Collaboration on Work Documents
One of the great features of SharePoint is the concept of a shared workspace, which enables team collaboration on various work items and documents. In SharePoint these shared workspaces are easily set up for a new project and can include features such as tools for document collaboration (with advanced editing permissions), task management and calendar tracking, shared document libraries, wiki’s, and much more. The benefit of these tools is the elimination of offline communication in the form of phone calls and emails, and the ability to track and document the collective knowledge of the team. This means faster, more efficient communications and easily accessible information for everyone.

Approval Processes
From inception to completion, marketing programs – especially in the creative development process – require a lot of approvals and feedback. This can be a time consuming, frustrating process. It is also a challenge to document internal as well as client approvals. In SharePoint these processes can be mapped and automated to give visibility into the process, track feedback, manage timelines and ensure the entire creative process stays on track. Instead of frustrations and delays, marketing teams can have tremendous insight into each program and a history of its progress.

Document management and version control
Document management can be a challenge and is plagued with problems such as too many versions, not knowing who owns the document or its status in the review process, and tracking changes. This is often an ad-hoc process managed with a variety of tools, from email to hand-written notes. The information in these documents is the combined knowledge of a skilled team, and losing these data can have a significant impact on productivity and execution. SharePoint can become an integrated document repository complete with version control, process, and workflow capabilities. A number of technologies exist for shared file access, but SharePoint adds several new layers beyond basic storage and retrieval. This means documents can be checked in and out (ensuring updates are made by one person at a time), version history can be maintained, documents can be taken offline (for the disconnected worker) and documents are all available in one central location. Instead of managing dozens of documents on your local machine and sharing data as needed, the team can log into the site, download the latest version, make changes offline, and share updates with the rest of the team.

Project Management and Project Tracking
For departments developing multiple program plans in tools such as Microsoft Project, SharePoint offers the ability to collect individual project plans into a central platform and then produce a higher-level master plan from the individual plans. This allows far greater potential for collaboration and near-real-time management, communication, and reporting.

Team communications and portal functions
Today, most organizations use a constant stream of emails to share memos, calendar items, news, process guidance, and other internal communications. This adds unnecessary volume to already-full inboxes. SharePoint can coordinate these communication efforts by serving as a portal that manages team calendars, news updates, internal memos, and more. This, in turn, can be integrated with other SharePoint tools such as project management, document libraries, workflows, and others to share automated updates and keep the portal active.

Management Reporting
Report management is extremely time consuming. A typical business spends many hours every month producing reports, tracking activities, and communicating program updates. SharePoint can serve as a central platform for report access, program status-ing, and information sharing. For example, if projects and workflows are managed within SharePoint, then calendars are all in place for roll-up reporting that provide up to date status reports and quick insight into the organization. And in this type of online environment, information is real-time or near-real-time, making for better decision making.

The Business Impact of Deploying SharePoint
Marketing organizations face a variety of challenges on a daily basis which have a significant impact on productivity and the bottom line. This is why leading organizations are deploying SharePoint as a platform that facilitates healthy collaboration, reduces inefficient processes and accelerates the go-to-market effort. It is a powerful application on which companies of all sizes rely to enhance their marketing efforts, and it is proving to be very adept at solving an array of challenges. With any technology, however, an organization should follow best practices in determining if the technology is the best solution for their needs and whether it will provide a compelling ROI. With a technology like this, there are many factors to consider, including whether one should use a hosted solution or bring it in-house, type of governance (and retention) policies to be set, and whether or not access should be extended to outside partners. All of these can impact speed to delivery and the total value obtained. With that said leading marketing organizations find tremendous value in SharePoint and apply it to some of their most common and most challenging problems to become faster, leaner, and stronger teams.