On May 27, 2015, Richard Schoen, Director of Document Management Technologies, and Don Donais, SharePoint consultant at Avtex Consulting, presented a roadshow about how to work smarter with SharePoint. The takeaways were important.
80% of Fortune 500 companies today use SharePoint, which Richard noted is an incredible adoption. However, many people don’t realize that they’re using SharePoint on a daily basis to communicate with colleagues both internally and remotely; they refer to it merely as the portal. SharePoint is an incredible collaboration tool for sharing, editing, and storing documents and initiating and acting on workflows, but many users find it difficult to navigate. What’s more, most companies aren’t using SharePoint to its fullest potential.
Before we talk about how to work smarter with SharePoint at your organization, Don noted some important points about changes that may occur with SharePoint in the 2016 version. Don said that Microsoft will likely release new APIs to make it easier to move SharePoint online, helping you to build and maintain an effective hybrid environment, much like the way Microsoft Azure offers cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). This will result in a faster migration than with the standard tool that you have.
Another major takeaway that Don impressed upon the audience was to understand that change is afoot in the coming year and the new version of SharePoint. Next generation portals will become increasingly customizable to help customers fit their applications to their business needs.
How to Work Smarter With SharePoint
So you know SharePoint is a powerful application and you know change is coming. But how can you start working smarter with SharePoint today at your organization? Fortra has a 30-year history of providing effective automation software for the IBM i platform via the Robot product. In the last decade, Fortra has built out its portfolio and successfully developed solutions for business intelligence, security and compliance, Windows automation, and cross-platform enterprise job scheduling, too.
This growing suite of solutions provides customers with unique and effective ways to improve the way they use SharePoint at their organization. More specifically, Fortra offers a suite of products that work to streamline, monitor, and automate SharePoint across diverse platforms in your data center, which gives you the collaboration and monitoring abilities you need to meet the needs of your enterprise.
In the sample workflow, you begin with InterMapper network monitoring software monitoring the network at the macro level. The benefit of having InterMapper monitor every device in your data center is that you’ll know if and when there is an error that directly affects the key machines for your SharePoint implementation. With InterMapper at the helm, you’ll know that your important processes—both SharePoint and otherwise—will continue to run smoothly.
While InterMapper protects your network, your end users go about daily tasks that involve SharePoint files. If a user creates or modifies files, your organization can utilize Automate Schedule to build a cross-platform and application-agnostic enterprise job scheduler. Automate Schedule can monitor for the specific file activity from your end user and use the activity as the basis for initiating a workflow within Automate Schedule. Automate Schedule can then create a record of this file and scheduling event in a database.
The next step in this sample workflow occurs when AutoMate is prompted to process the original file and add it to the SharePoint server using its set of pre-built SharePoint activities that users can build into automation workflows by dragging and dropping tasks. AutoMate has a very close integration with SharePoint, and using this tool is an effective way to minimize the tedium of daily SharePoint tasks for your team by helping them to automate many file and site activities. Thus, with AutoMate’s involvement in this workflow, your original SharePoint file that has been modified is now automatically returned to SharePoint.
Finally, WebDocs provides a way to centrally access and manage all of your organization’s documents, which means that it can help you to manage your SharePoint files easily. In this way, the Fortra solutions for document management, network monitoring, and Windows and cross-platform automation help you to work smarter with SharePoint by providing new ways to streamline SharePoint tasks across the organization.
Conclusion
Don’t let important but difficult business software applications keep you from achieving your goals. Start working smarter with your applications to get the most out of your team’s time.
Curious about these solutions for working smarter with SharePoint? Find links below to begin exploring each product: