You should now have a good understanding of SharePoint's functionality and be wondering where and when to start applying functionality to the business collaboration activity. This chapter looks at where SharePoint's functionality can be applied with regards to the following business areas:
Department |
Business Process |
---|---|
Sales Department |
CRM tracking, RFP management and response process, contact management, workflow approval, and pipeline status. |
IT Department |
IT Support, knowledge base, and change/release management. |
Project Management Office |
Project management workbench-Document management, issue tracking, and change orders. |
Human Resources |
Resume approvals, onboarding, and yearly reviews. |
SharePoint's functionality is most appropriately used when a department's or users’ main collaborating activity is mostly dependent on unstructured communications such as e-mail or when third-party applications are not used with both this collaboration and communication processes.
If a business process of third-party application is being considered to be migrated to SharePoint, there are both technological and interpersonal considerations that need to be factored into the decision making process.
In this chapter, where to apply SharePoint's functionality is broken down by department. However, it will be beneficial for you to read the entire chapter and understand where to apply relevant SharePoint functionality to a department's related collaboration activities.
The functionality discussed in this chapter has been explained in greater detail in Chapter 3, SharePoint Team Sites, Chapter 4, List Management, and Chapter 5, Library Management, but from the standpoint of technology functionality. This chapter will discuss this from a business standpoint.
Typical scenario example: the sales team has seven members:
The main challenges of the sales department are:
SharePoint's functionality can be applied to the Sales department to remedy these challenges.
If the sales process is not too complicated, SharePoint can be customized to provide very basic CRM functionality by applying the following high level steps:
Field Name |
Field Type |
---|---|
Estimated close date |
Date |
Status: Won, Lost, Undecided |
Choice |
Dollar amount |
Number |
Note that all fields in the Opportunities Library can be edited by the user in the Word document. This simplifies the user experience when making changes to information as the interface remains the same.
You can see that structuring the information this way has a standard relational database structure of a one-to-many or a many-to-one relationship, which is the same table structure often found in an Access database.
To provide additional user experience, the following bullet points should be reviewed and applied by the reader:
The type of RFP received by an organization will determine how the sales teams will respond, particularly if industry vertical expertise is required. A useful feature within SharePoint to assist with this process is called the Rule Based Submission. This feature lets you define rules on a folder for the routing of documents on a timely basis. These are settings that the SharePoint administrator can configure. When a document is uploaded to the folder, depending on a defined rule, it can be moved to the correct library/folder because rules are dependent on the metadata that the user has associated with the document. This is an example of the vertical of the RFP document type.
This saves time for users because they no longer need to navigate to a specific location within a document library; it is done automatically for them!
To do this, set up the Content Organizer feature that must first be enabled on the Site:
This is done via Site Settings, (Manage Site Features | Site Actions), and creates a document library named Drop Off Library.
After enabling the feature, go to Site Administration and click on Content Organizer Rules:
This displays a form where you can add the routing criteria. In the following example there is a rule called RFP that will move all documents with the keyword Gov
to the folder Gov
in the RFP document library.
In the following screenshot, the Managed Keywords can be changed to Gov and the uploaded document will trigger the Content Organizer Rule RFP Gov so that the document will be copied to the Gov
folder in the RFP's library. Regardless of where the document was uploaded to, the item will be redirected to the Drop Off Library before being routed elsewhere. Users will be able to see the final location of the document. Because this content indexing is automatically done by this rules engine, there is less user error and more confidence that the information in the target location is correct.
Because the sales contacts are now stored in the Contact centralized list that can be synchronized with Outlook, there is the ability to perform an e-mail mail merge (e-mail blast) using these contacts. This can be done by performing the following steps within Microsoft Word:
You can now send e-mails to contacts regarding upcoming events.
The preceding steps assume that the SharePoint contact list is connected to your Outlook. If this is not already done you can enable this setting by performing the following steps:
This SharePoint list is now connected to your Outlook. The list in Outlook is available when you are offline, and if new items are added to the list in SharePoint or Outlook, the content will synchronize.
Generally, a sales department collaborates with e-mail more than other departments because so much information is received from outside of the organization by e-mail. Using SharePoint's e-mail-enabling feature of lists and libraries to store and reference this content is a huge win.
It is common that sales material such as price sheets and product literature from a third-party is e-mailed to a sales person and is of interest to other co-workers in the department. Instead of that person forwarding the e-mail to the sales department, this e-mail could be forwarded to a SharePoint library and categorized using the subject field of the e-mail.
The library will store the attachments from the e-mail in a folder.
A daily alert subscription can be set up on the library to notify the sales department when content is added. This method of document categorization is very effective in storing content that can be quickly referenced, with minimal effort from users.
An e-mail-enabled team sales discussion list can also be created to capture sales-related activities, or industry-related news, with a daily alert to the sales group.
With both examples there are a few observations of the small yet valuable benefits that SharePoint is providing:
We have noticed that often co-workers are reluctant to e-mail FYI reference information to colleagues because people complain they receive too many e-mails. With the SharePoint approach of a daily notification from a SharePoint list, the e-mails are reduced and the content is searchable.