SharePoint Portal explained

The first question you are probably asking yourself is "What is a Portal?" and then secondly "What is SharePoint?". After that you may ask "How will this help my business?".

A Portal - often known as an Intranet - is a website which is designed to be used by your team to help them do their work. It is a central store of information on how you do things - in a standard format which can look like any webpage you could view on the internet. The Portal is like other applications in that it can store data and information, but it has the additional benefit that it can display information which is actually stored in other applications.

SharePoint is a comprehensive set of tools from Microsoft which has effectively created a development environment so that you can build a your own applications. This massively reduces the time to develop custom applications for a business. If you are a small business with a few staff then you can really do it yourself after a few days of training. However for large firms it is essential that the management tools link with the firms central stores of information whether it is your practice management systems or tax return packages. This requires a customised database to link together all your systems and then the tools to allow data from other systems to be displayed within the Portal.

This sounds very technical - and it is - but the advantages for a business are very real. How do you communicate to an accounts team of 100 across three offices, that there is one - and only one - way of writing to clients to request them to send in their records? The answer is that you have all your procedures in one place - dynamically linked to the Office documents which you need to use to carry out the work. Furthermore, if your Audit Partner does not understand how to prepare tax returns then you probably do not want him opening your tax return preparation software to find out how much tax a client needs to pay. Much better to have a simple report on a dashboard for that client, alongside the information on debtors from your Practice Management software and the progress on finalising the accounts from your accounts preparation software.

You can get an understanding of what can be achieved from the screen shots of the Portal we have built for an imaginary accounting firm called Frank Wood & Co.

If you want to have access to the demonstration site for FW&Co then please email andrew@ppautomation.com.

The cost for the basic package will vary considerably depending on the options selected. Call us for further details or email andrew@ppautomation.com.