(Rating: 5 out of 5) by Kevin Gunther-Canada, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Working in higher education, I see the need for business process automation on an almost daily basis. Unlike traditional businesses, academia is a difficult environment to attempt to create or impose standardized automated business processes in any real way, since such institutions tend to be highly decentralized and complex environments. SharePoint is a tool that seems to have been developed to address these kinds of business needs: it offers a foundational architecture that suffers from relatively few of the restrictive rules of turnkey solutions, while still providing much of the flexibility of custom-developed applications to address the myriad of unique needs academic institutions tend to have.