Archive for the ‘Comparison’ Category

What SharePoint Can Do for You

SharePoint is one of the most useful, versatile and beneficial technologies you can use. SharePoint can do many things for you, from managing data to document sharing to instant messaging. If you take a few minutes to think about the things SharePoint can do for you, you might just be pleasantly surprised.

On a basic level, SharePoint can provide you and your organization a way to share knowledge. Sharing knowledge benefits you on several levels. It helps to reduce the duplication of effort inside your organization. Users can become more efficient, building off one another’s work instead of creating everything they might need from the ground up.

In addition, the kind of knowledge sharing that SharePoint provides your business helps to streamline the knowledge sharing process. Rather than having to look in several places – such as a server, a personal computer and a filing cabinet – your employees can find all of the information in the SharePoint repository.

One of the best things about SharePoint is that it makes finding documents easier. While most companies have a way to share documents, SharePoint lets you do it in a uniform way. For example, attaching documents to email messages means that only the recipient of the email message has access to the document. In addition, to get any use out of the document in the future, that user has to be able to remember the particulars of the email in order to find the document. SharePoint puts the document in a central location where it is easily accessed.

In addition to easy access, SharePoint lets users have the latest and best information available. If you send someone a document via Email or burn a document to a CD, the recipient will only ever have that version of the document. If you update the document in the future, you’ll have to send an entirely new Email or burn a new CD. With SharePoint, you simply update the document on the SharePoint server and the user will have the latest version at their fingertips.

SharePoint can also reduce your overall need for Information Technology consulting or personnel. For example, SharePoint can empower your Human Resources personnel to make information available directly to employees via SharePoint, rather than having to place a request with your IT department and waiting for them to make the information available.

You can also use SharePoint to provide data and information across your organization to users without specialized knowledge or without specialized software. You could post accounting data to SharePoint, for example, which could then be used by other departments without having to install the accounting software and without having to make a formal request to the accounting department. In this way, SharePoint makes your company’s important data more accessible to the entire organization.

If you need a more effective way to share information across your company, consider implementing a SharePoint solution. SharePoint can make your business run smoother, and can do it in such a way that actually saves you money and increases productivity.

SharePoint and Google Wave are two products that overlap in their stated purposes. While SharePoint has a much longer and more established history, as well as a larger user base, there has been speculation that Google Wave may give SharePoint a serious challenge. It can be worth taking a few minutes to look at each of these applications, and compare how exactly one compares with the other.
It’s important, first, to understand what SharePoint is and what it can do. SharePoint is a collaboration and communications platform that utilizes many different Microsoft technologies, integrating technologies such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office applications. SharePoint allows organizations to create sites that group information and documents together so that users can share information in a secure and efficient way. SharePoint also has a number of other features and abilities, from things like version management to custom site design.
Google Wave also is a collaboration tool. Google Wave combines several different web-based concepts and puts them together into a specific product and platform. It combines email, instant messaging, wikis and blogs. It allows users to have real-time messaging conversations, and to store those conversations.
However, Google Wave isn’t, and doesn’t pretend to be, a complete and full replacement for SharePoint. Google Wave, in the most basic sense, isn’t really a full-fledged, feature-rich collaboration platform. Google Wave, instead, is more of an email client with many interesting, useful and new features that haven’t been seen in email previously. It is an exciting and innovative email client, to be sure, but it doesn’t offer the versatility that SharePoint offers.
In many ways, it isn’t entirely appropriate to compare SharePoint and Google Wave. Instead, Google Wave more realistically compares to Microsoft Outlook. Google Wave doesn’t include things like document management, content management, dashboards, workflow management and data integration. SharePoint does include all of those things, and those features are largely what defines SharePoint as a collaboration platform.
To truly compare SharePoint and Google Wave, Google would have to take a step back and integrate several of their products. For example, if Google were to integrate their Google Wave product along with their calendaring application, Google Sites and Google Gears, they would come close to having a true collaboration management platform.
There is some speculation that Google Wave will, eventually, replace Gmail as a web-based email application. In contrast, SharePoint doesn’t have those sorts of ambitions. SharePoint knows what it does best, and sticks to those core competencies.