Sharepoint & Alternatives

There are several aspects to Collaboration in the Cloud. Instant Messaging (Office Communications Online), Video Chat (Google Talk) , Web Conferencing (Live Meeting), Shared Calendars - the very essence of moving your Company systems to The Cloud helps your company collaborate more efficiently. This page focuses on workspaces where you can store documents, discuss projects, brainstorm, create email alerts, calendar entries, timelines and design systems to help you manage your specific business processes.

Collaboration systems in the cloud work in much the same way as many businesses operate systems such as SharePoint at the moment (SharePoint Online is part of the Microsoft BPOS offering). Setting up an in-house SharePoint system can be an expensive business, especially for smaller companies you can find out more about what SharePoint is here. Alternatively, you can see what new competition SharePoint has been confronted with due to the establishment of Software as a Service and we provide information of these new competing services such as Google Sites and Zoho Projects. The real advantage of Software as a service is that you can use all of the advanced features and functions of these systems at a fraction of the cost as you will only be paying for a system as big as your company requires and for the number of people using it.

Sales of SharePoint have done nothing but increase since it was originally introduced and these document management systems are very powerful. Rather than simply using a shared drive where one person can edit a document at a time, some offerings allow several people to work on the same documents at once. You can create timelines for business projects, wiki sites, discussion forums, Team sites, Blogs and manage meeting rooms through meeting workspaces. All of these sites can be directly integrated with Users calendars making it easy to organise people’s time. You can easily keep track of who is doing what, communicate on project specific forums store your documents look at previous drafts of documents.

There are differences between the offerings and many of these are reflected in the prices of certain offerings. Independent reviews have pointed out that SharePoint is significantly more versatile than Google sites. It has more options and you can combine concepts to create custom sites that lend themselves perfectly to your business. Google sites uses a more straightforward standardised system with less options.

A blog site, is basically a way for users to disseminate information to co workers, employees, press or the general public. You can choose who can see which blogs, use them for your employees or attach them to your website if you wish and a public blog can be a great way to help publicise your business. You can produce numerous versions of each type of site within your package – the only cost is the amount of storage space you require for all of your sites combined. The following videos use SharePoint as a base to help you understand what you can do with each collaborative site:

Team Site

Document Workspace

Meeting Workspace (How to create a recurring meeting)

Wiki Site (1 minute intro)