Microsoft SharePoint - Dealing with the Abundance of SharePoint Sites

Amplexor has developed a solution – ‘Ceylon’ - that allows “helicopter views” on your collections of SharePoint sites. Ceylon consolidates sites throughout the SharePoint farm in a structured way, thus offering an overview and single point of access to hundreds of sites.

Microsoft SharePoint has been widely adopted on the market. Companies using the SharePoint platform within their organization have seen a major take-up. Prior to the advent of SharePoint, simple collaboration services were poorly implemented or just plainly absent in many content management and document management systems. By focusing on basic file sharing, SharePoint really addresses a need that many mid-sized businesses or autonomous departments within large organizations encounter.

But this widespread – and mostly unmanaged - usage has also caused some issues regarding ‘findability’ and manageability. Senior IT-people are even comparing the current SharePoint-wave with that of Lotus Notes a decade ago.

One of the most prominent building blocks of the SharePoint environment is the concept of a ‘SharePoint site’; a place for collaboration, communication, or content storage. Depending on your business needs, you can create sites such as team sites, project sites, customer sites and others. You can customize a site's appearance, users, user permissions, galleries, and site administration by using the Site Settings administration.

Imagine the advantages of having project sites. The need for a central workplace for projects will occur in almost every single company. Project teams have lots of information they need to share – often on a temporary basis: project documents, project calendars, discussion forms, wikis, contact details of team members, KPI dashboards, etc. Within SharePoint, it only takes you a few minutes to set up this type of project site template and project leaders– with the right permissions – can start to set up project sites.

Problems will only arise later when project sites are in place. SharePoint isn’t capable of generating an overview of all available sites and it is NOT possible to assign properties (or metadata) on a site level. Typical sites properties one would like to assign to a project site would be things like: name of project manager, type of project, year of realization, status of the project, name of customer, commercial account manager, budget or whatever type metadata that is relevant for your business. So if one would like to have a look at all project sites of a particular type or from customer Y, you would need to wade through all your sites to find them. Good luck if you have tens or hundreds of said websites which is often the case.

Amplexor has developed a solution – ‘Ceylon’ - that allows “helicopter views” on your collections of SharePoint sites. Ceylon consolidates sites throughout the SharePoint farm in a structured way, thus offering an overview and single point of access to hundreds of sites. Ceylon Webparts lets you assign properties to a site. These properties are configurable per type of site you define for your business needs: a typical project site will have different properties than (for example) a customer site (proposals, invoices, contracts, etc.) or an HR site (labor contract, annual evaluation reports, pay slips, certificates,etc).

Now that these Site properties are available, Ceylon offers a myriad of ways to ‘unlock’ this information and provide a true helicopter view on all your sites through a faceted search overview of all the available property values. So with a simple click, you can select the name of a project manager and you will get a list of all projects realized by that project manager. If you want to drill further, just click on another property value – e.g. ‘Year of Realization’ – and the faceted search will filter out all the projects from that specific year.

Read more about Ceylon.