More than twenty business and IT leaders gathered on March 16, 2011 to participate in DMC’s Team Collaboration Breakfast Workshop hosted at Microsoft’s Midwest Headquarters in Downers Grove.

Led by Rick Rietz, DMC’s Director of Consulting Services, the workshop focused on how to make the switch to a collaborative company culture by applying technology like Microsoft SharePoint to ease the transformation. Participants were treated to a series of ideas and success stories about making change take hold in organizations where change is difficult to make happen. Each guest completed a Team Collaboration Playbook with dozens of exercises aimed at creating a personal plan for creating a culture of collaboration in their organization. A demonstration of SharePoint 2010’s communication, collaboration and dashboard features concluded the event.

Everyone in attendance also received a copy of the Heath Brothers’ best-seller Switch. Switch uses a three-part theme (rider, elephant, and path) to illustrate the challenges most organizations face in creating change and to suggest strategies to make change last. Attendees learned the importance of motivating the emotional side (elephant), appealing to one’s logical perspective (rider), as well as creating an easy path for people to follow when attempting to create a lasting organizational change. The concepts of Switch provided a fun and relatable theme throughout the workshop.

Rick Rietz noted “Making it easy to share ideas and knowledge with others is essential to establishing a culture of collaboration. Participants who had not adopted SharePoint were very encouraged to see how SharePoint 2010 made it easy for non-technical staff to contribute their ideas and knowledge to the organization.” Rick was surprised by the large number of workshop participants who were already using SharePoint. He added, “However, I was not surprised that many of them had only scratched the surface of SharePoint’s collaborative capabilities. Several of these participants told me they learned a lot about SharePoint today and how to make lasting change take root in their organization.”

Taking Next Steps

With over 100,000,000 world-wide users, Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as the de facto collaboration platform for business. SharePoint provides businesses with a cost-effective way to leverage the Microsoft technology they already own to drive their business to operate more efficiently and more competitively through a multitude of capabilities.

The presentation slides and selected screenshots from the workshop are available for viewing. For more information about SharePoint’s features, visit Rick’s video blog: Feature Comparison of SharePoint 2010, Foundation, MOSS, and WSS, as well as SP v. Google Docs blog.

To request a consultation on implementing a SharePoint collaboration portal or a SharePoint dashboard to share information, please contact Rick Rietz at 312.386.7463 or rick.rietz@localhost.

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The short answer is Google Docs/Sites is a great tool if you do not have an enterprise collaboration platform at your disposal, and you need to get a document sharing site up quickly. However, Google Docs/Sites falls way short in providing the breadth and depth of features that Microsoft SharePoint offers.

SharePoint is a true enterprise platform with capabilities that extend beyond document management and collaboration (e.g. Intranet, Extranet, Search, Workflow, and KPI Dashboards). If you have a dozen or more computer users in your organization who need tools other than email and network drives to collaborate, you should strongly consider an investment in the SharePoint platform. Office 365’s SharePoint Online subscription is a terrific value (a business with fewer than 300 users can get SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Skype for Business, and OneDrive for Business all for $5/user per month). Microsoft even offers a free on-premises version of SharePoint (SharePoint Foundation) for smaller organizations, along with premium versions for larger organizations.

Analysis Notes

I’ll try to keep my analysis short and simple by not debating the merits of cloud-based versus premise-based solutions (both Microsoft and Google offer cloud-based solutions for a monthly fee). A comparison of cloud-based document authoring tools (Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs) is also beyond the scope of this particular blog entry. Instead, this blog entry will focus on providing a functional comparison of the document management and collaboration features of these offerings.

Document Management

From a document management perspective, Microsoft SharePoint and Google Docs have compelling offerings. Both provide a browser-based user experience for managing documents in a central location and keeping track of a document’s version history.

SharePoint includes a wider variety of document management features than Google Docs, including:

• Metadata tagging to help you organize and find documents quickly
• Check-in/Check-out to prevent multiple users from editing a document at the same time
• Document sets which allow a group of related documents to be treated as a single piece of content that share metadata and version history
• Records management for managing the lifecycle of documents and providing for the ability to place documents into a legal hold state
• Workflow processes may be triggered (e.g. approval/publishing of content) whenever a document is added, changed, or removed

Google Docs may be a better fit than SharePoint in some circumstances:

• Google Docs is quite a bit easier to set up and configure than SharePoint, so you should be able to get started in less time (although SharePoint’s Active Directory integrated same sign-on capabilities are probably well worth the extra setup time)
• Organizations with only a simple need to share documents may find Google Docs easier to use
• Google Docs is often a good fit for organizations with ad-hoc teams that must be brought together quickly (Microsoft’s Office 365 Groups offering is also very nimble and provides this capability)
• Google Docs will likely take less time to implement than SharePoint; you will likely need a Microsoft Partner to assist you with a SharePoint implementation

If you are looking for a document management solution that supports day-to-day employee and inter-departmental document sharing as well as special projects, then SharePoint will be a better fit for your organization in the long-run. If you just need a quick and dirty solution for an ad-hoc project, then Google Docs is probably a better way to go.

