Six Important things that every manager should know regarding the Microsoft SharePoint platform

It would be great if a manager could just quickly find access to company information, work closely with teams from various locations and set up an extranet to share documents in a secure manner with major clients. This could be done and all with SharePoint.

For managers considering adopting the business platform to the enterprise, here are six key concepts that they should be aware of.

1. SP is mega-popular. It is one of the fastest-growing apps in Microsoft's history. In 2009, it generated $1.3 billion in revenues from an installed base of over 100 million users. The sales continue to rise and the platform is considered the most widely used document-and collaboration-centered tool. What this could mean for manager is that it is a top-rated product that would be around for years.

2. It is a lot of things to many people. Far beyond one app, the system is a full-featured suite of various applications. These include collaboration tools, content management, business intelligence, project and workflow management and enterprise search. Organizations use it for a lot of various things, or to perform the same thing in a lot of ways. For a manager, this could mean a lot of apps that could be set up in various ways. The management should be able to define how it would be used.

3. SP relies on a lot of technologies. For it to work properly, all the other technologies should run perfectly. These include SQL databases, Windows, Active Directory, IIS or Internet information server, domain name system, enterprise networking and more. Any glitch, misconfiguration or failure in any of the components could cause the program to fail. It is paramount to have technical support and system administration as part of the initial planning.

4. Making a plan before adopting the platform. It makes sense to plan for how the team could use it best. At a minimum, the plan must cover taxonomy for data stored, which pieces would be used and by whom and who would support every group of users. Managers must ascertain that a sensible plan is in place to set up the platform and storing information with it.

5. Rackspace has end-to-end expertise. A world leader in hosting, Rackspace acknowledge Windows expertise and named as Microsoft partner of the year thrice. It hosts hundreds of SP systems for enterprise clients, with expert teams on hand to handle system administration 24/7. For the management, hosting the tool at Rackspace provides a winning combination, which is power and flexibility and supported by an acknowledged leader with end-to-end Microsoft technologies expertise.

6. Supporting the program requires special expertise. Business users could draw on the tools to develop mini applications to team members. However, these users are not likely trained in best software development practices, so the homegrown apps could be full of unpredictable bugs. Thus, special expertise is critical. For managers, it may not be realistic to expect the IT team to support a major app by themselves. It is necessary to hire the services of SharePoint experts for this matter and even consultants.