For companies, the implementation of a corporate portal is a serious step forward,
which is not easy to make. It requires from all employees the consolidation of their efforts
in a common aspiration, requires changes in the processes, it changes the perception
of how you can work with the information to achieve better business conditions.
On the other hand, it is very important to choose the right technological platform,
which will become a reliable functional basis for the portal. A good platform must meet
a set of the following requirements:
- It should be scalable
- It should support a wide range of customization options
- It should be extendable
- It should maintain the required SLA level
- It should have ample options to integrate with other systems
- It should be intuitive to users
- It should have a wide range of functionalities
- It should support access from portable devices
SharePoint is a platform that meets all these and many other requirements. It serves as
the basis, which is ideal for the vast majority of corporate portal scenarios.
This system, which is designed to ensure the collaborated work of users in a single
information environment in organizations of any size, increases the efficiency
of business processes by optimizing the management of corporate content. It offers
a solution to exchange information at the enterprise and to involve employees
in common processes, organizes information flows and document flow, facilitates
the general access to important data, provides simple and convenient search
in various document formats, and ensures transparency of the enterprise structure.
Consolidation of solutions based on the SharePoint platform provides the opportunity
to create a single space for employees' work and communication, reducing the time
for information search, ensuring the building of flexible internal documentation centers
and storing document records in all possible formats.
INTERAL PUBLICATION PORTAL OF THE COMPANY
The availability of an internal publication portal contributes to the development of
the company image in the eyes of its employees, strengthens the corporate spirit
and promotes the company's key goals. This page of the portal is the main point
of access to it, where information about the life of the company, the most important
events, as well as information that is important to convey to every employee is published.
SharePoint Server supports a wide range of useful portal publishing features:
customization of portal design, navigation, intuitive UI for creating and publishing pages,
mechanisms for approving pages before publication, and numerous components
for publishing data from various sources.
CONSOLIDATION OF DOCUMENTS AND OTHER CONTENT
The most important role of corporate portals is to provide all information on the company
in one place, to structure and organize this content, to provide opportunities of quick
and easy search of the necessary data. The opportunity to easily search for information
is the main reason for the introduction of portals and the main advantage of such
an introduction for business.
SharePoint is created ideally to consolidate documents. The platform contains all
the necessary tools: the option of downloading even very large documents, including video,
versioning and auditing tools, document approval mechanisms, the options to centrally
configure the types of documents and metadata, the possibility to view and edit office
documents online, etc.
SEARCH
SharePoint includes a very serious search module that can index a wide variety
of data sources and which is easily scaled. The module has a wide range of options
for configuring of indexing. Using this module, the administrator can easily configure
the search for different sections of the portal.
COLLABORATION
Collaboration features are very important for the portal. Except for data,
the portal brings together users into a single virtual work environment.
An important function of the portal is to organize collaboration.
A good portal should include all these mechanisms.
SharePoint contains all the necessary mechanisms to organize the staff work –
it enables to create and maintain calendars that integrate with Outlook Server,
to create and track tasks and events, to work together with documents,
it contains module workflow with predefined workflows. It also allows you
to create customized processes to meet specific needs of the company.
SOCIAL NETWORK
Social networks had established for a long time in the life of every person,
connected with the Internet. However, companies intensively use social
networks as part of corporate portals. The internal social network greater
integrates people into the life of the company, allowing employees to follow it
and be more involved in the events.
SharePoint Server also contains many features of the social network – for example,
the feature, allowing to create and maintain an employee's personal site,
forums and blogs, to track changes in content and "follow" other portal users,
to create the corporate hierarchy of users etc.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Nowadays few modern companies do without project management. These can be projects
implemented for clients as part of the main business activity, or they can be
internal projects, designed to improve the company's position. Most of these
companies use IT systems to manage projects, but it is even better to implement
it in the corporate portal.
SharePoint closely integrates with Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server
to organize a common project management system in companies. Users can work with
projects directly from the corporate portal.
INTEGRATION
Each more or less large organization uses at least several different IT systems.
It is important to present the data which is taken from these systems on the corporate
portal, since the portal is the main place where everyone gets information.
SharePoint Server has the possibility to integrate with external systems.
The administrator can publish data from different systems in the lists and on the SharePoint portal pages.