Information Worker Solutions with Microsoft SharePoint Portal 2007

Many business have found Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, an effective tool for completing their Internet, Intranet & extranet portal strategy. As a public website, SharePoint Server facilitates public relations officer to publish & maintain web contents without IT technical assistance.

• As a members only site, SharePoint Portal Server allows customers, suppliers to login and retrieve latest product literature, join discussions, answer to surveys etc.
• As a staff portal, SharePoint Portal Server seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently.

Modules
Publishing Content

With SharePoint Portal Server, IT department can allow almost all users to contribute to the website. Contributions can be anything from topics of interest, news, online survey to gather opinions, discuss forums etc. Every user can be given a user-id and password to login with rights such as reader, contributor, administrator etc. The general public that do not have a user-id have no access to member only contents.

Each area or sub-area of the corporate website can be managed by different administrators. Contributors can contribute content but will require administrators to approve it. Best of all, most content can be created without knowledge of web design or HTML.

Site administrators will also be glad that sites and contents can be published and expired automatically by date.

Search Engine

One of the biggest features that come with SharePoint Portal out-of-the-box is the comprehensive search capability. The search engine build-in is almost as powerful and complete as internet search engines such as MSN.

Users can not just search news events, pictures, calendar events; it can also search information within Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, databases within Microsoft InfoPath documents, Acrobat PDF, Macromedia Flash, Auto CAD, MP3, ZIP, XML documents and others with appropriate iFilters. This means that users can upload any content on the portal from presentation slides, spreadsheets, product literature, price lists etc and share the knowledge within these documents with users of SharePoint Search.

Discussion

Besides able to create libraries of documents and pictures, another interesting feature is discussions. Discussion forums can be created in various areas within SharePoint Portal.

Survey

Interested to find out what people think, why not use an online survey?

With SharePoint portal, you can create simple to complex surveys easily and be able to view individual results or graphical summary as above and even export to Microsoft Excel.

Work Collaboration

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides a powerful team collaboration environment that enables organizations to aggregate, organize, find, and provision SharePoint sites across the enterprise.

Different departments, working groups, special interest groups etc can actually create their own site, recruit members, define user rights, etc with very little knowledge of website publishing. For example, in a meeting site, you might want to have an agenda for meetings, document libraries to share documents and schedule meetings etc.

You can enable document versioning & approval process for Microsoft Office documents to keep track of changes. Besides users can also create your own personal site and be able to share documents among each other for work, notes, photos etc. In addition, you can organize documents and information by topic and browse for relevant content. Alerts notify you when new information is added or existing information changes to help you better use the data. Sites can also be tagged with an expiry date to relieve administrators from maintenance.

Calendar of Events

Likewise, IT Department can freely assign its users the ability to publish events using SharePoint Portal’s build-in events management. They can also create individual event calendar for each department or team. Users can view the events in a list format or calendar. In the calendar format, they can also view by month, by week or daily. For those who do not visit the events page often, they can also subscribe to event calendar alerts to receive emails of new events. With SharePoint Portal Server, your company can now have a comprehensive Events calendar without knowledge of web design and development.

Integrating with Proposal Accelerator

Using the Microsoft Office Solution Accelerator for Proposals and SharePoint Portal Server. The Solution Accelerator for Proposals allows sections of the proposal document to be assigned to different people, notifying them and tracking the status of the work. Once the proposal is opened, the Solution Accelerator for Proposals can be used to track changes to the proposal, and team members can work on the assigned sections independently. Using the Solution Accelerator for Proposals and SharePoint Portal Server, a system has been created to allow collaboration on proposals among the sales development team, pre-sales consultants, suppliers etc.

Intregrating with Business Scorecard

Use a decision-support system for better and faster decisions by leveraging using the Microsoft Business Scorecards Manager, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft SQL Analysis Services. Using the SQL Analysis Services functionality in Microsoft SQL Server™, data can be aggregated from Microsoft CRM and other sources. It can then be presented in a scorecard format using the Microsoft Business Scorecard manager. This allows color-coded views of the data and analyzes past performance, reviews current trends, and predicts future scenarios. Such a decision support system will allow executives to make better decisions and take timely actions by putting key metrics in front of all executives via a Web browser.

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains ERP

SharePoint Portal Server is able to integrate with Microsoft Great Plains out of the box with Business Portal. SharePoint Portal Server can now present accounting and supply chain management key performance Indicators, offer human resource management self service and requisition management.