So as we approach the end of the year, I have looked back to my discussions with clients at this time a year ago.  The key these of these discussions was that we were finally out of the recession and that the outlook for 2011 was very positive. I don’t think many people would have predicted the uncertainty of the last year and the Euro crisis that will no doubt rumble on long into 2012.  The uncertainty of the last year has seen lots of organisations unsure of whether to stick or twist with regards to investment, but the majority of our customers have been looking to improve the way they use their existing technology.

2011 also promised to be the year of the Cloud, and although we see a lot more organisations using the cloud now most organisations are still looking at how they can implement the cloud into their IT Strategy.  We believe that the take up of the cloud will grow significantly over the next few years as internal IT systems come up for renewal, the cost reduction and ease of implementation that can be gained from using cloud solutions will start to change traditional IT procurement processes.

SharePoint is a very widely used platform within the majority of organisations, however typically organisations have been using a small component of the functionality for intranets or project collaboration.  In 2011 we have seen a big shift in organisations looking at how they can utilise the platform more, some of the solutions we have seen are; case management, document management,  general business process approvals and business intelligence reporting.  We expect this growth to continue in 2012 with many organisations now looking at migrating legacy systems (e.g. document management systems) onto SharePoint to help reduce their IT management costs.

At ImageFast we have had an exciting year that has seen the company grow considerably, across all of our technology sectors our SharePoint practice is growing fast and the more traditional document management part of our business has also seen a considerable growth this year especially in the local government and insurance sectors.   We start 2012 in a very positive position as a business and we are looking to continue the growth that we have seen over the last year.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our clients and partners for their business and support during 2011, and I look forward to working with you in 2012.

From everyone at ImageFast we would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New year!

Darren Edwards

Managing Director

At a recent conference, a show of hands highlighted that the majority of people consider SharePoint 2010 to be a platform rather than a solution.  This point of view is correct but if you are looking to drive user adoption then this can only be through deploying SharePoint as a solution and by engaging your users.

Users can be put off by featureless information sites and are now looking for interactive solutions which encourage collaboration and variety.  With this in mind, I recommend adopting some of the points detailed below in order to drive user adoption and reap the benefits of a great deployment with rich content and an interactive user community.

• Create a defined plan with realistic goals.  It is vital to assign accountability and responsibility to appropriate people or teams
• Define a communications campaign to support the launch of the solution
• Give the site branding, an identity and up to date look and feel
• Engage users early in the design of the solution
• Ensure that there is budget set aside for training materials and define a specific training.
• Stop sending communications out via email and start publishing them to SharePoint first
• Ensure that navigation is intuitive, simple and not too deep, make it quick and easy to locate the most popular sites and activities
• Encourage users to save documents to SharePoint
• Include a wide range of content formats including pictures, video and surveys for a varied and interactive user experience
• Prime the system with as much information as possible; company handbook, document templates, events calendars, company policies etc
• Make SharePoint the first port of call for performing day-to-day admin operations such as purchase requisitions, annual leave requests, car sharing schemes, meeting room booking systems via SharePoint calendars or lists etc
• Identify key users in the business that can receive additional training and act as local experts, providing informal training and advice to colleagues
• Delegate content ownership out to individuals, teams and departments
• Utilise Enterprise Search and ensure that you have defined adequate content sources, metadata and search scopes.  A great search experience will certainly make users return to the site.
• Define various audiences to target with specific, relevant content
• Encourage the use of Social Media tools such as news feeds, blogs and My Sites
• Set up specific informational sites, wikis or blogs for specific interest areas
• Use SharePoint to host competitions, i.e. best team photo!
• On a final note, I would say that the site needs to look fresh, be regularly updated, easy to navigate and engaging

Ultimately, SharePoint needs to provide value to the users in order to engage their interest. The list above is just a small example of the different types of things SharePoint can be used for, that users can actually relate to and visualise.

One of the great new features of SharePoint 2010 is the ability to open up the workflow design experience to business users. Many users are familiar with using Microsoft Visio these days and it has become almost a standard for defining business requirements graphically.   Over the past couple of years we have noticed that more and more of our clients are using Microsoft Visio to mock-up their process flows in the form of flow charts, or even putting together more complex swim lane diagrams.

Now, with the release of Office and SharePoint 2010, it is now to take output from Visio and use it to generate workflows within SharePoint.

Visio now comes with a new template under the Flowchart category called Microsoft SharePoint Workflow.  This can be used to model business processes using conditions and actions that are SharePoint Specific.

Quick Overview

In this image you can see the most common items that can be used to create a process map; these are included on the Quick Shapes navigation pane.

By clicking on any of the other three panes you can access a whole lot more actions and conditions.Any workflow process must start with a Start action and each point where the workflow process may terminate requires an End action.  In between these points, we are free to configure any number of conditions and actions to map out a real business process.

Common actions include starting a new out of the box SharePoint Approval workflow, sending an email or assigning a to-do item to a specific user (or group).  Quite complex scenarios can be designed using these items.

