Microsoft SharePoint®
SharePoint has taken root as a wildly popular platform in many enterprises. Its rich set of features and configurability endear it to IT, who deploy it for a variety of purposes. At its broadest, SharePoint can be an Enterprise Portal platform, and taken more narrowly, it can simply be a loosely-related collaboration toolset. Some of our clients are on their second-generation of SharePoint-based Enterprise Portals while others are getting their feet wet with SharePoint as a workgroup and content management tool.
Fundamentally we believe SharePoint is well suited to perform in many platform roles, contributing valuable capabilities to your portal foundation. The key from a programmatic perspective is to identify what SharePoint's role is and direct the activities of project resources accordingly. We see four deployment patterns emerging:
- SharePoint as a vertical portal
- SharePoint as an Enterprise Portal
- SharePoint as a loosely-related collaboration platform
- SharePoint as a tightly-integrated collaboration platform
Looking a little closer for a moment at what is unique about SharePoint: it's extreme configurability enables us to create templates for entire sites, while the demands on governance are more intricate than other platforms. Also, the blurring boundary between desktop tools and portal tools is intensified with SharePoint.
LDS is committed to delivering impactful user-experiences on every key platform. It will come as no surprise that our teams working with SharePoint elicit the same "aha!" reactions from customers, as those working on other platforms.
