Overview of SharePoint capabilities

The capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 are focused in six areas:
• Collaboration
• Portals and personalization
• Search
• Enterprise Content Management
• Business processes and forms
• Business intelligence

Collaboration
You can use a SharePoint site to share information and get your work done more efficiently. A SharePoint site offers workspaces and tools that your team can use to track projects, coordinate schedules, and collaboratively create and edit documents.

Improve team productivity by using a SharePoint site
You can use a site to store routine information for a single department or short-term information for a special project that spans several departments. By using a collaborative workspace such as a team site, your team can become more efficient and more productive.

Manage projects more efficiently
You can use a site to manage projects and coordinate tasks and deadlines among team members. The Project Tasks list template includes a Gantt chart view where you can see task relationships and project status. Your team can coordinate their work with shared calendars, alerts, and notifications. You can also connect a calendar on your SharePoint site to your calendar in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, where you can view and update it just as you do your personal calendar.

Create, review, and publish documents
Groups of people can create, review, and edit documents collaboratively on a SharePoint site. You can use document libraries to store and manage important documents, or use Document Workspace sites to coordinate the development of specific documents. Slide Libraries are a great place to share and reuse Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 slides in a central location. You can take document libraries offline in Office Outlook 2007 to enable people to view and edit documents while they are not connected to the network.

Capture and share community knowledge
You can use a team site to capture and share collective team knowledge or important information. Teams can create and capture community knowledge or document internal processes in a wiki. You can use surveys or discussions to gather information or encourage dialog, and then share your findings in a blog. Team members can use alerts or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to track updates to your sites.

Portals and personalization
You can use portal sites to work collaboratively and access the people, information, and business applications that you need to do your job. Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes features that organizations can use to personalize the portal site for individuals or groups of users

Search
You can use search on a SharePoint site to help you find information, files, Web sites, and people. For more information about using search, click the following links.

Enterprise Content Management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides powerful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) features for creating, managing, and storing content throughout an enterprise. You can use workflows (workflow: The automated movement of documents or items through a specific sequence of actions or tasks related to a business process. Workflows can be used to consistently manage common business processes, such as document approval or review.) to help manage the process of creating, reviewing, publishing, and even managing the content that your organization creates.

Document management
Document management capabilities can help you consolidate content from multiple locations into a Document Center, which is a centrally managed repository that has consistent categorization.

Records management
Integrated records management capabilities can help you store and protect business records in their final state.

Web content management
Web content management capabilities enable people to publish Web content with an easy-to-use content authoring tool and a built-in approval process.

Business process and forms
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides many features that can help you integrate and streamline your business processes. You can create browser-based forms and gather data from organizations that do not use Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. Workflows can streamline the cost of coordinating common business processes, such as project approval or document review, by managing and tracking the tasks involved with those processes

Business intelligence
Business intelligence is the process of aggregating, storing, analyzing, and reporting on business data to support informed business decisions. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a number of tools that can help you extract data from a variety of sources and present that data in ways that facilitate analysis and decision making.

SharePoint is the next thing you need

Twenty years ago most of us did not use word processing or spreadsheets. Today it is compulsory for all of us to be computer literate and probably be a super user with documents and spreadsheets.

WELL, the next thing we must be able to is to collaborate with one another. A SharePoint Web site allows you to easily collaborate with colleagues from across the hall and around the world. The ability to create knowledge bases, online surveys, discussion boards, and chats can help produce, organize, and distribute project information.

What is SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

There are three levels of users, namely:
1. End users / Site Administrators
2. System Administrators / Architects
3. Developers / Architects

In September and October I am focussing on SharePoint for all three levels of users.

In my next blog I highlight some of the areas of work in SharePoint.

White and Black Economic Empowerment

Namibia has gone through various political changes over the past two centuries. One thing however is always constant. Once the political change occurs, there is a realisation that political independence means very little without economic ownership change. When the English ruled over Southern Africa they had the economic might. The Afrikaner took over and had to create state institutions such as the “Eerste Nasionale Ontwikkelings Korporasie” (ENOK or First National Development Corporation) to allow Afrikaner businessmen to get a share of the economic pie. The also created other institutions that should be supported by their people to become as powerful as the English ones, for example banks and insurance companies (Sanlam, Santam, etc.).

In much the same way, the black people of Namibia need to become participants in the economy. The first efforts were made in the early 1990’s to unite the two chambers of commerce, namely the Windhoek CCI and Windhoek Business Chamber. This resulted in the Namibia National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the predecessor of the present NCCI.

This was one of the most challenging times in my working life. The mistrust of decades had to be plastered over for the sake of the country and our newly created democracy. We succeeded.

BUT, we only plastered over the problem. The black majority is still not participating in the meaningful way promised by the politicians. Or for that matter, the way the previous English and Afrikaner political movements allowed their voters to prosper.

Loving a prostitute

For a period of two years I lived in Ausspannplatz close to the police headquarters. This area was previously the place travellers would stop and leave their wagons before entering Windhoek. (“Aus spann” means to let the cattle free to graze.) There is a small park and two traffic circles in the area. This is the downtown of the city.

As in most cities and towns around the world, the downtown has become a night life area filled with bars and casinos. Of course, where there is money and alcohol, there are also prostitutes and drugs.

When my forefathers (the Plaatjies family) came to Windhoek, they had a business in the area – opposite where the Ministry of Transport and Works is today. Not surprisingly, I found some of the people still remember my family in the area.

But it is the night life that was the most interesting. The area starts to come alive with the “night people starting around 16H00. The first “ladies” start appearing as their customers pass by before heading to their respective homes. Alcohol is being bought for the night ahead as it is cheaper from the bottle store than at the bar. The men in the area are either “boyfriends”, (who share the income with their girlfriends), drug peddlers – mostly marijuana, or petty thieves.

I have spent many an interesting evening with the people of the area and have never felt threatened by anyone. However, life and death are ever present. This can be through knife fights, being shot by the robbery victim or police, or while asleep on the railway lines.

During this period I met a young lady who was living in the area and we became more than just friends. I later moved to another part of Windhoek and she moved with me. However, this part of town and the people in the area were too part of her life. We later broke up and she returned to spending her day and nights in Ausspannplatz. Unfortunately, she became sick and as it was untreated it led to pneumonia. She passed away three days after being admitted to the hospital.

Elmarie Motswana was only 24 years old.

Her story began when she was 13 years old. Her mother and stepfather worked as labourers on a commercial farm close to Mariental. She became pregnant and had a baby boy at this age. Barely literate and with no hope, she moved to Windhoek to get another chance at schooling. Within a few months the lights of the city had bedazzled her and she went missing from her family’s house.

She created a new history for herself and over the next ten years she became Elmarie Motswana. She had played soccer at school and had gone with the school team to Brazil. Her mother was a rich lady from Katutura, but she hardly went home because her stepfather did not like her. And so it went on with each passing year and less and less of the true Elmarie stayed behind. Only after her passing, was I able to piece together some of her past.

Bring back forced labour

Crime is a problem. It stretches from petty theft of cellular phones to murdering your own wife. Sometimes it seems as if our Independence has given us freedoms because the punishments have been taken away. The punishments done away with include corporal punishment in schools, the death penalty, and forced labour amongst prisoners. More importantly the shame that went with the crime is no longer there.

Bring back forced labour, the Namibian Constitution Article 9(3)(a) allows for forced labour “required in consequence of a sentence or order of a Court”. Allow the prisoner to reimburse the victim and society for the wrongs they have committed.