Overcoming SharePoint Infrastructure Woes

November 22, 2011

The IT blogosphere has no lack of discussion of SharePoint and its implementation.  What is SharePoint and how is it best used?  One thing is certain – SharePoint is no out-of-the-box solution.  Without careful planning, implementation, and customization, a company will fail to reap any benefit from SharePoint, and may even suffer confusion and frustration in the process.  Symon Garfield defines SharePoint as an infrastructure, expounding on its strengths and weaknesses in, “The Art of SharePoint Success: Strategy – What Is SharePoint?”

“The benefits are derived from the services that are implemented on the infrastructure rather than from the infrastructure itself and so it is with SharePoint. This is one contributing factor to the difficulties that many organizations face in creating a business case for SharePoint . . . Often the first SharePoint project in an organization has to bear the costs of implementing the infrastructure, even though the benefits are spread across the multiple solutions it enables.”

This initial report does not sound promising.  With the furious and indiscriminate adoption of SharePoint since its 2010 update, one has to wonder if most people are making the most of their enterprise search infrastructure.  Probably not.  So what is to be done?  How do we optimize the “benefits derived from the services that are implemented on the infrastructure?”

One solution that we have found is Fabasoft Mindbreeze, a substantive suite of information management solutions.  Where SharePoint offers only an empty infrastructure, Mindbreeze provides meaning and context.

“Highly efficient enterprise search and specific connectors link together data sources in companies and organizations. They integrate the knowledge of different sections of a company into a uniform, linked whole.  Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related. The software solution finds all required information, regardless of source, for its users.”

Enterprise search, when done well, is an essential business tool for managing the information storage and retrieval needs of the modern day.  But finding a solution that makes sense, and produces benefits without the hassle of tricky implementation, is paramount.  We think Mindbreeze is worth a second look.

Emily Rae Aldridge, November 22, 2011

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