Building Sharepoint for Business Verticals
// July 13th, 2009 // Sharepoint
Ever since the release of MOSS 2007, the growth of businesses leveraging Sharepoint as a tool has been huge. During my time as a consultant, i have witnessed Sharepoint (WSS and MOSS) being used in many different avenues or lines of business.
Some of the projects i’ve worked on have tailored Sharepoint to work as a Fleet Management Software, making effective use of lists and dashboarding using dataviews. Others have included using it as a News, Events and Announcements Source in a collaborative solution, another used it for its powerful Forms and Workflow capability as a store for common forms such as Leave Application, New Employee Application and Travel Requests processes, whilst some have used it as more of a Reporting Dashboard making use of the KPI’s, SQL Reporting Services Webparts and Performance Point Reports. I havent even expanded on its other capabilities in terms of document management or search in which we have provided multiple solutions for.
With all this functionality it seems that many businesses should and could incorporate Sharepoint as a tool. The growing trend in the past few months and possibly since its inception is start targeting the business verticals given Sharepoint’s expanse of opportunity in each section of the business.
Whilst some companies cater to all parts of the business such as Bamboo Solutions or Kwizcom or there’s Nintex’s Workflow 2007
, some focus on the business verticals such as Wennsoft’s Project Management Portal.
This seems to be the future of this highly scalable product where niche solutions and modules which target core areas of any particular business. With Sharepoint’s vast upgrade from Microsoft Sharepoint Portal 2003, came the ability to easily extend Sharepoint’s functionality with the use of features. Webparts, Custom Field Types and Workflows (using the VSTO power tools) can all be packaged up into WSP files – A Sharepoint soultion file. These files, using the Sharepoint Installer are designed such that your custom modules (WSP files) may be deployed easily between sites or when migrating.
Its no secret that these products has been around for a while, but i feel that Sharepoint consulting companies and consultants alike have failed to capatilize on niche solutions, solutions which based on a licensing structure perhaps, extending the core functionality with a solidly packaged product, may be deployed to multiple customers in a short period of time. Microsoft suggested the idea by releasing their free Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 but they are just base templates which definitely provide a quick-win for small deployments, but arent specialized for any particular vertical solution.
Looking around the web however, we see that niche solutions around a large scale product drive business by leveraging existing frameworks. Some web companies have made substantial sums of money, or gained a large user base just from these tactics. Twitter is a prime example of this with products such as twitpic, tweetdeck, tweetie, twiterrific – the list goes on. Facebook, where the applications they released used the same model, leveraging existing functions of a core product. Yes these arent quite the same, as they leverage a core userbase from their product, whilst Sharepoint is a stand alone system….but you get my point – they use an existing product to sell theirs.
With all this in mind, with so many existing tools to extend Sharepoint, is it not wise to target a vertical, study their business, determine the setbacks and create a product leveraging off Sharepoint’s strong base features to extend Sharepoint and provide unique functionality and strong solutions for these verticals?
Here’s hoping we begin to see this movement from Sharepoint Solution companies worldwide.
