SharePoint Overview

__________________________________________________________

Many companies wrestle with the concept of how to connect people to relevant information. As part of this quest, Companies have implemented both internally and externally facing portals to include employee self-service portals, customer self-service portals and partner portals.  By implementing web sites that aggregates relevant information, applications, and services, end users can easily connect to the people, information, and business intelligence they require to make timely, critical decisions.

 Additionally these portal technologies should integrate with Project, CRM and ERP solutions, leveraging familiar interfaces to end users. Ultimately the needs of businesses drive companies to provide web-based solutions that reduce costs, increase employee productivity, and connect with business partners and customers.

 Attain Technologies leverages Microsoft technologies to provide a robust solution that fosters collaboration, enhances productivity and facilitates the presentation of relevant business intelligence to the organization.

 Microsoft offers a variety of technologies that supports this effort, namely SharePoint and the rest of the Office System. Some companies have experimented with SharePoint Services or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) but had mixed results.

 If your business can work with the features that SharePoint provides out of the box, you have a great tool. However, Attain has found that most corporations want more functionality out of their portals than they receive with the standard install of SharePoint.

Some organizations have experimented with SharePoint and have run into issues. Here are some of the main issues that our clients have found:

• There is no knowledge or document management process around uploading documents. How do I get control over my document libraries?
• It is difficult to modify the templates in SharePoint to conform to your corporation’s web or marketing standards.
• Integration with other applications is not out-of-the-box and must be built.
• Creating custom functionality is difficult and finding developers who understand this process is a difficult and expensive process.
• SharePoint can’t scale to address the needs of large corporations.
• Adoption is difficult and training is limited
• Tried to implement a SharePoint solution ourselves and had limited success
• How do I plan an implementation of SharePoint?

How Can Attain Technologies Help?

Attain helps customers realize the potential within SharePoint and strategize with the customer on how best to implement SharePoint. With this roadmap, Attain partners with customers to build a solution that best fits their business environment. Whether it is SharePoint Services or MOSS, Attain works with your vision and business needs. Using SharePoint as the framework, Attain can leverage the built in security, user management, content management, and a large variety of tools the SharePoint API provides. This cuts down on development time and allows us to deliver and install a solution quickly.

Our Current Offerings

• SharePoint Design & Deployment Planning – Attain can assess your current needs and develop a roadmap on how best to deploy SharePoint, to include what features work best for your organization.
• Custom Look and Feel - Don’t like how SharePoint looks out of the box? We can make SharePoint look like any custom web site. As part of the look and feel customization, we can provide our clients with navigation that matches the corporate branding and is more intuitive. Need Silverlight functionality?
• External Web Site – Want to create a more robust company web site that is more interactive with the customers. Attain helps you design and implement externally facing web sites.
• Silverlight Integration - Attain can help design and integrate Silverlight applications into your SharePoint environment.
• Access Control - Need to integrate both external and internal resources to access content but still restrict their access to other portions of the environment. Attain helps organizations build access control process that manages where resources can go on a site.
• Document Management - We create an intuitive way to manage documents and information on sites and a housekeeping process to manage documents.
• Integration with Microsoft’s UC – Integrate presence and communications functionality throughout your SharePoint solution.
• Integration with Outlook -  We provide our clients the means to integrate SharePoint with Outlook so that users can view and search mail right from their personal sites
• Enhanced Search Capabilities - By implementing Enterprise Search and document management techniques, we are able to provide enhanced search capabilities that allow you to easily find your information and become more productive.
• Automating Processes/Workflow – We create workflows to automate manual processes such as reviewing documents, expenses, time reporting, contracts, service requests, and service tickets.
• Knowledge Management - By combining our enhanced search, notification engine, artifact housekeeping and workflow, we provide our clients with a complete knowledge management system.
• Content Management – Want to simplify changing content on the SharePoint sites? We build content management solutions to meet your business needs.

Other Offerings

At Attain Technologies we are always looking for new opportunities to enhance SharePoint...its our passion. As part of this strategy, we have several offerings which include the items listed above plus these:

• SharePoint Deployment Planning Services
• Designing/Building SharePoint Sites
• Implementing our custom pre-packaged templates to enhance operations around events, projects, and training
• Integration with MS Project
• Portfolio Management
• Business Intelligence Integration/Dashboarding/Reporting
• Reporting and Compliance Solutions integrated with Security or Network/System Reporting software.
• Automation and processing
• Complete change control solutions with regards to compliance

If one of these solutions could help you now, contact your Attain representative today.