Perfect information exchange system

SharePoint, also known as Intranet or WSS (short for Windows SharePoint Services) is an internal information exchange system. It is a perfect product for companies which widely utilize group work in their activity. Owing to SharePoint, information exchange will be significantly easier, faster and more effective.  Document flow, making reservations of conference rooms, managing car fleet or processing employees’ leaves and business trips – theses features are available to SharePoint users. The main asset of the solution is its simplicity – basic knowledge of Microsoft Office suite is sufficient to use it.

Advantages of Windows SharePoint Services

Windows SharePoint has a range of unquestionable advantages which make it a very attractive supplement to currently used office software suites. Main advantages are:

• A simple, well-known and uniform user interface, the usage of which is as simple as using the Internet.
• One integrated platform where all company information can be placed.
• Increasing employees' efficiency by simplifying business activity.
• Making it easier to achieve conformity with the provisions of law thanks to an extensive website contents control.
• Effective management of website contents and changing its purpose in order to increase business value.
• Simplifying access to structural and non-structural information in various systems within the whole organization.
• Connecting employees with information and knowledge, the perfect medium to transfer important information.
• Speeding up business processes shared in various organizations.
• Making business data available without disclosing confidential information.
• Enabling people to take more aware decisions by presenting key information in one, centralized location.

Internal computer network is currently the foundation of the activity of most companies in the world. If the internal network is available, it is a good idea to use it to create internal websites similar to websites published on the Internet. Let the websites aggregate your knowledge and information, and organize it within the environment available to all employees – that is what INTRANET,  in other words internal Internet, is all about.

Easy and intuitive creating of websites and internal portals

No specialist qualifications are required to create a complete informational, project or department website in Windows SharePoint Services system. By using a mouse and thanks to an intuitive technique of website creating based on ready-made elements (webparts), it is possible to make a professional website in less than one hour. Using webparts involves dragging such elements as contacts, document library or the list of news and dropping them in a selected area on the screen.

To create a website or its element, all you need to do is choose an appropriate entry from thematically grouped options presented above.

The picture above presents how SharePoint Services website is built. It consists of elements known as webparts. These elements can be easily added, moved or edited, which simultaneously alters the website looks.

Simple and efficient information exchange

Company structure can be recreated as a collection of websites reflecting particular organizational units or departments. Creating the system of informational internal websites (intranet) significantly increases effectiveness of information searching and simultaneously increases work efficiency.

Each department can have its own website with most commonly used documents, a notice board, contact list, bulletin board etc. Similar website can be created for each project or task. By implementing a search engine, employees can save a lot of precious time previously spent on searching for needed information or documents.

Improving business processes

One of the biggest benefits offered by Windows SharePoint Services is a capability to create simple company document flow processes (workflow), e.g. accepting documents such as all types of requests requiring acceptance (leave request, request for advance), forms or business trip expense settlements etc. Imagine how simple sending a request for advance can be when it involves only filling out a few form fields on a website and pressing “Submit". In addition to a great save of time, such a solution also guarantees that documents will not be lost in the process and that only appropriate persons will get informed.

Instant information searching

Windows SharePoint Services also consists of comprehensive built-in information search mechanisms. If you do not know where to look for a given document, simply type in keywords in the search form available in every place of Intranet. Searched keywords might consist of filenames or phrases found in files' contents. All MS Office suite documents are correctly processed by this mechanism.

Document versioning and group work

It often happens that a group of people work on one document. To avoid the possibility of overwriting changes made by two people simultaneously working on one document, SharePoint offers a feature of unregistering a document during its editing. After this operation, a document status is visible to everyone as Unregistered. Other users are only allowed to read the document, but they cannot edit it. It is possible to turn on the feature of saving a specified number of file versions. Shall the need to restore a previous version of a document arise, it can be conducted at any time! All features are available and ready in a standard package.

Perfect integration with Microsoft Office suite

It is undoubtedly one of the biggest advantages of SharePoint Services. In most available solutions, in order to save a document on the intranet website, first it is required to log in to intranet and then upload the document. It involves making a few inconvenient operations distracting you from work. Whereas in SharePoint Services you can read and save a document to document library directly from within Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any other application – in the same simple manner as saving or reading documents from a local hard drive! All you need to do is log in once and SharePoint will not bother you with any further messages.