SharePoint, More Than Just a Technical Solution

As a technical solution, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) provides a platform for addressing many of the collaboration issues faced by today's organizations. Using SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality, business users can configure and adapt their solutions as necessary. As a result, SharePoint creates new opportunities for these empowered users to build and manage their own solutions and help ensure adoption.

The SharePoint Solution

SharePoint provides a web-based way to address the challenges, in particular, collaboration and document management, facing many organizations. In today’s workplace, an organization’s employees might be spread across multiple locations and time zones, which make it even more important for them to be able to work together and share information efficiently.

A SharePoint site provides a way to store and publish information to specific audiences: the public, across an organization, or specific users. A common use is to create a site for a project that gives its members a shared workspace for anything related to the project. This includes project announcements, information on team members, tracking of issues, and tasks assigned to users. As a document repository, users know where to find the latest version of a particular document and changes can be tracked. In addition, workflows can be created to model processes, such as the approval of documents.

While SharePoint provides the basic templates for its sites, sites need to be configured and customized to fit the organization and its needs. There are multiple approaches available with varying levels of complexity as shown below in Table 1.

Figure 1. Creating a New Document Library: Settings screens such as this let administrators configure SharePoint to their specific needs.

Solutions should be created with the users in mind, because they are often the ones who will eventually be given control. While custom development through SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio does offer the most flexibility, it is not always necessary; solutions can sometimes be built solely by configuring SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality. Even in situations where custom development is needed, configuration can still go a long way towards the overall goal. SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio can then provide the last bit of desired functionality.

SharePoint’s configuration gives users the opportunity to take on more responsibility by allowing control over their solution without the need to write any code. Users are able to configure their site’s appearance, structure, security settings, and functionality, such as how documents are stored or how workflows behave. To access these configuration settings, users can use the settings screens built into the SharePoint interface. Such a setting screen is shown in Figure 1.

Almost all sites leverage SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality to some extent – either for content or security. By maximizing the use of this built-in configuration, users can maintain their sites without the need for additional tools or programming.