ioko Connect – Share is a team or organisation-wide tool that allows your staff to work together on documents and tasks, sharing lists of information, contacts, events and much more.

ioko Connect – Share is based on Microsoft SharePoint and allows team members to easily manage their own content, site layout and user participation.

As a collaboration platform, SharePoint lets users store documents on the file server. In addition to just storing the item and its internal content, SharePoint also allows each item to have metadata properties; the metadata properties are the source of much of SharePoint’s power. Metadata is additional information that is attached to the item – e.g. the author of a document, the department that published it etc.

SharePoint sites provide places to capture and share ideas, information, communication and documents. The sites facilitate team participation in discussions, shared document collaboration and surveys. All site content is accessible from a Web browser. The document collaboration features allow for easy check-in, check-out and document version control.

For simpler needs ioko Connect – Share can be hosted by us, providing very rapid deployment (less than a week is common for the first site to be running), zero infrastructure management and secure access from both the NHSnet and the internet, as required. With this option you are provided with a default site, based on a standard NHS orientated template. This is supplemented by the addition of custom web parts, including our navigation tree and our What’s New web part. Access to the site is via a password and user ID, these are provided automatically by the site when you register users on it. It is possible to apply SSL certificates to the site if additional security is required. Each site can support sub-sites, with the same or different membership, layouts and content from each other.

For more sophisticated needs we routinely develop larger collaboration solutions based on SharePoint Portal Server, often as part of an intranet or document management solution.

Importantly, whichever option you choose, there is excellent integration with Microsoft Office, so your team don't have to learn new applications of ways of working.

Store a document from Word (or PowerPoint, Excel etc) into the site and you can open it again directly from Word, checking it out to prevent overlapping edits. And while you're editing it you can see the lists, metadata, users, etc who are part of the team site.

When you are finished you can simply save it as normal, being prompted for any changes to metadata. There are options to keep multiple version of the documents as well as store comments or even whole discussion threads in parallel with the individual documents.

If you need to keep track of progress you can create alerts, to be notified when some changes or allocate tasks to team members. And that's just the start. There are a vast range of business problems that these tools can support; importantly none of it needs support from the IT department - it can be end user driven.

ioko Connect – Share makes the application available to NHS organisations on a fully managed platform or fully integrated into your existing environment and at an affordable price. We take full responsibility for ensuring that any technical issues are dealt with and we have experts who can give advice on getting the best out of the application. This frees up our customers’ technical resources and enables their users to focus on working together effectively and efficiently.

“We started to use the service to help with NPfIT. We use the document repository and discussion boards for sharing the latest reports, documentation and news. Above all the benefits that we get are that it provides a central location for up-to-date information and a single source of the truth”

Graham Folmer, Chief Information Officer at NSC Strategic Health Authority

Individual Empowerment

SharePoint site members can find and communicate with key contacts, both by email and with Instant Messaging. Site content can be easily searched, and users can receive alerts to tell them when existing documents and information have been changed, or when new information or documents have been added.

All of a site's collaborative content — for example, documents, lists, events, task assignments and membership rosters, can be read and edited within Microsoft Office programs.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 allows SharePoint site event calendars to be viewed side-by-side with personal calendars and it also creates meeting-specific workspaces to augment group appointments.

SharePoint has strong integration with Office 2003, allowing documents to be created in Word, for instance, and saved into a SharePoint document library instead of to a file system. Thereafter version control, check out and other facilities can be accessed from either the browser interface or within the Office application.

Site construction is flexible and straightforward and once created, well designed components or even entire sites can be saved as templates and reused by individuals or teams across the organisation 

“The truth of the matter is that most people have a tendency to store documents in too many places. And storing them in a central location does not equal collaboration”

John Durant - Microsoft