Making a Business Case for SharePoint 2013

  • Article

One of the things that is both so rewarding and yet so challenging about my job is the wide variety of requests that I receive from my customers.   On any given day, the questions could range from “Something is broken, how do I fix it?”, to “We want to start providing this capability but what is the best way to do so?”, to “We are building a DR environment, what does Microsoft recommend?”.  One recent question that I received, and the topic of this blog post is, “We are currently running SharePoint 2010 but want to move to SharePoint 2013.  Can you provide documentation to help us make a business case to end users on way we should upgrade to SharePoint 2013?”

Note:   This article focuses on the capabilities of SharePoint that are available in the product (both when running on-premises and in the cloud).  However, additional advantages can be achieved when choosing a cloud deployment over an on-premises deployment and vice versa.  This article does not discuss the topic of cloud versus on-premises but rather focuses on capabilities available in the product in general.

Why SharePoint 2013?

If I were trying to make a case for SharePoint 2013 to my users, I would focus on those features that will have the most impact on their productivity and day to activities.  That might be features that enable them to do things they couldn’t before or features that allow them to do things faster and more efficiently than they could before.  There a lot of features in SharePoint 2013 but here are some of the key areas of innovation that could have a huge benefit for the end user.

  • Better support for Mobile Devices

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161352(v=office.15).aspx

  • Social Computing

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219766(v=office.15).aspx

  • Better Performance

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262971(v=office.15).aspx 

  • Improvements in High Availability and Disaster Recovery

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263031(v=office.15).aspx 

  • Improvements in eDiscovery

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/fp161513(v=office.15).aspx

  • Improvements is Business Intelligence

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj542395(v=office.15).aspx

  • Improvements in Workflow

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219638(v=office.15).aspx

  • Improvements in Search

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee667266(v=office.15).aspx

  • Improvements in Web Content Management

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219688(v=office.15).aspx

Case Studies

In addition to looking at the newest features, I would also try to demonstrate how the product has benefited similar customers.

Below are a few of the published case studies for SharePoint 2013

  • Cambridgeshire Constabulary

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn479049(v=office.15).aspx

  • Mavention and web content management in SharePoint Server

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj822912(v=office.15).aspx

  • United Airlines and SharePoint Server 2013

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn423227(v=office.15).aspx

Additional case studies can be found at the Microsoft Case Study search site https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies

More Information

More information about SharePoint 2013 and the new capabilities that it provides can be found at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc303422(v=office.15).aspx