It is not difficult to understand why Mitrais has mounted a major corporate
effort to lay the foundation for and rapidly enhance its software engineering
skills in Microsoft SharePoint.
The rapidly escalating uptake of SharePoint reflects the recognition by
business of the importance of using information technology collaboratively for
workflow, search, and business data access and document management - functions
that are very much the bread and butter of any administration environment.
SharePoint
has, in comparison with other technologies and in a relatively short period of
time on the market, proven itself a powerful and flexible development platform.
More than 100 Mitrais developers are skilled in SharePoint. Its greatest
strength according to the company’s most experienced systems engineers and
developers is that SharePoint is highly configurable, rather than requiring them
to write of lots of code.
They endorse that SharePoint is highly scalable. It can be deployed in server
farms with specific servers handling specific functions beyond the normal web,
app, and database server configuration.
SharePoint can be load-balanced and clustered as well for high performance
and availability. The average 10,000 user deployment could easily run in two or
three physical servers or twice as many for a high availability application.
If SharePoint carries an overhead in comparison to conventional .NET
applications, it is because it contains a lot of metadata and it is constantly
looking up data to find the real data.
But that is what makes it so configurable.
The escalating interest in and popularity of SharePoint is reflected in two
instances: how quickly Mitrais is training and has certified its developers in
SharePoint and how readily it is being deployed for in some projects.
For example, in one project Mitrais has configured a records center site to
store and classify contracts by client and account codes which are obtained and
validated directly from the company’s accounting system.
The application has been extended even further so administration staff can
view a list of applicable contracts from an account screen in the CRM system and
open them there, without going to the record centre site.
Mitrais has developed travel and leave management systems using SharePoint.
The software was also the development platform for applications in the health
field.
Mitrais developers integrated SharePoint and MS CRM 4.0 so that data entered
to SharePoint is fed to MS CRM which functions as a data container.
“A BIG thank-you all and GREAT work! [The Client] is pleased with the results
as he says – looking good. Thank you all again for your wonderful effort over
the last few months.”
Mandy Franklin
TSA Corporation, Australia