Make a Point of Sharing

In October chilibean invited you, the numerous South African new media companies out there, to be part of the chilibean hotness? by opening up and exposing your new media stories, secrets, and dreams¦ something, anything, you’re doing related to new media.

Well, Martin Hattingh of bSOLVe jumped at the opportunity of spreading and sharing the joy of what his company is up to, and provides an invaluable insight into what an innovative South African organisation can achieve.

Sharing with bSOLVe

Back in 2002, a group of three University of Stellenbosch students decided to jump straight from the commerce degrees they had completed into starting an IT business. With one client and one project, bSOLVe began its life.

With it’s core business centered around Microsoft solutions, bSOLVe is these days recognised by both its clients and the Microsoft Partner community as an expert provider in technologies such as SharePoint, which is an organisational collaboration and information centralisation platform. bSOLVe states its primary mission as “implementing and developing software to help knowledge workers make sense of an increasingly information-rich environment”, and does this by finding innovative ways to streamline how information flows and is used within businesses.

The bSOLVe team is very enthusiastic about the possibilities around SharePoint, and see it as a great way for individuals and teams to work together. Martin Hattingh has the following to say: “With such incredible amounts of documents and files being generated in even a small business these days, it’s becoming really hard to efficiently store, find and use all this information. Often, there is a ton of knowledge contained within the business, but no-one knows about it because documents lie hidden away on individual PCs. SharePoint goes a long way towards helping create a central ‘home-base’ from which to work while keeping everyone up to speed.” This home-base is the power of SharePoint, which is in essence a collection of websites which enable people to do things like upload documents, share them with others, track who’s changing what, and create shared tasks lists and calendars to manage what’s being done. SharePoint can be used internally or extended onto the web, and can even be used as an engine to manage content for a corporate website, with full control over aspects like how and when documents are published to the outside world.

The SharePoint way of working integrates completely seamlessly with Microsoft Office, enabling the typical executive to easily share a document she’s working on with her colleagues via what’s called a “workspace”. Sharing can be done with a few clicks from within Word or Excel, for example. (Note that in the screenshot below, Word 2007 also enables publishing a document to a blog directly).

When the document is uploaded, everyone in the team is automatically notified via e-mail or RSS Feed. Documents can be organised in libraries and folders according to their purpose (in the example below, the Marketing library is shown).

SharePoint does more than documents. It also enables teams to create shared task lists and calendars, and notifies selected individuals when tasks are added, assigned to them or completed. In the view below, the user selects to only view tasks that are due today.

Seamless interaction with MS Office was mentioned earlier, and the system really does shine in this regard. SharePoint can be synchronised with Outlook to make content available offline, even when the user isn’t connected to the network/internet.

SharePoint is also not just about sharing documents¦ It can be used to automate routine processes through its workflow engine: For example, automatically creating a task for someone to complete if an e-mail with a specific subject is received, and alerting a manager if the task isn’t completed within a specified time.

As a business, bSOLVe believes that technology exists only to make everyday life easier. As Martin says, “Technologies like SharePoint help us to really streamline how people deal with massive amounts of information, and as a team we’re constantly excited by the possibilities this offers.” Always innovators, the bSOLVe team have created an offering targeted specifically at businesses who want to find their feet with SharePoint. Dubbed “SharePoint To-Go“, it’s a structured project package which includes all the basics needed to get up-and-running: professional needs analysis, setup and configuration, site look-and-feel customisation, and training to help everyone within the business make the best of what SharePoint has to offer. The whole package is pitched as “a take-away intranet”, priced at R7999.99, and designed to satisfy beginner appetites.

This is something to take into account if you run a Microsoft office, especially when one weighs up the benefits of having a truly connected, knowledge sharing organisation, and consider that the cost of the SharePoint To-Go package is roughly equal to the cost of an average two day training course - per person!

So now you have an idea of the hotness that bSOLVe, a small innovative South African company, has fired up - and I am sure we’ll be hearing more from them in the near future!

This is a repost of a post I originally published on chilibean, a blog I co-author on.