Category Archives: Projects & Clients

About a week ago, I came across an organization suffering from the ‘collaboration blues.’  It was looking for a way to automate document processing, search for and contribute to documents across multiple team members, create team workspaces, associate metadata with its documents, and expose all this functionality over Intranet and Extranet.  This set of requirements practically begs for a solution in Sharepoint, which is what I was going to recommend to the organization.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered this organization already had Sharepoint.

This situation is not at all uncommon. MOSS 2007 and its successor Sharepoint 2010 contain a set of out-of-the-box capabilities so large that it can become a liability. This organization’s Sharepoint instance is not the first I’ve seen relegated to the role of a glorified file server – many groups adopt Sharepoint without realizing the true power of content types, site templates, workflows, and other features that make a mature Sharepoint implementation a truly beautiful thing.

If you have a Sharepoint instance that’s looking a little too much like a file server, then take a peek at some of the items discussed below. They could be the keys to transforming your instance into something truly useful.

Content Types

Sharepoint content types allow you to associate data with different types of documents. Your HR department may create a content type for resumes that includes additional information like skill sets, candidate location, rating, etc.  It’s very convenient to have this type of data in addition to the resume itself, because once you’ve created the content type you can search for resumes with a rating of ‘Excellent’ or ‘Project Management’ included in their skill sets. Furthermore, you can restrict the range of data that can be entered into these fields by using custom lists (this will keep one recruiter from listing a candidate’s rating as “Great” while another prefers “Excellent” – governance, discussed later, plays a big role here.)

Site Templates

Most people know that you can create any number of site collections in a Sharepoint implementation, but surprisingly few realize that you can save a “model” site collection as a template. If you’re making subsites for a number of project teams that will have similar structure, lists, navigation, etc., then there’s no need to create them from scratch each time. You can simply create the first site collection to your liking, save it as a named template, then use it as the site template for the next site you create. All the navigation and web parts will be in place, providing your collections with a consistent look and feel.

Workflows

Sharepoint is capable of routing documents through approval workflows that can be customized as you see fit, and it can generally be done without writing a single line of code. If you require processing for your documents, make sure you check out the basic out-of-the-box Sharepoint workflows before you go looking for a custom solution. You may be surprised by the flexibility offered by the standard workflows.

Other Cool Things

• You can create timer jobs to execute according to a schedule. This is useful for a number of things, especially synchronizing Sharepoint document libraries with external systems
• You can configure document libraries to receive emails.  You can associate a document library with an email address and automatically populate that library with emails sent to its pre-configured address
• You can create custom web-based forms using InfoPath. InfoPath allows you to create forms without using code that can be deployed to Sharepoint and made available to users through the browser. Form information can be saved into document libraries or manipulated in practically any way you see fit, all without writing code

Governance

Governance is, in short, the creation and maintenance of principles that guide the use and implementation of Sharepoint to that it becomes a reliable, consistent, and useful system for the people it’s supposed to benefit. Governance is to Sharepoint what laws are to a nation. Sadly, this most important part of the business of running Sharepoint is also the most overlooked. The result is Sharepoint implementations suffering from one or more of the following:

• A patchwork of loosely related and often redundant site collections
• Inconsistent look, feel, and navigation throughout the site collections
• Non-existent or poorly defined content types that make locating documents nearly impossible, resulting in deep folder structures within document libraries that effectively turn Sharepoint into a file server
• No guidance as to how to implement and deploy custom features and other upgrades
• Lack of SLAs that cause Sharepoint maintenance windows to clash with project deadlines, among other serious problems
• A Sharepoint implementation that people hate to use

If any of the above looks familiar to you, then you probably have a governance problem.

I could go on all day about the robust features of Sharepoint, but we’ll leave it at this for now.  If you have any Sharepoint issues you’d like to discuss, feel free to email cnewman@cpointe-inc.com.