Gentle Intro to the scenario

It has been nearly a year since I am working for the company, who had asked me to sort out their mess in corporate data management, data life cycle, user collaboration and IT systems. They have implemented the system called Winman, which is another Enterprise Resource Planning software, especially useful in manufacturing, order processing, despatching, invoicing etc. This is where majority of business processes take place. It is fairly robust, it gets the job done, but it is not perfectly implemented though.

In addition, they use mapped drives for storing business unstructured data which is scattered all over the place.

Moreover (I know, it is quite a lot already), they have two separate instances of SharePoint for the UK and US branches of the business.

These are just OOTB SharePoint installations with default Shared Documents libraries containing folders and no real functionality. 

To date, I:

• got to know the company;
• conducted the user surveys;
• developed new IT and data management policies;
• researched and developed data and business records' retention schedules;
• learned SharePoint as an ECM system;
• provisionally concluded the information architecture in relation to SharePoint functionality;
• decided that we will:
• completely shut down the File Server for users;
• remove two SharePoint instances (2007 & 2010 Foundation versions)
• consolidate our corporate data on a one, unified platform (SP2013 Server)
• bring the UK and the US into one, shared portal to minimise E-mail use
• provision Remote BLOB store for archiving purposes and let users search archives in SharePoint

• provisionally developed a pilot site for one of the company's departments.

Having gone through the pain of licensing and getting required software ready, on the day of 26 of June 2013, we have finally installed SharePoint 2013 Server on our corporate servers.

The next post will describe the process of SharePoint installation.

Further posts will be a reflection of what we actually do with our SharePoint system, how it performs, what sort of issues we encounter and everything else you can imagine in a day-to-day life of a quickly growing and successful company.

Stay tuned!