3 Major Reasons to Move to SharePoint 2010

3 Major Reasons to Move to SharePoint 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is truly an exciting release. It has a myriad of significant upgrades including improved support for blogs and wikis, improved language support and greatly enhanced integration with Office to name just a few. All of these features are great, but its real value – for information workers and IT management alike – boils down to three fundamental factors:

  • Ease-of-Use
  • Findability
  • Lower Cost of Ownership

 

Ease-of-Use

This is where this product really shines. Workers can access information from a variety of sources and collaborate with colleagues using a familiar Office-like interface, and they can do this from a PC, a browser or from a mobile phone.

This tremendous flexibility comes from four key enhancements:

1. Seamless Integration with Office 2010

Microsoft Office 2010 comes with SharePoint Workspace 2010, a rich desktop client that enables people to work on SharePoint documents using the familiar Office-like interface. Entire folders can be downloaded from the SharePoint site and copied to a local folder, where users can access all the documents as they would any other document on their machines. In addition, SharePoint Workspace 2010 also shares with SharePoint Server 2010 a powerful feature - the ability to access information from external applications. (See next bullet point.)

2. Information from External Applications

SharePoint 2010 Server enables users to access data from external applications, e.g. the organization's accounting application or a database used to track compliance with federal regulations or even a social networking site. This is a feature previously available only in the enterprise version of SharePoint. This powerful new feature is accomplished using Microsoft's Business Connectivity Services, a group of applications that facilitate data interchange between different sources and SharePoint Server 2010.

This means that a worker can access virtually all of the information that he/she needs through a single application that has that familiar Office look-and-feel.

3. Improved Cross-Browser Support

SharePoint 2010 now supports Firefox and Safari in addition to Microsoft Internet Explorer. SharePoint 2010 also offers support for multiple mobile phone micro-browsers, enabling you to edit and view Word documents, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations while on the go.

4. Office Web Applications

If you are away from your office using someone else’s PC, you don’t have to worry whether or not it has the latest version of Word. SharePoint 2010 works with the Web companions to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, making it easy to collaborate on and even concurrently edit SharePoint documents.

 

Findability

Findability is the ease by which stored information can be found. One of the biggest problems with previous versions of SharePoint is simply finding information. How many times has a colleague told you, "I've uploaded it to our SharePoint site," but when you go to the site, you can’t find it.

SharePoint 2010 handles this from two different angles: (1) the new Content Organizer that helps control how documents are tagged and where they are stored and (2) a beefed-up search engine.  

1. The Content Organizer

This is a rules-based classification tool that makes it easy to consistently tag content using an agreed upon and approved set of terms. These terms or metadata are kept in a Term Store and managed by an administrator, who can add new terms as needed. Site owners can now create rules to drive content to specific Document Libraries and folders based on the type of content and its tags.

2. Dramatically Improved Search Capability
SharePoint Server 2010 delivers out-of-the-box search capability that has a number of enhancements:

  • Dramatically increased search speeds. Due to the ability to scale the search function to meet the needs of the organization, sub-second search speeds are possible no matter the size of the document repository.
  • The SharePoint 2010 search engine learns based on how users interact with search results. It uses this “knowledge” plus document tags and content to return much more relevant results.
  • Better results summaries help users identify whether they have the correct results faster. There are also filters that enable users to further refine search results.
  • Improved multilingual support for 51 languages.
  • A people-search function that enables workers to locate colleagues with special skill sets. This is particularly useful in large organizations.
  • Ability to upgrade to the FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. This is an extremely powerful search engine that allows an organization to completely customize the search experience to suit the needs of its people.
     

Lower Cost of Ownership

Put simply, SharePoint 2010 enables organizations to consolidate their business productivity solutions on a single platform, thus cutting IT costs.

According to a Forrester Research report on the ROI realized by early SharePoint 2010 adopters, "organizations can achieve significant financial benefits from consolidating collaboration, document management, internal and external portal software, and search onto SharePoint Server 2010."

The Forrester report, Total Economic Impact of Implementing SharePoint 2010, conservatively estimates that a professional services company of 5,000 employees could realize a 108% ROI within 11 months after deploying the product. 

Consolidation on one platform enables organizations to reduce the number of vendors and thus lower software license and maintenance costs. Savings can also be realized through reduced IT administration costs and the simplified application development that SharePoint 2010 provides.

Drew Naukam, Managing Vice President of Hitachi Consulting agrees. He points out in a Microsoft video on SharePoint 2010, that "There is a business case in terms of eliminating redundant software licensing and getting down to one cost model for SharePoint 2010. There is an opportunity to retire infrastructure. And then the ability to consolidate from a skills perspective."

Naukam notes that Hitachi's use of SharePoint to deploy solutions for business intelligence, workflows and intellectual property management has made the company more efficient.

 

SharePoint 2010 Resources

Here are two resources that can help you determine how SharePoint 2010 might benefit your organization.

Total Economic Impact of Implementing SharePoint 2010
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730143

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 IT Professional Evaluation Guide
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167123

 

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