Monday, October 11, 2010

Collaborating With Sharepoint Easily

By Andy Michaelson

Sharing with this product is not difficult at all. Well, even the name tells you that it's the core point of the software. It is made with the idea of facilitating and making collaboration and sharing a lot more easier. If you need help with developing a custom solution using this product suite, the rest of this article will teach you more.

The software is able to achieve this by integrating itself along with the other Windows and Microsoft applications. This makes it easier to become a framework around your current work environment. Here is an example: it is able to add buttons, tool bars and menus inside the MS Office suite. So, in case you want to share a document with someone else, all you need to do is to press the appropriate button in MS Word.

As you press the users button on the toolbar, you then choose the user you want to share this document with, and then you can choose to add a task for them (regarding this document). For example, you can set the motion of "approve or reject document". This is where SharePoint emails the user, and you are quickly notified when they open the document. After they approve or reject the document, you get quickly emailed about the approval or rejection, as well as any other comments they might have.

If you view the document in Word after the approval (or rejection), you will be able see their notes and comments exactly in the document, and this is what makes SharePoint the ideal platform for collaboration. Since I used the example of Word and approval/rejection, don't assume that the mentioned is the extent of its collaboration abilities.

In reality, there are literally millions of possible combinations, especially if you decide to design your custom work flows using SP designer. My advice is that you simply hire a consultant who can adapt and customize the product implementation to your personal needs.

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