What can you do with SharePoint on Intranet?

Question

We have had SharePoint where I work for a little while now, but we've not done a lot with it. We have an intranet with hundreds of ASP/ASP.Net applications and I'm wondering what kind of things can be done to integrate with SharePoint to make a more seamless environment? We put documentation and production move requests and so on in SharePoint now, but it pretty much feels like it's own separate system rather than an integrated tool on our intranet.

I've searched around to see what other people are doing with SharePoint but I've been finding a lot of useless information.

Answer 1

I think it depends on your environment. In our environment, we setup each department with their own pages and we use it for basic information, surveys, and the employee's homepage. We've built Google/Live Search and Weather.com widgets and roll RSS feeds using Tim Huer's RSS control.

Answer 2

A typical intranet portal segments functionality by department. Each department will probably have some custom web-based apps that you might have historically implemented in ASP.Net, and linked to from the intranet portal. With sharepoint you can start bringing the useful bits of those custom web-apps in as modular parts, so that the business owner of the portal can have more control as to how information is structured and displayed to his/her users.

Think dashboards, populated with custom metrics that only make sense to individual departments. That's one of the most obvious places to start. HR, accounting, IT, they all have metrics they want to track and display. They all have legacy systems that they might want to correlate information from. All this can be done in reusable web-parts. Since Sharepoint gives the end-user the control over layout, display, audience control, etc, you don't end up reinventing wheels all day.

Answer 3

SharePoint was designed to be a collaboration portal and document repository. If you have other business processes wrapped up in other internal web sites, you may not get much benefit from converting these sites into SharePoint sub-sites.

However, if there is signifcant overlap in your applications (contact lists, inventory, specs, etc.) you may want to make the investment to combine.

Answer 4

If you have InfoPath, you can create online forms. You can share your docs and edit them online. You can start an approvement workflow on these docs. You can create polls. You can create work groups.

Basically SharePoint is a giant and robust document store, but you can do anything what you can do in any ASP.NET web application. You can create e.g. custom workflows to automate business processes. We've worked for several customers to create corporate intranets and sometimes internet sites, so it really works. :)

But sometimes it's very hard to implement the requested features (a lot of workarounds).

Answer 5

Really its an intranet in a box. We pretty much run all of our day to day development tasks off of it. We keep documentation, track defects, manage people's time off etc. You can migrate your asp.net and asp applications to run under the sharepoint site. In the adminstration section you can set up web applications to run under the same site, but outside of sharepoint's control. That would probably help with the "feel" of it being completely seperate.

Sharepoint is really a shift in the way people have to think about web development and that's the key. You're no longer developing a standalone application, you're adding on to an existing framework. I would put it akin to having "silos of data" vs. a centralized database system which houses all the company's data. Once people realize that everything is connected, it will feel more like a seemless integration. My advice is to actively try and create applications in sharepoint and think about how to migrate existing apps on to it.

Answer 6

One thing you can do is to create web parts to provide access to data from existing applications. Initially they could simply be read-only views, but depending on your experience they could be fleshed out to allow writes.

Another idea is to add links between SharePoint and your applications (assuming they're web based); that will at least allow a flow between them.

I haven't done it, but you could also theoretically skin SharePoint to look like the rest of your intranet.

Answer 7

A great idea for you would be move your most used asp.net apps to run within the SharePoint site. Each app can be added either as a control directly on a pagelayout or integrated into a webpart (use the webpart to load child controls).

This would allow you to use the flexible moss interface to move the asp.net app into a unified information architecture so people can find the app easily.

SharePoint is really easy to roll out something that works, but creating a seamless intranet does require a bit of thinking outside of SharePoint itself (i.e. what should go where, which users need to see what, navigation structure...)

That is really a lot of work and requires lots of input from people outside the IT area.

Answer 8

Create libraries

Form libraries, documents libraries, slide libraries

Create standard or custom lists

Standard lists - announcements, tasks, contacts

Custom lists - suppliers, contractors, inventories, orders

Setup secure team discussion areas

Build shared team calendars

Create simple workflow processes on documents and lists