Microsoft SharePoint

SolutionKeys works with its clients to identify needs in all areas of IT. Communications management is a key area covering the communication between your business and clients, your teachers and students, or your management and workforce.

Whether its document and content management or the sharing of business intelligence within your organization, we work hard to deploy solutions for our clients, enabling them to gain greater efficiencies while streamlining business processes.

Microsoft SharePoint has one big advantage in the field as many of the tools needed for a successful implementation are already integrated within most organizations. Interfaces and technologies familiar to everyone (e.g. MS Office) make deployment of SharePoint an easier task than introducing a new and unfamiliar product to a time-stretched workforce.

Sharepoint itself is a very versatile product, usable straight out of the box, but it can also be easily enhanced and extended depending on the specific needs of your business. SolutionKeys can quickly deliver tailored business solutions with SharePoint that increase efficiency and help drive team integration and collaboration. We offer:

• Deployment, configuration integration, and custom development to exactly match your business’ needs.
• Complete technology and service requirements for any SharePoint based solutions.
• Bespoke solutions for your organization from SharePoint through to full Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
• Workflow for business processes, fully managed and executed in SharePoint.
• Extensive Enterprise Application Integration experience and integration of your existing applications and data with SharePoint
• Enterprise search of all business data and content
• The tools, templates, and experience to deliver your solution rapidly and more cost effectively than other providers.
• Extensive experience in developing custom solutions and across a variety of industries, including school learning portals.

SharePoint Migration
SolutionKeys are a certified professional SharePoint solutions provider, with specialists experienced in carrying out migrations and able to help ensure you experience a trouble-free migration. We work with clients to carry out SharePoint Migrations in the following stages.

Upgrade Preparation
Our specialists will work with you to identify your key assets and from that create a detailed upgrade plan, including provisions for backup and recovery of databases, confirming server farm configuration and determining the best upgrade path. The size and complexity of your operation and software applications will determine the speed of the upgrade, with simple cases taking place as one single procedure and more complex ones being carried out in a gradual, staged fashion.

Pre-upgrade
SolutionKeys recommends use of a pre-upgrade or pilot installation using a secondary site. This not only allows clients to preview the upgrade but also to view and address any potential issues that may be encountered during a full upgrade.

Upgrade
Our team of specialists will work with you to successfully upgrade SharePoint Server according to your bespoke upgrade plan. Upon completion we will review all upgraded sites and migrate your content to the new server applying any requested customizations.

Post-upgrade
To ensure a successful upgrade, SolutoinKeys performs periodic reviews during the migration process. After the upgrade is complete a post-upgrade review will be performed. The final part of the migration process involved reviewing all new sites to confirm that the upgrade has been successfully completed with any further problems seen to at this point.

SharePoint Server Solution
With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) your business can enliven its processes with a comprehensive portal and document management solution. SolutionKeys has extensive experience in the installation and configuration of MOSS. Our services include:

• Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Windows SharePoint Services.
• Configuring Microsoft SQL Server for use by SharePoint (including SQL Server).
• Installing custom web parts and event sinks.
• Configuring server farms.
• Configuring SharePoint search, including search properties, search scopes, indexing.
• Allowing secure remote access to SharePoint from across the internet either via VPN or SSL.
• Setting up backup and restore operations for SharePoint

SharePoint Development
MOSS is an excellent document management system and portal server on its own. However the full potential of SharePoint goes far beyond the basic installation. SolutionKeys can help clients improve their business’ SharePoint platform by creating a unique SharePoint setup with thousands of available add-ins and applications to enhance and extend the capabilities of MOSS.

Available Customizations
SolutionKeys can help you customize SharePoint in the following ways, creating:

• Custom business workflows
• Report development including Excel Services or SQL Reporting Services
• InfoPath development
• Custom web page development
• Custom WebPart development
• Custom Visual Studio Development
• Intranet development
• Integration tools

Document Management

• Prevent version conflicts by using document check-out and check-in.
• Compare new versions of documents with older versions.
• Host inline discussions, within a document to review or clarify changes.
• Centralize your documents in the document repository and eliminate the risk of data loss.
• Powerful document search featuring full-text indexing.

