What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a platform that offers specific kinds of tools (MS Office) and workspaces for people to collaborate and communicate with team members, track projects, coordinate deadlines, provide workflow procedures, process corporate reports, managing document life cycles and share information resources. The 'Team Sites' can be used to collect, archive corporate knowledge and enable transparency in the completion of each of the projects and activities that is critical in the medical practice.

Components of a SharePoint

• Team Sites and Workplaces – a central location, where individuals can capture and share ideas, and work together on documents, tasks, contacts, and events. It's the next best thing to being in the room together.

• Libraries allow users to manage document records, forms, wiki, picture, slide (PowerPoint) and reports in intuitive and effective ways through versioning, document policy and life cycles.

• Lists provides a way to communicate using the announcements, contacts, discussion boards (forums), calendars, tasks, issue tracking and surveys.

• Workflow* is a collection of steps and data that define the direction that can be taken to complete a task or procedure.

• Alerts give users the ability to be notified when information has been added or changed.

• Web Parts allow existing information to be organised and presented appropriately and provide additional corporate logic and applications that can be incorporated into the business operations, adding more functionality to the intranet.

• Navigation and Search provides a quick way to access / locate information through the use of metadata resources.

• Business Intelligence enables decision workers to be well-informed choices based on the data and reports gathered and presented. It includes several reporting tools for analyzing workflow history. You can use these tools to find holdups in your workflow or determine whether a group is meeting its performance targets and make recommendations.