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SharePoint is really a collection of capabilities. At its heart, it is a Portal that exposes information customized for a particular user. It has extended functionality to quickly build features inside this portal to enable Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Search. It has ventured into Social Computing and Collaboration by creating shared work spaces, supporting blogs and wikis and allowing people search. With the inclusion of PerformancePoint in its licensing, it also becomes a strong Business Intelligence offering, though it will require expanded knowledge of that capability to implement. It starts to break down when pushed to work as a Business Process Management Suite or Application framework.

Not at all. The problem here is the way you think about your projects. If you are consistently talking about “implementing SharePoint” you are going in the wrong direction. If you are talking about implementing any platform, you are setting up for failure. Many of the problems we run into with SharePoint and other platforms arise from focusing on the technologies.

Most organizations have been using Excel to do analysis, create charts and design dashboards for years, yet there is a lot of functionality in Excel that is not easily accessed in SharePoint, sometimes even for those with Excel Services. The question becomes, how does one translate their work from Excel to SharePoint? This means more than linking to an Excel workbook in a Document Library; rather, it requires displaying the charts and dashboards directly within SharePoint.

Have you even wanted to moderate documents or list items in SharePoint?
There is a built-in feature called “Content Approval” that lets you do this! When content approval is used on a list or library, this means that any item that is added or changed will have to be approved or rejected by the moderator before it is available in the list for everyone to see. The person who submitted the item will have the ability to look at a list of their submitted items and their statuses, with the capability of being alerted when the approval status changes. The moderator will be able to look at a list of items pending approval.

There are several ways to create a media center in SharePoint. In this screencast I show the structure of a document library that manages content display, and then use a customized list to access videos stored off the SharePoint server.

Many times I find people looking in the wrong direction when trying to find a SharePoint solution to one of their business problems. In this case, the question isn’t “How can I use SharePoint to combine multiple documents into a single, master document?” The real question is “How can I combine multiple documents into a single, master document?” It has nothing to do with SharePoint… the documents just happen to reside there.

With him being a novice to Sharepoint, I was able to really relay best practice decisions. Other more experienced Sharepoint users aren’t as open to these ideas in the collections they have built up. He appreciated and respected the guidelines I was offering. Not once did I mention the term metadata when referring to this column. That probably would have derailed the train and lost my user. Instead, I just stated this column will store information particular to the file being uploaded. The reality is that this bit of information is acting in the same way a folder does, without the physical structure that he was used to. He was a bit confused with this at first, but it became real clear, real fast when we uploaded 2 files with different metadata tags and they were grouped nicely.