Document Check-out and Check-in
Document management ensures that only one user can edit a document at any one time. The document check- out/check-in system within SharePoint prevents multiple versions being created by multiple users avoiding confusion and possible data loss.

Version tracking
SharePoint tracks changes made to a document over time and enables you to compare versions of your work at any time to see what has been done. Version tracking means that you will never lose any valuable work and can incorporate content from old versions into new versions.

Virtual document review
SharePoint provides inline discussion and review tools, allowing reviewers and editors in multiple locations to collaborate, viewing each other’s edits and comments. This allows discussions to take place within SharePoint and without the need for time-consuming email conversations.

Central document repository
A central location for all your employees to store their work eliminates the need for a document to be held in multiple locations (this is what usually happens when a document is distributed by email or stored on the LAN in a shared folder). This prevents version control conflicts, and reduces the need for disk space. In addition, strong backup procedures mean that the risk of data loss is eliminated.

Full-text indexing
Finding documents in a simple file system is a tedious and often frustrating process. SharePoint indexes the full text of each document in the repository, so that you search on a fragment of text. SharePoint will immediately find the documents containing that fragment.

Content & Document Management

• Manage diverse content
• Satisfy compliance and legal requirements
• Efficiently manage multiple Web sites
• Streamline business processes

Consolidate Diverse Content
With the wealth of documents needed to run a successful business, most organizations collect large amounts of electronic data, in a variety of formats which clogs corporate networks, remaining elusive or invisible. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Content management organizes diverse content from multiple locations into a central file repository speeding-up workflows, and allowing for better communication.

Integrated Document Search
MOSS’ Content Management Collaboration tools allow colleagues to work together to create, review, and approve documents in a structured way. Integrated search capabilities make it much easier to find documents, and access controls manage which users have access to which documents.

Store and Protect Records
Integrated records management functions enable organizations to store and protect your valuable business records. Expiration policies applied to documents ensure timely review and retention periods, maintaining legal compliance. Audit trails can be used by auditors to determine that records have been correctly retained. Important documents can be placed under quarantine to ensure they are not deleted.

Streamlined Web Content Management
MOSS greatly simplifies and slims-down Web Content Management with integrated tools and approval processes. Users can create templates allowing anyone with the correct access rights to create web content. All sites – external and internal – can be managed from one deployment, reducing cost and complexity for your IT departments.

Electronic Forms
Using automation to streamline your content-driven collaborative processes can reduce administrative overheads, lowering costs. E-forms can be used for data gathering and input validation when collecting feedback from users, employees or students.
MOSS’ supply a wide-ranging set of tools for collaborative content and document management significantly reducing the complexity and risk of content management within large organizations.

Business Intelligence Summary

• Assemble data from multiple sources and publish on the web
• Consolidate your organization’s reports in the Report Centre
• Publish Excel workbooks on the web or intranet using Excel Services
• Connect to external data sources
• Create and track KPI’s for your teams using KPI Web Parts
• Use Filter Web Parts to create subsets of data
• Use Dashboards to communicate status and drive action

Data from Multiple Sources
Giving your employees with the ability to gather, consolidate and publish data and reports on the web is easy with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Business Intelligence tools. Creating reports containing data from disparate systems no longer requires skills in data storage or data mining. Publication of data is much easier with MOSS and is no longer restricted to developers and external consultancies.

Report Center
The Report Center forms the core components of MOSS’ reporting tools, providing a central location for all Business Intelligence-related information, with individual libraries for storing different types of business documents, reports, lists, and external data. There are standard templates for building new reports and Web Parts. The Report Center is a default site at the top-level of your portal site, but MOSS allows any of your teams create their own Report Center using all of the tools available.

Excel Services
Excel is a popular and crucial tool for most organizations, but Excel can cometimes present problems when used to communicate valuable business information. Excel Services is a new server technology included in MOSS which lets you load, calculate, and display Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server. You can easily reuse and share Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server portals and dashboards.

Data from External Sources
You can use data from external sources such as other business applications (e.g. Siebel, SAP), and manage libraries of stored external data connections so that your employees can access the data and create new reports. All data connections can be managed with permissions to ensure data integrity. Web Parts can be created that allow users to interact with the external source data without ever leaving their browser.

