1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
SharePoint is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications,
e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies
how people interact with content, processes, and business data. This tight
integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ
services themselves and facilitates product adoption.
2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking, and
reporting common business activities such as document review and approval, issue
tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without
any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web
browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience.
3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over
content.
By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and
expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance
regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be
controlled and managed effectively. And you can reduce litigation risk for your
organization.
4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business
value.
Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval
and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual
content is simplified through new document library templates that are
specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version
and different translations of a document.
5. Simplify access to both structured and unstructured information across
disparate systems.
Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business
systems like SAP and Siebel through SharePoint. Users can also create
personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by
dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document
Repositories help your organizations store and organize business documents in
one central location.
6. Connect people with information and expertise.
Enterprise Search incorporates business data along with information about
documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results.
Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the
relevance of the results, so you can easily find what you need.
7. Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic
forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers,
partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules
help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated
into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual
data re-entry.
8. Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel
spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on SharePoint.
Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and
up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded
in the documents (such as financial models).
9. Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting
business-critical information in one central location.
SharePoint makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence
(BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from
disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web
Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data
connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single
place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.
10. Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and
Internet applications across the enterprise.
SharePoint is built on an open, scalable architecture, with support for Web
services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access
Protocol (SOAP). The service has rich, open application programming interfaces
(APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide
integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new
non-Microsoft IT investments.
