Each organization works differently; the same can be said of the individuals that work within these organizations. There is no right or wrong way to work, as long as the tasks and goals are accomplished; Microsoft recognized this fact. It then incorporated this philosophy into the Communities portion of SharePoint Foundation by providing collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and locate business information.
With SharePoint Foundation 2010, you can manage all of these tools from a single platform; thus, you can mix and match the tools in ways that work for you. With SharePoint 2010 Communities, you can be more creative and productive while at the same time knowing that you are working in a secure and well-managed environment.
With SharePoint 2010 Communities, you can work with your team in the manner that you want by using a full set of collaboration tools, from blogs to workflows, and team sites to tagging. SharePoint is a single, flexible platform that makes it easy to manage these tools and design the right collaborative experiences for different business needs.
SharePoint Foundation 2010 is secure, easy to manage, and can be scaled to the size that you need. With granular security and privacy features, your team will be able to work knowing that their content is safe.
Your team already uses several other technologies; SharePoint Foundation 2010 is not necessarily designed to supplant these. In fact, SharePoint is designed for you to be able to use your other technologies seamlessly through the SharePoint interface.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with Office 2010, which is the de facto productivity platform for much of the business world. SharePoint works seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft Business Productivity infrastructure, including Office applications, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics. Because SharePoint does adhere to open standards, you can also use third-party applications and systems.
Using Business Connectivity Services, you can easily reveal information located in other business applications through the SharePoint interface.
Your colleagues can set up their own individual profile page in SharePoint Foundation 2010 called My Profile. These pages contain information about employees including biographies, job titles, location, contact information, interests and skills, and previous projects.
This information might sound unneeded at first glance, but think back to a time when you needed people to assist you with a project that required certain skills or experiences; you might have been hard pressed to locate the correct skills in a timely manner. With the My Profiles pages, you can now search for the expertise and skill set that you need within your organization’s workforce.
By using tags, you can collect and manage content for your projects from the vast amount of information that your organization currently contains. Not only can you search for content, but through the use of tags and ratings, you can see rather quickly how useful the content will be for your requirement, based on the experiences of others.
Perhaps your organization is large and dispersed across many regions. With SharePoint Foundation 2010, in addition to the colleagues with whom you interact every day, you can also receive suggestions from SharePoint about colleagues whom you did not even know exist. Based on your reporting structure, communities memberships, email distribution lists, Office Communicator contact lists, and analysis of most common Office Outlook email recipients, you will be presented with colleague suggestions regarding individuals who might be of interest to you or vice versa. With this new functionality, you can finally locate talented people that are doing the same types of things that you’re doing.
Most organizations have large, confusing organization charts. With SharePoint, you can establish the colleagues, managers, and direct reports that your contacts have, thus saving you time when searching for resource connections within your organization.
Content within your organization is growing exponentially by the day, but in some areas, it’s not the amount of content that is produced but rather the quality of that content that assists users with accomplishing their tasks and goals. In the past, if you searched for information about a subject, you would receive results but you couldn’t determine if the content was relevant to what you were working on. With ratings, your organization can rate SharePoint pages, lists, libraries, and individual documents by using a five-star rating system.
You can create pages that provide information from multiple sources. In doing so, you can receive a more complete view of a topic or subject. With SharePoint 2010, you can combine the powerful ease of wikis with the functionality of Web Parts.
Your organization has a lot of talented people working within it. Unfortunately, even with the vast amount of communications tools available today, a lot of their ideas, suggestions, and opinions remain unknown. This could be due to them not having a convenient place to express this information. SharePoint 2010 solves this issue with blogs, which give your organization a place where this valuable content can be captured and acted upon. Through the new SharePoint ribbon, formatting blog text and uploading images are easy.
SharePoint 2010 gives you a personal, private SharePoint site called My Site, on which you can store and manage documents, favorite links, a personal blog, and wiki pages. You can customize your pages and set access and permission levels for any content in the section.
A lot of people think visually; as such, SharePoint comes with the ability to help people recognize each other via profile photos. Users can also use presence information to email, instant message, or call someone with the click of a button. Imagine being able to read a white paper, and then clicking a button to talk with the author via telephone, instantly.