Corporate SharePoint portal is not only the place to store public documents and maintaining access to it for company employees. Now such portals become single point of entry and informational space embracing all company activities and work histories of each its employee.

• Single company informational space
• Public calendars; data and tasks
• Corporate documents storage with version control support
• Ability to collaborate/teamwork on any type of information (including media)
• Task and project management
• Data integration and visualization from other corporate IT systems (CRM, ERP and others)
• Internal business processes automation (requests, approvals etc.)
• Access to single corporate knowledge base
• Personalized user interface for each employee
• Single sign on user authentication system

Portal allows full automation of all company contractual work: storage, search and approval of documents, application management, business parties’ contacts database, invoicing and invoice monitoring etc.

• Contracts and appendices archive
• Business parties and entities database
• Management of acts of acceptance, invoices and other contract-related documents
• Document approval procedures
• Quick filtering and sorting by document attributes
• Invoicing, invoice monitoring (integration with ERP and accounting)
• Document processing statistics

SharePoint has reach functionality for business processes automation. One of examples would be implementation of purchasing module, which allows company employees to order goods, tools or other things in centralized manner via corporate portal with subsequent requisition approval and processing.

• Collection of purchase requisitions from employees and departments
• Creation of requisition data card with extended attribute set and monitoring of its processing status
• Aggregation of requisitions (for large volume purchases)
• Approval of single and aggregated requisitions
• Approval of payment documents
• Business parties database maintenance for selection of best supplier
• Creation and monitoring of approval tasks
• Notifications for employees about requisition status and completion

Automation of internal organizational procedures and documentation is a thing that can be implemented in corporate portal relatively quickly, which shows to employees and management real benefits of using SharePoint tools.

• Orders
• Managerial notes
• Minutes of meetings
• and other documents

Office management process automation is (together with organizational documentation automation) one of the most important steps in ordering paper-based company activities. Simplification of incoming mail processing and preparation of outgoing mail are the functions that are already implemented using SharePoint in many companies.

• Registration of incoming and outgoing mail
• Automatic recognition of incoming e-mails
• Creation of document data cards
• Uploading of document scans
• Integration with stream scanning systems
• Distribution of documents to interested employees
• Document instructions and assignment of responsible people (if needed)
• Creation and monitoring of document-based action tasks
• Task integration with MS Outlook
• Search and filtering using document attributes and partial text
• Statistics for processed correspondence and tasks completion

Any business processes and procedures consist of separate steps, or tasks performed by assigned employees. SharePoint task center – key area where you can have all tasks and assignments generated in different business process management modules, e.g. contracts approval, preparation of outgoing correspondence or employees’ requests management.

• Task creation and assignment
• Consolidation of tasks from other business modules (documents approval, requisitions, Helpdesk, etc.)
• Notification distribution
• Monitoring of task performance
• Delegating tasks to other employees
• Acting on behalf of other employees
• Outlook integration
• Task performance statistics and reporting

Staff phone book and organizational chart are required in two typical situations: the need to quickly find an employee, linking business processes to certain positions in company hierarchy with the ability to configure and manage access rights and permissions.

• Employee phone book with quick search capabilities using partial first or last name
• Quick search of employees using attributes and organizational chart
• Employee personal pages and profiles
• Organizational chart in the form of expandable tree
• Ability to use two types of reporting: administrative and functional
• Integration with Active Directory and internal HR systems and accountancy

Helpdesk is one of the most often-used business modules in corporate SharePoint portal deployments. It allows employees to easily send tickets using either portal itself or via e-mail, can consolidate and automatically process (filter) tickets from different systems and for different subject areas.

• Gathering and processing of user tickets
• Email and portal form-based tickets
• Ticket status monitoring
• References of user PC hardware and software inventory
• Knowledge base for issues and solutions
• Maintaining statistics of ticket processing

Often that is company’s HR department who drives SharePoint portal implementation. Later portal usually becomes their main tool. One of interesting functional modules is the complex system for maintenance of internal vacancies and new employees’ recruitment and hiring.

• Creation and approval of internal requests for opening new positions and searching candidates for these positions
• Maintenance of open positions and requests database
• CV database; black and white lists
• Add and approve candidates
• One or several steps-based candidate selection and evaluation
• Approval of candidate for certain position
• Preparation and mailing of job offer
• Hiring, induction plan
• Integration with HR systems

Trainings module is often implemented within the scope of HR management SharePoint portal functions. Module functions can vary from more complex – electronic courses maintenance, to simpler, when only employee training history (course completion, testing results etc.) and training schedule is maintained.

• Catalog of available training courses
• Training schedule
• Employee self-registration for trainings
• Personal training program planning
• Company trainer: training performance
• Employee: training completion
• Employee: training evaluation
• Trainer: employee evaluation
• Review of training history and training completion for specific employees
• Overall statistics and reports

When company has few hundreds or thousands employees even simple routine services like requests for passes, stationery, leave information and other simple requests and procedures require ordering and automation. Corporate SharePoint portal can help with all these stuff providing standard approaches.

• Requests for passes and security permits
• Stationery purchase
• Access to internal IT-systems
• Leave approval
• Employee surveys
• Conference room booking
• Greetings to colleagues
• Say «Thank you»
• Many other services

Integration with ERP, CRM, accounting, HR and other corporate business systems can be key task in implementation of complex business processes using SharePoint portal if these business processes covers several areas – from purchasing to HR. Microsoft provides several integration mechanisms in SharePoint portal – from using web-services to Business Connectivity Services configuration. All these allows SharePoint integration practically with any modern IT-system.

• Seamless integration with Microsoft Office products
• Integration with SAP (process integration)
• Integration with accountancy and hr-system (web-services)
• Other systems (with support for web-services, SQL or specialized API)

From technological perspective SharePoint is a platform with a set of various tools and limitless customization and development capabilities. One of key tools are built-in reporting, views and business graphics capabilities. In addition, portal allows including and configuring any other Reporting & BI functionality, which your company may require.

• Consolidation of information from different sources
• Visualization with ability to filter by various parameters
• Report building and printing
• Document publishing based on pre-configured templates
• Data Mining

Industrial portals is a separate SharePoint application. Main advantage here is focusing on various user interface options, data integration and access rights management. Another benefit is existence of many ready to use specialized 3rd party tools (like OSISoft products), which allow quick implementation of data aggregation, visualization and analysis on SharePoint portal. This is implemented using built in visual diagrams, trends and other pluggable web-parts.

• Modeling of production and technological plant structure
• Low level data connectivity tools (SCADA; OPC -> PI Server)
• Industrial and process trends and diagrams for data visualization (PI ProcessBook)
• SharePoint integration – dashboards and alerts for dispatchers and process engineers
• SharePoint integration – reporting
• SharePoint integration – production model visualization and maintenance (PI Analysis Framework)