The power of SharePoint

Presently I am employed at Logica as a consultant and the projects I am involved in are always Dynamcis CRM centered. However, I used to work at Humandata earlier, run by the SharePoint MVP Göran Husman and I am since this time a devoted SharePoint fan.

At the time I was involved in several SharePoint implementations and we also had SharePoint as our Intranet at Humandata.

A couple of months ago Microsoft Office SharePoint Server was released at Logica as the global Intranet tool and I must say it is amazing to see the true power of SharePoint in a large organisation. At Humandata we were less than 20 employees and we all knew each other and more or less lived in the same City. The story at Logica, however, is drastically different, with around 40 000 employees in 41 countries.

With SharePoint we can now all communicate, I have taken the initiative to start a Logica-Global Dynamics CRM community to connect all the very talented Logica employees that in some way or another work with Dynamics CRM. We are still in start-up mode but the future looks bright and SharePoint is the enabler that makes it all possible.

Apart from this, it is also a great tool for running projects in. Instead of millions of post-its with all the questionsmarks in the project, we use a discussion board. Instead of impossible hierarchies of folder for SureStep documents, we use one Document Library with Meta-data describing what part of SureStep the document should be connected to. This way, documents are easier to find, easier to work with, easier to share and we get version control all for free.

So, if you are part of a large organisation, try to push for the use of SharePoint especially if this organisation is spread over a large geographical area and the use of virtual meetingspaces and focalpoints is of great use.

If you are employed at Logica and would like to be part of the community, just send me an email or leave a comment bellow - they are moderated so I don't have to publish them if they are private.

One thing to be remembered though, even if SharePoint is easy, nobody is born to understand it or the concepts in it, especially if you are used to working in a normal directory based filesystem, so make sure all your users get a good basic run-through and give them the possibility to dig deeper on their own. If you neglect the educating of the users you risk spoiling most of your investment, and the users view of SharePoint, something that is both sad and bad.

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect

Logica Sweden
www.logica.com