It is an early evening event and I am standing with a group of people near the center of the room. Each of us shares a little about our businesses and the first to begin is an Employment Attorney. Next to her is a CFO, followed by a Sales Executive and then a Chief Marketing Officer…. All having well defined and understood disciplines. Then all eyes turn to me in the circle and they look with anticipation to find out what I do.
How do I explain what my company does? Each of them are the exact people we serve and work with. We solve business problems, remove pain points that impact a company’s performance, increase communication, streamline workflow and processes while providing increased visibility to information across the organization from anywhere in the world and many times rescue failed attempts to implement SharePoint. It is too big to explain it all in a matter of minutes…..
SharePoint is a full-featured suite of different applications that is highly flexible to meet the individual and unique needs of our clients. It goes far beyond being one application and includes:
• Content Management
• Enterprise Social Networking
• Intranet / Extranet / Portal Creation
• Collaboration Tools • Project Management
• Workflow Creation and Management
• Business Intelligence
• Enterprise Search
Clients may choose to use a blend of the features of SharePoint to do many different things or even do the same thing in many different ways. This can be simply using the look and feel out of the box to having customized graphic design implemented so users don’t even know they are on a SharePoint platform.
The usual response when I say we are experts in SharePoint is one where their eyebrows raise and they say, “Huh? Share what?” This time I smile, taking a moment to look each person in their eyes and I say, “We specialize in making our clients successful by bringing critical information to their fingertips to facilitate decision making. We take frustration out of the job.”
How do you know when someone is a candidate for SharePoint? Just look for the frustrated user who can’t locate the correct version of a document; or a software development group that misses deadlines or not delivering what the customer wants because they are using the wrong version of the requirements document; or the company that takes weeks to onboard a client or employee because the handoffs between departments are manually done; or the company Executives are constantly asking for reports to see how a product is performing or the sales team wants to know their numbers at a moment’s notice.
Those are some of my potential clients. SharePoint is as flexible and diverse as there are business problems to solve. We make life better our clients!
About Your Columnist
Linda Amaro is a featured columnist for Women Taking Charge, the official blog of Connected Women of Influence, where she covers topics, tips and tricks surrounding The Virtual Office and using Microsoft SharePoint to improve collaboration. Linda Amaro, has been in the Information Technology (IT) industry for over 30 years and has risen to the position of CIO in the corporate arena managing multiple departments with over 150 staff members and projects for tier one customers ranging from $2.5 million to $20 million. In 2010, she started Klarinet Solutions, a SharePoint consulting firm that provides SharePoint Design, Site Branding, Workflow Automation, On-Line Forms Development, Document Management, Custom Development and Business Intelligence.
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