Web Portals using SharePoint

What is SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint provides a platform to build web portals that allow workers, customers and suppliers to share, edit and take advantage of relevant information across the business and beyond the business. For example, by creating a workspace, documents, emails, and spreadsheets can be viewed, edited and shared between team members – whether internal or external to the organisation. Document management and workflow technologies mean that team members can work together efficiently and information and data is shared securely.

SharePoint development

Once you have identified how SharePoint can help you, we can assist you configure and customise your SharePoint portal solution. We have certified development professionals who can rapidly and efficiently implement SharePoint and build customised Web Parts so that your SharePoint application meets all your business requirements.

Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organisational productivity by using electronic forms and workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or browsers.

Improve Business Insight

Effectively monitor business drivers, empower better informed decisions throughout the organisation, and proactively respond to important business events.

SharePoint is an ideal portal solution, allowing businesses to provide access to data throughout an enterprise, whilst still ensuring full security and access level control. SharePoint also provides full search facilities, again with the strict access rules being applied. Collaboration between parts of the enterprise (as well as its suppliers and customers) is also enabled.

SharePoint Web Parts

Users need the power to be able to create the "view of the data" that they want and containing just the data they need for a specific task. Web Parts are relatively simple components that are used to build complex personalised pages. These "building blocks" can connect to each other, share data and even complement each other's behaviour. Together they offer an extensible, highly configurable platform allowing developers the ability to produce personalised pages whenever required.

Integration with other Office products

Take-up of new technologies in organisations often fails because users find them hard to use or learn and they are not intuitive enough. Here lies the real strength of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) . The Windows interface and tight integration with Office makes for a very familiar set of tools which are almost immediately available to users of Microsoft desktop products such as Word and Excel. For example, users of 2007 Microsoft Office system programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Project, and OneNote can directly interact with information stored in SharePoint sites without having to manually download the content.

Extensibility with ASP.NET and Web Parts

SharePoint 2007's technical architecture is based upon ASP.NET  and SQL Server. This makes customising and adding to SharePoint a powerful option. For example the search architecture can be extended to index and search other business applications or different document types. Web Parts are modular pieces of code that you can embed in a SharePoint site e.g. for application integration you can use Web Parts to provide user access to legacy business applications through SharePoint, making the applications easy to find and embedding them in a familiar context.