Working in a large business means there are huge volumes of content stored across a number of disparate systems. Document management, practice management, knowledge management, customer relationship management and internal staff all have their own systems for storing information. Having these separate systems, in a best of breed approach is great, you get the power and functionality of the best system in each category. However, when you need to access this data together it gets time consuming opening up each system individually.

This is where the idea of an enterprise portal comes in. An enterprise portal essentially accesses each system and drags out relevant data and presents it together in a single area. This means, for example, for a specific customer you would be able to access information about the customer and contact with that customer, documents relating to their business with you, bills send and paid by them to you, who in your organisation has dealt with the customer and do this all without leaving one application.

It sounds tricky, but it’s not as hard as it sounds.

Microsoft provides Sharepoint to its Windows Server 2003 customers as a free download. Although there is a paid for version of Sharepoint, the free Windows Sharepoint Services covers 90% of enterprise portal functionality. Sharepoint on its own can do so much, it is in effect a content management system. However, you can add on and develop your own extensions to this product.

This is where Handshake comes into play. Handshake have developed a product that can access almost any database source and (while respecting security permissions) bring data back into Sharepoint to display to the user. The benefits of using Handshake are pretty clear – rapid development; respect of security and ease of use. For the business I’m working in, Handshake provide ready built connectors to much of the software we use already which means that much of the hard work is already done and that the correct data is being extracted already.
I’m about to install Sharepoint and Handshake in an enterprise, and am thoroughly looking forward to the experience.

I am a touch concerned about Sharepoint’s lack of respect for web standards and accessibility. I feel that web standards should be used a lot more by Microsoft as it improves peoples ability to access information from multiple sources (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Mobile browsers, screen readers etc) but Sharepoint is almost exclusively Internet Explorer only. It’s encouraging to see well known and respected developers such as Cameron Moll beginning to experiment with Sharepoint so hopefully the future is brighter in this regard.