The release of Sharepoint 2007 really helped Microsoft stepping a big step forward into the Intranet market in recent years, but what's predicted coming up bigger than ever is Sharepoint 2010, which many industries experts have shown a lot of love with. When working with Sharepoint 2007, I actually got amazed by its usability and how flexible and useful it could be in a business environment. The even more amazing part is, the bigger the business, the more useful Sharepoint could be to the business.
When websites got popular in the dot-com era, everyone jumped into the web design pool, created their own "user friendly" content management system, and insisted how a website could do benefits to a company. Yes, I do believe there are a lot of good companies out there doing really blinging stuff with web interfaces, using really cool technologies; but what upset me, which was also the reason for me to move from working on websites to intranet was the bubble - the dot com bubble! It's really sad to see how many crappy web firms there are in the market everywhere you go and the term "web design" seemed to have gone from the top crown job to an "everyone can do a wesite" type of job. Not only that, the process of educating clients to the point where good websites are costy is like playing piano to cow.
I do believe web design market has grown to its fullness which would end up only the good ones to be able to survive. What I mean by the good ones are those who really know what they are doing and have own strength of creativity and technologies. As for those crappy firms who just try to grab something out of the boom, it's too late! The dot-com bubble had burst long time and what comes next, is the Intranet era!
I believe companies should be investing more money into their own Intranet than an extranet (website)! The amount of benefits a great intranet could boost a business's productivity as well as connectivity between elements within the business.
From the article, Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession, while sales for the Microsoft's flagship Windows fell for the first time ever this year, SharePoint sales grew. The list of 17,000 SharePoint customers includes marquee names like Viacom and Starbucks.
So what's so good about Sharepoint? Why is its name suddenly appearing everywhere you go? The idea of Sharepoint is to enable a business to have an internal portal that all employees could access to and gain information, collaborate and communicate.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 enables organizations to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features. SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in the broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners, and customers to work together in new and effective ways.
Some nice case studies of successful implementation of Sharepoints:
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