SharePoint
SharePoint can fit many product scenarios. Understanding if there is any alignment of SharePoint product features to your product's features is key to determining a fit. A good place to start is exploring the six high-level product capabilities of SharePoint 2010 in many presentations and Microsoft documents.
Sites - SharePoint Sites deliver a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across intranet, extranet, and internet sites. SharePoint Sites bring users together to share information, data, and expertise across organizations.
Communities - SharePoint Communities empower people to work together in ways that are most effective for them. SharePoint Communities make it possible for people to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and ideas, connect with colleagues, and find information and experts easily.
Content - SharePoint Content enables all users to participate in a governed, compliant content management lifecycle. SharePoint Content makes it possible to expertly balance user experience with policy and process.
Search - SharePoint Search gives users the ability to find the content, information, and people they need by combining an integrated, easy-to-manage platform with best-of-breed enterprise search technology.
Insights - SharePoint Insights enables users to access and interact with information across unstructured and structured data sources. SharePoint Insights empower users to discover the right people and expertise to make better and more agile business decisions.
Composites - SharePoint Composites empower users to rapidly respond to business needs by creating their own no-code solutions, on premises or in the cloud, through a rich set of building blocks, tools, and self-service capabilities.
SharePoint provides a great foundation for application development at all levels of the software development stack. The capabilities extend outward to include search, workflow, scalable and extensible services architecture, and administrative features.
Being built upon ASP.NET and Windows Server platforms allows SharePoint to expose infrastructure features and inherent points of extensibility to application developers. ISVs who choose to build upon SharePoint will find that they inherit a rich set of platform capabilities, letting them put more time and effort into developing unique product features vs. generic features.
Applications that connect to SharePoint can reveal application data and features either in the SharePoint UI, Business Connectivity Services (BCS), or via one of the many options for extensibility provided by SharePoint.
Social Media
Somewhere in your organization, you are probably already using the five most popular types of collaboration and networking tools. They are:
File Sharing - File-sharing is the mother of all digital collaboration. When people work together, inevitably they need to share files in a more methodical way than e-mail allows. If you do nothing else, start here.
Blogs - Blogs are great for sharing individual knowledge and experience, as well as spurring discussion, but not ideal for project-oriented collaboration.
Wikis - Wikis are well suited to the task of creating shared documentation over time. To manage them, however, most companies find it necessary to assign an active caretaker to make sure they don't become chaotic and lose their usefulness.
Microblogging - Think "Twitter within the company." Microblogging is better suited to group interaction than instant messaging. Services such as Yammer can help employees share Facebook-like status messages such as "Remember, I'm on vacation tomorrow." It is important to set expectations for when microblogging is and isn't appropriate; it is not well suited for more complicated discussions, for example.
Forums - Discussion forums or "bulletin boards" are among the oldest collaborative tools, and still very useful for sharing and discussing ideas around a particular topic, like "where should we open our next franchise?" Unfortunately, forums can be hard to navigate and search.
Too often managers and employees kick off the discussion about collaboration with a discussion of specific tools, like "We need a wiki" or "let's start an internal blog." That's backwards. You should start by figuring out what you are trying to accomplish from a business perspective, then decide which corresponding tool is right for you. Here's a short list of objectives that may seem relevant for your business:
Building a knowledgebase - You want the latest and greatest information in front of your customer service reps. A wiki could enable everyone in the company, including the representatives, to keep information up to date.
Brainstorming and vetting new ideas - Small businesses thrive on bringing new ideas to market faster. Consider blogs or forums for sharing and vetting ideas.
Sharing private documents with customers and partners - You may have the ability to share documents internally, but what about beyond your company? Web-based file-sharing helps you do that in a secure, auditable way.
Managing projects more effectively - Maybe your team can't meet in person; if so, shared whiteboards and microblogging can keep everyone in touch.
Keeping employees better connected - Work has always been social, but many employees now spend much of their time away from the office. Social tools can help people stay connected at a personal level, even when they're not meeting around a watercooler.
