How Microsoft Sharepoint tackles the problem of making years of archived information usable and meaningful again...

Well, in most cases, our friendly, bloated email inbox actually is a kind of database - the worst kind: unordered in any really useful way, and containing hundreds, probably thousands of documents - many of which are incremental versions of the same 'document in progress'. Many of which have equally numerous siblings over in the inboxes of our colleagues. Basically, a virtual folder - a 'pile of information'.

I'm not talking from the high ground here, by the way - I speak as a compulsive archivist with a veritable 'Manhattan skyline' of back-up discs dominating one section of my home, which is very slowly getting catalogued into slip-folders. And I speak also as someone who has never had any luck in deleting emails - I inevitably keep the ones I never need again, and delete those that later turn out to be crucial. This leads, of course, to a personal inbox with what can only be described as 'morbid obesity'. And one from which it is often very difficult to extract meaningful information (example: try searching your own mailbox for 'Twitter' in the hope of finding the account information that Twitter sent you when you signed up - and marvel at the sheer number of totally unrelated emails that feature this word!).

And yet I am inclined to be organised - as someone who has worked a fair bit with database systems, the idea of organisation appeals to me immensely. So it was with great interest that I got to take a look at a new Sharepoint portal created by Wanstor's tireless developer/designer Uzma Naz yesterday for one of our enterprise-level clients, and was incredibly impressed - most of all by the way in which Sharepoint can address very specific problems that an individual company might have, and make those solutions easily accessible without sacrificing security. But more of that particular aspect another time.

First, what about security? You wouldn't necessarily open your mailbox to all and sundry as a solution to inbox clutter, after all. A large corporation with a number of franchises or commercial concerns needs access to all the information coming in from all its companies; some of those companies need a certain amount of access to a certain amount of that data too; and some of the others need, quite literally, to be minding their own business.

If you're the chief admin of your Sharepoint infrastructure, you can control all user permissions. If you're a user, the assigning of permissions is totally transparent, and you don't have to worry about it.

A customised Sharepoint solution brings in all the vital information that was previously being obtained by soliciting emails or bothering the accounts department every month/week, and makes it accessible on a 'need to know' basis. And since all the information stays in one place as it builds up, not only does it never outgrow the limits of a desktop spreadsheet program, but can process that data into meaningful reports in seconds - without the need to download an attached spreadsheet (and wake up your security software in the process).

In fact, Sharepoint is fairly retro-friendly - if you really can't recover from decades of spreadsheet addiction, you can still export the information for your local copy of Excel instead of printing it directly from Sharepoint. And it also knows how used we are to making an email program the centre of our organisational routine - for this reason, you can even upload a spreadsheet or document to Sharepoint and still have it 'live' within Outlook - except that it will always be the same version that your Sharepoint-powered colleagues are talking about - and you'll still be able to go back to an earlier version if a data disaster occurs with the document.

There's a lot more I want to say about Sharepoint's ability to cut through and make productive sense of years of accumulated data-clutter, and I'll come back to this subject soon. If you're intrigued by the idea of getting back several business days a year and dumping the 'flat folder' of unrelated information that is your swollen email inbox, consider what Wanstor can do to help Sharepoint put you back in touch with your archives.