What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is a web application framework designed by Microsoft as an all-in-one, consolidated software solution to various combinations of enterprise networking requirements.
To help businesses and SharePoint developers understand the bundle of functionality built into the platform, Microsoft segments SharePoint features into six basic categories—sites, communities, content, search, insights, and composites.
- Sites: SharePoint allows users to develop and produce ‘sites’ (intranets, extranets, or websites) without a technical knowledge of programming or development. With some basic application training, any user can utilize SharePoint as a locus for administrating and moderating ‘sites’ within his or her organization.
- Communities: One goal of SharePoint is to stand as a foundation for community development. A variety of social integration and networking features fosters a cooperative environment, bringing employees together and enabling them to rally together around the latest project, client, or company announcement.
- Content: SharePoint is perhaps most renowned for its efficient and capable system of file, document, and information management. The platform supplies a centralized repository for enterprise data that can be accessed from internal or external client applications (i.e. Microsoft Office) or using the internet. Efficient data mining and file management augments SharePoint’s potential as an effective business intelligence (BI) solution.
- Search: SharePoint arrives complete with highly capable ‘search’ functionality. The platform can crawl through user profiles, public websites, external content, and internal data, presenting relevant results to users in the organization.
- Insights: SharePoint easily integrates with SQL Server Reporting Services to create a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) solution. SharePoint implements powerful crawling, integration, and reporting features to indentify, extract, and analyze high-value enterprise data that inform critical business decisions.
- Composites: SharePoint is designed with development in mind. Delivering on the promise of versatile deployment options, ASP.NET 3.5 based SharePoint application development enables ‘no-code’ solutions to complicated enterprise issues, while SharePoint’s Visual Studio app allows custom SharePoint development to be deployed for fine-tuning SharePoint to your precise company requirements. Companies with unique business needs will often source custom SharePoint developers to build on and around the framework to tailor the framework to their specifications.
Enterprise Benefits of SharePoint Development
SharePoint is a powerful solution to modern enterprise requirements. Instead of buckling under the overwhelming weight of a whole throng of requirements necessary for the life of a business, companies can consolidate everything under one useful, engaging, and automated software platform. With SharePoint, information and process management tasks can be measured across all employees in a company. Non-technical employees can create and moderate powerful intranet portals, extranets, and websites to streamline information transfer throughout a company network.
One aspect of the logic behind SharePoint is: user-adoption and employee engagement are essential to the success of a network platform within a company. In other words, one can wield staggeringly powerful data management or business intelligence software for a company, yet if employees shy away from usage, the goals of the software will remain unreached. SharePoint seeks to eliminate the lack of cohesion and discontinuities within a company regarding who knows the software, who can update the inventory, who knows how to mine the data, and who knows who to find and analyze it.
SharePoint places everyone in your company on the same page. It is only when this happens that the most precious facets of web application frameworks for businesses (e.g. content management, data extraction, analysis, and performance management) can become productive.
Our Approach—Custom SharePoint Development with ProAce
Our custom software consultants at ProAce boast a wealth of experience in the analysis of company infrastructure and the subsequent pairing with the software platform most apt to drive desired business results. When ProAce is approached with clients who are still operating on ancient data repositories, inefficient reporting operations, and other legacy business intelligence systems, we often discover in Microsoft SharePoint an excellent destination for complete enterprise software platform migration. When we develop with SharePoint, our goal is to replace inefficient, scattered database and enterprise systems with a consolidated, customized software solution that will ramp up capabilities, cost-efficiency, productivity, and other high-value business results.
At ProAce, we believe more is necessary for the success of SharePoint than a simple install of a pre-packaged software solution. The ProAce development team works closely with our clients to analyze the specific needs of the business, discerning how SharePoint might be manipulated to meet those needs, and tailoring the software accordingly through custom SharePoint development. Our consultants exercise a thorough knowledge of SharePoint’s full set of extensibility APIs, allowing us to customize SharePoint applications and implementations that sync with rapid response to your unique enterprise needs.
If you think your business could benefit from custom SharePoint application development, give ProAce a call today. We’ll walk with you step by step, initiating SharePoint, training your group on its usage and benefits, and seeing you through to the vast enterprise benefits SharePoint promises.