Key Performance Indicators
Communication is of course an important element of Business Intelligence – with MOSS you can create specialized Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your teams communicating to them how well they are progressing towards a goal. In a fast-moving business environment visual information is key. Filter Web Parts are Web Parts that allow you to show only the data that needs to be shown – subsets or filters of data can be more meaningful to users. The final element of SharePoint Business Intelligence is Dashboards – specialized sites that gather all of a user’s reports, charts, connections, filters, and KPI’s in one location.

Business Intelligence & Reporting Summary

• Share, control, and reuse business information.
• Link to business applications such as SAP, SQL Server and easily publish reports.
• Store reports, data, connections and templates in the Report Centre at the organization or team level.
• Easily share Excel workbooks via web pages, but protect business logic.
• Create a central library of external data sources.
• Display customized Key Performance Indicators for different teams across the organization.

One of the most important areas for an organization is Business Intelligence and Reporting. SharePoint offers a number of key features that can be used by your organization to improve the quality of your reporting and ensure that key data and business intelligence is available to your decision makers.

The SharePoint Report Centre stores all your reports, data connections, and templates. By storing your reports in a central location you can make sure the reports are always available and you can control the level of access to each report, so as to ensure that the right people see the data. Your employees will be able to create and deploy reports, and can easily create web pages using the templates and data connections available to them in the Report Centre. Data Connections can include links to common business applications such as SAP, Siebel, SQL Server, Access and Excel.

A key feature of SharePoint Business Intelligence is Excel Services, which allows you to store Excel workbooks on a server and then publish any part of that workbook on a web page. This allows you to share useful data with partners, but you can prevent that data being passed on and protects your valuable business logic.

Intranet & Portal Summary

• Comprehensive portal framework to easily build portal/intranet sites for your organization.
• Centrally managed site design, publishing and deployment.
• Combine multiple types of documents, information and applications to create a powerful business tool for all your employees.
• Create libraries of templates and images for employees to create their own sites and portals.

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) SolutionKeys can help you build and maintain a portal site and intranet for all parts of your organizationv whether school, bank, shop or media company.

A flexible, highly scalable architecture supports personal, divisional, intranet, extranet and Internet sites whatever size your organization. Integrated web content management and powerful authoring features allow any user to easily contribution content.

Our consultants can help you incorporate your existing business applications into your intranet or portal environment allowing you to consolidate your applications and create new customized applications to support your business processes.

We recognize that automation of business processes can greatly improve your productivity and this is a key feature of SharePoint which, if desired, can be included in each employee’s personal site “My Site”, which pulls together key summary information and role-specific tools and data.

MOSS also allows your employees to perform collaborative tasks within the browser, such as meetings, document management, project management and other common group tasks.

Workflow Summary

• Standardize your business processes with workflows.
• Improve productivity and eliminate needless bureaucracy by automating common business tasks.
• Reduce the risk of organizational “memory loss”.
• Co-ordinate group efforts on complex tasks, e.g. Tenders and Request for Proposals/Information.
• Issue tracking and resolution.

SolutionKeys can help clients capture and automate business processes with SharePoint. Every organization has multiple processes, however most organizations rely upon the knowledge of individuals them to make them work efficiently. SharePoint Workflows give you the power to structure, capture, control and document these processes.

SolutionKeys Example IT Workflows:
Approvals. When a process (such as a purchasing request or expense claim) requires approval from multiple people in your organization, a workflow can speed up this process, making sure that each person who needs to approve the request sees it and actions it. With SharePoint approvals can be tracked, the comment can be appended, or the request can be sent back for more information.
Coordinating complex group tasks. Large projects require input from many different people within an organization and it can be very difficult to keep track of what has been done and what still needs to be done. By defining the steps of a project in a workflow and assigning each step to one or more people, your project becomes more manageable and project accountability is enhanced.
Issue tracking and resolution. If your organization generates issues for resolution, an automated workflow can centrally record an issue, record which member of your staff has been assigned to the task, and track the status of a task.