Organizations typically have a combination of in-house developed applications, third party information systems, file-shares and document management systems. The information and data contained in these repositories often exists in a silo. Therefore, it is not available to information workers if they even are aware it exists. Portals can deliver a vast amount of value to the information worker, but only when this information and data is made available to them.
Advances in collaboration and integration tool sets, such as SharePoint 2010, introduce enhanced search, system integration and business intelligence capabilities. These capabilities allow the information worker to search across multiple systems, read and write data to and from these applications and systems as well as build dashboards and reports off of the data sets. While not a new concept, enterprise portal projects are becoming more common and are being implemented with greater user adoption rates as a result.
When implementing SharePoint portals for our clients (intranets, extranets and public-facing sites), we leverage our SharePoint Team, User Experience Team and Integration Team across our project life cycle.
Our User Experience Team works with the stakeholders and users to understand requirements and use this information to drive prototype development, interface design, interaction design and branding. These requirements are then digested by our SharePoint and Integration teams, who start working on the technical aspects of the solution. Our SharePoint Team ensures that the implementation of the solution makes appropriate use of native SharePoint features and is consistent with best practices. Our Integration Team ensures data integration efforts are designed and built properly.
Integration efforts can extend well beyond the use of SharePoint’s native integration tools and can require data consolidation, scrubbing and migration efforts. In larger and more complex environments, downstream or upstream data processing rules must be designed to ensure that users are looking at accurate data sets. This may involve the creation of web services, message queue systems and/or extraction, transformation and load (ETL) processes.
It is this additional complexity that requires integration expertise not typically found in traditional SharePoint experts. Allin’s combination of four competencies (User Experience Design, Integration, Infrastructure and SharePoint) enables us to successfully implement integrated SharePoint Portals for our clients.