Rogue Services and Solutions

As a former technical writer, I am conditioned to seek review of everything I write. I am the annoying friend who sends the midnight email, “Hey, can you read this?” My people are a great test audience and provide perspective that I can’t get on my own. When I passed along my Why SharePoint? blog (forthcoming next week!), they didn’t let me down with their feedback. And they all asked a question I should have seen coming: “But, what is it?”

Here on our Rogue blog, that feels like the right place to start.

If your business had a secure fireproof box that contained everything important to the company, what would be in it?

Now bear with me here—I have a true and abiding love for outdated pop culture references and will invoke them far too often. In the TV drama “Lost,” which I was obsessed with for its run from 2004 to 2009, the island had a magic box that contained whatever the inhabitants needed at any given time. If you think about this secure fireproof vessel in magic box terms and not as a time capsule, your perspective may change a bit. Your company’s organizational chart, contracts, invoices, benefits, and employee information are contenders. Since it is magically updated at will, expense reports, invoices, and other revenue-related materials make sense in here as well.

If you could partition that box so that department leaders also had access to it around the clock, what would be inside? The HR Director may want to include all information needed for onboarding, from recruiting to a new employee’s first week. Functional managers may request status reports and metrics for upper management, performance review information for employees, templates for deliverables, and training guides. They might throw in employee time collection. The VP of Sales may want to see a relationship management process, trend reports, a sales target dashboard, client satisfaction survey results, and commission pay-out reports.

What if you could expose it further—to the entire employee base—but keep all the items above tied to their intended audiences? Corporate announcements from the CEO, the employee handbook, reminders, and calendars would be helpful. Departments may want information that describes what they do and what their value is to the company. Teams may use the box to manage documents, such as collaborative drafts and peer reviews. Sales may want to highlight happy customer stories. The communications team may want to post media sightings. The marketing group may want to brand the entire box so that it looks and feels like the company and is an artifact of corporate culture.

Spoiler alert! SharePoint is that magic box.

SharePoint is an enterprise server solution for business that allows for discrete user permissions to surface relevant information. Let’s dissect that overtly techie phrase a bit:

“Enterprise” refers to the SharePoint audience. It is not downloaded for one user or one-time use. It is to be used across a company and is accessible via web browser for a singular user experience. It exists within a company’s network, meaning it is not open to the outside world.

“Server” is where SharePoint lives. Whether in the Cloud or on-premises, SharePoint requires infrastructure to support its application, database, and front-end web layers.

“Solution” here refers to a thing that is implemented. SharePoint is a product that must be procured, licensed, installed, and configured.

Everything I have said so far may sound IT-oriented, but SharePoint is definitively a platform for business. Its out-of-the-box configuration allows business users to configure security and create collaboration spaces, workflows, document management, and notification logic without IT administrator intervention.

By “discrete user permissions,” we mean that SharePoint is security trimmed—users can only see what they have access to.

SharePoint’s sophisticated search functionality allows users to “surface relevant information.” Users can search for people and/or content. They will only see results that are within their security-trimmed permissions.

At Rogue, we definitely eat our own dog food. We rely on an Office 365 subscription with SharePoint Online for all of our business relationship and project management, marketing and brand development, document collaboration (including blog post draft review), and creating and testing our apps. SharePoint is our enterprise repository. Microsoft’s SAAS model works well for us because we are a small business with a commensurate budget. We have all the benefits of the magic box without the infrastructure maintenance and associated costs.

To support other businesses in making the most of their solution platform, Rogue has developed several apps that snap into SharePoint. These include a plug-and-play intranet, a business relationship and timekeeping/invoicing app, an HR onboarding app, and a ticketing system. Several others are in proof-of-concept stage, and we look forward to over-sharing details on all of this with you.

Next week, we post Why SharePoint? Stay tuned. And thanks for reading!

What is SharePoint?