So the goal for the user is to define the process flow and make reference to every condition and action that may occur as the process is executed.  The following image is a very simple representation of a workflow process modeled in this way.

The important thing for the user to do is label each of the actions and conditions correctly and ensure that any conditions have labelled Yes and No paths assigned to them.  Once the workflow is complete, it can be exported in a Visio Workflow Interchange format and sent to a more technical user who has access to the SharePoint Designer application.  They can then import the exported map into SharePoint Designer where it is translated into a SharePoint workflow.  They can then modify it and prime it for use, ensuring that it functions correctly and is associated with the correct document libraries, lists or sites.  The workflow can then be published to a test SharePoint environment for verification.

All in all, this is a great new feature and will make it a lot easier for power users and subject matter experts to get involved in SharePoint projects and will speed up the overall design to publish process.  The important thing is that it puts the power of definition back into the hands of those who understand their business and who should be able to model it more accurately.  Granted, there is an element of IT involvement required, and this should always be the case to ensure that standards are maintained and processes are optimised for performance.  As with anything, governance is critical and should always be a central part of any workflow project.

The only thing to bear in mind is that you do need Visio Premium and you will also need to download SharePoint Designer.  As a rule, we would recommend that SharePoint Designer workflows are only used for specific departmental or project level solutions, and that enterprise workflows are modeled with a more robust, measurable and scalable toolkit.

The question that I often get asked by our clients is:

“Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?”

…and how does it compare to the more traditional document management systems (DMS)?

As always with questions like this, it depends on several factors;

• your specific requirements
• the systems you currently have in place for managing documents
• and of course how much money you have

I often hear people comment that SharePoint is free so it is a simple option; this can be especially true of sales people in traditional document management companies when they have just lost a deal…

Whether your organisation is considering SharePoint or looking to expand your existing SharePoint implementation, it is important to understand that SharePoint is not free, no matter what the actual software costs.  As a minimum you need to consider costs related to; the infrastructure to support it, the ongoing management and support, plus more than likely other 3rd party products to give extra functionality.

Let’s first consider whether SharePoint has the key components that an organisation requires for document management?

The answer is a very clear yes, as long as you are using SharePoint 2010.  Features such as; managed metadata, version control, document sets, search and records management are all provided as standard and provide most organisations with more than enough functionality.  SharePoint also has lots of other features and functions such as blogs, wiki’s, workflow, and reporting that can offer true collaborative solutions.

With all this considered, is there still a place for traditional document management vendors?

Well again the answer is yes.

If you don’t have SharePoint, then implementing SharePoint to help you provide document management can in lots of cases be described as taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  Most organisations implement document management on a department by department basis, where select departments have a need and then this grows across the business.  If you are looking for departmental solutions, such as in-house legal, then you would be better focusing on traditional document management systems, as these can be easily installed and configured for quicker delivery to the users.  This is of course assuming that your organisation does not have SharePoint implemented.

Another consideration is to look at how the users would interact with the system.

Many of the traditional document management vendors, such as OpenText, provide a very integrated solution for the user, that allows very easy profiling (entering metadata) and interaction with the DMS from a range of applications. This helps with the adoption and use of the document management system.

You must also consider and clearly think through how you are going to ensure that your information and documents are secure. Whilst both SharePoint and traditional document management systems provide a robust security model, some of the organisations that ImageFast have worked with require very strict security that even stops administrators from having access to certain information.  This is normally achieved by creating silos of document management for specific business functions, and can generally be achieved far better with a traditional document management system than SharePoint.

The amount of data and documents that organisations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organisations management of their information life cycle.  Again this is where traditional document management vendors can excel with their specific solutions, as most have been providing capabilities such as this since the 90’s.

SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues.  Some of the document management vendors have realised the opportunity here and, using OpenText as an example, have provided specific archive capabilities for SharePoint that allows documents or entire sites within SharePoint to be archived.

So what about the benefits of SharePoint?

There are not many large organisations now that do not have a SharePoint implementation of some sort. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet.  SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organisations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage.

If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. At ImageFast we have helped several organisations significantly reduce their document management costs, by; migrating old legacy document management systems onto SharePoint, reducing their requirement for in-house skills to support several document management applications, and removing the sometimes astronomical annual maintenance costs for these applications.

The additional features within SharePoint 2010 can also help extend the functionality of document management, for example ImageFast have recently developed a full case management system for an insurance company – where not only are all of the documents relating to a case stored, but also information on the case, tasks that need to be completed and complete reporting, to allow management of the workload and any potential risks to the business.

The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organisation with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage.

Back to the original question – can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?

Yes you can, and it should be considered as one of the key options.

However is it right for your organisation?

As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information.

White paper

ImageFast has a free white paper available for download, ‘Using SharePoint 2010 as an Enterprise Content Management system’, visit www.imagefast.co.uk/consulting/sharepoint-adoption

A place for us to share with you our wealth of experience in the information management industry.

Lots of interesting articles are on their way!

ImageFast

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