SharePoint

Part 1 of 4 - SharePoint Features and Capabilities: The Best and The Worst

Whenever I sit down with someone on the topic of SharePoint, I often start by asking the following questions and usually receive the following answers:

Q: What's the best thing about SharePoint?
A: All of its features and capabilities!

Q: What's the worst thing about SharePoint?
A: All of its features and capabilities!

You see, SharePoint's nemesis is the fact that it can be hard to put it into a single bucket of capabilities. The power that makes it such a force for change and productivity in business is the same power that makes it hard to put walls around. Even after a customer has SharePoint running in their enterprise, which features and capabilities they can and should use can be confusing.

This is why it's important for a SharePoint professional to have a very good working knowledge of the product as well as the ability to draw out their customer's specific pain points. It is vitally important that these be enumerated - this creates a target for SharePoint to be directed towards. It also helps the customer to start creating a definition of what success looks like. If the customer doesn't know what success looks like with their pain points, then no tool—including SharePoint—will be successful in that organization.

Now, if you don't already know all of the features and capabilities of SharePoint, here are a few links I find useful:

• Video showing how SharePoint can be used
• Microsoft site detailing capabilities

Once you have a good understanding of what SharePoint can do, it's time to decide which features your organization should and will use.

If you are still unclear how features in SharePoint are implemented or you just want to test drive the product, please contact me (jeff.deverter@rackspace.com). I will be more than happy to provide you with a complimentary demo environment.

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