Now might be the time to finally make that change. Sure, they have been trusted and reliable friends for many years. They have provided you with the value you needed as you grew your business and defined your process but sometimes you just need to say goodbye.
Microsoft Access and Excel or a combination of the two have been used by many if not most businesses to facilitate processes, manage tasks and statuses, and to drive workflow, store data, and report results. Many businesses rely on them to fill in gaps left by their ERP or other systems and after years of using them they have become accustom to their use, macros, hot keys, and footprints.
Until recently there has not been a reasonable way to preserve the value of these one off applications and to transform them into applications that can be managed and integrated.
Microsoft SharePoint can now provide that value to the businesses that Access and Excel have been providing value to over the last 10-15 years.
SharePoint provides a data collection, data management, and workflow management framework and application base that can be used to build (not code) applications from standard components, existing spreadsheets, and access style datasheets. These applications can provide the data management capabilities of Excel and Access with the added functionality of email notification, approval, web access, and integration to each other and outside applications.
You may have already been exposed to SharePoint as a way to create collaboration, content management, or intranet applications for managing things like documents, events, and contact lists. The same functionality that is used to provide these SharePoint canned application can be customized and repurposed to provide company and industry specific application functionality.
With its SQL Server base, web server host, and email integration, SharePoint applications can provide enterprise wide applications for tracking and managing all of those pockets of data that are important for your business.
Sharepoint is idea for applicications and needs like the following:
- Tracking status and dates related to a task lists, projects, or deadlines.
- Storing product information or attributes that you don't have a place for inside your ERP.
- Attaching and collecting pictures, documents, emails, and presenations around a particular part, customer, or process.
- Collecting form information or other data for approval and central organization and dispersal.
- Creating complex workflow process that requires multistep approval and is timeline based.
Any or all of these application can also be integrated to the data in existing applications and retrieve needed data from them. The status and communication from any of these processes can be displayed right in your Outlook inbox through email or in your Outlook tree view as calendars, task lists, and document libraries.
To understand how this Outlook integration can add value and visibility to your workflow and data, download the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Quick Reference Guide.
To understand the full scope and diversity of the types of applications you can provide with SharePoint, take a look at the free Application Templates provided by Microsoft. These templates provide generic functionality in several areas. After looking through these, try to imagine which of these processes might have some common characteristics with your Excel and Access managed business process. See any similarities?
Maybe you have been hanging out with a different crowd. Do you have Filemaker, FoxPro, Lotus Notes? Those friends might be slowing you down as well. Sharepoint can be a great platform for transforming those applications into web based workflow applications as well.
Meritide is currently working with several of our customers to develop new SharePoint applications that provide managed workflow and process applications to replace manual and Excel or Access based workflows. These new applications provide all the ease of use and visibility that Excel and Access did but reduce the manual emailing of documents, manual version control, and latency in access and data updates. These application will also be the starting point for added and integated functionality and overall automated workflow development for the organization.
Don't wait another year to move away from Access and Excel to a next generation SharePoint application (and certainly don't keep building new ones). Meritide can work with you to evaluate your existing Excel and Access application and provide you with a SharePoint plan and implementation.
For more information or to discuss your needs, contact Neil Otto at 651-255-7308.