Introducing ShareVis for Microsoft SharePoint

ShareVis has been successfully benchmarked and won against systems that cost several times more and is now in use by companies in Electronics/High Tech, Automotive, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Oil & Process, Transportation, Pharmaceuticals and Government.

As part of the sales cycle ShareVis typically offers to configure and demo a workflow and web-form process. In most cases the a company will already have a quote for a custom implementation of the same process and seeing it easily configured in ShareVis really opens their eyes to the power of ShareVis. The process showcased in the demo usually ends up being the first process the company deploys once ShareVis is installed.

The depth and breadth of the following real-world example exemplifies the power and flexibility of ShareVis. Customer references are available upon request.

Objectives

• Control documents life cycle ensuring that only approved versions are available for general distribution.
• Provide secure access to previous versions of documents, including their approval history.
• Update the document with automatically generated document number based on configurable name template that is tied to any attribute, such a department, etc.
• Update document attributes (meta-data) as part of the workflow process.
• Provide easy notification to process and non-process participants via email.
• Allow for easy selection of approvers and others by either selecting people interactively or by having them automatically selected based on some criteria such a document number, product, or document type. The selections can automatically determine all participants or some of them.
• The approvers may accept/reject the document, re-assign it to someone else, or invite someone else to the process.
• Approval may be done entirely via email, i.e. the document is attached to the email where the approver approves or rejects via email (without logging in to the document control system in SharePoint).

Implementation

• The workflow uses ShareVis Plugins to create and update document meta-data (SharePoint columns).
• Configurable name templates are used to generate unique document numbers.
• Labeled assignments are used to group users and to relate SharePoint columns, which control pre-configured groups of approvers.
• The workflow is prepared using ShareVis Designer.
• Some steps in the process are designated as approvable via email.
• All forms used by the ShareVis DocEx product are automatically rendered based on the workflow information.