The Four C’s to Sell MOSS

You’ve been tasked with bring­ing some order to the chaos of your var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions’ file shares, e-mail servers, and exter­nally fac­ing web­sites. After all the research and analy­sis you’ve done you’ve decided that MOSS 2007 is the opti­mal solu­tion to solve the prob­lem. The prob­lem? Sell­ing it to man­age­ment. You can demo MOSS with all its fan­tas­tic fea­tures and Office inte­gra­tion, but your man­age­ment needs some “bul­let point” rea­sons why they should invest in MOSS.

In Essen­tial Share­Point 2007* the authors lay out the “four C’s” of com­pany por­tals that MOSS can sat­isfy. These can be used as a good start­ing point to sell them and bring MOSS into your organization.

Commu­ni­ca­tion is a fan­tas­tic rea­son to bring MOSS into your organization’s processes. Many com­pa­nies are plagued with dis­sem­i­nat­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion both to inter­nal and exter­nal indi­vid­u­als, and MOSS can aid in deliv­er­ing timely, rel­e­vant, and accu­rate infor­ma­tion to your tar­get audi­ence. Through the use of MOSS sites geared for news, announce­ment web parts, blogs, and audi­ence targeting—MOSS can greatly help your orga­ni­za­tion accom­plish this much-needed functionality.

Collab­o­ra­tion is the strong point of MOSS and also the eas­i­est to sell. Your orga­ni­za­tion strug­gles from dis­cern­ing which doc­u­ment is the most recent, and peo­ple in your orga­ni­za­tion real­ize that e-mailing around a doc­u­ment is not an effec­tive way to col­lab­o­rate. Here is a great time to talk about the work­flow capa­bil­i­ties in MOSS. Demon­strate an approval work­flow which engages the man­age­ment instantly by show­ing them how the whole process can be auto­mated, con­tained in one area, and man­age­ment can see what’s hold­ing up the work­flow. Add onto this team sites with robust doc­u­ment man­age­ment capa­bil­ity with an exten­si­ble secu­rity model, and you’re well on your way to con­vinc­ing them.

Consol­i­da­tion is prob­a­bly the rea­son you were tasked to find a bet­ter solu­tion than file shares. There is no way any­more to know where to get what and if it’s even accu­rate. With enter­prise search you can ensure that your users can always find the doc­u­ment (with a good meta­data structure/information archi­tec­ture). You can also sell the Busi­ness Data Cat­a­log (BDC) which can crawl those old file shares and bring them into the same search inter­face. You’ll also see eye­brows rise when you show them the busi­ness intel­li­gence capa­bil­i­ties in MOSS such as Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tors (KPIs) which will help your man­age­ment make the best deci­sion on the most up-to-date information.

Consis­tency is some­thing that we all long for in our IT appli­ca­tions. Right now your pub­lic fac­ing web­site, other mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als, and even stan­dard com­pany doc­u­men­ta­tion can’t look the same for any length of time. With the use of mas­ter pages you can be sure that the inter­face changes you make will be reflected across your entire MOSS instal­la­tion. Hav­ing prob­lems keep­ing that Pow­er­Point tem­plate up to date? Cre­at­ing a con­tent type will ensure that your users will always have the lat­est ver­sion of the com­pa­nies template.

These are four great sell­ing points of MOSS to bring your man­age­ment on board. When part­nered with some sim­ple demon­stra­tions that will cre­ate a strong case for MOSS.

*Jami­son, S., Car­darelli, M., & Han­ley, S. (2007). Essen­tial Share­point 2007. Read­ing: Addison-Wesley Professional.