I was pleased to be in Utrecht this week for the Congres SharePoint, which saw 350+ people come together for a day of high-energy presentations.

For my part, I talked about how SharePoint can be used to deliver powerful content-driven solutions, as well as sharing a pile of real-world examples of intranets (of course!).

A few notes from the session to go with the slides above:

• I started with a truth that is widely known: if all you want to do is to publish web pages with content, there are simpler tools than SharePoint (there, I’ve said it!).
• SharePoint can, however, be used in powerful ways to do smart things with content.
• SharePoint can be used to add structure to content, such as the precedents system created in SharePoint 2010 for Bennett Jones, a mid-sized Canadian law firm.
• Metadata can also address business needs. For example, IMF used a common taxonomy to create “all about a country”, a single home for everything that IMF knows about the economic state of countries (a lot).
• We can also blur the lines between content and data. FortisBC is a Canadian energy company that has to manage 11,000 regulatory requests per year, and has used SharePoint to automate the process of assembling responses. This has saved over $57,000 per month in direct costs alone.
• Hansen Yuncken is an Australian building company that has used SharePoint to automate several of their core business processes, including bidding on work. Is this managing data or content? Or is it both!
• Content can also sit at the heart of organisations, such as the educational tools developed for Calgary Board of Education.
• Finally content should be delivered to mobile devices, such as at Barclays Bank, who have delivered extraordinary business outcomes by better supporting their frontline staff.
• In short, use SharePoint to deliver powerful content-driven business solutions.

(FortisBC, Hansen Yuncken, Calgary Board of Education and Barclays Bank all feature in this year’s Intranet Innovations 2013 report. IMF and Bennett Jones are previous winners, captured in the full Intranet Innovations bundle.)