SharePoint in-a-box™ Business Solutions!

Posts Tagged ‘life cycle sharepoint’

I have been involved in implementing content management technology since 1993. SharePoint has rapidly democratized electronic document management, collaboration, web content management, portal and many other content technology. It is impressive to see the number of blog, website and conference that are focusing on the SharePoint technology.

But the reality is that the SharePoint technology represents only 25% of your project. The implementation of a SharePoint solution consists of the following:

1. SharePoint software; 15%

2. Information architecture; 25%

3. Solution architecture; 25%

4. Infrastructure hardware; 5%

5. Training; 5%

6. Change management and communications strategy. 25%

Point 6 is the one most often neglected. We forget too often that a SharePoint implementation is the introduction of new working way that impact directly your users.

Imagine if I knocked on your door at home, and tell you how you should organize your garage based on my methodology?

You did organize your garage your way for twenty (20) years and I would be surprised that you would agree to change it quickly, even if you think I’m right.

The success of your implementation is intimately connected to the adherence of your user to embrace the usage of your application. Over 30% of your efforts should be devoted to develop a strategy for managing change within your organization. Here are some recommendations that are simple application, but effective:

1. Target your internal customers: Make sure you involve your users early in the needs analysis and seek for cohesion.

2. Communication Plan: A communication plan allowing all impacted users by the implementation will help them to take a step by step approach to accept changes. Users will have the opportunity to share ideas in the cafeteria, coffee break and their respective office allowing them to give feedback to the implementation team. Make sure you have a place to allow feedback from users: Ideas of the week! Proposed improvements! Etc …

3. Training: Training will be an opportunity for interaction between users and potentially bring or suggest improvements to the application. The training team must be intimately related to the implementation team of the application in order to influence the improvements suggested by users.

This is not an exhaustive list, but I wanted to make you aware that the change management when you implement a SharePoint solution is the cornerstone of your success.

The idea of this article came to me with the advent of SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint 2010 which will have a far greater impact on your users compare to SharePoint 2007. The new interface of SharePoint 2010 worried many SharePoint experts, since it requires greater adaptation, especially if you still on Office 2003.

Good day in-a-box, and hope to see you at SharePoint Summit 2010 in Montreal

Alcero the leader in Intranet/Extranet SharePoint in-a-box^™ solutions is very proud to announce the release of 2 new Products, EXsto™ Extranet in-a-box for SharePoint and IuGO™, SharePoint in Outlook.

With the addition of these two (2) new products, we have built an impressive line-up of components within our Alexya^™, Intranet in-a-box for SharePoint solutions to meet our customer business requirements.  With EXsto™, users will now be able to rapidly deploy a secure Extranet within hours with an in-a-box solution and provide a secure environment for your external business partners, customer or various users. 

For more information on this solution please log onto the following:  http://alcero.com/sharepoint/exsto/solution_overview.htm

 With IuGO™, users can now access most of the SharePoint list in online or offline environment thus improving workplace efficiencies.  Our objective is and continues to be to leverage the SharePoint platform and build solutions that will allow users to optimize their SharePoint.

For more information on this solution please log onto the following: http://alcero.com/sharepoint/iugo/solution_overview.htm

The Board of directors of SharePoint 2010 have officially sent out a call for speakers.  If you, or anyone you know that would be interested in becoming a speaker at the next SharePoint Summit, we invite you to visit the offical SharePoint Summit 2010 website and download the call for speakers at the following link.

http://www.sharepointsummit2010.com/call_speakers.asp

All applications will be sent to the evaluation committee and selected speakers will be officially notified by the committee of their acceptance.

This would be a great opportunity to share your SharePoint knowledge with people that are focused entirely on SharePoint.

Would you buy a database and build an accounting system? An inventory management application?  A billing system?  Why not?

Well, nobody does this anymore and here are some key reasons:

1. Costly
2. Challenge to get the right people to build a product:  will require system analysts, developers, product designers and an Information Architects
3. Cost and time to maintain the product: path, upgrades, migration to a newer version (SharePoint 2010) etc…
4. Time to elaborate Documentation: installation, user guides, etc
5. And the final reason: Is your team SharePoint Certified and are they subject matter experts?  Are they well versed in  the best practices for the elaboration of a product? Is this their core business?

I strongly believe that the market place has not yet realized that SharePoint is not a product, or a business solution, it’s a SOFTWARE.   You do need to evaluate your business needs, the product market place, and then determine the value of buying a product versus developing one yourself.

Microsoft’s objective is to provide the best software platform for collaboration, enterprise content management, search, BI and business processing.  However, they will continue to invest in providing a great development platform for product developers such Alcero to take the plethora of services from SharePoint to build a product, and then let a consulting or integration company like InterDoc to build an end-to-end solution for  your organization.

We also have additional partners : http://www.alcero.com/partners/partners.htm that can support you to take  Alcero products and create a vertical solution for your company.

Alcero makes integrated SharePoint solutions meant to enhance existing SharePoint functionalities, and fill the empty spaces left in the document and records management aspects of the SharePoint platform. If you are not familiar with SharePoint, there is a nice little video called “SharePoint in Plain English” .

 Link to the video: http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/76e8d3af-c2bd-42a6-bb12-befcbd041bf1.

Over the next few weeks, we will be posting a series of articles, one for each Alcero product. In these articles, we will  explain the reasoning behind the product functionalities, how and why they were implemented in a certain way, and which SharePoint functionalities we are enhancing / implementing.  We will go over product functionalities using real life scenarios and discuss certain SharePoint limitations, and how our products  remove those limitations and  allow for a more robust content managment solution using SharePoint and Alcero Products.