This question does seem to come up a lot. People may have a general idea of what SharePoint is, but are unable to apply their own business processes to it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...a little training goes a long way in increasing productivity in the products you use in your business. Everything I've listed can easily be accomplished by the everyday user that has taken the time to learn SharePoint.

Listed below, you will find some common business needs that can be solved by using a SharePoint Services 3.0 site. Maybe you'll find a few things here that you've been trying to find a solution for within your own organization.

These are only a few of the ways that you can use SharePoint Services. Once you start using it, you begin to realize other areas that your business can benefit from the functionality that's available at your fingertips...with no web staff needed. Very often, you've got SharePoint in place but no one is using it. See if these ideas can change that.

• You're having trouble managing projects and are considering buying an expensive project management solution.
• You keep all your emails in Outlook and wish you had a better place to store and archive them.
• You collaborate a lot on documents with others and find it difficult to know who has done what, and wish you could easily see earlier versions...maybe even restore to earlier versions when someone really messes up. Wouldn't it be great to tie documents to the projects they are associated with?
• You are a task-driven company and would like to assign tasks to your team members, and have them be notified automatically that they have a new task. You also want to be alerted of updates to the task.
• You want a help ticket solution for your company, and you don't want to pay an arm and a leg for it.

• You've decided you want a company blog to start communicating and sharing ideas with your team. You don't want this to be a public blog.
• Your company deals with a lot of events, so you need a place to stay organized. It would be great if it would integrate with Outlook.
• You've seriously thought that your company could use some sort of document management system that uses a check-in / check-out feature.
• You would like to have more control over the company documents that are posted to a central location. Something that has a content approval feature would be perfect.
• You would like to have a secure place to share documents and other information with clients and/or partners, just as long as it's secure and private.

• You would like to start offering training material to your teams, clients, and/or partners in a password-protected website that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
• You want a central task location and the ability to assign tasks to team members. You want those tasks to automatically show up in their Outlook 2007 To-Do List. Wouldn't it be great if those tasks were linked to your projects so you could easily find out what tasks are still open for each project?
• You would like to be able to access and work with your data directly over your internet-enabled mobile phone.
• It's hard for your teams to all meet at the same time for brainstorming sessions. You would like to have a better team communication strategy in place where everyone can participate in the conversation when their schedules permit.
• You would love to have a central place to make company, team, or project announcements, and then everyone automatically gets notified, no matter where they are in the world.

• You and your team members travel a lot, and you wish you could be offline and still work on the files, projects, tasks, issues, discussions, etc. and then sync the updated information later on.
• Your company uses Microsoft Access 2007 databases for much of the company information. You would like there to be a way to continue to update this data from a local desktop using Access and have the information sync to a central location that could be accessed from anywhere in the world.
• You and your team members, clients, and/or partners all work on the same documents. You would like for each person to take the "central" document, create a local (and syncronized) copy of it. If changes are made by others while you are working on your local copy you want to get updates with the click of a button. Then when everyone is done they sync it back up to the "central" document. Every person's edits are merged to the single document.
• You want to be able to easily add custom fields to any area without the help of a web or IT person.
• And it goes without saying that you don't want to spend a fortune on a solution to meet these needs.