/pcq/media/agency_attachments/L8pkS8gpnodJThOdAfv1.jpg)
Follow UsAll organizations — regardless of size — require work-ing with data and documents — and that too lots of different types of each. SharePoint 2010 can helpin many different ways. This article will talk about someof these different scenarios and how SharePoint helps.
Document repository
This is one of the most basic requirements that most organ-izations will have. Storing, retrieving and searching for doc-uments important to the organization. Unlike a simple fileserver based “folder”, SharePoint contains a lot of morethings that can really help out. Every “library” in SharePointcan contain a bunch of additional metadata. For instance,you can have a library of Proposals sent from the company.But you can also put in metadata such as the grand total forthe proposal, a category, the client name etc. With this youcan start doing more actions on the metadata — like sorting,filtering and searching on this metadata for each document.Even MS Office apps can work with this metadata directlyfrom within the application itself.
Document sets
This is a new feature in SharePoint 2010 that lets you definea working unit which consists of more than one document.For instance, in an organization, a work unit called “Pro-posal” might actually consist of multiple documents that allneed to be worked on and sent together to a client. Thesedocuments can be a technical proposal, financial proposal,a task breakup worksheet and a company brochure — all puttogether. You can create and work with these work units to-gether and manage them in one place with shared metadatarather than doing it with folders or Zip/Rar files.
Managed metadata
When an organization wants to define certain “terms” thatare consistent across the entire setup, this is where Management Metadata comes into play. You might want to de-fine certain sets of terms that are specific to your organiza-tion and is used in all the different SharePointimplementations on the server. For instance, terms couldbe “Locations”, “Product names” etc. so that these are usedabsolutely consistently across. Each term can also consistof definitions in different languages and/or synonyms aswell. For example, a location like Mumbai could have syn-onyms like Bombay and BOM (the airport code). Eachcould also have their language equivalent.
Business connectivity services
There are many times when data is not stored within Share-Point itself — especially when it comes to custom or propri-etary data or applications. But it also makes sense to exposethis data through SharePoint in many cases. BCS allowsyou connect to different types of data stores — RDBMS,.NET objects, Web service etc. — and perform all the stan-dard operations — view list, view item, create item, edit itemor delete item. A good example would be of allowing Share-Point to create and present the standard forms for these ac-tions for say a custom database structure. The forms thatSharePoint creates have all the features that any Share-Point list would have.
Office Web apps
Office Web Applications in SharePoint 2010 lets users ac-cess, view, and work with Office documents from within thebrowser without having Office clients installed on the ma-chine itself. This gives perfect fidelity in terms of what theusers sees and works with and can be a great replacementfor the Office client.
Information rights management
In case document security is of paramount importance toyour organization, you can use IRM to secure them. Say, you have some sensitive documents that you don't wantyour competitors or rivals to get their hands on. Howeveryou do need to share it with people within your organization.Instead of simply giving access to the documents througha username and password, you can even define rights withinthe document itself. For instance you can specify which users can view or print or copy or email or other actions on the document itself. Any user who has not got the correct rights will not be able to do any of those. You can even have the document self-destruct itself if access in an unauthorized manner.
Custom applications
You can build fully custom solutions on top of SharePoint(or have a vendor do it for you). You get additional feature sautomatically and therefore can customize it even more than getting a fully custom solution developed — say in a standard web development technology like ASP.NET orPHP. This will also automatically use single sign on to authenticate and will work consistently with the rest of the In-tranet.
Communities
You can now build a social network within your organization and allow employees to interact with each other just like they would in any public social network like say Facebook.Each person can create their own profile page and others can subscribe to it and send messages, view updates, down-load latest documents, etc. This allows the SharePoint site to become much more interactive and enable user community growth for knowledge management.
Business Intelligence
Another place where SharePoint excels is becoming a front-end to business intelligence services. Users can utilize SharePoint for viewing and managing analysis of businessdata using reports, dashboards, forms and KPIs — allthrough a simple to use interface in the browser or through an MS Office client like Excel.
As you can see, SharePoint lets you perform a huge num-ber of tasks. We've just touched upon some of the top items,but SharePoint 2010 can do these and more for your organization.
Related Articles: