SharePoint
IT4E brings a level of knowledge and experience to SharePoint engagements that is greater than you will find from most any provider of SharePoint services, including very large IT consulting companies. We began our SharePoint practice in early 2004, training IT professionals to plan, deploy and customize SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003) and to develop custom applications based on it. Our training activities provided valuable exposure that brought us consulting opportunities with enterprises that were implementing SPS 2003 for a wide range of applications. Meeting the expectations of some of the industry’s most experienced, accomplished IT professionals in our training classes and responding to the diverse requirements of our consulting clients has given us both breadth and depth in the capabilities that we bring to every SharePoint engagement.

In 2006, we were among the first IT companies to work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). We presented many training sessions across the United States in the Microsoft Certified Partner Readiness Program, a training program offered to employees of companies that were members of the Microsoft Certified Partner Program. We also worked on several prototype projects for Microsoft clients to demonstrate the capabilities of MOSS. We still have medium and large clients or our own for which we provide MOSS operational support and custom application development.

In 2009, some of our clients engaged us to help them with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (MSS 2010), which was only available as a Beta release at that time. Those engagements involved new deployments for clients that did not have an existing SharePoint infrastructure as well as clients that were upgrading from older versions of SharePoint. Today, we support clients with large installed bases of both MOSS and MSS 2010.

SharePoint is a product that interfaces with many other products and technologies. Effective SharePoint consultants cannot be narrowly focused on a particular area of IT such as system administration or software development. An extraordinary qualification of our team is that our consultants each have a broad background and experience base that includes system administration and architecture, software development and database management systems. One of our recent projects involved developing .NET code to create a custom web part which is a developer subject, implementing Active Directory Federated Services (ADFS) and Kerberos which are system administration subjects, and a dashboard which is a business intelligence subject. Our team has the range to span all of those topics. System and network professionals often do not work with development, and developers often do not work with system administration topics like ADFS and Kerberos. To support SharePoint, your team has to span that whole range of topics and more, and our team does.

SharePoint projects are almost always very unique to the enterprise that engages our services. We draw on our experience base with SharePoint and information technology experience over many years to make your project a success, but your project is never exactly like another one that we have already done. Meeting your business requirements, which are never quite the same as another client’s, is critical to the success of your SharePoint project. Our team consists of very experienced IT professionals that have the right communications and analytical skills to define and document business requirements, a critical success factor in any SharePoint project.

Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing
Business Intelligence (BI) provides executive end users with the information they need to make strategic business decisions. Our consultants utilize Microsoft's BI toolkit to create dashboards and reports which enable company decision-makers to analyze and respond to business data. Data is prepared with Integration Services, cubes are created and analyzed with Analysis Services, reports are generated with Reporting Services, and dashboards are integrated with SharePoint and PowerPivot. Our consultants follow proven requirements gathering techniques to help determine the specific requirements of your BI project.

Data Management
Data Modeling
This is the first step in turning data into information. Data by itself is meaningless. We take facts and figures you wish to collect and imbue them with context in a comprehensive and expressive database design. Data given context is information. This transformation is enabled by our discussion of the strategic goals of your business with executives and our learning about the operational details of day-to-day life from your employees.
Database Implementation
This is the second step in turning data into information. Given a comprehensive and expressive data model, we will build a database and supporting systems that you can use to harvest the new information and use it to meet your goals. The specifics of database implementation vary for every client. Typically we build databases in SQL Server on Windows platform.

Software Development
Application Development
If you decide to build, how do you go about doing it? We can build it for you, supplement or manage your existing team, or even teach your people how to build it for themselves. Whether it's a browser-based intranet tool, a distributed application system (using your network and the Internet but not running in a browser), or an old-school client/server program, you'll benefit from our expertise.
Intranets and Extranets
A corporate intranet is an excellent enabling platform for distributed systems and corporate workflow applications. Add systems integration with your external partners and vendors via a secure extranet and you have the facility to provide data and information throughout your enterprise.

Information Management
Workflow
Information by itself is only moderately useful. It generally needs to flow through your organization in order to be used effectively. Workflow applications enable the management and flow of information from department to department and from person to person. Workflow applications can bring about productivity gains in the tasks they automate by facilitating a major reduction in processing delays. It's provides the framework by which people can work together smoothly and efficiently. We design our workflow applications to know which tasks and procedures to apply to which types of information in order to increase throughput and reduce human error.
Systems Integration
You may have several systems already in place. And individually each one may be doing a good job. But if they cannot exchange data with each other you still have the problems of duplicate data entry, manual information consolidation, and cross-system data quality. For example, if a customer changes their address and notifies your billing department, does the shipping department find out about this before the customer calls to ask about the whereabouts of their new order? This is where our systems integration services can help. By applying techniques such as inter-application messaging and data cataloging and building solutions employing tools like Web services and XML, we can link your disparate systems to increase operational efficiency and accuracy.

IT Strategy
New Technology
Every week brings something new into the fold of technology and your company. How do you avoid technology obsolescence and plan for the future? What can you do today for immediate benefit and future returns? We can help you answer those and other questions. You don't have to go it alone.