The SharePoint Document Library & Oracle Fusion Middleware Increase Worker Collaboration

The SharePoint document library provides a central place to store documents helping companies have better control over their content so they can work with the same information. Having a central storage location for documents resolves the problem of copies of a document being emailed back and forth between team members. Since all team members edit the documents in the document library, there is only one place to go for the most up to date version of a document. All members of the team will edit a single, shared copy of each document. SharePoint enforces a "check out" and "check in" procedure, which ensures that only one team member can edit a document at a time. In addition, SharePoint can maintain version histories, so that team members can see the previous versions of a document as well as the current version.

Major corporations seeking to improve communication within their worker community have found SharePoint to be an invaluable tool because it can be deployed across a company's intranet and extranet. It can provide a sure footing for business intelligence (BI) applications so as to encourage better content management and consistent communication and collaboration within the worker community. It is an especially wise choice for companies who have already invested heavily in Microsoft technologies.

According to a One Stop Click news article published in October 2008, even though there are challenges related to implementing SharePoint with web content management systems (CMS), "many customers ... may still adopt it heavily for document collaboration." But they need to "understand how to integrate documents with web publishing systems."

In an article entitled "Get More from Microsoft SharePoint with Oracle Fusion Middleware", Computerworld reports that "Oracle Fusion Middleware includes a unique and broad set of capabilities that help IT organizations get control of SharePoint deployments while enhancing the content experience for end users."

Computerworld further reports that "as organizations rollout Microsoft SharePoint, a new ecosystem of content sharing, collaboration, and project libraries is introduced. This infrastructure is sometimes managed centrally by IT organizations, but more frequently it is a viral rollout based on departmental and project teams standing up SharePoint instances to provide spaces and places for local content.

"While this may provide benefits to specific teams, it also creates unique new challenges to IT organizations looking to provide aggregated access to content, secure corporate intellectual property, comply with regulatory or legal policies, and rollout enterprise search and content management tools across an increasingly diverse and distributed set of content stores and document owners."