Business Process

What are business processes?

Business processes are a set of activities or events that are required to complete a business task. Electronic forms provided through InfoPath Forms Services are key to providing built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review and archiving processes.

• Organisations have a wide variety of business processes based on forms
  • Internal: Expense Reports, Timesheets, Holiday Leave requests, etc.
  • External: Loan Applications, Partner Purchase Orders, Invoices, etc.

Common barriers to business process

• Data entered in forms can be time consuming, can contain inaccuracies and often involve duplication of effort
• Cost of creating or modifying Forms and Forms-based applications
• Difficult to analyse paper-based forms
• Forms get lost in the clutter

Features and benefits of SharePoint 2007's business process

SharePoint 2007 allows you to create, maintain, and analyse custom workflows, enabling you to streamline your collaborative processes. Customised electronic forms are an essential part of such workflows and make it easy to collect and validate information that drives your business processes, directly from the client application that you use every day.

SharePoint 2007 business processes and forms allow you to:

• Extend data-gathering solutions to anyone with a browser.
• Streamline business processes and connect forms to Line of Business (LOB) applications.
• Centralise the management and control of your forms solutions.
• Reduce time spent filling out and processing forms.
• Reduce time spent creating forms by reusing form components, such as template parts.
• Develop advanced forms functionality without coding.
• Validate data at the time of entry.
• Help business users develop their own forms.
• Rapidly deploy sustainable forms solutions.
• Capture common form information consistently.
• Access forms from mobile devices.
• Centrally manage data connections with simplified reconfiguration, simplified migration and flexible authentication

Next part of the SharePoint 2007 pie - Content Management