Windows SharePoint Services for Small Business

What is SharePoint?

Windows SharePoint Services (or WSS for short) provides a shared area on your computer network in which you can collect, edit and categorize information. That information can be in the form of documents, tasks, issues, images, or other electronic data that can be store in a list. It does some of the things a database will do, together with a lot that a database won t! If you find yourself regularly setting up small Access databases to share around your company, you could find that SharePoint will ease the task of managing that data whilst at the same time offering new ways of using the data. In the terminology of WSS, documents are stored in a library and other information is stored in a list.

The shared area is known as a workspace, and you can create as many workspaces as you want on your server. One way of managing the information in your business would be to have one workspace for each key project or client.

SharePoint presents its information and features through web pages, though Office 2007 can interact directly with WSS lists and libraries.

A tip - if you don t have an Intranet, you can create a simple one quickly using SharePoint, and so have a central location for staff to find all your business policies and literature.

Who can Use SharePoint?

If you are running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, or Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, on your company network, then you can start using SharePoint Windows Services right now it is available as a free download. The installation is a relatively simple process for anyone comfortable with managing the day-to-day running of a server, though you may want to consider getting advice or help with planning the setup.

If you have not running a server in your business, some web hosting companies offer SharePoint sites for a monthly fee. Just be aware that you may not be able to use all the features of SharePoint through a hosting company.

One more point about servers in business if you are interested in investigating the advantages of running a server in your business, have a look at this article on HomeBizBuzz.

What are the Key Benefits?

One key benefit of adopting SharePoint is that the number of emails sent between staff within your business can be reduced. Why is that a good thing? Consider how much important intelligence about products, projects, clients and competitors is contained within emails that are accumulating in inboxes. The only way in which that intelligence gets shared is if the email is copied to everyone who needs to know. But a new member of staff who joins a day after the email was sent never has a chance to find the vital facts contained in that email.

The alternative offered by WSS is to post this information to a list, where it can then be found through the search page. Or submit that information to a WSS discussion forum and everyone in the company can then contribute their ideas and knowledge on the subject.

Or even publish the information on a wiki page to allow the content to evolve. A wiki lets all users create and edit the content of a web page. It allows notes and ideas to be shared, and one of its uses is in brainstorming new designs or concepts. Have a look at Wikipedia to get an idea of what this technology can be used for a complete online encyclopedia whose content has been submitted by people around the world who are knowledgeable in the subjects covered on each page.

The emphasis of SharePoint is on collaboration, so it offers a number of abilities to aid small groups of people to work together:

Looking at Document Management

One feature of particular importance to small businesses is document management. To understand what Windows SharePoint Services can offer in terms of document management, consider the journey of a document in a business that is making the most of WSS.

The fictitious business is a marketing agency which has just received a Word document from a client. The document contains a list of question about a planned marketing campaign. An agency staff member receives the document in an email from the client. To store the document in WSS, she simply forwards the email to a special email address linked to the library. SharePoint receives the email, and adds the document to the library.

The account manager for that client has setup an alert on the document library. This means that he is notified when the new document has been added. He checks out the document to ensure that he is the only one who can currently edit it, and starts to answer the questions. If the questions need information from several members of staff, he could create a document workspace and assign tasks for each of those people to add particular sections to the document. When he has finished editing, he checks the document in. Other staff members then take turns to check it out, edit and check back in (this prevents one person overwriting changes made by another when they save). The document is not yet in a published state as it must be approved by an executive. The executive notices a major error in the latest version of the document, and so uses the versioning feature in SharePoint to roll the document back to the previous correct version.

When satisfied that all is ready, the executive approves the document, and then uses Outlook to take an offline copy of that document out of the office on his laptop to the client. If the document needs modifying whilst out of the office, the executive can edit it on his laptop, and then synchronize the new version back to the SharePoint library when back in the office.

As can be seen in this example, several features of the document library can really help in working together, and in managing the lifecycle of a document. The offline capability was not available in the previous version of WSS, so this is a big advantage of the version 3.

Other capabilities not touched in the example include:

Summing Up

In this article I have only had a chance to touch upon the features offered by Windows SharePoint Services. If you are using Windows Server 2003, and need to manage documents or to make more use of the information within your business, WSS can help you. Even if you make use of only one of its features, it ll be $0 well spent!