The SharePoint MonsterAlternate Ltd

Who am I?• Denis Ngahu• SharePoint Consultant and R&D lead at Alternate Ltd.• Email: denis.ngahu@alternateltd.com• Twitter: @denisngahu• Skype: denis.ngahu

SharePoint at a Glance

Today’s Business Productivity Challenges

Meet changing business needs Manage IT costs and complexity

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.

Document Management

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.

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.

Search

Business Process Automation

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.

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.

Information Gathering

Social at the Workplace

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.

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.

Business Intelligence

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.

Data Presentation

• Depending on the data source and the configuration, you can have interactive dashboards that allow some level of self service business intelligence.

Project Management

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.

Project Management

Project Management

Gotchas

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.