Three Ways to Optimize your SharePoint Implementation
This is where organizations which have implemented an enterprisewide information optimization strategy are well-positioned to gain the benefits of their strategic IT investments.
The benefit of this optimization is felt in both SharePoint and non-SharePoint environments. First, it ensures that people searching enterprise content will be able to find any relevant documents residing in departmental SharePoint repositories. At the same time, it enables SharePoint users to use any non-SharePoint content—including both structured and unstructured data—that they need for the activities that they are doing within SharePoint.
Again, you want to accomplish this in a way that individual SharePoint implementations are not constrained in counter-productive ways. The same requirements for enforcing access permissions apply when integrating SharePoint content with other enterprise content.
Keep in mind that once you have merged SharePoint and non-SharePoint information and made it so accessible to users, they are going to want to tag, comment, forward and track changes to both types of content from a single easy-to-use interface, regardless of where it came from. And that leads to our next step, which is to build additional functionality into SharePoint.
You can achieve enormous gains in productivity by replacing SharePoint’s native search functionality with more advanced, best-of-breed search, clustering and notification capabilities. Ideally this should be done seamlessly with modular Web Parts that snap into place using standard SharePoint configuration tools. While better search will give a big boost to your SharePoint deployment, you should also ensure that the information optimization platform you are using for this project includes other advanced collaborative features such as the ability to annotate and rate documents for relevance, locate subject-matter experts along with search results and create personalized information dashboards.
The right information optimization platform will also enable you to make SharePoint documents and metadata available to other applications through application programming interfaces that will enable your IT organization to integrate that content into other applications as necessary to fulfill specific operational requirements.
Benefits of Optimizing SharePoint
Your company can reap a number of substantive benefits by incorporating your SharePoint deployments into a solid overall information optimization strategy:
Improved business performance. Having the right information at the right time helps product designers design better, manufacturing teams manufacture better, marketers market better, salespeople sell better and customer service departments service customers better.
Improved knowledge worker productivity. Companies today are running leaner than ever. That means that they have to make sure their knowledge workers can quickly find the content they need—and that they don’t waste time recreating content that already exists. Optimizing SharePoint will directly and quantifiably improve knowledge worker productivity.
Reduced business risk. In addition to the upside benefits that result from using information efficiently, there are downside risks when it isn’t. Opportunities are missed, customers are misinformed, and operational problems go undetected. SharePoint implementations that are departmentally fragmented, isolated from other content and functionally inadequate can lead to reduced revenues, wasteful spending and erosion of market confidence.
Better governance and compliance. Organizations have substantial responsibilities when it comes to securing sensitive information, maintaining documentation of business activities, providing that documentation to regulators, performing e-discovery and generally keeping tabs on content across the enterprise. But it becomes more and more difficult to fulfill these responsibilities with SharePoint’s limited capabilities. That’s why you need an information optimization platform with the ability to discover and categorize content across the enterprise regardless of format or location.
Reduced cost of ownership. With resources tight and multiple priorities competing for attention, it’s essential to reduce both the cost of SharePoint ownership and the overall effort it takes to achieve key corporate information optimization objectives. By providing a single platform that delivers enhanced search, governance, integration and productivity features for SharePoint—and for every other content-producing application—you can drive down project costs, lifecycle content management costs, and the overhead associated with content-rich applications.
The bottom line is that SharePoint is a great product for any business that wants to achieve competitive advantages improving its collaborative use of information—but it’s just one component of an overall strategy for doing so. Given today’s pressures for operational excellence, productivity, risk mitigation and good governance, bringing SharePoint into a full-blown information optimization strategy is essential for achieving real business results.
Vivisimo In Play
A global consumer products company uses Vivisimo’s information optimization platform to drive greater productivity and efficiencies across all of its operating divisions and to gain greater value from its SharePoint investments. From a single point of access, authorized users can browse of all of the organization’s information resources across all operating divisions, including internal document-centric systems like SharePoint, distributed file systems, transactional systems such as SAP, external subscription services and Internet content. Search results contain information about people who may be able to provide assistance in a particular topic, as well as featured links to SharePoint sites that may provide more information. The result is greater overall efficiency and better insights across the entire organization, leading to faster time-to-market for new products.
Vivisimo helps organizations unlock and optimize the true business value of information—regardless of application or source—to drive innovation, real-time decisions and actionable insight. Visit
http://www.vivisimo.com