During our engagements with clients, we often see the criticality and the mandate for a central repository, or area, for collaboration where people within the organization can actively retrieve, update, and view historical changes to documents and information with appropriate controls in access and security. We’ve seen examples of such in the following:

• Policies and Procedures – Many companies are becoming extremely mature in the creation of Standard Operating Procedures and Policy documents. Whether it is due to legislation that runs across all industries such as SOX, or Life Sciences specific compliance, such as Government Pricing, the need to access and control documents for policies and procedures is not only important, but required by legislation.
• Technology Implementations – Each of our clients are evolving and increasing their technology and infrastructure capabilities through implementation activities often with System Integrators. Many times, these projects and implementations run in parallel within an organization and share common tasks and documentations. An area of collaboration allows multiple streams of work to run effectively, without work being lost or redundant work being performed. Once again, implementations in areas such as Life Sciences require access and control to documents for CFR Part 11 Validation requirements, hence a driver towards an area for web collaboration.
• Geographically growing organizations – With organizations growing nationally and internationally with vendors in various locations, web based interactions are increasingly necessary to enable teams to create and hold meetings, and manage shared workspaces.

SharePoint is quickly emerging as the standard for web collaboration. It offers a tight integration with Microsoft Office 2007 to enable ease of online collaboration with several of the Office document formats such as Word and Excel.

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The key characteristics of the solution are:

• Through a solid integration layer, we are able to expose many different functions to end users that span multiple systems. This creates a single entry point for end users and reduces confusion and increases productivity
• Also, through the use of some more complex web services we are able to mimic the functionality of legacy systems through the SharePoint UI. A good example of this is enabling Documentum workflows and document editing through SharePoint.
• As more and more applications are built with a SOA vision in mind, SharePoint will continue to become a more valuable piece of the enterprise infrastructure. HighPoint Solutions can bridge this gap immediately with our solid core of SOA infused development staff to create robust service layers on legacy applications

• Expertise in System Integration – HighPoint Solutions has deep experience in architecting SOA visions and solutions for various clients. This ability allows us to come in and work at an enterprise level in hooking a SharePoint solution into as many systems as necessary without increasing support TCO while increasing end user productivity.
• Microsoft Software and .NET expertise – We have several skilled developers and architects that have built complex solutions using Microsoft products such as SharePoint, BizTalk, MS SQL Server, etc. We also have built many custom solutions using .NET including custom web parts.
• Business Process Optimization – HighPoint Solutions has done several projects where our consulting team has documented and streamlined business processes in various areas. This ability pared with our knowledge of how SharePoint can be used further optimize processes through online collaboration is paramount to our ability to make our clients successful.