Collaboration is now moving strongly into the enterprise as organisations seek ROI by cashing in on the benefits of integration starting from workflow to document management, portals and enterprise search. A sweet spot, most certainly, for TEXPO as we leverage our SharePoint expertise to deliver customer value.
If we could name the two key critical components for businesses today that would be communications and collaboration. For TEXPO, this is a validation of our focus on building capabilities based on Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 that aims to help enterprises manage documents, project workspaces, and information repositories and tie it all into content, analytics and search capabilities.
Although collaboration as a concept is not new to the enterprise, what’s makes it different today is the approach and the result that technology can have on the way it helps the business communicate. “In the past what we have seen is that organisational efforts in the collaboration space were mostly undertaken in silos. This structured approach however is now is fast giving way to an integrated one and as a result, technologies like SharePoint are now in a position to help enterprises re-shape workplace collaboration and pursue greater innovation in their work style,” Mr Fasial Qayum Siddiqui, Director Product & Strategy (Global), TEXPO shares.
It’s useful here to take a look at what the analysts are saying. Interestingly, according to Garter, in the past, organisations typically supported collaboration through e-mail and highly structured applications. However, today, social paradigms are fast converging with e-mail, instant messaging (IM) and presence, creating new collaboration styles.
However, as Gartner points out, a truly collaborative, effective and efficient workplace will not arise until organisations make these capabilities widely available and users become more comfortable with them. Technology therefore is only an enabler; culture is a must for success.
We agree. And for an organisational culture to be developed, it becomes essential for enterprises to invest in the right technologies and tools to support this cause. This trend reinstates our position nicely with our offerings based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
So why SharePoint?
Almost every developing organisation today is focused on pooling and integrating content, knowledge, data and information in ways that it can be used to deliver business benefit. One of the main ways of doing that was by creating and updating web content. But the main question is this - what more can you do with web content that can help integrate both internal and external knowledge resources?
In our view the answer is clearly the emergence of collaborative intranet platforms, particularly SharePoint’s multi-purpose platform which allows managing and provisioning of intranet portals, extranets and websites, document management, collaboration spaces, social networking tools, enterprise search, business intelligence tooling, process/information integration, and third-party developed solutions in an integrated manner.
“What it helps an organisation achieve is an established framework for enabling intra-company collaboration process. At the same time, business processes and workflows could be integrated, thereby tying in all components to tell one story,” Mr Siddiqui tells us. One cannot also underestimate the importance of user experiences in facilitating the collaborative experience. “SharePoint can also be used as a web application development platform and the products users to create and modify web content without having to refer to web development as such,” he adds.
For TEXPO, delivering expertise on SharePoint is serious business as we build up an end-to-end play in SharePoint expertise right from helping customers plan their information architecture to the design and execution of the solution itself. Some of the key aspects including integrating content management solutions, enabling social collaboration tools for business communication, digitization of solutions and process automation.
“Collaboration is no longer about a point solution. It’s about first putting in place a strategy and then supporting that with the right tools. That’s when you actually build an organisational culture that becomes conducive to working in tandem,” Siddiqui emphasises. We couldn’t agree more.
Getting started? Here are our recommendations on key components to start with on your SharePoint 2010 journey:
- Sites: It makes perfect business sense to integrate multiple department sites for your organisation thereby creating a single infrastructure. This enables employees to share documents with other colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to your customers.
- Social collaboration: This is what innovation is all about. Using SharePoint 2010 can deliver not just collaboration tools, but also a single platform to manage from. This makes it easy for people to share ideas and work together the way they want in your organisation.
- Content management: Managing content within the organisation needs to be a strategic activity. This involves setting up compliance measures and ”behind the scenes” tracking with features like document types, retention policies and automatic content sorting and then letting people work naturally using Microsoft Office tools that they are familiar with.
- Business Intelligence: The value of information is captured only when you share it. Using SharePoint 2010 effectively can enable everyone to have access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications. This helps people locate the information they need to make good decisions.
- Enterprise search: Looking for information does not mean having to deal with clutter. SharePoint 2010 offers a search solution that delivers a unique combination of relevance, refinement, and social cues that help people find the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.
- Integration: A successful strategy is one that helps the organisation to collectively and rapidly respond to business needs. This means integrating data from all systems and sources and allowing it to interact seamlessly in a SharePoint environment.
TEXPO Research Team
10th January 2012
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