Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Coordinating teamwork, setting up documents, generating reports, proposals and authorisations, checks and releases: to complete these tasks, a combination of Office components such as Excel or Word documents with Outlook emails is often used.
In many cases, business data stemming from operational systems is transferred manually into MS Office documents, which are in turn forwarded to others per email. After a number of multi-level authorisation and processing steps, the consolidated results are usually once again entered into other IT systems by hand.
These kinds of media disturbances are a thing of the past with SharePoint Server – for the following reasons:
- MS Office documents are “permeable” – for example for figures and business data from other IT systems. Current values can be read in automatically and, if desired, made “visible” to the outside “world” (e.g. lists with computed total lines).
- Documents are no longer coordinated and processed by sending email attachments back and forth, but rather by jointly processing the same document (in structured or unstructured fashion).
- If necessary, frequently recurrent processing flows can be automated using electronic workflows.
With these new options, it is possible to achieve considerable increases in efficiency: multiple versions of the same document are no longer required, eliminating the need for manual consolidation. This avoids errors ensuing from manual processing, saves time and effort and in turn, costs.