Microsoft SharePoint has proven to be among the most potent and cost-effective software platforms available for financial service organisations, to facilitate knowledge worker collaboration and organisation of digital assets. To fully leverage the platform for success, several issues related to platform management, protection, and compliance must be addressed.

Financial Service providers must perform at the highest levels to remain competitive, and so must their collaborative platforms. Slow application response and platform instability are simply unacceptable in today’s competitive environment. Therefore, it is vital that SharePoint and its associated SQL server databases are optimised via appropriate off-load archiving, geo-replication, and platform availability strategies.

The financial services sector faces increasingly critical and complex business and technology issues. Market trends such as globalisation, emerging economies, increased regulation and technological innovation that are currently shaping the industry provide huge challenges.

SharePoint is a cost-effective, browser-based solution that incorporates document and content management, workflow, collaboration, enterprise search, portals, business forms, integration and business intelligence. It enables financial services organisations to capture, store, find and share information in a familiar Microsoft environment.

Benefits

With SharePoint financial services organisations can:

• Improve customer service processing calls and enquiry management
• Improve staff performance due to inherent search capabilities
• Attain and maintain quality compliance by ensuring 'best practice' methods are followed and audited
• Increase collaboration between employees, customers, and partners
• Enable sharing of information and customer self-service by providing online access to financial products and other information
• Achieve substantial cost savings by reducing printing, mailing and archiving costs while also providing a disaster recovery solution for paper-based information
• Share internal information including staff handbooks and training material
• Unlock the knowledge in e-mail systems and network drives by allowing content search and archiving
• Achieve integration with structured business applications including Finance, HR, CRM, etc

• Have a central library and classification for all company information