Microsoft Office 2010 In Pictures

With SharePoint 2010 in combination with Office 2010, you can control precisely what happens to documents within your organization well after someone hits "Save." In this article, we'll explain the key building blocks of SharePoint, drill down on key capabilities for growing businesses, and outline the business case.

A Brief Primer On Sharepoint

Suppose you've painstakingly compiled an Excel workbook containing a list of retail outlets worldwide that sell your brand-new product. If you're a sole proprietor, you might stop there. If you're a small business with a few employees, you might pass the Excel workbook around via email as needed, or better yet, put it on a shared folder on an Internet server so that employees can access the data at any time. To ensure data quality, you could use Excel's data validation features to confirm that each retail outlet had an employee assigned as the customer's main contact. Then, if you want to create a "Where to Buy" web page, you can export the data from the spreadsheet into a format that can be uploaded onto a basic website.

But what happens when your company grows? Before you know it, you're managing multiple workbooks for each product, the employee assignments fall out of sync, and the process of manually uploading information to your website becomes a much bigger task than you had anticipated. And as your company grows, you'll have other lists, data and documents to manage, with each business requirement spawning a separate project on the IT to-do list. Ultimately, you'll face a motley collection of point solutions that add up to an expensive and hard-to-manage IT infrastructure.

The SharePoint approach anticipates and supports the spread of data within a growing enterprise through a comprehensive approach to storing, managing and sharing information. As companies grow, they need to capture a wide variety of content; provide access to employees and partners through intranet sites; serve customers, suppliers and other stakeholders through external-facing websites; and manage the workflows associated with the content. While the specifics vary, the fundamental data requirements of an enterprise are reasonably predictable, and SharePoint implements a technology stack and methodology to deal with all but the most specialized business needs.

Let's revisit the aforementioned example with a deployment of SharePoint Foundation 2010, a free version of SharePoint that works with a licensed copy of Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server. You'll start by installing a server farm containing a database server and a web server. Within the web server, which will have its own URL for use only within the company intranet, you'll set up what's called a "Site Collection," with its first site containing one item, your original list of retail outlets. That's five levels of hierarchy if you're keeping track (server farm -> web server -> site collection -> site -> list), just to replicate information that used to reside within a single Excel file.

But now, you'd have a scalable infrastructure that could easily incorporate other sources of data -- both structured and unstructured -- into a comprehensive enterprise repository. In SharePoint 2010, a list can contain not just text and numbers, but also multimedia elements including audio and video, Office 2010 documents, and other binary objects.

Out of the box, a SharePoint installation includes blogs, wikis, team workspaces and document libraries. You can set item-level permissions, enable employees to check documents in or out, and have the ability to retrieve previous versions of documents for auditing and revision control. From within Office 2010, your users would be able to create their own lists and store their own documents online, your department managers could create their own sites, and your IT department can deploy new site collections as needed. Although moving that first list to SharePoint may take significant effort, building successive lists and sites gets easier and easier.

Furthermore, because the underlying data is being stored on the enterprise server farm instead of on an isolated PC, you can easily point external and mobile users to versions of shared data. You'd be able to create a parallel list containing just the data elements that you want to make public. That list would be contained within a site collection on an externally-facing web server, tapping into the shared database server on the enterprise server farm.

However, this transition from the private intranet to the public internet does require an upgrade to SharePoint Server 2010. There's only so far you can go with the free version of SharePoint, and if you're truly taking an ECM (enterprise content management) approach you'll hit the limits soon enough.