SharePoint Services

SharePoint is a complex suite of capabilities, and it can be hard to know whether a SharePoint-based solution would be good for your particular requirements. We can help by structuring a review of your needs, using our experience to understand how SharePoint can serve your organisation. We can provide an independent, objective assessment of whether or not SharePoint is a good fit, as well as which versions (WSS, MOSS etc) of SharePoint would be best value.

SharePoint can run on a single server, a "farm" of many specialised servers or anything in between. This flexibility makes SharePoint suitable for SMEs and large enterprises alike, but it can be quite challenging to arrive at a good view of what you need to make your SharePoint installation suitably quick and robust. Furthermore, once you have arrived at a good understanding, getting the infrastructure properly configured, and setting up good operations practices, can provide further hurdles to a successful implementation. Our specialist skills will get you up-and-running with SharePoint quickly, as well as providing you with the confidence that your SharePoint-based solution will grow to meet your needs.

Experience tells us that SharePoint has the features and flexibility to benefit most organisations. However, we are also convinced that without proper consideration of your organisation's needs and business processes, SharePoint can be irrelevant or worse. We have seen many cases of an IT department simply installing SharePoint and sending users on training courses, only for the system to remain largely unused - or being actively disliked by the users. A SharePoint implementation needs to be designed to fit the way your organisation works; this involves building a good understanding of how SharePoint could benefit the organisation, then tuning and customising SharePoint to fit your needs and processes. This way, SharePoint will make people's lives easier - whereas the standard "out of the box" implementation would be an impediment. We have seen many SharePoint implementations where the business has formed the view that SharePoint is unsuitable - where the real problem was that an IT department did not have the necessary experience to deliver a suitable implementation. With dozens of successful implementations under our belts, we can provide assistance with requirements analysis, technical design as well as implementation guidance. Even if your IT department has the bandwidth to implement SharePoint, a small amount of guidance from an experienced Ballaird consultant could mean the difference between a succesful project and a failure.

One of the major benefits of SharePoint is the extent to which it can be customised to fit an organisation's particular requirements. In many cases, a small amount of custom development can add significant polish to a SharePoint implementation, significantly reducing the effort required by users. However, in the modern IT environment it is relatively uncommon for an organisation to maintain the specialist skills required to perform SharePoint development. Ballaird can complete your IT function by offering a full range of SharePoint-oriented custom development services, including:

• Custom branding and look and feel
• Custom site definitions and template
• System integration
• Reporting and business intelligence
• Bespoke web parts
• Custom workflows
• Data migration

If you are considering an offshore approach to large custom development projects, Ballaird can provide a vital design consultancy and project management role, helping to understand the detailed requirements, and providing technical specifications to your offshore partners, as well as understanding and managing risks and technical issues arising from the project. We can also manage the communications between your business and an offshore implementation team; frequently, offshore projects fail or are seriously affected by misunderstandings between a business and a remote technical team - Ballaird can fill that gap effectively, drawing on our experience in working with both businesses and technology to keep things running smoothly.

While many users are able to work with SharePoint with no training at all, some users are less confident with technology, or will be called on to manage SharePoint's more advanced functions. In addition, technical staff will often need to have specific skills development before they are able to operate and support a SharePoint-based system. We provide a complete range of training, from "packaged" user and administrator training courses, to tailored "power user" courses or developer courses which cover your particular customised SharePoint implementation, rather than just the "out-of-the-box" offering. For more information please refer to our SharePoint Training page.

You may have implemented SharePoint, but might be unsure as to whether your implementation gives you as much benefit as you could be getting. Or, you may be in the process of a SharePoint project and simply want an independent assessment of progress, design suitability, maintainability, security or any other aspect of your SharePoint implementation. We can draw on experience of many successful SharePoint implementations to provide a thorough and independent assessment of your SharePoint implementation. Where appropriate, we can provide detailed guidance for remedial action or "next steps", and if necessary can assist your IT team or implementation partner in making any necessary improvements. Our consultants have performed this function for large corporates and blue-chip financial institutions, and bring integrity and authority to the review process.