Every company uses different internal systems and has its own distinct set of software requirements that are critical to a its productivity. Because of this, it is important that we understand your one-of-a-kind business requirements in order to provide SharePoint integration services that work with your entire business.
SHAREPOINT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND CONSULTING
SharePoint Integration Services
What is SharePoint?
SharePoint is a Microsoft software solution that makes collaboration and document management a breeze for growing organizations. SharePoint has numerous valuable capabilities as an off-the-shelf solution, but it really shines when it’s supplemented with custom SharePoint development services and integration with wider internal systems.
Key Features of SharePoint (And Why It Works for Businesses)
Why is SharePoint such a popular choice for businesses that are looking to connect their internal IT systems?
Here are just a few of the features that make SharePoint so effective for businesses:
- Intranet and custom portals
- File and document management
- Collaborative working functionality
- Project management potential
- Information rights management and compliance monitoring
- Opportunities for custom development and integration
What Are SharePoint Integration Services?
Options and opportunities for integrating and expanding SharePoint are diverse, and SharePoint consulting may assist you in determining which capabilities are most appropriate for your needs.
Our SharePoint integration services help you to connect this flexible system to your existing internal software. This could be programs like Teams or Microsoft Dynamics, more common functions like calendars and CRM systems, or creating links with completely custom software.
We can help you to build bridges between your programs and identify automation that ensures seamless collaboration across systems for your teams.
Why is Integration with SharePoint Important?
Integrating your SharePoint system with other internal systems streamlines your internal processes and make teams more efficient. Using a lot of different software that doesn’t work together can be time-consuming for staff. Going from program to program to find all the information you need can take a while, particularly if you are communicating with external partners, customers, or even other internal departments. This delay in information transfer can be extremely frustrating.
i3solutions offers both SharePoint consulting and ongoing support to help you keep all of your systems up to date and working well together. Once we’ve set up a system we can help advise you on which other systems work best and create automation and links to ensure the whole system runs smoothly.
SharePoint Integration Options
SharePoint’s high configurability allows for greater flexibility when it comes to customization and integration. The platform powers seamless integration with CMS, ERP, HR, and business intelligence (BI) software and several applications like Azure SQL, Dynamics NAV, IBM DB2, Office 365, RSS, and Salesforce to boost interoperability and provide greater business advantage.
CMS Integration
A content management system can be integrated as part of the user’s SharePoint site to create, edit, manage, and publish content. The most popular CMS that are integrated with SharePoint are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and SalesForce. By integrating CMS with out-of-the-box SharePoint, we offer our clients a centralized repository to store their documents in various formats including rare formats like .ppsx and .ods. They are also able to index documents based on their metadata to facilitate accessibility. Likewise, they enjoy robust search functionality as SharePoint integrated with a CMS powers enterprise search, eDiscovery and metadata extraction.
ERP Integration
Enterprise resource planning software automates routine business functions like accounting, invoicing, order management, and sales quoting. The integrated software suite which encompasses customer relationship management (CRM), financial management, supply chain management (SCM), and human resource management (HRM) enables better organized and consolidated business data. ERP software is designed to streamline business operations as it offers an interconnected management of specific business processes. ERP is great on its own, but it becomes excellent when integrated with SharePoint.
SharePoint can be integrated with systems that are at the heart of the day-to-day running of your business. Professional integration can mean that your document management system functions alongside and integrates with existing HR and ERP systems to keep the business running smoothly while removing extra tasks that can waste time and reduce productivity.
A SharePoint and ERP integration will support businesses with better operational visibility and provide real-time business data required for decision making to authorized employees. By leveraging the superior search functionalities offered by SharePoint, our clients enjoy greater end-user functionality. We can help you explore SharePoint integrations with popular ERP platforms like Sage ERP, SAP and Oracle or any other solution you require.
CRM Integration
Customer relationship management (CRM) is vital to the growth of any organization as it helps build lasting relationships with their customers which improves customer loyalty and retention. CRM software monitors and tracks the behavior of customers over time to understand their needs better. This generates a large amount of data that needs to be managed. SharePoint is an effective tool for teams that need to manage vast amounts of content. This can be integrated with your systems to make file sharing and management easy. For content managers, this can mean being able to easily approve and edit the content or escalate it to managers with ease.
The tiered access options and ability to store specialist files can help marketing teams work closely with design teams. And once content is approved, integration with scheduling tools and publishers can help to keep content rolling out automatically. Your teams can access all the information needed in one place with CRM and sales integrations. This ease of access can help support and sales teams provide high-quality service for customers to keep them coming back for more.
CRMs provide businesses with detailed analytics and are able to conceptualize data to make it more meaningful and understandable to management and other authorized end users. CRM software like Dynamics 365 can be integrated with SharePoint to power fully functional and limitless customer relationship management. This integration has the capacity to take your business to the next level by scaling CRM workflow and providing a unique portal experience to your customers.
