With the recent release of SharePoint 2010 and all its new functional goodness, the temptation to upgrade or install a new instance has become even more tempting. More and more companies are coming around to understanding the benefits that SharePoint can bring to their business and now that many have taken the plunge to roll out Office 2007 (or even 2010!) this is no longer a barrier to integration.

With the evolution of geographically-diverse offices and workers, thanks to the increased availability of broadband and mobile phone access, the case for SharePoint has never been stronger. According to a survey by  CitrixOnline - “70% of employees see access to mobility devices and applications as key to productivity”. As connectivity options become more available, this can only increase further. Having access to corporate information whilst working from anywhere with an Internet connection is a very attractive proposition to employees and employers alike. Flexible working is something that is becoming more and more important in this modern world and offering such facilities can be a big advantage when attracting new recruits into the business.

Establishing a corporate intranet using SharePoint can help your business to achieve this objective. However, SharePoint’s biggest strength is also one of its biggest weaknesses. Time and time again, I come across companies that have happily installed SharePoint within the business and have sat back and expected users to magically produce a fully functioning corporate intranet just through general use. SharePoint is extremely intuitive to most users and anyone with an understanding of how a web page works can come to grips with it. Here-in lies the problem - it becomes a sprawling mess very quickly. Sure, this can be managed via permissions but once ‘Owner’ permissions have been granted to a user at Team Site level, who knows how far down the rabbit hole goes in terms of sub sites, lists and libraries. Trying to find something specific? Good luck. Even assuming that search has been configured correctly, no doubt there will be three or four different versions of the same document in different libraries dotted around the place.

Designing a corporate intranet is not easy but it is something that is vital for a successful implementation. In order for the design to be correct, all the different parts of the business must be consulted and requirements gathered. These requirements should capture how users intend to use SharePoint functionality, how sites should be structured, what lists and libraries they will need and so on. These requirements not only help to establish a great foundation from which to build your SharePoint intranet but can also help to streamline your business and identify less than optimal processes. Holding user workshops will also raise awareness (and hopefully interest!) of the project and inevitably good ideas will come out of them which can be incorporated into the design. It is only once the requirements have been gathered that the SharePoint implementation can be designed in such a way that the structure of the intranet makes sense to those that are expected to use it.

A fully-fledged SharePoint implementation is designed to form the information backbone of your corporation. As such, it will touch upon and affect every area of your business. It should be viewed as a great opportunity to ‘get your house in order’. For example, file shares should be analysed to establish who exactly ‘owns’ files contained within them. One advantage of doing this is that duplicate files and overlaps in information ownership can be identified and dealt with. The owner of individual files will determine under which area of the intranet they will live. Old files should be archived off and the remaining ones uploaded to the appropriate team site and library. If your Active Directory could do with some organisation, this is a great opportunity to get this ball rolling. Organisation Units and Groups can be created to mirror that of the SharePoint structure. This will also make user permissions easier to maintain in the long term.

The ‘look and feel’ of the SharePoint implementation is also very important. Sure, the vanilla theme is OK but it is important that the style of the site is fitting with your corporate branding and colour scheme. It needs to be an extension of your business rather than a separate entity. By approaching your site design in this way, you will get greater buy-in from your users and combined with promoting the site internally, you should start to see its use increase. Ideally, the goal should be to have SharePoint the first point of call when looking for information within the organisation.

Business Intelligence and the exposure of performance management information should also be incorporated into your intranet design. Typically, the implementation of a BI solution built on top of SharePoint is managed via a separate project but, nonetheless, it should be kept in mind when designing your SharePoint implementation. SharePoint 2010 has seen much tighter integration with other Microsoft enterprise products such as Office 2010, Visio 2010, Project Server 2010, PerformancePoint analytics and the SQL Server Business Intelligence stack. Management and operation performance information that was once contained within spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations can be made available via the intranet by publishing them to SharePoint. These documents can be viewed in the browser rather than downloaded to a client machine making access to information much easier and quicker for those working remotely with less than ideal Internet connections. PerformancePoint dashboards with analytical and interactive reports can be built to expose performance management information contained within databases or other data stores within your organisation.

Once you have consolidated all your corporate information into a nice, clean SharePoint intranet, the work does not end here. Good governance is critical going forward to ensure that all your hard work does not go to waste. Periodic reviews of the structure and content of sites should be conducted to ensure that information is not being duplicated across the site or, even worse, being saved to shared drives! Once the intranet is live, there is a compelling argument for removing access to shared drives for this very reason. Improving the site iteratively based on user feedback will go a long way in ensuring that users continue to use the intranet and increased productivity is maintained.

So what are the benefits of all of this hard work? This is a good question to which the answer depends on the extent of the effort that you went to. However, ultimately the benefits should be (at a minimum):

1. Greater accessibility to information for those that have the right to it combined with increased security of information for those that don’t.
2. Elimination of duplicated documents and files.
3. Greater content ‘ownership’ with information stored in intuitive locations.
4. Removal of old, out of date information with a promotion of new and relevant information across the business.
5. Increased productivity of workers by spending less time looking for certain information.

There are many other benefits that SharePoint can bring to your business when designed and implemented correctly. However, a SharePoint project should be taken seriously and investment in requirements gathering and design is critical in its successful implementation.