SharePoint®
High Monkey has been providing SharePoint solutions since the first versions of SharePoint (Team Services, WSS 2.0, Portal 2003). In addition to our expertise in providing solutions in both the WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 versions of SharePoint, High Monkey has already completed Microsoft's advanced partner training for SharePoint 2010. We've built a couple of portal solutions in SharePoint 2010. In other words we've been there - done that - and have the experience to prove it.
SharePoint sometimes appears to be the 900 pound gorilla of collaboration. That perception makes some business decision makers reluctant to implement SharePoint. At High Monkey we understand that reluctance and prefer to call it caution. SharePoint can also appear deceptively easy to implement "Let's turn it on and see if people use it."). Unfortunately, we have seen numerous SharePoint installations and rollouts that have "gone south" due to a lack of planning. Many of our clients ask us to help them figure out what they did with SharePoint and how it got so out of control. We're always willing to help sort things out after the fact. It's always a better choice to do some solid planning before the fact--or as we call it, SharePoint Roadmapping (yes, it's a service we offer).
What exactly is SharePoint?
The official line is that SharePoint is: a tool for collaboration. At High Monkey, we view SharePoint as a technology platform that enables better communication, improves business processes, and delivers information in an organized manner. The consultants at High Monkey know the technology of SharePoint inside and out but you will find that we work first with our clients on identifying business problems, and then we determine if SharePoint is the best solution. Believe it or not, there are times when we don't recommend SharePoint. For a majority of our clients however, we deliver SharePoint based solutions that leverage SharePoint's out of the box functionality as much as possible. In other words, we approach projects as business people first and technologists second.
High Monkey is different from our competition because we take a simpler approach to technology. We find that many SharePoint systems are "over thought". We help organizations look at themselves from a user's perspective, a taxonomy perspective, a search perspective, and an administrative perspective. In addition, we consider ourselves to be SharePoint "out-of-the-box extremists". We rarely recommend custom coding as a solution because it often costs more, is difficult to maintain, and makes clients feel like they are tied to us. We also make sure the solution we provide our clients is extremely well documented. We may joke that we are documentation zealots and it is true. Along with documentation, we provide knowledge transfer and mentoring throughout our client engagements. Our goal is to build our clients' knowledge about SharePoint so they are not dependent on High Monkey. We find that most of our clients keep doing business with us because they want to --not because they have to.
From document management to workflow to portals, take a look at our portfolio and you will see the variety of SharePoint projects that High Monkey has delivered for our clients.