Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 - Collaborative Features
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Perhaps one of the main attractive features you'll find in Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 is the ability tocollaboratewith your teams. You can not only touch base with your colleagues, but you can also share your documents and other information with them. Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 gives your team a central workplace in which to categorize your documents, schedules, and take part in conversations that focus on your topics. Don't think that all of your team members must be within your company in order to communicate with you. They can communicate with you over the extranet.
Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 offers significant security features. For one, you can set up security policies, including creating permissions as deeply as the document or item level. Site managers or other teams can then set up and manage their self-service workspaces and tasks. New features in Microsoft Windows SharePoint include the ability for IT to implement top-down policies for enhanced content restoration and groups. At the same time, employees or partners can monitor others' participation and access, based on your security policy.
You can require that your colleagues must check out the document before they can edit it. You can also keep track of the document's versions. That way, you and your team don't get confused as to which version you're modifying. If you need to look at earlier versions, Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 allows you to recover and view them. If you're concerned about making sure that only a select group can look at certain documents, you can implement security measures with respect to each individual document.
Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 also has some versatile and robust communications features. Send out alerts when you need to inform your team that you've made changes to the documents or schedule meetings. You can also set up announcements or conduct surveys. Another powerful communication feature you will want to take advantage of is setting up discussion boards. Discussion boards enable you to obtain significant information that will help you to make better business decisions.
In addition, Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 allows you to set up forums so that you and your team can brainstorm and capture ideas. Another powerful tool you can use lets you create knowledge bases. Companies are increasingly using them. For example, if your company has a help desk, it's not uncommon for technical support analysts to not only capture the root cause of the problem, but more importantly, to list the steps taken to solve it. That way, other technical support analysts can quickly resolve the same problem when it crops up again. Using a knowledge base not only saves time for higher level IT professionals, but customers as well.
Other popular communication features you can use with Microsoft Windows SharePoint 3.0 include creating wikis and blogs. Wikis have become popular forms of websites because your team members can quickly edit information. Companies use blogs as tools to communicate with not only their employees, but customers. Blogs can focus on products or services that companies are marketing or selling. This can be a great way for companies to garner feedback from customers. Companies can then build upon that product or service's success, try to correct what is wrong with it, or just discontinue it.
If your colleagues travel a lot, then they can still work on documents by using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Though they may be offline, they can still use Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to manage information, including lists, calendars, tasks, contacts, discussion boards, and document libraries. Then when your colleagues are able to get Internet access, they can synchronize those changes.
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