing effectiveness, efficiency and
accountability.
• Conversations can carry on past the board room, collaboration can
take place without physical proximity, processes can be performed
from multiple locations with ease, data can be visualized/presented
and information is made more accessible to the users.
7. Document & Records Management
• The document life cycle can be particularly hectic to manage in an
organization with disparate document repositories or even worse,
where documents are treated as employee property.
• SharePoint can centralize the storage and make it easy to manage
the document life cycle from authoring to collaboration to archiving
and finally disposal, while adhering to security guidelines.
• Also, records can be managed by defining where to store them,
when to store them and how long. It’s all tedious work at the
beginning but it pays off in the end.
8. Search
• The purpose of any document management system is to store
documents and therefore the importance of a search engine can’t
be undermined.
• SharePoint has a powerful search engine that allows you to find
your items in your organization easily. Based on the configuration,
you can instruct it to ignore items in a particular location.
• It also comes equipped with filters that you can leverage to increase
the speed with which you find information. You can also create your
own filters to make your search experience more fulfilling.
11. Processes
• Processes continue evolving from time to time as organizational
policy changes. The obvious result is that the manual processes
become more cumbersome with time and managing them
becomes problematic.
• SharePoint comes with a workflow engine enables organizations to
effectively model and manage processes electronically thus
reducing room for error and increasing efficiency.
12. Information Gathering
• Every process is designed to either collect information only or
collect and provide information. This can be achieved easily
through various web forms that are supported on SharePoint and
this information is what is used to determine the nature of the
process.
• Using SharePoint and other Microsoft tools like InfoPath and Visual
Studio, organizations can easily create web application forms
necessary to either completely or partially digitize the information
gathering part of its processes.
15. SharePoint Social
• SharePoint comes with various features to enable a true social
experience at the workplace.
• These include newsfeeds(items and people you are following),
status updates, tags, notes, about me section etc.
• People are able to interact with their colleagues and see what they
are up to.
• SharePoint also integrates with Yammer to enhance the social
experience.
16. Social everywhere
• The social story is not only confined to the desktops in the office
but easily extends to off premise locations on mobile devices.
18. Data Presentation
• Every organization collects data that’s useful to them but the
analysis usually takes a long time. Using the data to drive decisions
in the present is what gives companies an edge over their
competition.
• SharePoint provides a layer for presenting the data once it has been
analyzed and graphical reports generated. It utilizes tools already
available to the organization like SQL and Excel and presents the
analytical information from these tools, combining them together to
form dashboards.
19. Data Presentation
• Depending on the data source and the configuration, you can have
interactive dashboards that allow some level of self service business
intelligence.
21. Project Management
• Project management has come a long way in SharePoint Server
2013. Out of the box you get a few tricks that help you manage
your projects on a basic level. (tasks lists, timelines)
• Project server, though expensive, helps you get the real
stuff…..gantt charts, dashboards, workflows etc. It’s a really powerful
tool that can come in handy for organizations that work on multiple
projects.
25. It’s not just a bed of roses
• When you look at it critically, it all comes down to the configuration
of your environment, but there are some specific things that can be
quite a nuisance:
• Permissions - Lack of a proper hierarchy.
• High availability – The lack of a high availability strategy.
• Performance – How was the environment scoped and/or designed? Is it
scalable? Are there certain unnecessary services running that are slowing
down your farm?
• Governance strategy – More like the lack of one. Without proper
governance of the content, adoption will lag.
