Office 365 is where your favourite productivity tools meet the power of the cloud. Have your trusted email, communication and collaboration apps virtually anywhere at any time backed by the reliability of Microsoft.
With our range of expertise across design, business analysis, development and user adoption, we deliver SharePoint projects from conception to completion.
Our focus from the outset is to achieve your programme or project goals and will integrate our Making Improvements Real methodology across the end-to-end delivery process. We look to work alongside your team or partners as we know that any successful solution is only sustainable thanks to the people who stand behind it.
We have a long history of implementing both out-of-the-box and customised SharePoint solutions that have a high level of technical complexity. We can do this thanks to the expertise we hold across our teams - including custom development on the Microsoft .Net technology (the foundation for SharePoint), data management and analytics.
As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, our development teams are well versed in SharePoint best practice, and we take pride in our continuous efforts to recruit and maintain leaders in architecture, development and quality assurance. The way we work is underpinned by our benefits-lead approach and user-centred design.
Through the many SharePoint solutions that we have developed, we have built relationships with specialised partners whose leading technologies add real value on top of the core SharePoint technologies that are available. These partners provide technology to aid the delivery of solutions where data storage, data migration, data archiving, and workflows are required. Details of our partners in the SharePoint space can be found here.
Intranets
If you are looking to develop an Intranet that allows you and your colleagues to easily gather and share information, communicate, and provide secure access to crucial information, SharePoint is a very cost-effective, easy-to-manage choice.
Collaborative Working
Microsoft SharePoint makes it easier for people to work together by providing a platform that supports various communication channels and the sharing of information and knowledge. From sites that enable cross functional teams to work together (team sites) to enterprise content management and search solutions, SharePoint's components and capabilities combine to support compliance, collaboration and workflow with great efficiency.
Centralise knowledge
Information is held in many places in organisations such as emails, network shares, local drives and people's heads. Making the information and knowledge centrally available means users will spend less time searching for, and recreating information that already exists, and those experts in your organisation can be more easily sought out. SharePoint also enables the creation of forms for gathering information that may be manually captured in the business today.
Provide easy access to reports and data
Reports on performance help people make decisions, but all too often they are only available from within a specific system, or are delivered by email as, at best, a near time view of what is happening to what is being reported on. SharePoint provides Business Intelligence capabilities which provide real-time reports and data dashboards to the users that need it, regardless of where the data is held, integrating with line-of-business systems in HR, CRM, Finance and ERP as needed.
With our expertise as Microsoft Certified Gold Partners we have demonstrated success in developing intranets on the SharePoint platform for a range of national and global organisations.
Business Portals & Websites
Business portals allow you to securely collaborate and share key information with partner organisations and clients. In our experience, SharePoint provides an excellent and scalable platform on which to develop portals.
Business Portals widen the collaboration needs usually associated with an Intranet to that of that business' working together to achieve a common goal. A business portal built on the SharePoint platform can integrate diverse sources of data, create easy-to-search repositories of information, and provide the tools for communities to collaborate on strategic projects.
Websites
SharePoint's capability as a platform for delivering public facing websites has reached a mature level. The Web Content Management capabilities of the latest generation of the platform allows modern, compliant, SEO optimised websites to be created.
This ability alongside SharePoint's Intranet and Business Portal (Extranet) further ads to its ability to be used as a strategic web platform for delivering your web based needs.
SharePoint Services
SharePoint Search provides enterprise level search capabilities, it enables organisations to search content both inside SharePoint and external to SharePoint. This content isn’t just files and copy on web pages, but also includes people. Which content is indexed can be selected and tuned, and there are multiple ways to tailor results to provide users with a rich experience.
Enterprise Content Management provide ways to store, manage, categorise, tag, version and implement policies against the different types of content stored in the intranet to aid in the relevance and currency of content, so that content can be located more effectively. Other features such as forums, discussion boards and wikis provide more informal ways of sharing knowledge.
Social Computing forms a large part of how we experience the web these days, as such SharePoint provides a range of features through its User Profile service that are designed to create real benefit by enabling a personalised experience and instant updates and sharing.