Collaboration

SharePoint and Google Docs with Google Sites are pretty far apart on the maturity scale – SharePoint has been around since 2001 and is a stable platform for small & mid-sized organizations, as well as large enterprises; Google’s Docs with Sites was released in 2008 and has seen limited adoption, primarily with smaller organizations.

Both SharePoint and Google product suites include document management systems and the ability to create collaboration sites, but SharePoint includes quite a few additional features. SharePoint is often referred to as a Swiss army knife of collaboration and office productivity features.

Feature Comparison

SharePoint features that are absent from Google’s offering include:

• Workflow to automate and manage business processes
• Enterprise search capabilities to index content on your network drive (as well as the content you store inside SharePoint)
• Configurable lists to capture metadata when storing documents
• Centralized task lists to replace spreadsheets (great for managing projects)
• SharePoint dashboards can integrate data from other systems to track your Key Performance Indicators
• Tight integration of Documents, Tasks, and Calendars with the Microsoft Office Suite (e.g. updates made in Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will automatically update the central copy inside SharePoint)

Permission Management

SharePoint and Google Sites now have similar capabilities when it comes to permission management. Prior to recent updates, Google Sites allowed you to only define who can view content and who can edit content on each site. Since 2007, SharePoint has allowed administrators to identify groups or individuals who may view some portions a site’s content, but not necessarily everything. Similarly, SharePoint allowed you to specify groups or individuals who modify some pieces of content, but not necessarily everything.

Market Share

The organization adoption level for Google sites is pretty tiny when compared to the adoption level of SharePoint. A few notable Microsoft customers switched from MS Office (Word/Excel/PowerPoint) to Google Docs a few years ago, but generally speaking, Google Sites will only be found in some smaller organizations.

Conclusion

Overall, SharePoint is still a category killer and the clear winner when it comes to document management and collaboration solutions. For good reason, there are over 190 million users of SharePoint across 200,000 organizations worldwide!

Learn more about DMC’s SharePoint Consulting Services and contact us to get started on your next PLC Programming project.

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In this video blog, I describe some key factors to closely consider when planning your SharePoint Portal.

Functional Planning:

• Features – Collaboration, Business Processes, Content Management, Search, Web 2.0, and KPIs/Dashboards
• Versions – SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Foundation, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0), and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)
• Portal Taxonomy – Site map and structure to make it easy to find content on your SharePoint Portal

Technical Planning:

• SharePoint Farm Architecture – Single-server or Multi-server farm; Failover and redundancy
• Technical Infrastructure – Hardware sizing; SQL Server Express or Standard; 32-bit or 64-bit

Implementation Planning:

• Resources – Project Manager, Business Analyst, SharePoint Developer; Internal or External leadership
• Cost – Software licensing, Hardware infrastructure, and External labor
• Schedule – Phased or Big-bang; 6 weeks or 6 months

Related DMC SharePoint Video Blogs:

Automating a SharePoint Dashboard is Essential

Feature Comparison of SharePoint 2010, Foundation, MOSS, and WSS

I hope you found this video blog informative.  Please feel free to get in-touch with me directly (rick.rietz@localhost) if you have questions about planning your SharePoint Portal or need help implementing SharePoint to maximize its benefit to your business.

Learn more about DMC’s SharePoint consulting services.

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Microsoft awards competencies to partners who have demonstrated expertise by certifying multiple developers in a particular technology and producing multiple customer references for successful work completed within the competency area. In addition to awarding this elite credential to DMC, Microsoft also grants DMC access to exclusive Microsoft training and support programs focused on the SharePoint platform.

Microsoft SharePoint is an enterprise portal that can be configured to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites for both small companies and large corporate enterprises. SharePoint is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft, with over 17,000 companies adopting the platform and over 100 million licenses sold worldwide. With SharePoint, an organization can:

• Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities, such as document review and approval, project management, and issue tracking.
• Provide executives and managers with at-a-glance dashboard views of company goals and key performance indicators by consolidating business-critical information from multiple systems into one central location.
• Find information quickly with powerful search capabilities, including a full-text indexing of all documents on a network drive, as well as content added directly to SharePoint.
• Facilitate collaboration activities between employees, third parties, and customers without compromising confidential business information.

DMC has maintained its Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for 6 consecutive years. In addition to the Information Worker competency, DMC has also earned Microsoft competencies for Custom Development Solutions, Business Intelligence, and Data Management Solutions.

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