Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Development and Support

Our Approach

Thinking of, or already have, SharePoint Deployed in your Organisation?

If you are considering the deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in your organisation, then TCS can offer you expert consultancy, advice and planning from a UK Top 30 SharePoint Consultant, backed-up by an experienced team of Microsoft SharePoint trained and certified support professionals, tailored to deliver a support package which meets your business's individual needs.

With over 90 Million SharePoint licences sold worldwide, over 50% of organisations either have or are considering implementing SharePoint, and with an increasing number of 3rd Party Web Parts and Templates to help your employees collaborate, this little-before used application has become the Enterprise 2.0 platform of choice in 2009.

It may also please you to know that many SharePoint CALs (Client Access Licenses) are bundled with corporate purchases and as a result many organisations already have client licenses they are underutilising. So now is the ideal time to consider deploying SharePoint as it is likely to cost less than you think to realise the benefits of organisation-wide collaboration and information.

For more information about our SharePoint Deployment, Development and Support services, please turn to the next tab.

Our Services

TCS are able to offer a full range of services for initial planning, through deployment, commissioning and training and on to maintenance and support.

We can assemble teams from various levels of SharePoint qualified staff, from Expert to Architect, Solutions and Development Consultants, General Consultants, Lead and Senior Developers and Support Staff so you can be confident that we can supply a skilled resource to assist across all four main Project and Service areas:

SharePoint Planning and Architecture

No one denies that SharePoint can be complex to deploy and this means that specifying and planning the structure of the various components within a SharePoint site is absolutely critical.

Using Microsoft checklists as well as our own knowledge base gained through our experience with previous projects, we can guide you through the planning stages of your SharePoint project covering all aspects including, but not limited to:

• Determining Business Objectives;
• Designing the Information Architecture;
• Defining the Project and Operational Management;
• Planning and Resourcing the Development and Configuration;
• Identifying and Evaluating the Infrastructure Requirements;
• Implementation and Provisioning of the Testing Environment;
• Defining the Education and Training Strategy;
• Designing Taxonomy and Navigation; and
• Planning for Enterprise Search.

...and that is just the start.  There are many more areas that need to be covered in the planning stages to ensure that the deployment of SharePoint is a long term enduring success and is widely embraced.

SharePoint Deployment and Configuration

SharePoint has the potential to touch every aspect of your business and the impact of the deployment needs to be carefully managed to minimise disruption to the daily workflow of your business.

Also, human nature often resists big change and, therefore, a more strategic, phased approach to the deployment of SharePoint is recommended rather than a "Big Bang" approach.  Part of an early adoption strategy often involves a pilot of key features in a test or staging environment to test user receptivity, acceptance and compatibility and to fine tune features prior to going live.

TCS can help in planning the staged deployment of SharePoint and the gradual release of new features and integrations.  Integrations such as Microsoft Project Server for project task management and Project Workspaces and Microsoft Performance Point Server for business Planning, Monitoring and Analytics.

With SharePoint's amazing ability to integrate with almost any data source out-of-the-box, you will soon find that Contacts, Products, Resources and Staff can be managed more effectively through custom lists and the Business Data Catalog.

SharePoint Development and Customisation

SharePoint has many features that will run 'out-of-the-box', and these can be configured without any additional programming. 

However, to aid the seamless integration into your business's operational procedures and IT Infrastructure sometimes requires the development of specific workflows, branding and customisation of page layouts that are beyond the capabilities of a SharePoint Administrator.

There are a number of developer tools that can help implement custom solutions within SharePoint such as SharePoint Designer 2007, WSPBuilder and, of course, Visual Studio 2008.

TCS can provide SharePoint developers that are capable of using these tools to apply finely tuned branding of your SharePoint site almost to the extent that it is no-longer recognisable as "SharePoint".

We can also implement Workflows specifically designed to meet your users' needs and aid communication and collaboration in your organisation.  Our experts can work on site to determine your requirements and build these into the deployment plan.

SharePoint Maintenance and Support

Once TCS has successfully deployed your SharePoint Site throughout your organisation, the work should not stop there.

There are a number of activities that will be required to be performed over time and of course, your business requirements will not stand still for long and changes to the site structure, layout or design of the site will be inevitable.  Some of the ongoing activities will include:

• Security/User Management,
• Implementing new sites and applying site templates,
• Further rebranding,
• Document management/backup/archiving;
• Site/Process migration to new servers,
• Integration of new datasources,
• Development of new workflows,
• Managing the Business Data Catalog.

