5 Reasons Why SharePoint 2010 Will Revolutionize Your Organization

What if you can reduce cost and still provide the necessary tools to meet organizational needs? SharePoint 2010 (news, site) can do exactly that. 

Don’t You Love It When …

• You get a meeting invite with 20 massive attachments. Then after the meeting, action items fly back and forth via email with additional attachments.
• You triumphantly win the game at work called “Whoever-saves-the-file-last-in-the-network-share-wins?”. This game also tests your memory skills by remembering that the file has to be saved in a location 18 folders deep.
• You ask IT to build some system yet you get it when it’s too late. IT is so slammed these days that you’re so careful when you make such requests.

It’s Time For A Revolution! The days of email and network share collaboration are over. Down with the draconian IT institution! IT is so swamped these days that they can’t help you in a timely manner. Power to the people! What if you can be in charge of your technical destiny?

Join the SharePoint Revolution

SharePoint 2010 is the collaboration platform for the enterprise and the web, which addresses and enhances organizational collaboration needs around: Document Management, Collaboration, Reporting, Content Management, Records Management and Compliance (Additional reading: SharePoint 2010 Review: The New 6 Pillars of SharePoint).

Here are 5 reasons why SharePoint 2010 will revolutionize your organization:

1. Empower Individuals

It empowers users to build their own solutions, which traditionally they would rely on IT to do. Let’s walk down memory lane back in the early 90’s: How was a project manager able to have a centralized repository for project artifacts? They would have to send in a request to IT to provision a network share for the project or perhaps a website. Would the PM get one in a timely fashion?

With SharePoint 2010, not only can project managers provision their own project sites, they can build related solutions as well like dashboards, workflow automation and integration with existing tools and systems. The technical barrier to entry is relatively low. It builds on users’ existing skill set and familiarity with Microsoft Windows, Office and web-based technologies.

2. Delivers Relevant Information

With SharePoint 2010, corporate information can be better-organized and identified with enhanced metadata management features and powerful search.

In addition, the complete overhaul of My Sites in SharePoint 2010 takes personalization and social computing to a whole new level in the enterprise. It is a personal hub that allows you to interact with relevant content and people. Think Facebook for the enterprise.

Wouldn’t it be great if you found out that a colleague of yours in Asia that you rarely interact with just finished a similar project that you are about to start? How beneficial can it be if relevant information is delivered to you at the right time?

3. Supports Compliance Requirements

SharePoint 2010 has upgraded features for Records Management allowing for better management of organizational records from cradle to grave.

It can provide out-of-the-box solutions for industry-specific compliance such as Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), 21 CFR Part 11 and the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA).

Additional reading: How SharePoint Can Deliver Project Transparency and The Scoop: SharePoint 2010 Records Management.

4. Interoperability

A compelling benefit of SharePoint 2010 is its’ cross platform capability:

• It has adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) for cross browser compatibility. Read Maximizing SharePoint 2010 on a Mac + iPhone or iPod + iPad 
• Apart from Windows-based authentication, it can interface with various industry standard authentication mechanisms such as Open ID and OAuth.
• It supports industry standard data interchange via Web Services, XML, ODBC, Connection Strings, etc. Interaction with varying data sources can be accomplished with SharePoint 2010 tools like Business Connectivity Services (BCS).

5. It’s All About The Benjamins

Taking a strategic assessment of your organization, step back and consider how much are you spending on licensing, support, training and maintenance of various tools like Content Management Systems, Document Management Systems, Reporting tools, Collaboration tools.

More importantly, what’s the cost of:

• Users’ frustration over multiple tools?
• Management not being able to aggregate and extract organizational information?
• Relevant information is not available when needed?

What if you can reduce cost and still provide the necessary tools to meet organizational needs? SharePoint 2010 can do exactly that. As Ted Schadler of Forrester points out, “ … Microsoft has bundled in tools that you previously paid another vendor to provide. Storage, social tools, basic archiving, email filtering, etc. Add it all up, and the economics just make sense."

How real is the SharePoint revolution? It’s as real as 1000 people showing up wanting to learn about Sharepoint at a community-driven event last May 15 in Washington, DC on a nice Saturday.

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