At Diamond Technologies, our clients ask us all the time “what can SharePoint do”?  When we hear that, we’re reminded of the old spaghetti sauce commercial, the one that no matter what ingredient was asked about, the answer was “it’s in there”.   And that’s the challenge with SharePoint, there’s a lot in there.  But with SharePoint or any powerful technology, the question we really should be asking is not “what can SharePoint do”, but rather “what problem am I trying to solve?”

So now you know what problem you’re trying to solve, is SharePoint your best choice?  Well naturally…that depends (you knew that was coming didn’t you)?  According to Nucleus Research, Children’s Hospital Boston saw an ROI of 409% in 3 months by using SharePoint to move content creation from the IT department to the departments and content creators.

If your solution demands one or more of the following core features, we seriously recommend you take a look at SharePoint:

Portal – SharePoint does a great job providing a single platform for Internet, Intranet and Extranet Portals.  Half of the Ten Best Intranets of 2009 are built on SharePoint (source: Jakob Nielsen).

Collaboration and WorkFlow – Fancy words for getting your people working together more efficiently.  SharePoint provides the familiarity, productivity and seamless integration with the Microsoft Office suite of tools, including Word, Excel, Outlook and more.

Web Content Management – With SharePoint, managing your web content can be done by your team.  No more calling IT to get the website updated (careful – proper governance and approval guidelines are essential).

Document and Records Management – SharePoint lets you manage your documents and records effectively; including extremely powerful search capabilities and built-in functions for team collaboration on document creation, approval and workflow.

Forms – SharePoint comes loaded with tons of out-of-the-box templates for numerous standard line of business actions.

Business Intelligence – Another fancy word for business analytics and reporting, SharePoint provides out-of-the-box capabilities to manage and present server based Excel spreadsheets, KPIs and data dashboards.

Why do we recommend SharePoint for these key functions?  Because in each of these areas, the built-in capabilities of SharePoint make it a much better solution than custom development.  You’ll see results faster and cheaper, both in the short term and over the long run.  “Well architected SharePoint solutions are likely to be one of the smartest investments companies can make to survive and thrive in this challenging economy.” (source: Susan Hanley in Network World).

Unless you’ve been hiding under the proverbial rock for the past couple years, by now you’ve probably heard plenty about Microsoft SharePoint.  Here are a couple things about SharePoint that you might not already know.

1. SharePoint Is The Fastest Growing Product In Microsoft’s History (And Why You Should Care)

Back in 2008 sales of SharePoint passed 100 million licenses sold, had attracted 17,000 user companies, and eclipsed $1 billion in sales for Microsoft.  Critics may dispute these exact figures or point to SharePoint’s flaws but they don’t deny that the SharePoint juggernaut is real.  For our customers, the reason this matters is simple – Technology executives have to be careful where they invest valuable resources, especially today.  Given these numbers it’s safe to say that SharePoint is here to stay.  We believe that SharePoint will be the de-facto building platform for Microsoft solutions in the future and we are counseling our client development shops that they need to understand and get on board with this technology or get left behind.

2. SharePoint Can Actually SAVE You Money

What you say?!  With licensing, implementation, training, and all that, how do I save money?  Diamond Technologies has always been a company focused on the business value of technology solutions so this one’s near to our hearts.  One of the strongest virtues of this technology is that SharePoint empowers your business users with the tools to create real business value without the IT department.  OK, before you IT types come to my office and kill me let me clear that up just a bit.  Once your IT folks establish the proper SharePoint governance and infrastructure, then your business folks can create that value.  Let’s face it, even in the best of times IT resources can be scarce and overworked.  With SharePoint, your departmental users can keep intranet and web content up-to-date; create and manage powerful business and workflow processes and much more, without engaging those IT resources.

3. A Sneak Preview At SharePoint 2010

There’s still a ways to go, but as the saying goes “time flies” and before you know it…So here’s a few tidbits of what we see as significant with SharePoint 2010.   Ready for the Internet – The current release (MOSS 2007) is currently regarded as a great platform for intranet solutions but is sometimes criticized for its applicability outside the firewall.  With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft seems determined to change that, with improved capabilities all around for developing collaborative solutions that will run on any device across all technical and geographical boundaries.  “64 is the new 32.” – Plan on including upgrades to your hardware platforms, operating systems, and your SQL Server (for storage). SharePoint 2010 will only be available in a 64-bit version. Also, your development staff should start looking at Silverlight and LINQ to get a jumpstart on the technologies which will be integral to the SharePoint 2010 release. Other Stuff – The new version includes a significantly improved web page editor, out-of-the-box support for Silverlight web parts, end-to-end integration with Visio’s back-end data links, more powerful search, and on and on.  Obviously, there’s much, much more to SharePoint 2010 than we can ever cover here, but we thought you’d be interested in a few things we think are important for your business.