SharePoint does that?

Many understand the basic capabilities that Microsoft SharePoint brings to the enterprise such as document management and team collaboration, but SharePoint can also provide a bevy of solutions that help you better manage people, processes and information from a unified infrastructure.

Plato recently hosted its second in a series of SharePoint Executive Insights events led by SharePoint Server MVP, Amanda Perran, titled: “SharePoint does that?”

Below are some of the core insights that we explored during the session:

1. SharePoint: A Wikipedia for your business.  SharePoint Server 2010 offers robust WIKI capabilities right out of the box.  One of the biggest pain points across teams of skilled workers is knowledge management and sharing.  WIKI’s are easy to setup and use, allowing you to share your knowledge across the organization.
2. Records Management is flexible and user-friendly.  With SharePoint, mundane and entrenched data becomes accessible and easy to use, while providing security and integrity.   Creating rules for your records now can save you a lot of time, energy and money in the long term.
3. SharePoint can be customized to YOUR business.   Most organizations go to great lengths to protect the integrity of their brand.  SharePoint is a web-based content application, which means when it comes to look and feel, the sky is the limit. SharePoint can be customized to mimic corporate applications, cultures and brands, giving you a seamless transition alongside other line of business applications.  
4. SharePoint as a Project Management tool. SharePoint provides great communication capabilities in resource management through Project Server. Project Managers have the ability to manage resource availability, identify and address over-utilized staff.
5. SharePoint as a way to engage audiences. SharePoint has the ability to replace the classic staff newsletter with built-in blog and news content capabilities. Create an open and secure communication channel for your organization, where commenting and sharing ideas is a breeze.
6. SharePoint as a Workflow tool.  SharePoint can help you to automate processes quickly and easily.  Visual workflow capabilities make collecting approvals, routing documents or collecting signatures quick and easy.
7. SharePoint is not just for Intranets.  More and more people are taking advantage of SharePoint for Public Facing Websites.   SharePoint comes with a full range of features for publishing content to the web such as content approval, multilingual and rich text editing right from the browser.

   The capabilities for SharePoint in your enterprise clearly depend on how you want it to work, to meet your organizational goals. SharePoint is adaptable and customizable, and has much more capabilities and options than many traditionally know.