Why Southern Housing have chosen to invest in SharePoint and Unify?

SharePoint has become a key part of Southern Housing Group's IT strategy. They are a Microsoft house, SharePoint fits and binds important business applications and processes together.

There are several strands to the strategy, all of which are focused on control, document management and workflow. The days of traditional file shares with their lack of search and security management issues are coming to an end, knowledge, record management and controlled access at a file level is becoming essential.

SharePoint is also playing an important part in the social and communication dynamics within the business. Microsoft Lync is also being adopted and together with SharePoint will improve internal communication and knowledge sharing, which is an important strategic objective. SharePoint is more than just a place to store and manage documents. It is a platform for delivering business solutions.

Southern Housing Group is planning to put its intranet, extranet and website on a SharePoint platform. Such services have previously been outsourced and much will be brought in-house providing better value for money . Hamish McDermid commented "Solutions to support business processes are being developed, including using SharePoint to manage collection and handover of data between Development and Operational teams".

There are many more benefits, another also worth mentioning is Business Intelligence.

SharePoint will replace Southern Housing Group existing B.I. application to provide a more integrated and cost effective solution.

People can struggle to 'get' SharePoint because it can do so much and has such huge potential that it is difficult to know where to start or which SharePoint solution to use in the business. Hamish has taken the approach that SharePoint is part of the infrastructure that the IT team delivers, a bit like providing a mail server. His team then offer SharePoint as a viable solution for various business needs and will grow the SharePoint infrastructure as required.

The Unify Intranet solution is an excellent place to start as it provides an easy to implement solution that can form the foundation for future development by showing the business what SharePoint can do. Unify Intranet is a particularly good starting point for the development of a knowledge management, document management and workflow solution.

Hamish regards SharePoint as an essential part of Southern Housing Group's IT service portfolio; a powerful platform on which to build solutions to strategic IT requirements.

What benefits have you and SHG achieved from using Montal/Inspired to assist with SharePoint development?

The Unify Intranet provided by Montal and Inspired was a very cost effective solution. The service was responsive and well managed and has proved extremely good value for money.