SharePoint: Enabling Collaboration across the Enterprise

Enterprises today are seeking ‘collaboration’ among their workforce to tap the knowledge, expertise, experiences and skills to stay competitive and achieve desirable business results. To get that, organizations are using the power of social media technologies for their operations. SharePoint 2013 provides a robust enterprise collaboration platform that enables organizations to use social collaboration tools to channelize their business operations for desirable outcomes.

The enterprises consider SharePoint 2013 as a strategic platform for content management, record management, and business process management which fulfills their portal, content and collaboration need. Organizations are using SharePoint for five major purposes:

• Intranet
• Team collaboration
• Portal development
• Document management
• Public internet

Other popular uses of SharePoint involve process management, knowledge management, business intelligence, project management, and case management.

Organizations are adopting SharePoint 2013 platform especially because of SharePoint enterprise collaboration feature which benefits them with a reduced TCO (total cost of ownership) and increased ROI(return on investment).  In spite of its rich features and capabilities, organizations face 3 major challenges, outlined below:

• Need of experts in consulting and implementation- SharePoint consulting becomes indispensable when implementing SharePoint version for strategic planning, aligning with business goals, and a detailed implementation roadmap with budgets and schedules.
• Tools and processes for quicker roll out- despite the fact that SharePoint has undergone significant improvement, there still remains a need for customization to meet specific business requirements. Using out-of-the-box features or using third party tools and processes are the most recommended approaches according to the business requirement. 
• Ongoing support and maintenance cost- With the implementation of SharePoint, it is seen that the end-user adoption and usage grows phenomenally, and because of this the support and maintenance of SharePoint environment becomes the major key challenge for IT department of the organization.