Is Sharepoint Right For You?

Thousands of organizations have started using SharePoint within a couple of years and their number is growing rapidly. SharePoint is a top-rated product that will be around for many years to come. If you’re thinking of adopting it, you’re backing the right horse.

One of the fastest-growing applications in the history of Microsoft, there are now more than 100,000+ SharePoint professionals and there are more than 200+ million licenses sold. SharePoint now brings in more than $2 billion annually for Microsoft.

Gartner calls SharePoint “the most widely used document- and collaboration-centered platform.”

So what is it that leads these organizations to shell out big money to get SharePoint? Is it just because of the Microsoft marketing, or is because SharePoint is providing real value to all these people? More importantly, will SharePoint provide value to you and your organization?

From our experience and study of SharePoint, we tell our clients and customers whether to implement SharePoint or not. I’ll focus on the organizations and explain what you as a business user need to consider before you decide whether SharePoint is for you. Will discuss thing on high level mainly strengths of SharePoint.

Optimizing business processes and improving efficiency and communication are key to success. After all, reducing costs or increasing profitability means the organization stays healthy.

SharePoint's tight integration with existing Office products, and a plethora of third-party developers, consultants, and products makes it the best platform to offer these massive post-application benefits.

Strengths and Areas of Excellence of SharePoint

Structured Data
SharePoint at its core is a lot more than just a glorified database. When you work with SharePoint applications utilize data to enable collaboration, reporting, business process management, and all the other things that SharePoint can do. SharePoint lives and breathes for working with structured data. No structured data = no benefit from SharePoint.

Business User Empowerment
SharePoint excels at creating and evolving applications for solving simple business needs.

Software Development Platform
Rapid application development means businesses can realistically adopt SharePoint to its specific problems rather than model its problems after what an application can solve.

Integration with Microsoft Office
Current users of Microsoft Office will be able to utilize existing skills for working with SharePoint.

Enterprise Search
SharePoint offers a rich set of features to ensure that users find the right information rapidly.

Business Process Automation and Workflow
The biggest strength of SharePoint is the power and ease SharePoint fills in the business user. According to the marketing slides, anyone can build complex business applications without having to learn the complex details about software development. And the beauty is workflows adapt to business processes, not the other way around, and they allow you to automate those processes to increase speed, predictability, manageability, and trace-ability.

I hope these brief pointer will help towards your understanding of SharePoint and will guide you in choosing SharePoint for your organization.