By the end of the workshop it was clear to the client that records management was just one facet of their overall business challenge and that SharePoint could facilitate the delivery of their end to end information management requirements. The room was bright; the light bulbs were all switched on!

In conclusion, there’s a life style here that I describe from the professional consultant’s point of view, but which applies almost equally to full time employees in a BA and/or power user role. Work patiently with the experts in your company and extract the core business requirements as best you can. With a deep understanding of SharePoint features and functions to draw upon, more often than not, you’ll be able to answer concerns and offer ways to improve everyone’s work day leveraging core SharePoint features.

With the exception of the forms based authentication module and a handful of InfoPath forms, this project is using nearly all out of the box SharePoint functionality. Before I wrap up this min-case study, I want to point out something very important – no on involved with this project (aside from my company of course) has any idea that a thing called “SharePoint” is playing such a fundamental technical role. Nearly all of my end users view this as “the web site.” Our client values us because we’re solving their business problem. SharePoint is a great technical blob of goodness, but done right, that’s irrelevant to end users. They need a problem solved, not a wonderful blob of technology.

The question of the day comes from Dawn:
Do you have any case studies on companies who have implemented SharePoint as their central communication hub?
Dawn – I do have a white paper in draft form that I can make available to you. It documents the process of setting up SharePoint to manage AIDS Vaccine Research data, [...]