TCS can offer a fast, cost effective and reliable SharePoint maintenance and support service after your deployment.  With a Service Level Agreement in place, covering many administrative duties such as user management, site management and service availability, you can be sure that once your SharePoint site is deployed and a critical part of your business, TCS will ensure that it remains available and up to date.

Our Experience

Among the key barriers to implementing SharePoint are knowing what to use it for, the business case to justify the cost and being concerned that the time and money invested to start down one path will be lost, if, other requirements or strategies are revealed at a later date.  These concerns can be overcome by focusing on implementing SharePoint one step at a time with a specific focus on addressing the most important business needs first.

The following case studies provide real-world situations in which TCS successfully deployed and maintained SharePoint to meet a particular business need:

Project Documentation Site for Local Government Infrastructure Project

One of the most obvious uses of SharePoint is its ability to provide a single searchable repository for project related documentation and allow secure access to that repository from your Intranet, Extranet or any remote location via a Web Browser.

Between 2005 and 2007, TCS implemented, hosted and maintained a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 intranet site for a £multi-M Infrastructure Upgrade and SQL Migration project for Greenwich Council.  This site was used to store all the project related documentation, including Project Plans, Design Documents, Infrastructure Schematics and Test Plans, and accessed by staff and contractors at Greenwich Council, Deloitte, Northgate Information Solutions and TCS.

Without the site, project documentation would have to have been shared via email which would have resulted in fragmented storage and a lack of version control.

Short Term Site Hosting for Law Firm Migration Project

In 2008/2009, TCS implemented, hosted and maintained another Project Documentation site for a £.75m systems migration project for a UK Law firm.  In this case, the site was maintained for a period of 6 months, before being archived and decommissioned.  However, in that time, it was accessed by several different IT and IS suppliers, the client and ourselves (who were also involved in the migration of over a dozen LoB applications written and maintained by ourselves).

Such a short term use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server highlights the flexibility and ease of deployment of SharePoint when the Business Requirement is clear and the preconceptions of how 'difficult' it is are overcome.

Business Intelligence Portal for a Construction Consultancy

In 2006, TCS implemented a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 proof of concept installation to determine how SharePoint could be utilised for corporate, regional and project portals for the business and to demonstrate the use of Business Scorecards using the latest, at that time, Microsoft Business Intelligence tools.

In 2008, TCS implemented a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 intranet site that demonstrated the possibilities of deploying Reporting and Business Intelligence.  The project utilised PerformancePoint Server 2007 to deploy Business Intelligence KPIs, Excel Services to deploy Pivot Tables based upon OLAP data and integrated Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services to deploy the more traditional static tabular reports for Order Book, WIP and Job Profitability.

Workflow and Search for Information

Another Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 intranet site TCS implemented in 2008 included Search, Project Documentation, Workflow, Reporting and Business Intelligence.

Microsoft Search Server was also installed and the search component integrated into the SharePoint site.  This was configured to index several Terabytes of documentation spread across several file servers.

The Workflow was implemented using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 to create task work flows.  Finally, PerformancePoint Server was utilised for deploying Business Intelligence based upon OLAP data.

Knowledge Base for Systems Integration and eGovernment

In 2008, TCS built a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site for a client to store the project documentation related to the implementation of several system integrations using Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006.

The site was also built to contain a Wiki which is used to store important system related information and notices that might otherwise be 'hidden' in Microsoft Word and Visio documents with the SharePoint document libraries.

The site has proved an invaluable resource for the support of the BizTalk integrations as, with thousands of transactions happening every hour, all stakeholders, support staff and contractors need to know where critical information is held when issues arise and details of a particular orchestration (a BizTalk integration) need to be known fast so as to minimise disruption to the service and minimise the potential backlog of transactions that need to be resubmitted when an integration fails.

Our In-house Use

There's nothing like practising what you preach and TCS does just that by making use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in-house along with Microsoft Search Server, Project Server 2007, PerformancePoint Server 2007 and various Wiki templates to capture our knowledge about technologies, development and, most important of all, our clients' environments, systems and software.

They say Performance Improvement begins at the coal face and TCS found just that with the use of Microsoft Project Server integrated into Microsoft Outlook.  We found that the management of assigned tasks entered via Project Server was made easier and, due to the higher adoption rate, there was a lower latency between tasks being physically completed and the task status being updated.  This had a positive impact on the reporting extracted from Project Server and delivered via the OLAP cubes into the Excel Services portal used by TCS Project Mangers and Directors.

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