The Heat in SharePoint Semantics June 29 to July 5
July 10, 2012
This week’s SharePoint Semantics posts took a more anecdotal look at the way that the content management platform affects our workplace environment and relationships with other departments.
Who is the idea SharePoint user? “Microsoft SharePoint Really Can Be All Things to All People” works to answer that very question. It appears that SharePoint changes to fit the unique needs of both large and small businesses from vastly different industries.
The article focuses on three major factors driving SharePoint deployments:
First is that all organizations have files and documents which they need to manage. This information needs to be easily retrieved, organized, and edited. Second is that all organizations need to communicate. With SharePoint, an organization can use activity streams, social tagging, blogs, wikis, and discussion boards, as well as other tools to stay updated. Third, all organizations want to simplify IT. With SharePoint, an organization can consolidate many applications into one system, which reduces long-term maintenance efforts and increases productivity.
The majority of the problems in the world can, in my opinion, be narrowed down to a failure to communicate. SharePoint is no different in the regard. The July 2 post “Overcoming Communication Issues to Better Manage SharePoint” highlights an article that recommends that in order to find solutions that benefit both departments, IT and marketing should develop relationships with one another.
The article states:
After the first outing or two, you’ll have found some common ground. You will have begun to trust each other and you’ll be communicating more openly. Then you can begin adding your business challenges into the conversation. You’ll be able to openly talk about your challenges without thinking the other has some hidden agenda. And you’ll discover that each of you not only can help the other, but actually wants to help the other when possible.
When dealing with SharePoint hardships, it can sometimes be uplifting to hear a SharePoint success story. “SharePoint 2010 Results in Huge Success for San Diego County Juvenile Justice System” directs readers to an article that shares how the San Diego probation department, district attorney, and public defenders implemented a hugely successful custom content management and workflow solution based on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
The three part system, that currently holds 15,000 juvenile cases, proved to be highly effective:
Financially, the county incurred about $175,000 in initial system development and implementation costs. It estimates that during the county’s first full year of using JELS, it could decrease the staff (which it expects to do without any layoffs) that it needs to handle physical case files and other paper by the equivalent of roughly six full-time positions, avoiding about $360,000 in costs annually. Given its expected cost avoidance for the first full year of implementation, the county anticipates an initial ROI of about 100 percent.
While coming together to work on SharePoint can solve many headaches, sometimes it takes inlisting a third party solution to come to terms with those issues. The semantics technology created by Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform can make your organization more productive by allowing SharePoint data to be more easily organized, retrieved, and edited than with SharePoint out of the box.
Jasmine Ashton, July 10, 2012
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