With the document management capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, SharePoint becomes a full-featured solution for managing business documents.
It provides a very rich set of features that provide a typical trust with everything they need to create, store, find and manage almost all their document and record types, from management board meeting minutes to staff records, from GP correspondence to policies and procedures.
Content and document creation and management
There are two common approaches to creating new documents in our SharePoint solutions. For day to day documents a document template is created in a document library; new documents can be created from within the library and will be saved directly within SharePoint (avoiding local or shared drives altogether). For more complex documents, such as new policies or project proposals it is more common to create a collaborative site, where team members will work on the document using the collaboration tools provided. Once complete it would be published from the worksite to the main portal.
Support for rich metadata, workflow, check out/in and granular version control all support the process, while review and expiry functionality ensures time limited documents are acted upon.
Store and Organise Documents
With Microsoft SharePoint organisations can store and organise all ‘public’ business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types, as well as provide different views of the lists of documents based on their metadata. For example, one view might show documents grouped by Directorate, while another lists only active Policies.
Fine security control can limit access to particular folders based on a user’s position or tasks. ‘Single Sign On’ access automatically sets the permissions assigned to different content authors and readers. Content authors have permission to edit certain documents, whilst a reader would not. SharePoint can control access to a document according to a user’s individual access rights, their department, or their manager to ensure that sensitive data is kept confidential.
Slide libraries are a hugely powerful way share and reuse PowerPoint slides, while allowing the communications team to ensure only the most current corporate information is displayed.
Policies and Procedures
All organisations struggle to ensure that their staff have rapid access to only the most current versions of policies and procedures. Not only is this important to avoid litigation risks, but also it saves substantial amounts of time for staff and gives them confidence that they are working within a well maintained and effective governance regime.
Use of powerful SharePoint search, plus carefully architected metadata schema and library views ensures staff don’t lose time when needing to find a document.
We have expertise in rapidly implementing SharePoint policy and procedure libraries. These can define customised document management policies to control item-level access rights, retention period, expiration actions, and document-auditing settings. Integration with familiar client applications (such as Microsoft Word) ensures staff quickly rely on the system.
Addressing this need ensures that multiple versions of key documents are not kept, unregulated, in several locations. Staff find what they need quickly and know that it is current, while version history ensures the organisation knows which policy was in place at a given time should the need arise.
We have extensive experience in matching our clients needs and processes to the capabilities and strengths of SharePoint, with particular emphasis on understanding and implementing metadata across Sharepoint’s sophisticated (and somewhat complex) infomration model (local and site wide metadata definitions, Content Types and library design and views).
