Mid-size and enterprise companies are using Web 2.0 collaboration systems to build solutions that service several different parts of the organization. In many cases, line-of-business users from many departments are interested in using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 as an integrated platform as part of their solution.

This article highlights some of the common scenarios, sponsors, benefits, and opportunities for multiplying the ROI of a collaboration platform by leveraging its use across multiple departments.

There are many high-level business objectives that can be addressed with SharePoint as an integrated enterprise platform:

1. Collaboration: Going beyond the file server to allow document collaboration, project workspaces, task lists, and organize deliverables.
2. Portals: Building and maintaining company intranet sites without having to ask the IT department for help.
3. Content Management: Providing built-in content management including approval and governance. Allows users to contribute, approve, and manage content, while maintaining IT oversight and control.
4. Search: Letting everyone find what they need in the company, just as fast as they can find what they need on the Internet. Search your intranet, extranet, Web sites, external file servers, e-mail, document management systems, applications, and relational databases.
5. Business Process: Using workflow to enforce business rules inside custom applications. Easily model and build processes that include approvals, rules, prerequisites, and post-conditions that fit the way your business works. Move away from paper-based forms to gain efficiency, save money, reduce errors, and improve manageability.
6. Business Intelligence: Use the platform for constructing dashboards and managing key performance indicators. Leverage services built into your intranet and applications for sharing metrics and calculations across the enterprise.

Many companies start using SharePoint for a portal or document management system and soon realize that they can achieve even greater ROI by applying the software to other initiatives. This multi-use strategy helps to combine budgets across different departments, making the solution more affordable for everyone.

For instance, a large financial institution in Boston originally planned to deploy SharePoint as a standalone Web-based document management solution. The team and department heads quickly became so impressed with the collaboration platform that they decided to use it as a complete replacement for their intranet. This saved significant licensing fees on another software product, along with a six-figure implementation budget. Instead, they were able to replace their intranet and combine two products into a single user interface.

Applying Enterprise Collaboration Systems across Business Lines
At the departmental level, most human resource (HR) groups want to provide an Intranet portal to keep the latest forms and information available to everyone in the company. They don't want to have to know HTML, or get time from the IT department every time they want to add or edit content. A site for the HR portal can be provisioned easily through a multi-purpose collaboration platform like Microsoft SharePoint 2007, allowing regular users to access the site and certain users to add, edit, and approve content.

The benefits coordinator in an HR department usually wants to automate some of the currently manual processes and forms, for example, life insurance beneficiary designation, 401(k) elections, and direct deposit setup. Custom forms built by business users with specific software-based workflow can all be accomplished in SharePoint's robust collaboration platform without requiring software developers.

Legal departments realize that their compliance, retention, and legal hold requirements increasingly apply to electronic documents as well as traditional paper documents. In turn, they want to use features of SharePoint as a record center to automatically manage document lifecycles to comply with industry and legal standards.

Marketing and public relations folks have to manage collateral, press releases, identity statements, photos, logos, PDFs, and templates. Many have explored and then applied SharePoint, which offers a familiar interface, as a document repository to ensure everyone always has the latest version of all files when developing content.

The sales team likes its current CRM system, and it's working well for it. However, the operations team would like to have a view into aspects of the order pipeline for production planning. Using Web Services in SharePoint, the operations team can construct these views and extract the information it needs to plan.

Executive teams often ask the CFO to provide some easy-to-read metrics to help run the business day-to-day. This information is typically housed in an Excel spreadsheet, a file constantly updated and forwarded via e-mail. Acknowledging the need for a more robust and compliant solution, ideally where key performance indicators are published and always available on the intranet, executives explore workflow-conducive systems. In this scenario, and those outlined above, SharePoint 2007 provides the collaborative Web 2.0 functionality that lines of business need to collaborate, run reports, and comply with business processes.

Can SharePoint Play Well with Others?
A large biosciences company in Cambridge, MA applied SharePoint 2007's dynamic collaboration software, which provides a very extensible platform for software development, to build the company intranet. Although the new intranet had document management capabilities, the company had already invested heavily in another product. Instead of being forced to choose between the two, the IT team applied SharePoint's extensible platform to quickly integrate with the existing document management system to view, search, submit, and manage documents right from the familiar interface of its prior intranet. This eliminated the need for users to have to learn two systems.

Most regional and national banks maintain a very large public folder to store e-mail for compliance purposes. In the case of another New England-based bank, the underlying database had gotten so large that searching and browsing became impossible. Using SharePoint, the bank was able to migrate the e-mail content quickly to a Web-based platform supporting state-of-the-art classification, indexing, and search capabilities. Now, any new content is automatically directed into these new sites, while browsing the public folder automatically shows them the Web site where its content is stored.

From a macro level, company employees often have a hard time finding exactly what they need on a company intranet. The intranet has to be searchable through a configurable and flexible application. Additional content (files, databases, external applications) may also need to be crawled and indexed. SharePoint 2007 offers users comprehensive search functionality and the ability to save searches with alerts and custom search scope capabilities.

Cost Considerations & Savings
Today's budget-strained business climate has prompted companies across industries to seek out ways to leverage their investments in its existing infrastructure for collaboration and Web 2.0 applications, as well as for authentication and authorization. IT teams also know they should integrate efficiently with the most common authentication software and servers. SharePoint requires authentication and authorization levels. In each solution, there are controls for who gets to see what data and who can edit and change data.

Any one department might be able to justify the licensing, hardware, and services costs to build a collaborative solution on its own. But when solutions are combined and the same tool is used to implement them, the investment becomes much easier to justify. Server license costs are paid once across the company. For all but the largest SharePoint installations, a single set of server hardware (Web servers, database servers) can be shared as well. As more users use the system, the company can buy licenses in larger quantities or bundles to save money. In fact, many organizations already own licenses for enterprise software with the capabilities mentioned here.

Most companies don't have specific architecture, development, and/or implementation resources in-house with experience in specific technologies capable of meeting the demands mentioned above. IT staffs are typically busy keeping up with current demands and would be hard pressed to cross-train and take on a new project quickly. Further, while most SharePoint functionality can be implemented out-of-the-box, the platform's real potential is derived from custom development to meet specific business needs. For this reason, many companies hire outside firms to help them plan, build, and implement SharePoint solutions. Any one department can probably justify the ROI of consulting services. However, as with hardware/licensing cost savings derived from combining projects between departments, companies can gain efficiencies with integrated development services. For instance, separate design sessions, test cycles, and project management overhead can be combined into a larger project. Depending on the pricing model of the outsourced resource, larger projects can also qualify for discounting.

The cost savings continue in an IT group, which is usually charged with administering the solutions developed. If several in-house solutions are based on the same tool set, it's easier for the IT department to maintain a group of people to support SharePoint solutions. An administrator's training helps him understand any of the solutions developed, from HR to legal or marketing. Having a shared platform lets departments limit hires and IT folks know the tool set cold. This lets staff concentrate on helping business users achieve their goals instead of having to chase down the "resident expert" on one or more systems to answer questions and resolve problems.

Implications
Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 has infinite business process relevance, including content and process management for compliance, improvement of business monitoring and insight, and simplifying secure internal and external collaboration and search.

By optimizing a common platform for multiple solutions across the enterprise, institutions leverage a single asset multiple times and decrease cost of ownership. Each new solution that uses existing architecture, hardware, and expertise lowers average costs for licensing, hardware, and services. To ensure SharePoint development success:

• Multiple departments must get in on the licensing budget
• Institutions must pool money for implementation and development work
  
• The IT organization must centrally manage projects, with implementation control by line-of-business departments.