The Business Intelligence capabilities are provided through two key components, Performance Point and Excel Services. PerformancePoint Services provides flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to help individuals across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy. Excel Services enables Excel workbooks to be published on a SharePoint Server. The Excel workbooks can be connected to external data sources, reports created, and then the workbook can be published to a SharePoint document library providing a means of sharing reports throughout an organization.
SharePoint has provided the ability to support multiple language requirements for several generations of the product, the latest release of SharePoint includes Microsoft's Machine Translation Service, this enables content that does not need an official translation to be displayed to users in various languages.
SharePoint Customisation & Integration
Creating an engaging user experience is key to user adoption and presents certain challenges when building a solution on top of a product. Over the significant number of projects we have executed in the SharePoint space our Design team have established how to work with SharePoint, not against it, to provide solutions that implement the brand and provide the engaging user experience.
Our design team work closely with our developers to ensure that the designs can be brought to life. We implement these designs through components that are specific to SharePoint, ASP.NET and more widely used HTML and CSS. With the advent of the latest generation of SharePoint we are able to build richer user interfaces by harnessing HTML5 and CSS3, and can deliver solutions for the growing "any device, anywhere" need of users.
SharePoint provides many components "out of the box", but inevitably some of these will be close to what you require but might not deliver the business value needed. As SharePoint is built upon Microsoft's .Net framework it can be extended with new functionality to meet a business' requirements. We have particular experience and expertise in building upon the functionality provided by the SharePoint platform and developing bespoke applications using the range of technologies associated with SharePoint such as C# and JavaScript. Whether it is the creation of a number of Web Parts to display data contained inside SharePoint or to create an application that is hosted inside SharePoint but pulling data from external data sources such as a database or from third party web services, we have the in-house custom development skills to develop the right solution.
As part of ensuring good Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Microsoft's PowerShell forms a key part of each solution we build. We use it to create fully automated, near one click, deployments for our SharePoint solutions. Doing this ensures we instil Quality Assurance as early as possible in the development process, "it works on my machine" is an expression that isn't heard from our SharePoint developers when issues are found.
3rd Party Integration
Because SharePoint adheres to open standards it can easily integrate third-party applications and technology by either embedding them directly or through SOA or SaaS. This adherence to standards allows data from other systems to be surfaced in SharePoint through the Business Connectivity Services or through custom code.
SharePoint can integrate a number of authentication providers, most commonly Active Directory. As Claims Based Authentication is now the standard authentication mechanism in SharePoint, Single Sign On and Federated Identity Management across applications including your SharePoint environment becomes more achievable.
SharePoint Strategy
From the outset SharePoint is a complex platform. The drivers for deploying SharePoint range from collaboration, knowledge management, content management and communication.
With our years of experience, we understand that simply saying we want to improve collaboration, knowledge management or communication is just the beginning of the story. We work with clients to truly understand the underlying issues that drive the business case for a SharePoint implementation. From inception to delivery we aim to deliver long lasting value.
Getting to the right reasons
In the discovery phase, our focus areas are to understand the issues the organisation is facing, understanding the aspiration of your business and how to measure success of a SharePoint implementation.
Knowledge Transfer
From day one we start transferring our knowledge to everyone working with us from your organisation. Our role is to steer the SharePoint implementation, it is important that the stakeholders that will own and use the solution understand the platform as soon as possible.
When stakeholders understand the capabilities and limitations of the platform, they begin to take ownership and shape the outcome of the solution delivered.
Post Implementation
For solutions such as intranets and portals, going live is not the end of the story. Once launched lasting value must be delivered. From the beginning of our engagement, we will work with you to develop a tailored adoption, governance and engagement strategy which outlines how to transition from the status quo to new ways of working for the organisation.
Office 365 and SharePoint Online
Microsoft’s Office 365 gives you and your colleagues access to email, calendars, files and the familiar Office suite of software from anywhere at any time. With capabilities for sharing and managing documents, creating websites, instant messaging and conferencing, it is secure, all-in-one solution for collaborative, more efficient working.
We are cloud partners for Office 365 and SharePoint Online and can help your organisation introduce this collaborative environment while keeping costs to a minimum.
The cloud-based solution runs on the SharePoint platform, and can be a more cost-effective alternative to traditional IT set-ups by removing the need for expensive hosting equipment.