News

Effective Collaboration

25/8/2010

EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION Roger Hoyte Business Development Manager for Technology Services Group (TSG) writes: As legal firms are looking for ways to manage the growing amount of data and information being stored in filing cabinets, network file shares and other sources, more are turning to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as a tool to help them with this difficult content management challenge.

SharePoint is a feature rich Intranet, Collaboration and Document Management product from Microsoft, which gives organisations a powerful tool to manage all areas of business process not currently handled by a Practice Management solution. By utilising SharePoint, organisations can reduce the number of disparate systems and improve efficiencies through features such as Workflow, Searching and Reporting.

Below are a number of the features available with the SharePoint product. This is not the full list be a long way, but will hopefully give you brief overview of some of the product’s key functionality and how this could benefit your business.

Intranet
In its simplest form, SharePoint can act as your company Intranet. Announcements, calendars, staff phone lists, policies, procedures and forms can be stored on an internal website that can be access by employees based on their network username and password. With tight integration to Microsoft Office, users with the necessary permissions can easily update or add items and ensure the correct information is shown with the help of workflows and content approval.

Wikis
A Wiki is a quick and simple way to share knowledge on a particular topic. Busy colleagues can easily update wiki pages with content relating to any area of the business, from IT help pages, to admin procedures, to best practice relating to a specific case or client. By taking advantage of the searching capabilities of SharePoint, Wikis can become the foundation for a vast structured portal of useful knowledge for all areas of the organisation.

Document Management
As more and more documentation is stored on our IT networks, it is important we are aware of what is there and how it is being management. Not only do we need to have to comply with various legal requirements, but we want to make sure that users can quickly access the information they need. Documents in SharePoint can be secured with Rights Management to restrict who can view, modify, print or forward a document, even when outside of the network. Auditing tracks user events when they occur, so we have full visibility of the lifecycle of a document. Versioning ensures that we can rollback to older copies of a document, and also reduces the multiple different copies of a single document being stored throughout your network.

Searching
SharePoint search is often a key reason for adopting SharePoint. Within milliseconds search will return content from a range of sources for the user, SharePoint documents and wikis will be presented in the same page as content found on your Network Share, in your Practice Management system or even on external websites such as your corporate site. Users can quickly access information on a particular case, client or topic from many sources in one single location.

Scanning
Data stored in filing cabinets poses several problems to an organisation. Space is often a common problem with some businesses loosing valuable office space to the vast number of cabinets and others choosing to move the data to offsite storage locations. There’s also the problem of retrieval; how much time is wasted by employees trawling through hundreds or thousands of folders trying to find what they need, this is even more of a problem when they are in different locations.
With a range of scanners capable of uploading bulk documents to SharePoint, we can utilise the Document Management features of the product. These features ensure that the data remains secure whilst giving users an easy method to retrieve the files they require.

E-Mail Archiving
E-Mail is a major part to a business’s IT network; users are receiving large numbers of E-Mails every day and are resorting to their own filing system of folders and folders to sort and store them. Due to the content of many E-Mails it is often necessary to make them available to a wider number of users and also ensure that they are kept for a certain amount of time.
E-Mails can be copied or dragged to an area of SharePoint and stored in the same way as a Document or Spreadsheet. Once an E-Mail is in the SharePoint system, it can be viewed, searched or secured in the same way as any other files being stored.

Reporting
It is not uncommon to have data stored in several systems around the organisation. These may be an Accounts application, a Practice Management system and a number of other bespoke or third party products. Reporting is often specific to the product and is usually in a proprietary or separate tool for each one.
SharePoint has a number of reporting tools with the capabilities to connect to multiple system and process data individually or in a connected view. Users don’t need training up on several products and they also don’t need to leave the intranet to view the results. A user with the correct permission could view a report on the cases they have open in the same place the have just submitted a holiday request. As these reports are web based, they are available anywhere in the world (assuming you have permission to access them).

For more information please contact Roger Hoyte 07530192498 roger.hoyte@tsg.com www.tsg.com