We had a friend of ours ask us about using SharePoint for a case management system. He works for a government agency and has been tasked with investigating whether SharePoint would be an acceptable environment for their case management needs. Having received this somewhat “off the wall” query, we turned to our friend and colleague Ben Schorr. Besides the fact that Ben is incredibly bright, he’s also a wiz with SharePoint. Ben has graciously allowed us to post his response.
SharePoint is, at its heart, just a browser-based front-end to a big database. It supports lists, document libraries, tasks, events, workflow, integrates with Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote… I don’t see any reason why a firm couldn’t adapt it for use as a case management system. That said, I’m not aware of many firms that actually do.
The two best resources on the topic that I’m aware of would probably be OpenText’s case management framework, and the government agencies document from Microsoft.
OpenText: http://www.opentext.com/2/sol-products/sol-pro-extensions-microsoft/pro-ot-casemgmt-sharepoint.htm
Microsoft: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/2/f/22f21dfd-87db-4318-9b11-6a48fc8cdbee/tdm_casemanagement.doc (opens a Word doc)
SharePoint is like walking into a gold mine with a bunch of wooden sticks and some metal plates. You could get down on your knees and scrape away at the ground with that stuff, but if you have somebody who can craft the sticks and metal into shovels and pickaxes you’ll get a lot more done. A good SharePoint developer could probably make a pretty good case management system out of it.
Of course once you’ve got a pretty good case management system you’re back to the time-honored problem of getting people to commit to using it.
Thanks for the great response Ben.
-John and Mike
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digitalsamurai@senseient.com
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