Why Use SharePoint in a Corporate Environment

In my current role, I have incorporated SharePoint in a variety of ways and perhaps that's its greatest attraction and benefit. SharePoint is an enterprise product and we needed to have a number of business use cases to justify its costs. For us the cost of the platform, licensing, resilience, DR, support etc. all need to be considered before it became the platform of choice. Luckily for most organisation, although not the case for my current company due to sensitive data, cloud hosting including Microsoft's Online offering do away with the initial steep curve to embed it in.
Even given the initial capital outlay, it is a far more cost-effective option if you consider a plethora of alternatives that need to be procured to provide the same set of functionality. In our case we have used it for;

1. The intranet


2. Customer Portals for our partners. that incorporate surfacing data from our other enterprise systems; Oracle, SAP, IBM, Maximo etc.


3. Health and Safety System.


4. A number of document management sites for various departments, migrating from other expensive products.


5. Collaboration to increase security and reduce load on Outlook (constant attachments etc.).


6. There are a number of other projects that we're considering that will go on SharePoint.

It's integration with Outlook, Lync, SCCM, SQL Reporting, Office Web Apps (OWA), Microsoft Dynamics is the next set of challenges that will eliminate the need for a number of scattered systems and bring a coherent search experience.