February 4, 2010 9:42 AM |
Posted by Bob Beach |
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This week I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at Legal Tech NY about SharePoint Development best practices. I was joined by Guy Wiggins, Director of Practice Management at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, and Steve Fletcher, Chief Information Officer at Parker Poe.
The focus of the session was on best practices for using SharePoint for client service and business development. The panel shared some very interesting insights on the topic.
Using SharePoint to Drive New Business
SharePoint can and should be used as a platform for bringing together information about clients, matters, and practices/industries served by the firm. When done well, this can lead to new insights about the work the firm is doing, and opportunities to drive new business. Parker Poe currently uses SharePoint as their intranet to deliver comprehensive information about various practice areas, and specifically their Resorts and Hospitality practice, where they have organized content around key resort destinations. If a prospective client asks what they know about resort development in Anguila, Parker Poe lawyers have the answers at their fingertips. In fact, they show these intranet pages to prospective clients as part of the pitch process – and it has absolutely won business for them.
Client Extranets Help Deliver Value to Clients
Client extranets are a great way to interact with clients beyond simple document sharing to include collaboration capabilities, billing-related information, and trending towards matter budgeting and task/project management. There are technically several options and decisions to be made around the setup of SharePoint extranet sites, including site architecture and provisioning, authentication approaches, login and password management, and usage analysis. SharePoint provides many of the capabilities natively, but third-party products like XMLAW OneView Extranet and Epok and others enhance and expand on these capabilities.
The Importance of Meaningful Content
The key aspect for both SharePoint intranets and extranets is the quality of the content. Without meaningful content, neither solution will deliver value to end users.
The keys to great content are:
1) Fresh and relevant
2) Targeted/personalized
3) Categorized/tagged
4) Prioritized and highlighted
5) Vetted/audited
6) Readily available
SharePoint provides content management capabilities in all of these areas, but the primary technical area to focus on should be custom content types. Content types are much expanded in SharePoint 2010 to allow you to define an enterprise taxonomy that spans sources of content.
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