We've learned from our work with SharePoint for various medical devices clients that creating "pretty" functionality means thinking quite a long way past "Out of the box" and applying some "outside of the box" approaches. Content Formula have developed several good looking and interactive applications using a combination of Flash, JQuery and HTML/CSS. None of these required any SharePoint development, instead using standard SharePoint features and some creativity from our developers! Because of this, they cost our clients a lot less to develop than if we'd used the in-house development team.

This is just a little taste of the sort of things you can create with some good SharePoint knowledge, lateral thinking and just a dash of wizardry. Read on...

Most intranets are largely static sites. On its own, an intranet is essentially a shared drive, serving up centrally stored documents alongside internal articles or communications. Some organisations use words such as “communication hubs” to describe them, but for the most part that communication is one-way.

These days, however, an intranet really can be a hub for your company. The intranet portal now closely mirrors employees’ expectations of world wide web functionality. Systems such as Microsoft SharePoint allow users to communicate with each other and collaborate, much as they would using social media tools such as blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

There are a number of capabilities that you can implement relatively easily, with SharePoint in particular making many of them available as standard.

Read on…

SharePoint 2010 is in beta testing, with a probable release date somewhere in Q4 this year. In the new release of the collaboration platform, emphasis seems to be placed on breaking out the roles of people involved in the production of a SharePoint intranet, and the access to resources as needed by people in those roles.

SharePoint 2010 looks to be the biggest update in the Microsoft Office family this year, as all communications so far indicate that other Office applications will only undergo minor tweaks.

So what are the big changes for SharePoint?

Read on…

SharePoint has launched a revolution in the workplace. Thanks to its easy-to-use collaborative features all employees can now publish information about their projects, initiatives and skills onto the corporate intranet.  We hear stories of blogging CEOs; departmental wikis that allow everyone to post the solution to their problem; forums buzzing with activity. It’s like Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia all rolled into one. Oh, and don’t forget Google.

Sadly, reality in most companies doesn’t look like this. A typical SharePoint intranet is made up of many, many pages containing poor quality content. There’s an abundance of uploaded Office documents with filenames that tell you very little about the contents (do you really want to click on “pm_update.ppt” to find out what it’s about?). The countless forums you come across contain one or two obviously planted (and unanswered) posts from last year. Content that you do take the time to read is poorly laid out, badly written and boring. Images are either massive and take an age to download or they have been distorted and shrunk beyond recognition. Jo User is poorly served. Read on…

One thing we notice when we’re looking at large intranets is the sheer number of ‘external’ attachments that they often have. Rather than displaying content on HTML pages, many intranets make users download PDFs and Word DOCs.

These documents have their place online. They’re great for larger articles or graphic-heavy content. They’re also good for templates and policies – essentially, things that a user might want to print and read, or that don’t need to be changed. They’re also good when an intranet relies on users to upload content, as templates can be provided. Read on…

SharePoint has been the buzzword lately around the water cooler in our office. More and more of our clients are deploying it as their intranet system of choice. This popularity is reflected in its sales: Microsoft expects SharePoint sales to hit $1 billion this year, and more than 100 million licenses have been sold since the product was launched in 2001. Read on…

The 5 worst things you can do to your intranet

Some companies see their intranets much as they do potted plants: mainly decorative, placed with the intention of cheering up the workplace. Like plants, intranets appear easy to maintain at first glance – but this is not the case. Intranets are fickle and easy to kill: too little attention and the site will wither and die; too much water – or information – and it will drown in a puddle of inaccessibility. Read on…