Sharepoint and collaboration

Help distributed teams work together efficiently with Sharepoint Collaboration

Sharepoint helps distributed employees access and share project related information to maximise efficiency and complete key tasks on time. With shared folders, calendars and task lists, it enhances collaboration, improves project management and streamlines compliance.

Increasingly, work is something you do, not somewhere you go. In theory at least, home workers and other remote employees can come together online to reduce business travel, lower office costs and improve work/life balance.

However, to achieve these benefits, remote teams need to track, store and share information centrally. This is a key challenge in the information age, especially as multiple document formats, including email, reside in a range of systems and locations. Sharepoint and Smartstore addresses this challenge by giving distributed teams access to all the information they need via a simple to use web interface With a single repository for all project related content, Sharepoint enables team members to store, search and share documents easily online.

It also creates audit trails to ensure compliance with legislative requirements. And with calendars and task lists built in, it provides a comprehensive team working environment. As an additional benefit, Sharepoint 2010 integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook. This enables employees to drag and drop emails into SharePoint directly from their Outlook inboxes.

It consists of four simple stages that work in a continuous cycle.

1. Assess

Obtain a much greater understanding of your existing Collaboration Process and requirements. This phase requires an agreement to share your current operational model for sharing information and engages key users and support staff, it is normally sponsored in the business by a senior executive stakeholder. The objective of this stage is to produce a jointly agreed Scope of works for the current collaboration and process environment. An assessment typically takes 1-3 weeks to complete. Confidence for both parties to contract is dependent upon the quality and level of information provided at the assessment stage.

2. Design

Focus on creating a solution around your Collaboration Requirements, review your existing manual processes and the software and support services that will be required to meet your business and project objectives. This centres on rationalising the existing method of sharing documents and projects. The output of this phase is the production of a scope of work with the most appropriate solution.

3. Implement

Set up all of the relevant processes, agreements and technologies to meet the contracted requirements. This is driven by two key stages: Transition which focuses on changing the provision of existing manual method to the Shared Collaboration and Project Management. Transformation which focuses on changing the process or technology used to deliver the solution with your users for quick adoption.

4. Manage

This is the heart of the service, partnering with you to guarantee that your Collaboration solution receives ongoing management in the way that’s right for your business and ensuring that the service performance levels are maintained over the contract life. This phase consists of three key activities:

• Process Review: ensuring that the SharePoint Project is optimised and the cost of the projects are tracked and understood.
• Incident management: handling all requests in a professional and timely manner
• Account management: ensuring that new requirements and changes to existing requirements are properly defined, agreed and implemented

The partnership doesn’t end there. We will continue to work with you into the future to make sure that your Collaboration solution is always optimised, as well as ensuring that the technologies you use are the right choice. To make this happen, we’ll carry out regular strategy reviews, deliver consultancy and have regular meetings to ensure that the services you receive meet any Service level agreements in place. So whenever your business changes, your business processes can change with you, as it adapts to deliver against your new demands.

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