Monday, February 6, 2012

Taking SharePoint Further

According to the 433-page Intranet Design Annual 2011* from Nielson Norman Group, featuring what they consider to be this year's ten best intranets, half of last year's winners use SharePoint as a foundation. Yet in the consulting world, you'll hear a lot of, "I want to use SharePoint, but I don't want it to look like SharePoint." With enough time, money, and effort, you can make SharePoint look utterly chic. Yet organizations need to think about harnessing SharePoint's power and customizing it in smart ways, not just pretty ones.

Keep it Real: SharePoint workflows should custom-tied to the actual, day-to-day activities of worker bees. That will enable an instant enterprise productivity boost.

BI, not BS: Custom scorecards and mash-ups within SharePoint can provide quick, powerful, and really useful business intelligence to end users.

Right-time vs. Real-time: A correctly-leveraged SharePoint site is all about delivering the right information to the right people in the right format at the right time, particularly for the people in charge. This will drive quick, data-driven decision-making.

The key to all of this is finding a SharePoint partner who will focus on making the changes that will really matter to your business. Don't know where to start? Idea Entity can do all of the above – and the jewel in our SharePoint crown is our ability to leverage SharePoint to consolidate enterprise line-of-business applications to save you a whole lot of money.

*http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/