SharePoint

• Author: Dennis Kennedy - Tom Mighell
• Pages: 157-160

157

SharePoint

SharePoint is a portal-based collaboration platform from Mic-

rosoft. It might be the most well-known and widely available

collaboration tool for legal professionals, primarily because it

is integrated so closely into the Microsoft Office suite of tools.

It can be obtained on a stand-alone basis, as a service hosted

by a third-party vendor, or as part of an Office 365 subscrip-

tion. SharePoint has drawn a lot of attention from large law

firms, and it has been available since 2001. We’ve often noticed

large audiences at presentations on SharePoint at legal tech-

nology conferences we’ve attended. That said, many Share-

Point users have a love-hate relationship with SharePoint; in

our opinion, the “hate” is most often the result of poorly exe-

cuted SharePoint rollout initiatives, which do not do a good job

of explaining the benefits and simplicity of using SharePoint.

We believe it’s still the best place to start your investigation

of a multi-purpose collaboration platform, especially if you are

running Microsoft Exchange or using Outlook.

SharePoint uses the familiar Microsoft interface and look

and feel. It works within a browser, making it easy for anyone

with an Internet connection to access. It can be used internally

or externally. SharePoint also integrates well with Microsoft

Office products, including OneNote, and it can be configured

to pull data from other law office programs, databases, web-

sites, and other sources. Even right out of the box, it provides

a wealth of collaboration tools as well as easy ways to person-

alize and customize them.

A basic SharePoint site is composed of modules called web

parts, which are components that implement a specified func-

tion, such as a task list, discussion board, calendar, or shared

document area. SharePoint sites are quite customizable, which

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