BI Integration
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are analytics solutions used to collect and process large amounts of business data to help decision makers make accurate decisions based on real-time information and thus drive business growth. Business intelligence tools and solutions offer businesses valuable business insights and better data quality to power fast and accurate reporting and increased operational efficiency. Microsoft SQL server and Power BI are the most used Business Intelligence solutions for SharePoint integration. A SharePoint and BI integration provides a centralized storage for business intelligence reports as well as helps data visualization of the business intelligence data.
Other Integration Options
Several other solutions, systems, and applications can be integrated with SharePoint to boost their overall functionality. SharePoint experts can also customize this software before they are integrated with SharePoint.
Project Management Systems
Project management systems (PMS) assists businesses with the planning, organizing, and implementation of their projects. SharePoint ensures interoperability of these systems and provides teams with centralized solutions where they can jointly manage their projects and share knowledge. Integrating a PMS with SharePoint offers businesses a self-sufficient solution that can handle all task management. Popular project management solutions that we integrate with SharePoint for our clients are Asana, Wrike, Trello, and Microsoft Project.
Document Management Systems
Document management can help to protect teams from losing vital files and help individuals work together on them. It also has the ability to send updates and notes through Teams to keep everyone up to date and organized.
SharePoint comes out of the box with the primary functionality of serving as a document management system. However, connecting SharePoint with superior document management systems like Zoho or Alfresco, our clients enjoy better document management features. An integration of SharePoint and a DMS enables document versioning and can also activate automatic synchronization between on-premises and cloud document storages.
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365 product suites can also be seamlessly integrated with SharePoint to boost its functionality. With this integration, users can leverage Office 365 groups for group communication and file sharing, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. SharePoint is a collaborative tool commonly used for content and project management. Its integrations with to-do lists, calendars and more make it naturally appealing for this reason.
SharePoint can be integrated with other collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams which makes communication and team-work simple, particularly when many teams are remote or based in multiple locations. Communication is key to collaboration, and SharePoint integrations make it easy.
Businesses also enhance workflow capabilities with Microsoft Flow, easily create new layouts that allow for mobile friendly display and leverage Power BI to make information readily available.
LMS Integration
Learning management systems such as Moodle, Adobe Captivate Prime, Docebo LMS, iSpring Learn, and eFront are useful for employee regular training and onboarding. Any one of these can be integrated with SharePoint to offer a virtual workspace where workers can obtain crucial training whenever they need it.
Social Media Integration
Most business activities happen online, and when it comes to interacting with customers, businesses rely heavily on social media. Social media applications, such as Facebook or Twitter, can be integrated with SharePoint to increase the quality of the business customer interaction.
Custom Integration
SharePoint integration services are not limited to pre-built systems and SharePoint custom development. Custom solutions can also be built and integrated into SharePoint. Our experienced team can help you to build links and connections with almost any system imaginable.
i3solutions’ SharePoint consulting services will help you identify where your internal systems can benefit from automation, custom development and updates to ensure all of the cogs in your machine work well together.
SharePoint Integration with Third-Party Tools
Our SharePoint customization and integration experts deliver successful integration of third-party tools and solutions with SharePoint. These tools include:
API Integrations
Leveraging on APIs such as JavaScript client object model, .NET Framework client object model, Silverlight client object model, and REST or OData endpoints APIs, we enable third-party applications to interact with SharePoint seamlessly. The API we use depends on the operation we want to perform.
Business Connectivity Services
Integration via business connectivity services enables trouble free data flows between SharePoint and other data sources. These services provide a central interface for interacting with legacy systems during SharePoint integration with write-back capabilities.
Hybrid Integrations
Hybrid integrations permits the display of Office 365 search results in SharePoint on-premises. Hybrid APIs make for simultaneous management of legacy systems throughout integration.
Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS)
Integration via content management interoperability services (CMIS) can also be used to assure the compatibility of content management systems and content repositories with SharePoint.
Custom Integrations
We also leverage Microsoft visual studio to create unique integration between SharePoint and third-party applications.
What Should You Consider When It Comes to IT and Software Integration?
Your IT and software solutions should work for you, and you should not have to compromise. If you are comparing different systems but aren’t quite sure which to choose, it might be a good idea to speak to a specialist for advice.
Often integration and custom development can help you expand a specific system that might be lacking a couple of features to make it work perfectly for your business. For many companies, this is hugely beneficial and can save money on switching systems long-term.
i3solutions’ Approach to SharePoint Integration
i3solutions has a unique and well-rounded approach to SharePoint integration services. Our 25 years of experience have provided us with a huge knowledge base working in a wide variety of industries. This helps us to offer advice on the direction of your internal systems and identify the potential for integration. i3solutions offers both SharePoint consulting and ongoing support to help you keep all of your systems up to date and working well together. Once we’ve set up a platform, we can help advise you on which other tools work best and create automation and links to ensure the whole system runs smoothly.
We take the time to help our clients understand the range of offerings that SharePoint could provide them and their business through customization and integration. These processes are more than just making simple tweaks and minor edits, but our experts are well experienced and prepared to handle the tasks. According to Microsoft, more than 250,000 organizations are already using SharePoint. 85% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform as part of their Office 365 suite. And it total, over 190 million people now use SharePoint. What are you waiting for? Contact us today to discuss your integration needs
