Riverbank It management

Take a look at this list and ask yourself if your business would run better if you had:

• A dynamic fully-searchable internal web site with company news and announcements, ideas and discussion area, and much more.
• A client area on your network to bring your best clients closer to you.
• A company knowledge base.
• All your business procedures in one place.
• An online staff handbook.

Riverbank clients are discovering the power of SharePoint, and the opportunity it provides to improve their own systems.

Internal web site

SharePoint is designed to be your internal company web site. It gives you a workspace in which you can manage documents, schedules and lists, and hold discussions. This workspace can be available within your office network or via the web.

The SharePoint building blocks are:

• Document libraries with check in/check out and version control
• Announcements and discussion areas
• Calendars
• Wiki
• Full search capability

The best part of SharePoint (more properly known as Windows SharePoint Services) is that it is included with Windows Server 2003/2008. You may well already have SharePoint, or a licence to use it. You just need to start using it. If you don’t have a Windows server we can provide you with a hosted SharePoint site.

Create a client area

One Riverbank client uses SharePoint to provide and maintain a document library for their clients. Because documents can be maintained within the SharePoint environment (with version control) there is no need to e-mail or transfer the finished documents. This makes the management process faster and more streamlined. By giving their clients access to the SharePoint site they also make the client relationship closer and stronger. It’s a win-win.

Knowledge base

Do you need a company knowledge base? Somewhere that you can keep, and find, those gems of information that are normally locked away in the brains of your best members of staff? The answer is a SharePoint wiki. If you haven’t come across a wiki before think of it as a fully searchable container for unstructured information. You can throw almost anything into your wiki and then use the search facility to find what you need.

The problem for one Riverbank client was that people in one section of the business couldn’t find out about things that people in other sections had done. By creating a wiki everyone has the ability to find anything from any part of the business. The company now has the ability to exploit a vital asset - its accumulated knowledge.

Within Riverbank we use a SharePoint wiki to hold those vital IT problem-solving tips. When someone comes across a novel way to solve a problem, it goes into the wiki. Then when we need that solution again in six months time we can find it.

Business procedures

One of our clients works in a safety-critical environment. They use SharePoint to store and manage all their company procedures in document libraries. The version control is important to them, and being able to control the access permissions down to the level of individual documents means that they can be quite clear about who has changed what.

Each document is also tagged with additional data (‘meta-data’) so they can extract documents that relate to particular subject areas, processes or procedures.

Staff handbook

A staff handbook is one of the classic ball-and-chain problems for a small business. You have to spend a lot of time creating a handbook, then it has to be distributed to staff. After that you need to update it and then you have to distribute it again. On top of that you have to make sure that people aren’t using the old version. In short it rapidly turns into a nightmare.

Use SharePoint to manage your staff handbook instead. It’s always digital so you have no distribution costs. Everyone always sees the same up-to-date version. Whenever you make a change SharePoint can automatically notify everyone that there has been an update. And, of course, the staff handbook is fully searchable and accessible to any staff anywhere. It’s a better world to work in, for everyone.

What next?

Riverbank can help you get started, or we can produce an entire SharePoint system for you. Many people find that SharePoint is a great way to get started with a project. Its flexibility gives them the ability experiment and change their system as their needs change and develop.

If you would like to discuss implementing SharePoint in your business contact Riverbank on 01844 278036 or e-mail help@riverbank.co.uk.