Microsoft SharePoint

Like many ideas in IT, in the right situation this is one technology that can give you an unbelievable return on your investment.

MS SharePoint is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft with over 100 million licenses sold worldwide. Yet the majority of Waikato/BOP businesses I speak with either have not heard of SharePoint or do not know what it does. Additionally, the vast majority of businesses already own Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). This is because it is bundled free with MS Windows Server or Small Business Server which is run by the bulk of businesses in the region.

SharePoint in essence is an integrated suite of software that can help improve organisational productivity. It does this by providing a large number of productivity tools of which the most useful for SMB’s (small-medium sized businesses) is, in my opinion, document search. This facility allows users to quickly find documents (Word, Excel, PDF, emails, etc) using text within the document. This is similar to using Google to find information on the web except that SharePoint searches for your documents on your own network. You can also expand the searching power of WSS by installing a free add-on called Search Server Express.

As more and more information is produced at a faster and faster rate, finding the information you need quickly becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. By designing your directory structure and naming your files intelligently you can make it a lot easier to find the documents you want. However, in my experience this only helps you most of the time. There is still the time when the name of the document or its directory eludes you.

Research shows that 30% of workers’ time is spent looking for information. Another 30% of their time is spent recreating content because they cannot find the original content.

I am a great believer in document management software. This is because if one can easily and quickly retrieve information, then you can better use the time otherwise wasted searching and worse still, recreating, that information.

However there are not that many well priced and effective document management packages around for SMB’s. On the one hand you have the large packages used by government and city councils costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are beyond the reach of SMB’s not just in purchasing the package but also in implementing the technology. At the other extreme you have the free packages you can download from the Net such as Copernic or Google Desktop Search. These packages generally only work well on local hard drives and they can pummel your server resources quite heavily to index your emails.

The attraction of MS SharePoint is that it works well, is more gentle on your network and best of all, for the vast majority of businesses that already run Windows server networks, the software is free.

Certainly for me, document search helps me reclaim at least 15 to 30 minutes of my time each day. This is why I am such a passionate champion of the technology.

Like many ideas in IT, in the right situation this is one technology that can give you an unbelievable return on your investment.

By Alan Chew

Managing Director of the Houston Technology Group

This article appeared in the August 2009 edition of the Waikato Business News, for which Alan writes a regular column as "Your IT Adviser".